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

08.06.16

Links 6/8/2016: Wine 1.9.16, Tizen SDK 2.4 Rev8

Posted in News Roundup at 1:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Government must consider open-source software – ACT

    ACT Leader David Seymour today called on the Government to take a new approach in its software procurement policies, allowing substantial savings to the taxpayer.

    “A substantial number of civil servants could generate the same output using open source software and open document formats, instead of proprietary software like Microsoft Office,” said Mr Seymour.

    “Departments should see what functions government employees need in their software, then source software that fulfils those functions.

    “Countless private businesses already use open-source software to achieve efficiencies and savings. There’s no reason we shouldn’t expect the same from our Government.

  • The FCC just forced TP-Link to support open-source router firmware
  • FCC announces $200000 settlement with TP-Link
  • A new open source database, open source firmware on TP-Link routers, and more news
  • Upskill U Kicks Off Open Source Courses

    As service providers seek to rapidly implement virtualization, open source software is emerging as a crucial tool in both expediting the software development process and creating an agile virtualized network architecture. But, open source isn’t without its challenges and operators are pursuing open source strategies that strike a balance with traditional standards-based development processes, ensuring the software they use is both robust and secure.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Firefox 48.0 Lands in All Supported Ubuntu OSes, Solus and Arch Linux

        It took them a couple of days, but the maintainers of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions have pushed the final release of the Mozilla Firefox 48.0 web browser to the stable channels, for users to upgrade from Mozilla Firefox 47.0.1.

      • Let’s Encrypt Root to be Trusted by Mozilla

        The Let’s Encrypt root key (ISRG Root X1) will be trusted by default in Firefox 50, which is scheduled to ship in Q4 2016. Acceptance into the Mozilla root program is a major milestone as we aim to rely on our own root for trust and have greater independence as a certificate authority (CA).

        Public CAs need their certificates to be trusted by browsers and devices. CAs that want to issue independently under their own root accomplish this by either buying an existing trusted root, or by creating a new root and working to get it trusted. Let’s Encrypt chose to go the second route.

  • Databases

    • Graph Databases for Beginners: Graph Search Algorithm Basics

      As has been illustrated above, graph search algorithms are helpful in traversing a set of graph data and providing relevant information. However, they also have their limitations. We have seen that there are many varieties of search algorithms, ranging from the more basic breadth-first and depth-first to uninformed and informed searches to the Dijkstra’s and A* algorithms. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and no one type is better than another.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Review: LibreOffice 5.2 — solid, unpolished alternative

      LibreOffice is an office suite that rivals Microsoft Office yet costs nothing. There are versions for Windows, OS X and Linux along with a portable edition that works from a USB drive.

      If you’re on a tight budget and have a Windows PC, LibreOffice is by far the best alternative to Office. It is more complete than Google Apps and leaves Apache OpenOffice for dead.

      OS X users have a good alternative free option. Apple’s iWorks suite is free with new Macs. Even so, you might prefer LibreOffice because it has better Microsoft Office compatibility.

      LibreOffice looks and feels more like Microsoft Office than iWorks. If you know Microsoft Office, moving to LibreOffice will be less of a wrench. It also includes a database unlike either the OS X version of Microsoft Office or iWorks. If you need a simple database and have no budget, LibreOffice would be ideal.

      Some Linux distributions include LibreOffice either as standard or as an optional download. It’s a more straightforward choice than using a tool like Wine to run Microsoft Office.

    • Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2 Review

      Every computer needs applications to do any work, and that means more money. Except for open-source software, like OpenOffice, which is free. In the case of OpenOffice, the free software looks and acts like Microsoft Office circa 2003, and includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation creator. Not only does OpenOffice look and feel like Office, but it also reads and writes Office files so well that most users could exchange files between the two suites and no one would know the difference.

    • Best Microsoft Office Alternatives 2016

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 11.0 Has Been Pushed Back By One Week

      FreeBSD 11.0 has seen a very minor set-back in getting its release out the door.

      Due to a problem surrounding ZFS and VFS in 11.0, developers have decided to tack on an extra beta release and delay the branching and release candidates for FreeBSD 11.0.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The GNU C Library version 2.24 is now available
    • GCC 6.2 Is Coming Quite Soon

      Version 6.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is expected to come quite soon.

      This is important as GCC 6.2 is the first point release to the stable GCC6 compiler under the versioning scheme they rolled out last year: GCC 6.0 was development, GCC 6.1 was the first stable release, and GCC 6.2 is now the first point release. That’s important since a number of distribution vendors tend to wait until around this first point release before incorporating a major new version of the GCC compiler.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Sales number for the Free Culture translation, first half of 2016

        As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published a French and Norwegian translation of the classic Free Culture book by the founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig. A bit less known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations, using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original. And because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it too. The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons Corporation. In other words, I do not earn any money from this project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative Commons is needed.

  • Programming/Development

    • Moving to GitLab! Yes, it’s worth it!

      I started evangelizing Git in 2007. It was a very tough sell to make at the time.

      Outside of the kernel development almost no one wanted to learn it and we had very worthy competitors, from Subversion, to Mercurial, to Bazaar, to Darcs, to Perforce, and so on. But those of use that dug deeper knew that Git had the edge and it was a matter of time.

      Then GitHub showed up in 2008 and the rest is history. For many years it was just “cool” to be in GitHub. The Ruby community drove GitHub up into the sky. Finally it became the status quo and the one real monopoly in information repositories – not just software source code, but everything.

      I always knew that we should have a “local” option, which is why I tried to contribute to Gitorious way back in 2009. Other options arose, but eventually GitLab appeared around 2011 and picked up steam in the last couple of years.

    • PHP 7.1 Beta 2 Released

      The second beta of the upcoming PHP 7.1 major release is now available for testing.

      The PHP 7.1.0 Beta 2 release has core fixes, various calendar / cURL / GD / PCRE / SPL / Streams fixes, and a variety of other bug fixes.

    • PHP 7.1.0 Beta 2 Released

      The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0 Beta 2. This release is the second beta for 7.1.0. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

Leftovers

  • FTC to Crack Down on Paid Celebrity Posts That Aren’t Clear Ads

    Snapchat star DJ Khaled raves about Ciroc vodka. Fashion lifestyle blogger Cara Loren Van Brocklin posts a selfie with PCA Skin sunscreen. Internet personality iJustine posts Instagrams from an Intel event. Missing from their messages: any indication about whether they’ve been paid.

    This uptick in celebrities peddling brand messages on their personal accounts, light on explicit disclosure, has not gone unnoticed by the U.S. government. The Federal Trade Commission is planning to get tougher: Users need to be clear when they’re getting paid to promote something, and hashtags like #ad, #sp, #sponsored –common forms of identification– are not always enough. The agency will be putting the onus on the advertisers to make sure they comply, according to Michael Ostheimer, a deputy in the FTC’s Ad Practices Division. It’s a move that could make the posts seem less authentic, reducing their impact.

    “We’ve been interested in deceptive endorsements for decades and this is a new way in which they are appearing,” he said. “We believe consumers put stock in endorsements and we want to make sure they are not being deceived.”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Dangerous Liaisons: ChemChina’s Bid for Syngenta

      Switzerland-based Syngenta AG is best known for its top-selling herbicide, atrazine; for trying to fool the world into thinking its genetically engineered Golden Rice will save the world; and for taking out pollinators with its neonicotinoid pesticides.

    • Olympic executives cash in on a ‘Movement’ that keeps athletes poor

      Its members call it, with an almost religious conviction, “the Olympic Movement,” or “the Movement” for short, always capitalized.

      At the very top of “the Movement” sits the International Olympic Committee, a nonprofit run by a “volunteer” president who gets an annual “allowance” of $251,000 and lives rent-free in a five-star hotel and spa in Switzerland.

      At the very bottom of “the Movement” — beneath the IOC members who travel first-class and get paid thousands of dollars just to attend the Olympics, beneath the executives who make hundreds of thousands to organize the Games, beneath the international sports federations, the national sport federations and the national Olympic committees and all of their employees — are the actual athletes whose moments of triumph and pain will flicker on television screens around the globe starting Friday.

    • Olympic Athletes Are About to Sail Through a Toxic Bay of Shit

      One of the first things Olympic Games tourists will notice in Rio de Janeiro is the toxic vista of Guanabara Bay. It’s the official site of the competition’s sailing races, but local residents know it as the country’s unofficial sewage dump.

      An estimated 70 percent of the coastal city’s trash—waste from 12 million people—flows untreated into Guanabara Bay from 55 dying, ecologically degraded rivers. As part of its bid to host the Olympics, Rio de Janeiro’s government promised to cleanup the polluted waterway, which now overflows with garbage, chemicals, and human excrement. But come August, environmental surveys reported viral and bacterial levels so high, that ingesting three teaspoons of water could cause brain inflammation, respiratory failure, and heart illnesses.

    • Rio’s real vs. unmet Olympic legacies: what they tell us about the future of cities?

      The heavily corporate city Rio has attempted to create, resulting in exacerbated urban problems of spatial, economic and social inequalities, is creating the conditions for Rio as the Singular City.

    • The $100,000-Per-Year Pill: How US Health Agencies Choose Pharma Over Patients

      Don Reichmuth survived prostate cancer once before, back in 2007, so his physician was concerned when tests recently revealed the cancer had returned. Reichmuth’s physician prescribed a drug called enzalutamide, marketed by the Japanese company Astellas Pharma, Inc. under the brand name Xtandi. But when the physician sent the prescription to the pharmacy, the managers of Reichmuth’s insurance plan sent back an immediate refusal to approve it.

      Reichmuth, a retired teacher who lives in Washington State, was puzzled by the logic. Then he learned the price of the Xtandi prescription: over $9,700 each month.

      Reichmuth is just one of millions of Americans who are experiencing prescription drug sticker shock. There are the extreme high-profile examples, like the former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli hiking the price of a critical toxoplasmosis drug by 5,000 percent overnight, or a new hepatitis C medicine costing over $1,000 a pill. But the issue extends beyond the headlines. Pharmaceutical corporations consistently set most of their prices hundreds of times higher than their manufacturing costs, then relentlessly raise those prices at rates far exceeding inflation. The result is breathtaking corporate profits as high as 42 percent annually. The industry’s average return on assets more than doubles that of the rest of the Fortune 500.

  • Security

    • Linux Botnets on a Rampage [Ed: Kaspersky marketing in essence]

      Linux-operated botnet Distributed Denial of Service attacks surged in this year’s second quarter, due to growing interest in targeting Chinese servers, according to a Kaspersky Lab report released this week. South Korea kept its top ranking for having the most command-and-control servers. Brazil, Italy and Israel ranked among the leaders behind South Korea for hosting C&C servers, according to Kaspersky Lab. DDoS attacks affected resources in 70 countries, with targets in China absorbing 77 percent of all attacks.

    • Machine-Learning Algorithm Combs the Darknet for Zero Day Exploits, and Finds Them

      In April, cybersecurity experts found an exploit based on this vulnerability for sale on a darknet marketplace where the seller was asking around $15,000. In July, the first malware appeared that used this vulnerability. This piece of malware, the Dyre Banking Trojan, targeted users all over the world and was designed to steal credit-card numbers from infected computers.

      The episode provided a key insight into the way malware evolves. In the space of just a few months, hackers had turned a vulnerability into an exploit, offered this for sale, and then saw it developed into malware that was released into the wild.

    • Frequent password changes are the enemy of security, FTC technologist says

      Shortly after Carnegie Mellon University professor Lorrie Cranor became chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission in January, she was surprised by an official agency tweet that echoed some oft-repeated security advice. It read: “Encourage your loved ones to change passwords often, making them long, strong, and unique.” Cranor wasted no time challenging it.

      The reasoning behind the advice is that an organization’s network may have attackers inside who have yet to be discovered. Frequent password changes lock them out. But to a university professor who focuses on security, Cranor found the advice problematic for a couple of reasons. For one, a growing body of research suggests that frequent password changes make security worse. As if repeating advice that’s based more on superstition than hard data wasn’t bad enough, the tweet was even more annoying because all six of the government passwords she used had to be changed every 60 days.

    • Managing Encrypted Backups in Linux, Part 2

      In part 1, we learned how to make simple automated unencrypted and encrypted backups. In this article, I will show you how to fine-tune your file selection, and how to backup your encryption keys.

    • Getting started with Tails, the encrypted, leave-no-trace operating system

      Tails, an encrypted and anonymous OS that bundles widely used open source privacy tools on a tiny device, is one of the most secure operating systems in the world. The Linux distribution rose to popularity when it was revealed Edward Snowden relied on Tails to secure his identity while sharing NSA secrets with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. In the past half decade, Tails has been embraced as an essential security suite by journalists, hackers, and IT workers.

      Tails is an acronym for The Amnesic Incognito Live System. The OS runs Debian and is easy to run on Macs and PCs from a USB drive. Tails encrypts all local files, runs every internet connection through Tor and blocks all non-secure connections, and provides a suite of secure communication tools like the Tor browser, HTTPS Everywhere, OpenPGP, the Claws Mail client, I2P, an IP address overlay network, and a Windows 8 camouflage mode to deter over-the-shoulder snooping.

    • Never Trust a Found USB Drive, Black Hat Demo Shows Why [Ed: Windows autoruns stuff]

      Does dropping an infected USB drive in a parking work when it comes to a hacker luring its prey into a digital trap? The answer is a resounding yes.

      At Black Hat USA, security researcher Elie Bursztein shared the results of an experiment where he dropped 297 USB drives with phone-home capabilities on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. He also explained how an attacker might program and camouflage a malicious USB drive outfitted with a Teensy development board to take over a target’s computer within seconds after plugging the drive in.

    • Friday’s security updates
    • How to Hack an Election in 7 Minute

      When Princeton professor Andrew Appel decided to hack into a voting machine, he didn’t try to mimic the Russian attackers who hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s database last month. He didn’t write malicious code, or linger near a polling place where the machines can go unguarded for days.

    • Apache OpenOffice and CVE-2016-1513

      The Apache OpenOffice (AOO) project has suffered from a lack of developers for some time now; releases are infrequent and development of new features is relatively slow. But a recent security advisory for CVE-2016-1513 is rather eye-opening in that it further shows that the project is in rough shape. Announcing a potential code execution vulnerability without quickly providing a new release of AOO may be putting users of the tool at more risk than they realize.

    • New attack steals SSNs, e-mail addresses, and more from HTTPS pages

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Two Belgian police hurt by machete-wielding assailant shouting ‘Allahu akbar’

      A machete-wielding man shouting “Allahu akbar” (God is the greatest) wounded two policewomen in the southern Belgian city of Charleroi on Saturday before being shot and injured, local police said.

      One of the policewomen was taken to hospital with “deep wounds to the face” while the other was slightly injured, Belga news agency said.

      The incident took place outside the main police station.

      Belgium has been on high security alert for months since suicide bombers hit Brussels airport and a subway station near the European Union’s institutions on March 22, killing 32 people.

    • Beijing sends bombers, fighter jets on combat patrols over contested S. China Sea

      China has said it carried out a combat air patrol over contested islands in the South China Sea. In a separate incident, roughly 230 Chinese fishing vessels and Coast Guard ships were spotted near East China Sea islets, triggering an angry response from Japan.

      Several Chinese aircraft, including H-6K long-range bombers and Su-30 fighter jets, went on patrol over two contested islands in the South China Sea, Senior Colonel Shen Jinke, a spokesperson for the Air Force said on Saturday, according to the Xinhua news agency.

      The warplanes were escorted by Airborne Early Warning Aircraft (AWACS) and flying tankers, which were part of “actual combat training to improve the Air Force’s response to security threats,” the Air Force said.

    • I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton. [Sharyl Attkisson: “..nothing against Morell, he’s an expert in many areas, but his employment at pro-Hillary PR firm is required disclosure (in my opinion).”]
    • CIA Director Entry Number 2: Mike Morell, Fabulist

      Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor in making political hay out of Trump’s call on Putin to hack Hillary, especially coming as it does from someone (unlike Jake Sullivan and Leon Panetta) without a known history of mishandling classified information.

      But that line? “recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation”? That’s all about the clicks, and it has been serving splendidly. Just like “Slam Dunk” was a nifty line.

      In a piece auditioning to be CIA Director, I’d prefer someone stick more rigorously to the truth. Trump is an apologist for Putin, undoubtedly, but there’s no more evidence Putin has recruited Trump (unwittingly) than there is, say, the Saudis have recruited Hillary. They’re all just picking the assholes they champion, with Hillary picking the assholes we’ve long championed.

      Then again, this is not the first time Morell has stretched the truth a bit — up to and including on torture, so we shouldn’t be surprised by the tactic.

    • Commentary: The world’s best cyber army doesn’t belong to Russia

      National attention is focused on Russian eavesdroppers’ possible targeting of U.S. presidential candidates and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Yet, leaked top-secret National Security Agency documents show that the Obama administration has long been involved in major bugging operations against the election campaigns — and the presidents — of even its closest allies.

      The United States is, by far, the world’s most aggressive nation when it comes to cyberspying and cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on foreign cities, politicians, elections and entire countries since it first turned on its receivers in 1952. Just as other countries, including Russia, attempt to do to the United States. What is new is a country leaking the intercepts back to the public of the target nation through a middleperson.

      There is a strange irony in this. Russia, if it is actually involved in the hacking of the computers of the Democratic National Committee, could be attempting to influence a U.S. election by leaking to the American public the falsehoods of its leaders. This is a tactic Washington used against the Soviet Union and other countries during the Cold War.

      In the 1950s, for example, President Harry S Truman created the Campaign of Truth to reveal to the Russian people the “Big Lies” of their government. Washington had often discovered these lies through eavesdropping and other espionage.

      Today, the United States has morphed from a Cold War, and in some cases a hot war, into a cyberwar, with computer coding replacing bullets and bombs. Yet the American public manages to be “shocked, shocked” that a foreign country would attempt to conduct cyberespionage on the United States.

      NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a “surge effort against one of Mexico’s leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peña Nieto, and nine of his close associates.” Peña won that election and is now Mexico’s president.

      The NSA identified Peña’s cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, “might find a needle in a haystack.” The analyst described it as “a repeatable and efficient” process.

      The eavesdroppers also succeeded in intercepting 85,489 text messages, a Der Spiegel article noted.

    • Former South Sudan official says ‘total breakdown of law and order’ in country

      Carved out of Sudan following years of civil war and the Darfur genocide, South Sudan was originally touted as a U.S. foreign policy success story after a vote for independence in 2011, but in the five years since, the country has been overrun by an internal war that has resulted in mass murders, gang rapes and torture.

      After speaking to Fox News last year, former government official Joseph Bakosoro was arrested and jailed. He recently escaped to the United States and says America must help — and soon, or another genocide is imminent.

      “There are insecurities all over the country, there are gunmen all over. There is no rule of law in the country now,” he said. “Everybody’s above the law. Every individual has a gun and there is total breakdown of law and order.”

      There are more than 60 tribes within South Sudan, but the majority Dinka has held rule since the country’s inception. Other tribes claim to have endured mass killings, rapes and worse at the hands of the Dinka. In response, the second largest tribe, the Nuer, formed rebel forces and have gained ground in recent months.

    • ‘You can’t deny the people forever’. Kurdish voices in exile.

      Over baklava and sweet tea, openDemocracy hears about Turkey’s post-coup crackdown and the dreams of an independent Kurdistan.

    • Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson on A Vision for Black Lives, William Hartung on US Arms Trade

      This week on CounterSpin: The Movement for Black Lives has never relied on corporate media to get their message out. But the coalition’s newly released policy platform does provide an opportunity for journalists—sometimes given to ponder what black activists are for—to engage those ideas. We’ll hear about A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice from Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, an organizer with Project South and with Concerned Citizens for Justice, and part of the policy table leadership team of the Movement for Black Lives.

    • Nixon says public defender maneuver not legal

      Naming Nixon as a public defender is not the only attempt by Barrett to recover the money Nixon is withholding. The commission last month filed a lawsuit seeking to force Nixon to release the money. An initial hearing on that case is set for Monday.

    • To Make a Point, Missouri’s Lead Public Defender Assigns a Case to Gov. Jay Nixon
    • Was America Great When It Burned Native Babies? (Audio)

      Benjamin Madley, a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was exposed to the effects of colonization at an early age. “When I was a boy,” he explains, “my father was working with Karuk people, as a psychologist. … I was getting exposure to the ongoing conflicts between colonists—us—and the indigenous people of California.”

      Madley is the guest for this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” podcast. He joins Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer to discuss this too-little-known aspect of California history. The two begin by talking about the label “genocide,” a term used by Madley in his book, “An American Genocide: The United States and the California Catastrophe, 1846-1873.”

    • Behold, a Pale Horse and its Rider’s Name Was Death

      In Obama’s account, Washington is defeating ISIL in Iraq, but Russia and Assad are defeating the Syrian people in Syria. Obama denounced Russia and the Syrian government—but not ISIL—as barbaric. The message was clear: Washington still intends to overthrow Assad and turn Syria into another Libya and another Iraq, formerly stable and prosperous countries where war now rages continually.

      It sickens me to hear the President of the United States lie and construct a false reality, so I turned off the broadcast. I believe it was a press conference, and I am confident that no meaningful questions were asked.

    • Letting Saudi Arabia Off the 9/11 Hook [Ed: mentioned yesterday]

      The 9/11 attacks opened a bloody chapter of American history, “justifying” U.S. attacks on multiple countries but not on the one most connected to the terrorism, U.S. “ally,” Saudi Arabia. Why is that, asks Lawrence Davidson.

    • Is Hypocrisy The Silent Strategy of Western Democracy?

      The official reasons for the US-led, UK-backed invasion of Iraq in 2003 were to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, end Saddam Hussein’s support of terrorism, and free the Iraqi people.

      However, immediately after the United States deposed and killed Iraq’s dictator and established a new authority to govern the country, a chaotic post-invasion environment surfaced, militias formed, inter-ethnic violence between Sunnis and Shias increased, and the Abu Ghraib scandal came to light.

      In the following years, communities have been displaced, terror attacks have increased, and the Islamic State has emerged. Since the beginning of the invasion by the US and its allies until the present day, 180’000 civilians have lost their lives in Iraq, according to a database by the Iraq Body Count.

    • US to Give Argentina Files on American Role in ‘Horror’ of Military Dictatorship

      In Buenos Aires on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he would hand over declassified documents relating to America’s role in the 1976-83 military coup and dictatorship in Argentina—often referred to as the “Dirty War”—during which tens of thousands of leftist activists and dissidents were murdered and imprisoned.

      “I want to note that the relationship between the United States and Argentina is an exciting, forward-looking one. But we’re also conscious of the lessons from the past,” Kerry said during a press conference.

      The move comes amid warming relations between the U.S. and Argentina, which elected neoliberal businessman Mauricio Macri as president in November, signaling a rightward shift for the country. President Barack Obama announced in March that the U.S. would release the files.

    • Dispatches: Obama in Argentina on 40th Anniversary of the ‘Dirty War’

      On March 24, United States President Barack Obama finishes a two-day visit to Argentina. The visit coincides with the 40th anniversary of the Argentine military coup, which ushered in an era of brutal attacks on people perceived as dissidents, including executions, torture, and the abduction of detainees’ babies. Obama’s pledge to declassify military, intelligence, and law enforcement records related to Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1976-1983) is a critical contribution to the country’s efforts to bring those responsible for these serious abuses to justice.

    • Afghanistan: The campaign’s forgotten war

      Although hardly news, it bears repeating that the Afghanistan War stands as the longest in all of United States history. By election day, it will have entered its 16th year. Our next president will surely inherit the war there, just as Barack Obama inherited it from George W. Bush. Here is a situation where the phrase “endless war” is not hyperbole; it accurately describes reality.

      Given this depressing fact, one might think that those aspiring to the office of commander in chief would have something to say about how they intend to win or at least curtail that conflict, or perhaps why the U.S. should persist in such a costly endeavor. But in their lengthy convention speeches, neither Donald Trump (who spoke for 75 minutes) nor Hillary Clinton (who spoke for 66) found the time to even mention Afghanistan.

    • Baby Teeth of Iraqi Children Tell Troubling Tale of War’s Toxic Impacts

      New study finds exposure to heavy metals and other toxins having severe impact on generation who have grown up amid endless bombings and violence

    • Ex-CIA Chief and Torture Defender Endorses Clinton—Why Are Democrats Cheering?

      Morell has in the past defended torture, most publicly in a book published as a retort to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s torture program during George W. Bush’s presidency.

    • Malaysia confirms Flight 370 pilot plotted fatal route

      Malaysia acknowledged for the first time that one of the pilots of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had plotted a course on his home flight simulator to the southern Indian Ocean, where the missing jet is believed to have crashed.

      Australian officials overseeing the search for the plane last month said data recovered from Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s simulator included a flight path to the southern Indian Ocean. Malaysian officials at the time refused to confirm the findings.

    • Zimbabwe’s army chief threatens to deal with anti-Mugabe protesters

      Zimbabwe’s army commander said on Friday that his soldiers will deal with threats from activists using social media to mobilise anti-government protests, the first time the military has commented on the demonstrations.

      Lieutenant-General Valerio Sibanda, the Zimbabwe National Army Commander, said in an interview with state-owned The Herald newspaper that social media activism was cyber warfare that the army would deal with.

      Neither the army, which has anchored President Robert Mugabe’s 36-year rule, nor the police force have been paid on time since June.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Melting Greenland Ice Cap Will Expose Military’s Cold War-Era Toxic Waste

      The rapidly warming climate will melt Greenland’s ice cap to such an extent that thousands of tons of hazardous waste left in the 1960s by a secret U.S. military base will be unearthed by the end of the century, new research finds.

      The biological, chemical, and radioactive waste will then seep into the ground and the sea, endangering humans and animals alike.

    • Melting Greenland ice sheet will soon unearth waste from long-forgotten Cold War-era military base

      In 1967, the U.S. decommissioned a military base that had been constructed underneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. In doing so, the military removed a portable nuclear reactor that had helped power the 200-person base, but left the rest of the waste there, from gasoline to PCBs and nuclear coolant water.

      At the time, the U.S., along with their Danish partners who had authority over Greenland, assumed the waste would be entombed for eternity beneath a perpetually deepening snow cover.

      However, what once was buried, global warming is poised to unearth. According to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the melting ice sheet could begin spreading the hazardous waste across the surface of the ice sheet and into the ocean in as little as 75 years from now.

    • Largest Indonesian fires linked to El Nino events

      A team of researchers with NASA, several other U.S. institutions and one from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has found that large increases in Indonesian fire activity and the resulting smoke pollution that occur some years can be linked to El Niño events. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe their analysis of long-term satellite imagery, what it revealed and why they believe changes need to be made.

      Last year, fires in Indonesia drew headlines due to the massive amount of smoke generated and carried over long distances in the atmosphere. The fires were set by palm oil and other farmers in their fields as they sought to get rid of leftover debris—it is, according to the researchers, currently the most economic means for clearing fields. But the smoke is a form of pollution, irritating lungs and sending massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, adding to the amounts from other countries and contributing to global warming.

    • Louisiana Parish Hit by Third Oil Spill in Ten Days As Pressure Grows To Hold Oil and Gas Industry Accountable for Coastal Damage

      Yesterday, an estimated 4,200 gallons of crude oil was discharged from a well owned by the Texas Petroleum Investment Company into the mouth of the Mississippi River, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. The Coast Guard and other state agencies are now responding to the third oil spill in two weeks.

      Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish coast was also hit with two oil spills last week. An estimated 4,200 gallons of crude oil attributed to oil and gas extraction company Hilcorp spilled in the marsh near Lake Grande Ecaille, part of Barataria Bay, on July 25. Three days later, 850 gallons were discharged by a Texas Petroleum Management flowline into marshland in the Southwest Pass.

    • Clinton Fundraises With Frackers

      Hillary Clinton is growing cozier with the hydraulic fracturing industry, just months after she promised to heavily regulate it.

      The Democratic Party’s presidential candidate attended a $50,000 per place fundraiser in Aspen, Colo. on Tuesday, hosted by fracking magnate Charif Souaki. The event raised $650,000 for the campaign.

      As the International Business Times reported, Souaki “amassed his fortune working for natural gas companies including one he founded last year, Tellurian Investments.” A subsidiary of Tellurian, Driftwood LNG, filed for a license in June with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to construct a natural gas export facility in Louisiana.

      Hydraulic fracturing—or fracking—refers to a process by which energy, primarily natural gas, is extracted. It involves shooting millions of gallons of water and chemicals into underground shale rock formations, which releases hydrocarbons trapped inside.

      Fracking is heavily scrutinized due to concerns about the slurry of chemicals used in the process. The injection of the industrial mixtures into the earth may be contaminating nearby drinking water sources, critics say. Congress passed legislation in 2005 that shields the industry from having to report on the contents of their fracking fluids.

  • Finance

    • Joseph Stiglitz resigns from Panama Papers committee over ‘censorship’
    • Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Stiglitz Quits Panama Papers Probe
    • Panama Papers: Pieth says officials are in denial as he quits
    • Panama Papers leak: Joseph Stiglitz and Mark Pieth resign from investigation committee
    • Stiglitz quits Panama Papers clean-up committee
    • Stiglitz quits Panama Papers commission, cites lack of transparency
    • Panama Papers: Joseph Stiglitz quits as government adviser
    • Exclusive – Stiglitz quits Panama Papers probe, cites lack of transparency
    • Panama Papers Probe Faces Major Setback as Stiglitz Quits Team
    • Panama Papers scandal to get Hollywood movie treatment
    • Britain owes the EU £21bn, report claims – but is it true?

      A German magazine has claimed the UK owes the EU €25bn (£21.2bn) in unpaid debts, its share of €200bn owed by all member states to the bloc, and that any Brexit deal will be blocked until London settles up. The report in Wirtschaftswoche quoted an anonymous EU official who said: “A deal with Great Britain is unimaginable if the British do not pay their outstanding debt.”

    • ‘White Trash’ — The Original Underclass

      Waste people. Rubbish. Clay-eaters. Hillbillies. Two new books that reckon with the long, bleak history of the country’s white poor suggest their plight shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country off guard.

    • The IMF confesses it immolated Greece on behalf of the Eurogroup

      What good is it to have a mea culpa if those officials who imposed such disastrous, inhuman policies remain on board and are, in fact, promoted for their gross incompetence?

    • Four-Year Campaign Results In Historic-Win For Tax Whistleblowers
    • Union got Trump Taj Mahal casino workers to kill own jobs: Icahn

      Billionaire investor Carl Icahn wrote a letter Thursday to the soon-to-be unemployed workers of the Trump Taj Mahal casino, accusing their union of inciting them to destroy their own jobs by participating in the longest strike by Atlantic City’s main casino workers union.

      Icahn told the workers that officials of Local 54 of the Unite-HERE union knew that the company had made its final offer, but rejected it anyway, knowing a strike would result.

      The union has been on strike since July 1. The central issue has been restoration of health insurance and pension benefits that the previous owners got a bankruptcy court judge to terminate in October 2014.

      Icahn said the company’s final offer to restore health care, albeit at a lower level than what workers at Atlantic City’s other seven casinos, was negotiated with union president Bob McDevitt.

    • Employment Again Rises Sharply in July

      The Labor Department reported the economy added 255,000 jobs in July. With the June number revised up to 292,000, the average for the last three months now stands at 190,000. The household survey also showed a positive picture, with employment rising by 420,000. With new people entering the labor force, the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) edged up by 0.1 percentage point to 59.7 percent, while the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.9 percent.

    • Another Phony Jobs Report

      As John Williams has made clear, the monthly payroll jobs number consists mainly of an add-on factor of 200,000 jobs. These jobs are a product of the assumption in the Birth-Death Model that new business ventures create more unreported new jobs than the unreported job losses from business failures. If we sustract out this made-up number, July saw a gain of 55,000 jobs, not enough to keep up with population growth. Even the 55,000 figure is overstated according to John Williams’ report: “The gimmicked, headline payroll gain of 255,000 more realistically should have come in below zero, net of built-in upside biases.”

    • Forget Clinton’s and Trump’s Plans for the Economy: It’s Time to Erase Debt and Create Jobs

      So far, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton has offered a credible plan to restart the long-stalled U.S. economy.

      Trump favors lowering taxes to spur demand, a reduction in the supply of illegal foreign labor to boost wages, and modifying trade policy to encourage investment in U.S. manufacturing and create better-paying jobs. He also touts an unspecified infrastructure investment. Some argue that this approach will not provide jobs in the magnitude required, and will likely increase the federal deficit.

      Clinton favors higher taxes on the wealthy and more spending for infrastructure. To keep the debt off the federal government balance sheet, she has specifically proposed so-called public-private partnerships. This is the Wall Street solution. Public guarantees will be used to attract private investors, who will finance, own and rent back to the people the entire public infrastructure of the United States.

      Neither program gets at the real problems: Americans—families, students, businesses, state and local governments, school districts, etc.—are drowning in debt, and there is not enough money in circulation for productive, job-creating purposes. Instead, it is eaten up paying off debt.

    • U.S. Attorney Asks Court to Reconsider Countrywide Loan Case

      In an unusual move, the U.S. attorney for Manhattan’s Southern District has asked a three-judge panel on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a ruling that overturned a verdict that found Countrywide Home Loans and a bank executive liable for fraud. The company made billions of dollars of home loans that defaulted after the 2008 global meltdown.

    • The Goldwater Girl and the Wall Street Girl

      They are one and the same in Hillary. The Goldwater girl is the one who rooted for Goldwater’s racism and is also now the Wall St. girl.

      It is said of Trump that what you see is what you get. With Hillary what you see is what you don’t get. Trump provides some clarity, albeit distasteful, but shows what America has been and still largely is. This may lead to conflict upon election which may lead to change, the 1960s again! Hillary is not what you see—she will lead to thousands of people killed in her illegal invasions abroad, as her history makes clear but she obfuscates today, all the more reason she is dangerous. She already the other day again said that she will get rid of President Assad. Yet she cries foul about her election here influenced by Russia.

    • Dave Zirin: Protests by Athletes and Displaced Rio Residents Accompany Opening of 2016 Olympic Games

      Dave Zirin, sports editor for The Nation magazine, says protests highlighting racial and economic injustice are expected from athletes attending the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, such as tennis champion Serena Williams and players from the NBA, WNBA and other countries. Polls show more than 60 percent of Brazilians think hosting the Games will hurt their country. He says that ahead of today’s opening ceremony, residents of heavily policed and displaced neighborhoods plan a major march to Rio’s “Olympic City.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Surprise! There Isn’t a Single Woman on Trump’s New 15-Member Economic Advisory Council

      All things considered, it’s not terribly surprising that Trump would decline to name a female to his flashy new economic advisory council, considering she might be someone’s wife and that’s a “dangerous thing.” Still, one would hope Trump could name a single woman he’s willing to take advice from who’s not his daughter or the woman immediately in front of him. But alas, here we are.

    • Sorry Hillary, Voting for the Lesser of Two Evils is Textbook Blame-Shifting

      Of all the redundant and generally loathesome reasons for continuing to support the two-party duopoly that constitutes the electoral oligarchy upon which the global corporate empire we know and love maintains the most threadbare pretenses of democratic legitimacy, surely none are relied on more heavily than the old lesser-of-two-evils argument: which is to say, we must support the candidate we find the least hateful to reason and basic decency. As it happens, this is not only a repulsive line of thinking, it is also textbook blame shifting.

      Referring to the textbook, we find that blame shifting typically involve psychological strategies like playing the victim, victim blaming, demonizing our enemies, refusing to admit responsibility for wrongdoing, and articulating self-defenses in absolute terms, typically by refusing to acknowledge any difference between criticism of our behavior or policies and attacks on our person and rights. The latter most commonly manifests as the ‘with us or against us’ fallacy, which despite commonly being associated with former President George ‘Dubya’ Bush, is surprisingly common, as its repeated appearance in the Bible (eg. Matthew 12:30, Luke 9:50, Mark 9:40) seems to suggest.

      Social psychology classes this particular group of behaviors as ‘moral disengagement,’ or the subjective mechanisms we use to neutralize our conscience and reconstruct actions as just and morally legitimate that might be interpreted as unethical, immoral, harmful, dangerous, irresponsible or even criminal. This approach recognizes that we rarely reject the idea of morality out of hand, merely apply it selectively. Through selective application of principle on the basis of moral disengagement we retain the idea of ourselves as moral actors while finding various pretexts upon which to make exceptions to our principles for the sake of momentary expediency.

    • Roaming Charges: the Trump Conspiracy?

      here are real conspiracies, of course, like the CIA’s plots to kill Fidel Castro or the successful scheme to have Nelson Mandela arrested on terrorism charges. But most conspiracy theorists function to obscure and invalidate real conspiracies. Cockburn and I used to joke that the 9/11 conspiracists were, in fact, themselves a conspiracy seeded by the CIA to distract the Left from challenging the real objectives of the War of Terror. But that worked out much too well to have been a real CIA plot.

      Now, however, I feel myself slipping into the grip of a fever dream featuring Donald Trump as some kind of Manchurian Candidate designed to destroy the GOP and secure the election of the otherwise unelectable Mrs. Clinton.

    • Third-party candidates lose legal fight to get into presidential debates

      A long-shot lawsuit by the Libertarian and Green Party candidates for president has been tossed out by a federal judge, lowering the odds of a third-party candidate making it into this year’s televised debates.

      “We are exploring our options, with the firm resolve that this case and the larger issue of fair debates are too important to simply allow such an arbitrary dismissal,” said Ron Nielson, the campaign manager for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson.

      Late last year, the largest third parties teamed up to argue that the Commission on Presidential Debates protected a de facto monopoly. Bruce Fein, the lawyer who drafted the lawsuit, hoped that a judge would see the private CPD as a gatekeeper for millions of dollars in free publicity, and its 15 percent polling threshold as a threat to the First Amendment. That, thought plaintiffs Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, would distinguish their cause from previous failures to open the debates.

      [...]

      Since 1996, third-party candidates have tried and repeatedly failed to cross the CPD’s threshold — 15 percent support in an average of polls. Denied access, they have resorted to stunts. In 2000, Ralph Nader obtained a ticket to view one of the debates between Al Gore and George W. Bush, and made a fuss after he was denied entry. In 2012, Nader’s Green Party successor Jill Stein was arrested after a protest near the heavily-secured entrance of a debate site.

      [...]

      But Johnson has struggled to hit 15 percent in any poll. In an average of polls collected by RealClearPolitics, he enjoys 8 percent support, a function of voter frustration with the major party candidates, but far short of what he needs for entry, even as the CPD suggests that it will round up if a third-party candidate closes on the magic number.

    • Judge rejects third parties’ suit against debate commission

      A federal judge has tossed out a lawsuit alleging that the Commission on Presidential Debates violated federal antitrust laws and the First Amendment by excluding third-party candidates.

      In a ruling Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer dismissed a suit filed last year by the Libertarian and Green parties as well their respective 2012 presidential nominees, former New Mexico Republican Gov. Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Each also happens to be his or her party’s presidential nominee again this year.

      Collyer’s ruling found little, if any, merit in the suit. She said antitrust law had no relevance to the situation and many of the ills the plaintiffs complained of were of their own making, not the debate commission.

      “Plaintiffs in this case have not alleged a non-speculative injury traceable to the Commission,” wrote Collyer, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. “Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries are wholly speculative and are dependent entirely on media coverage decisions. The alleged injuries––failure to receive media coverage and to garner votes, federal matching funds, and campaign contributions—were caused by the lack of popular support of the candidates and their parties sufficient to attract media attention.”

    • Dr. Jill Stein’s Stiff Dose of Progressive Medicine

      I spoke to Dr. Jill Stein just days before she received the Green Party’s nomination for president. A Harvard-trained doctor, Stein also ran for the presidency in 2012, when she received about a half-million votes. Today, though, she hopes to pick up votes from many of the progressives who felt the Bern and have no interest in supporting Hillary Clinton, even though she’s running against Donald Trump. The following interview has been condensed and edited for brevity.

    • Protesters with pocket Constitutions removed from Trump rally

      A group of protesters at Donald Trump’s rally here on Thursday stood up silently during the Republican nominee’s speech and held up pocket copies of the Constitution.

      They were quickly ejected by campaign staffers and drew fierce boos and jeers from the roughly 1,800 Trump supporters packed into the auditorium, the capacity of the venue.

      [...]

      Moments later, as the man interrupted Trump’s speech with shouts, a campaign staffer tapped him on the shoulder and escorted him out of the venue.

      The Republican nominee focused much of this speech on attacking Clinton and President Barack Obama.

      He also disputed that there was any “fissure” between him and running mate Mike Pence, after Pence endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s reelection, while Trump has declined to support the Speaker.

      “Paul Ryan’s a good guy, actually, so Mike called me and he said, ‘Would you mind if I endorsed? I won’t do that if it causes any complications.’ … I said, ‘Mike, you like him?’ Yes. ‘Go and do it.’”

    • Donald Trump Admits He Gets Confused and Makes Things Up After Watching Fox News

      In other words, he mistakenly thought grainy video images shown over and over on Fox News this week — of three Americans of Iranian descent getting off a plane in Geneva in January, after being freed from jail in a prisoner swap with the United States — showed money the United States has owed to Iran since 1979 being delivered the same night.

      [...]

      The transfer of $400 million to Iran by the Treasury Department has prompted outrage in the right-wing Twittersphere this week even though it was never secret. President Barack Obama announced it himself in January, calling the agreement to resolve a longstanding dispute over Iranian money held by Washington since the fall of the shah a side benefit of diplomatic ties renewed during talks over Iran’s nuclear energy program.

      An Iranian general boasted at the time that the money was a form of ransom paid to release the jailed Iranian-Americans, and this week the Wall Street Journal reported a new detail about the payment: that it was made in cash flown to Tehran on the same night the prisoners were freed. That led to renewed criticism of the deal from Republicans who argued, as they first did in January, that President Obama had paid ransom money to a state that held the American citizens as “hostages.”

    • Assange to speak to Green Party Convention via live feed

      Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, the organization that recently posted thousands of the Democratic Party’s internal emails online, will speak via live stream at the Green Party national convention, party officials announced Friday.

      Assange is scheduled to speak at 11:45 a.m. Saturday over a live stream from the Embassy of Ecuador in London.

      He will speak on the third day of the progressive party’s national convention at the University of Houston, before the party nominates its 2016 presidential nominee, widely expected to be Jill Stein.

      Assange is expected to be interviewed by 2004 Green Party presidential nominee David Cobb, party officials said in a statement Friday.

    • Inside the DNC Walkouts

      The 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia was the most contentious since 1968. Characterized by bold protests both inside and outside the convention, the U.S. and world watched a powerful challenge to the Democratic establishment take place over the course of the week. The events helped fuel an already rapid growth in support for Green Party Candidate Jill Stein, which is developing into the most significant left independent presidential run since Ralph Nader’s historic campaign in 2000.

      The political high point of the convention resistance was the Tuesday mass walkout of delegates. While exact numbers are unknown, the clearest evidence (including video and photography of vacated delegation seats) points towards a walkout of likely more than 700 Sanders delegates after the abbreviated conclusion of the roll call vote. The large and well organized Sanders delegations from California and Washington led supermajorities of their delegates outside, leaving a visible void of more than 200 seats between those two states alone.

    • The Elective Affinities of Hillary Clinton

      I’m raving, you say? This is the Age of Empire, and empire breeds monsters. We live with them now. Imperialism is our political and economic reality. Nothing material or substantial can be reformed within this colossal juggernaut. Yet, we continue to pretend that this has no bearing on our lives. In 2003 alone, the Iraq invasion cost $60 billion, three times the yearly budget for education, yet, we wonder why schools are starving for funds. When we clamor for reforms without mentioning imperialism, it is as if we were told we would be dead in three weeks and reacted by scheduling an appointment for a facelift.

    • Want a Third Party? Vote Hillary, Support Bernie

      Note that last line. America has a problem, and it isn’t Donald Trump. It is the simple fact that the nation claiming to be the largest most successful democracy in the world is run by two parties, both of which are held hostage to lobbyists and corporations.

    • Liberals Grow Hysterical Toward Those Who Plan To Break From Democratic Party

      Every four years, progressives are lectured and berated by left-leaning pundits, who have varying degrees of allegiance to the Democratic Party. Any consideration of a third-party candidate, especially the Green Party’s presidential candidate, is deemed reprehensible. Now that Hillary Clinton is officially the Democratic Party’s nominee, that moment in the election cycle is upon us.

      Some of the very same people behind the attacks on Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his supporters are behind the first volley of attacks on Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, including the concerted effort to smear her as a crank who does not believe in vaccines.

      These commentators do not care whether an alternative to the Democratic Party is built in the United States. In fact, to borrow a phrase from Aldous Huxley, they treat us to their “excruciating orgasms of self-assertion” because they have a deep-seated contempt for those who dare to dissent and meaningfully challenge Democrats.

    • Could Third Party Candidates Prove Clinton’s Achilles Heel?

      The bad news: Two of those polls—and a chunk of others recently—show that when the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein are included in a theoretical match-up, Clinton’s lead drops, making, according to a headline in Politico, a potential “third-party headache” for the former secretary of state.

    • WikiLeaks: Alcohol Industry Encourages Congressional Concern About Cannabis

      Is the alcohol industry is spending money to get members of Congress to pay attention to the problem of “marijuana-impaired driving”? That’s the case being made on cannabis industry website Marijuana.com, where a blogger seems to have assiduously searched the famous WikiLeaks dump of DNC e-mails for any reference to our favorite herb.

    • Green VP pick powerhouse of human rights and racial justice

      In looking for a vice-presidential running mate, I sought a candidate who embodies the principles of equity and social justice underpinning our campaign, and who could inspire the millions of disaffected voters hungering for an alternative. In Ajamu Baraka, I found that candidate.

      Ajamu brings to the table an unwavering commitment to human rights and the interests of the dispossessed and disenfranchised that has been the hallmark of a career spanning more than 40 years of advocacy and activism.

      From his roots with the Voter Education Project and the Black Liberation movement in the 1960s and ‘70s and continuing with his groundbreaking work against the death penalty with Amnesty International and as founding director of the U.S. Human Rights Network, Ajamu has fought for social justice while challenging the stranglehold on power that economic and political elites have enjoyed for decades at the expense of the majority.

    • Following the money behind Tim Kaine

      Hillary Clinton has chosen her potential second-in-command if elected to the White House — Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. Kaine launched his career as a civil rights lawyer, and he’s no stranger to public service. He’s a former city councilman turned mayor turned lieutenant governor turned governor turned Democratic National Committee chairman turned senator turned newly minted vice presidential candidate. Throughout his time in politics, he’s certainly seen his share of campaign money — we examined the cash behind his extensive career.

      [...]

      Three years later, Kaine became governor of Virginia and a force within the Democratic party — raising $18 million in the process. His 2005 run for governor was buoyed by several special interest groups and big donors, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. These include:

      Washington Wizards and Capitals owner Ted Leonsis ($5,000)
      Universal Leaf Tobacco ($30,000)
      Comcast ($30,500)
      Sprint ($33,453)
      Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. ($35,000)
      Billionaire and Democratic megadonor George Soros ($40,000)
      Microsoft ($42,890)
      Altria tobacco ($50,000)
      Novelist John Grisham ($75,000)
      Billionaire Randall J. Kirk ($100,000); Kirk and his companies gave Kaine and his PACs nearly a million dollars between 2005-2012. Kaine later appointed Kirk to the Board of Visitors in Virginia.
      Sandy Lerner, co-founder of Cisco Systems ($188,463)
      Sheila C. Johnson, co-founder of BET ($392,490); Johnson also gave Kaine $2,500 in airfare to and from the 2008 DNC convention in Denver.

    • The Culture War and the 2016 Election

      The blistering criticism raised by Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, a distinguished Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq in 2004, about Donald Trump has once-again ignited controversy over the real-estate developer con-man’s likely role as president. This only heightened the revelations in a recent New Yorker article by Jane Mayer on Tony Schwartz, the author of Trump’s bestseller, The Art of the Deal, and makes it clear that the presidential candidate is an egomaniacal psychopath.

    • Standing Up ‘For The Greater Good’: MintPress Will Report From Green Party Convention

      As the Green Party’s Presidential Nominating Convention convenes in Houston, there’s renewed attention on the party’s presumptive nominee, Dr. Jill Stein, and increased interest in third-party alternatives to the American two-party duopoly.

      On Saturday, MintPress News will be at the University of Houston, where Stein and her running mate, human rights scholar and activist Ajamu Baraka, are expected to accept the Green Party’s nomination for president and vice president.

      Polls consistently show that Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the political status quo. Just 9 percent of U.S. residents voted for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the primaries, according to The New York Times. In a poll conducted in May by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, some 90 percent of voters expressed a lack of confidence in the American political system, while 40 percent said that the two-party system is “seriously broken.”

    • Is The DNC Hacking A New Cold War… Or Just The Continuation Of What Every Intelligence Agency Does?

      But if there’s a high road to be had, the US government can’t really claim it. As James Bamford explains in his commentary piece for Reuters, US spy agencies haven’t exactly stayed out of world affairs, including local elections.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • YouTube’s Trolls Are Crying Censorship Over Cyberbullying Rules

      If internet history proves anything, it’s that not a day can pass without someone protesting about “free speech.” And while this theme is nothing new—as events like the Meow Wars, from 20 years ago, demonstrate—I suspect that free speech will be remembered as one of the defining questions of our era, the adolescent internet at its most audible and belligerent and angsty.

      Which is why the latest outcry on YouTube over censorship is hardly a surprise.

      Some background: One week ago, a video appeared titled “THE YOUTUBE RANT (I’m getting banned off YouTube).” Its creator was already infamous: the “commentary” channel Leafyishere.

      The video accuses YouTube of a selective approach to moderation, one where smaller channels are cautioned or shut down entirely for “roasting” and casual parody, while bigger channels (like Leafy’s own—he has well over 4 million subscribers) consistently get away with it. But now, Leafy argues, even bigger channels are being removed for minor infringements on community guidelines, which have been altered, he protests, to define even casually criticising another account in a video or comments as a form of cyberbullying.

    • Suicide Squad unlikely to secure Chinese release due to censorship laws

      China is now officially the second-largest marketplace for films in the world and has been responsible for saving more than a few underperforming blockbusters this summer. Warcraft and Independence Day: Resurgence both had strong takings in China, despite the fact both weren’t critically lauded or performed all that well in the US and European territories.

      Essentially, when studios talk about worldwide box office, they’re talking about the Chinese box-office. However, the issue with releasing in China is that the country has an incredibly strict censorship board that has a number of odd quirks compared to other countries. One of them is that China specifically bans any films that features or references ghosts.

    • Did You Catch All the Ways Hollywood Pandered to China This Year?
    • China, Hollywood, and the Global Future of Film Production
    • On Screen China: Summer Slump Sees July Drop 18% from A Year Earlier
    • Summer Blockbusters Attract Chinese Censorship
    • Sløtface Talks Feminism, Internet Censorship and “Take Me Dancing”
    • Minnesota Carpet Cleaning Business Sues US Olympic Committee Over Its Ridiculous Social Media Rules

      The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) must spend a majority of the four-year break between Olympics thinking up new, spectacularly petty demands to make of everyone when the next event rolls around. It’s always been overbearing and thuggish, but it seems determined to top itself with each new iteration of its sports-related boondoggle.

    • Facebook wants to stop clickbait. (And you won’t believe how they’re doing it)

      Facebook is escalating its war on “clickbait” headlines by instituting a new system on its newsfeed that will weed out misleading and exaggerated headlines the same way that email spam filters weed out fantastic offers to help Nigerian princes recover their lost fortunes.

      The tweaks to the algorithm, announced today in a blog post, will de-prioritize posts with headlines that “withhold information required to understand what the content of the article is and headlines that exaggerate the article to create misleading expectations”.

      The blog post listed three examples of clickbait headlines: “When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS… I Was SHOCKED!”; “He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe”; and “The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless.”

      The changes mark the second attempt by the social network to crack down on the much-reviled but nevertheless effective strategies publishers employ to coax readers to click on their content.

    • Asia Minute: China’s Online Population Grows, Along with Censorship

      Some 710 million Chinese now use the internet. For a little perspective, that’s more than double the entire population of the United States. That’s according to China’s government…which for these purposes defines an internet user as anyone who has gone online at least once in the past six months.

      The China Internet Network Information Center says the number of users is up more than 3% since December. The same study finds more than 90% of those on the internet in China get there by way of their mobile phones.The state-run China Daily highlighted a growing number of Chinese shopping and paying their bills on line…hailing taxis online…even ordering takeout food on line.

    • Yavuz Baydar: Turkey takes wife of journalist hostage

      Police in Erzurum raided the home of journalist Bülent Korucu and, in his absence, arrested his wife until he presents himself to the authorities.

    • Aditi Mittal, Ashutosh Dabke on performing adult comedy in the time of censorship

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Thousands sign petition calling for Russian PM to resign

      More than 178,000 people have signed an online petition calling for Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s resignation after he suggested teachers wanting more pay should seek a different career, AFP reported Friday.

      When asked by a university lecturer at a public forum why teachers receive less money than policemen, the prime minister replied that “there is no need to compare, the issue is what you choose in life.”

      Teaching, he said, “is a vocation. If you want to earn money, there are a bunch of great places where you can do that quicker and better in business. And you didn’t go into business.”

    • Sheriff Uses Unconstitutional Law To Raid Home And Seize Electronics Belonging To Watchdog Blogger

      This suggests a bit of magistrate shopping by the Sheriff’s Office. Now that the warrant has been executed and devices seized, a motion to quash is in place. But that does little for Officer Wayne Anderson. Not only has he been suspended (with pay) by the Houma Police Department while this farce plays out, but the court is holding onto his computers and phones until a hearing on the motion can take place.

      The First Amendment implications of Sheriff Larpenter’s raid are clear. That the search warrant — in pursuit of bogus criminal defamation charges — has already been carried out means Sheriff Larpenter will be facing Fourth Amendment violations claims as well in the inevitable civil rights lawsuit that will follow this debacle. Sheriff Larpenter should have had no problem fighting speech he didn’t like with speech of his own — especially considering his position as a public figure who holds a powerful office. Instead, he has chosen to abuse his position and power to silence a critic, something that’s not exactly helping him look any less corrupt.

    • Pokemon Company Threatens Pokemon Go API Creator With CFAA Lawsuit

      Is there no goodwill that the Pokemon Company’s lawyers won’t step in and kill off? With the popularity of Pokemon Go, some third parties had started trying to develop some services to go with it, and as part of that, a few have tried to create Pokemon Go APIs. A user going by the name Mila432 had created an unofficial Pokemon Go API in Python, and posted it to GitHub.

    • 1968 ‘Black Power Salute’ Sparked Ongoing Miscarriage of Justice by U.S. Olympic Committee

      C. Robert “Bob” Paul Jr. was one of the most interesting sports figures you probably never heard of. He was born in 1918 and died near his home on Long Island in 2011. For much of his life, he was a publicist, first for his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, and later for the United States Olympic Committee (USOC).

      In an obit for Paul released by the USOC, longtime spokesman Mike Moran wrote: “With his death goes an important cornerstone of a long ago USOC and its remarkable history.” Mr. Moran was right. There was a book in Paul, and it’s a terrible shame that he never got around to writing it.

      Eight years ago, I sought him out at a retirement home in the borough of Queens, N.Y., while researching what I regarded then and still regard as the most important unresolved issue in American Olympics history.

      “It was a story that should have made headlines for one day,” said Paul, who was the USOC’s publicist at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City. “If they had handled the whole affair right, with some reason, tolerance and common sense, it would have been something we could now look back on with pride. Instead, it’s the Olympics’ biggest ongoing shame.”

    • Israeli Company That Helped Build Gaza’s Wall Is Less Sure About Donald Trump’s

      An Israel-based security company that provided intrusion detection technology for the barrier between Israel and the Gaza Strip has offered to help Donald Trump secure the U.S. border — but suggests that building an actual wall along every section of the border is not the way to go.

      Sa’ar Koursh, the CEO of Magal Security Systems, told Bloomberg News that he would be happy to help Trump. “We would join forces with a major U.S. defense company that has experience with such projects worldwide,” he said. “We’ve done it in the past and we would definitely want to do it.”

      For Magal, border-wall building is a lucrative enterprise. It has installed perimeter detection systems between the Gaza Strip and Israel, and has deployed its surveillance and intrusion detection systems in the occupied West Bank.

    • The Intercept’s Olympics Guide for Identifying Brazil’s New Leaders

      With the 2016 Summer Olympics officially opening today in Rio de Janeiro, the world’s eyes will be on the nation of Brazil. Ever since the actual, legitimate, democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff, was suspended in April pending a final impeachment vote scheduled for later this month, there has been a new set of political leaders who rule the country — from the very same center and right-wing parties, and often the very same people, who were repeatedly rejected by voters as they sought to obtain the political power they now, without an election, are fortunate enough to wield.

      Beyond the anti-democratic means they used to seize power, Brazil’s new leaders — most of whom who were also key plotters in Rousseff’s removal — are themselves the targets of serious corruption investigations, drowning in all sorts of official allegations. Given that impeachment was justified based on the need to fight corruption, that is an ironic fact indeed (despite the high number of politicians in Dilma’s party implicated in these personal corruption scandals, including her predecessor Lula da Silva, she herself never has been). Thanks to the legal “privilege” high-level Brazilian officials have gifted themselves — whereby they can only be tried by the nation’s Supreme Court, which is so backlogged that it will be many, many years before that is remotely possible — most of these corruption scandals are unlikely to be legally adjudicated for some time, and in most cases they have denied their own guilt, though they are based in credible evidence.

    • Treat, don’t police

      Last week’s shocking treatment of migrants by employer Byron shows how government is seeking to create an army of informants – and they’re trying the same tactics in our NHS.

    • Whistleblower Retaliation Alive and Well at Hanford

      It’s getting real out at Hanford in eastern Washington, the site of the most expensive (and likely dangerous) environmental clean-up in the world. On July 21, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, along with watchdog group Hanford Challenge and UA Local Union 598 Plumbers and Steamfitters, filed an emergency legal motion asking US Judge Thomas Rice to intervene and force the US Department of Energy and federal contractor Washington River Protection Solutions to protect their workers from toxic vapor exposure at the site.

      “[It’s] as serious as it gets,” Ferguson told King 5 News. “At Hanford there’s a culture of indifference by the federal government and their contractors. Frankly, we’re not going to put up with it anymore…. So right now we’re trying to get before the judge immediately asking for immediate steps required from the federal government to protect workers. That’s the bottom line.”

      Allegedly, that “culture of indifference” is what got Sandra Black, an employee concerns program manager (ECP), fired in January 2015. Black, who worked for DOE contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), was in charge of hearing out grievances raised by workers who have safety concerns, such as those working at Hanford. Black claims that she was terminated after speaking to investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

      “I would not lie or cover up substantiated concerns or engage in unethical or illegal activities that I was directed to do,” Black said at a news conference, where she, along with three US senators presented the GAO report. “My disclosures included describing numerous incidents in which an SRNS corporate lawyer interfered with an ECP investigation, directed an ECP investigator to change findings or substantiated retaliation to not substantiated.”

      SRNS strongly denies firing Black for her cooperation with the GAO. Nonetheless, the GAO report, which was released in July, was damning in what it revealed.

      The report claimed that the DOE had “taken limited or no action to hold contractors accountable for creating a chilled work environment — in part because DOE has not clearly defined what constitutes evidence of a chilled work environment or the steps needed to hold contractors accountable.”

      In other words, the buck stops with nobody.

      “Our problems are with the way the Energy Department allows the contractors basically to self-assess how open their environment is,” Diane LoFaro, who worked on the GAO report, told the Center for Public Integrity. “Our recommendation is that those assessments need to be independent. The contractor should not be assessing themselves. The DOE should be assessing the contractors’ cultures.”

      So what happens when over 100 workers are exposed to toxic vapors while working to remediate Hanford’s 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste? According to Dave Lee, an instrument technician at Hanford, when issues are raised that may help prevent such exposures, the DOE and their contractors fight back.

    • Crowdfund Aims To Help Ex-Muslim Atheist Girl Facing Threat Of Execution Escape To The West

      An ex-Muslim atheist girl from an Arab Gulf State who faces execution in her home country if her religious affiliation were to be discovered is, with the help of the internet, planning an escape to the west.

      The girl, known on the web under the pseudonym “Dee,” currently resides in a Gulf State country where atheism is punishable by death. According to the fundraiser, her parents are also fundamentalists, who “would not hesitate to turn her over or perform an honor killing themselves if her atheism was discovered.”

      Dee also goes by the pseudonym “Haram Girl” on Twitter, where she posts regular critiques of Islam and Muslim culture. She describes herself as an atheist, a classical liberal, and an egalitarian.

    • Clinton Scandal: Bill Took Millions From Group That Pushes Sharia Law

      Ethics: When it comes to the Clintons, the scandals never end. This week, it was revealed that Bill Clinton took millions in money from a special “educational foundation” that pushes Sharia law — the basic law of Islam — around the world.

      “Why would Bill Clinton be participating in programs that teach Sharia in foreign countries where that is the specific objective of the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and al-Qaida,” Stephen Coughlin, a counterterrorism expert, wondered in an interview with the Daily Caller, which first reported the story.

      It’s a good question. The former president took some $5.6 million total from 2012 through 2014 from Dubai-based GEMS Education, which runs 51 Sharia schools in the Mideast having some 250,000 students. It has schools in other countries and regions, including Asia, the United Kingdom, Africa and even Chicago, which has two schools. As the Daily Caller reports, GEM uses one-eighth of the proceeds of its schools “to fund Islamic Jihad.”

      Oh yes, and, the Daily Caller reports, GEMS also gave the Clinton Foundation millions of dollars.

    • Chicago releases video of police shooting Paul O’Neal, unarmed black teen (GRAPHIC VIDEO)

      Footage of the fatal encounter between Chicago police officers and unarmed black teenager Paul O’Neal has been released by the city. Police review agency chief described the video as “shocking,” while a family lawyer called it an “execution.”

      O’Neal was killed by CPD officers in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood on July 28, after crashing a Jaguar convertible that was reported stolen earlier in the day in Bolingbrook, a suburb to the west. The Cook County medical examiner’s office confirmed he was shot in the back.

      On Friday, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) posted dashboard and body camera footage from four of the officers involved in the shooting.

    • Why Are Police So Afraid of Bold, Black Women Like Korryn Gaines?

      The brutal death of a 23-year-old African-American woman named Korryn Gaines has sparked yet another much-needed conversation in the United States about the use of lethal force by police and its disproportionate impact on blacks.

      Gaines was killed in her Maryland home by Baltimore County police, who had issued a warrant for her arrest over charges stemming from a traffic violation and her failure to appear in court. The young mother was armed with a shotgun that she apparently pointed at police, although they fired first. She responded with a round of shots and then police fired back, killing her and injuring her 5-year-old son.

    • Black Lives Matter Groups Stage Protests Across the U.K. (Multimedia)

      The United States’ Black Lives Matter movement has been making headlines for its protests in response to recent killings by police, but many Americans don’t realize that the United Kingdom has its own growing Black Lives Matter movement.

      Five years ago, Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man, was shot and killed by police in London. His death prompted widespread riots throughout the U.K. In recognition of the anniversary of his death, BLMUK staged protests in five cities Friday.

      In the days leading up to the protests, BLMUK posted a video outlining its reasons for action. Speakers in the video name those killed by police in the past eight months. Many of their statements echo problems of racial injustice in the U.S. “Black people face far more severe sentencing than white people for the same offense,” one man notes.

    • A Lawyer Who Turned the Tables: Graphic Biography Immortalizes Leonard Weinglass

      Leonard Weinglass stands in the grand tradition of the legendary 20th century lawyers who themselves joined social justice movements and helped the popular forces to move history forward — including Clarence Darrow, Constance Baker Motley, Thurgood Marshall, Bill Kunstler, Florynce Kennedy, Arthur Kinoy, Lew Steele, Jeff Haas, Michael Ratner, Jan Susler, George Crockett, Conrad Lynn, Nancy Hollander, Dennis Cunningham, Lynn Stewart, Lani Guinier, Leonard Boudin, Flint Taylor, Ernest Goodman, Charles Garry, Joey Mogul, Michael J. Kennedy, Walter Riley and Jeff Adache — and he’s earned the exalted rank of “People’s Lawyer.”

    • White Police Officer Convicted of Manslaughter for Death of Unarmed Black Teen

      Former Portsmouth police officer Stephen Rankin faces up to 10 years in prison for the death of William Chapman, who was killed last April in a Walmart parking lot as Rankin attempted to apprehend the 18-year-old under suspicion the teen had shoplifted, Huffington Post reports. It is unclear whether Chapman actually stole anything from the store.

    • Judge Tosses 200 Hours Of Recordings From FBI’s Courthouse Bugs

      The fallout from the FBI’s surreptitious bugging of county courthouses in California has coalesced into two motions to suppress — with two very different outcomes. What makes this even more interesting is that both decisions were issued in the same judicial district.

      Judge Phyllis Hamilton denied a motion to suppress last week. While she had concerns about the location of the bugs used in the FBI’s investigation of property auction price fixing, she reached the conclusion that the recording of conversations that occurred in a public area did not violate the defendants’ expectation of privacy. The decision hinted Judge Hamilton would be hard pressed to find any conversation in public — no matter what attempts were made to prevent bystanders from listening in — worthy of an expectation of privacy.

      Judge Charles Breyer, however, has reached the opposite conclusion. Breyer dug deeper into the location of the recording devices and questioned whether the FBI was crossing a line by placing them in areas where privileged conversations might occur.

    • State Supreme Court Rolls Back Decision That Would Have Made Violating Company Computer Policies A Crime

      The Oregon Supreme Court has handed down a ruling that should help prevent the state’s computer crime laws from turning into a local level CFAA — something that can be easily abused by prosecutors to, say, toss someone in jail for two years for 40 minutes of headline altering at a news website.

      Caryn Nascimento was arrested for theft after using a convenience store’s lottery machine to print off thousands of dollars of tickets she never paid for. But rather than settle for the theft charges, the state chose to charge her with unauthorized use under Oregon’s broadly-interpreted computer crimes statute.

      The state appeals court upheld the conviction, prompting the EFF to intervene in her case when it headed to the state supreme court. The EFF pointed out that the appeals court decision would criminalize a lot of behavior normally only subject to companies’ internal disciplinary processes.

    • Frustrated Public Defender Appoints Governor — And Licensed Attorney — To Provide Indigent Defense

      Providing public defenders for criminal defendants may be Constitutional but it certainly isn’t popular. When states look for places to cut budgets, far too often they find trimming public funding for defense lawyers is an easy way to find extra money without suffering any significant public backlash. After all, this is just money being wasted defending guilty people, right? It’s just shady lawyers ensuring criminals are back on the street as swiftly as possible by exploiting loopholes in the system citing violations of their clients’ Constitutional rights. To many members of the public, this is money that could be better spent elsewhere — even as they enjoy the benefits of the Constitutional amendments (4th-6th, mostly), public defenders are constantly protecting from additional damage.

      So, a right guaranteed by the Constitution becomes a privilege extended by the grace of the state, subject to clawback and only offering defendants the promise that someone with an already-unmanageable caseload will try to fit them in somewhere. Meanwhile, defendants who can’t make bail get to sit around in a jail cell until someone from an underfunded public defender’s office can attempt to suss out the weaknesses in the prosecution’s case in between all the other cases they’re already falling behind on.

  • DRM

    • EFF to FTC: Online Retailers Must Label Products Sold with Digital Locks

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of consumer groups, content creators, and publishers asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today to require online retailers to label the ebooks, songs, games, and apps that come with digital locks restricting how consumers can use them.

      In a letter sent to the FTC today, the coalition said companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple have a duty to inform consumers if products for sale are locked with some kind of “digital rights management” or DRM. Companies use DRM to purportedly combat copyright infringement, but DRM locks can also block you from watching the movie you bought in New York when you go to Asia on vacation, or limit which devices can play the songs you purchased.

      “Without DRM labeling, it’s nearly impossible to figure out which products have digital locks and what restrictions these locks impose,” said EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow. “We know the public prefers DRM-free e-books and other electronic products, but right now buyers are in the dark about DRM locks when they go to make purchases online. Customers have a right to know about these restrictions before they part with their money, not after.”

    • DRM: You have the right to know what you’re buying!

      Today, the EFF and a coalition of organizations and individuals asked the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to explore fair labeling rules that would require retailers to warn you when the products you buy come locked down by DRM (“Digital Rights Management” or “Digital Restrictions Management”).

      These digital locks train your computerized devices to disobey you when you ask them to do things the manufacturer didn’t specifically authorize — even when those things are perfectly legal. Companies that put digital locks on their products — ebook, games and music publishers, video companies, companies that make hardware from printers to TVs to cat litter trays — insist that DRM benefits their customers, by allowing the companies to offer products at a lower price by taking away some of the value — you can “rent” an ebook or a movie, or get a printer at a price that only makes sense if you also have to buy expensive replacement ink.

      We don’t buy it. We think that the evidence is that customers don’t much care for DRM (when was the last time you woke up and said, “Gosh, I wish there was a way I could do less with my games?”). Studies agree.

      The FTC is in charge of making sure that Americans don’t get ripped off when they buy things. We’ve written the Commission a letter, drafted and signed by a diverse coalition of public interest groups, publishers, and rightholders, calling on the agency to instruct retailers to inform potential customers of the restrictions on the products they’re selling. In a separate letter, we detail the stories of 20 EFF supporters who unwittingly purchased DRM-encumbered products and later found themselves unable to enjoy their purchases (a travel guide that required a live internet connection to unlock, making it unreadable on holiday), or locked into an abusive relationship with their vendors (a cat litter box that only worked if resupplied with expensive perfume), or even had other equipment they owned rendered permanently inoperable by the DRM in a new purchase (for example, a game that “bricked” a customer’s DVD-R drive)

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Megaupload 2.0 Will Link File Transfers to Bitcoin Transactions

        Kim Dotcom is teasing fresh information about his Megaupload 2.0 project set to launch in January 2017. Noting that every file transfer will be linked to a bitcoin transaction, Dotcom says the new platform will take decentralization, anonymity & encryption “to the next level”.

      • Kim Dotcom dumps out a load of new Mega information

        NON-PUBLICITY SHY internet phenomenon Kim Dotcom is bursting at the seams with news about the new file storage system that he is developing to replace the one closed down with sledgehammers by the FBI and the one that he walked away from while grumbling.

      • Photographer Learns To Embrace The Public Domain… And Is Better Off For It

        There are constant debates over the value of the public domain. As you know, in the US, Congress has repeatedly expanded and extended copyright law to effectively wipe out the public domain. No new works have gone into the public domain because of copyright law (other than works by the Federal government) in many years, and that likely won’t change for many years either. The only way works go into the public domain these days are through some sort of public dedication, such as by using the Creative Commons CC0 license — though very careful lawyers may remind you that even this is not technically putting the work in the public domain. Under the current Copyright Act there really isn’t a way to officially put something in the public domain. A copyright holder can only make an effective promise that the work should be treated as if it’s in the public domain by declaring it so.

        The fact that the law is so hostile to the public domain is no accident. If you look at the history of the debates about copyright shows the legacy copyright industries being actively hostile to the public domain, and making a variety of silly, nonsensical (and flat out wrong) arguments about the public domain. They’ve argued that putting works in the public domain removes all value from the work. They’ve also claimed that putting works in the public domain will cause it to be over-utilized, since it’s free, thereby harming its value in a different way. The fact that these two arguments seem to conflict with each other was more or less ignored. And then you even have the extremely ridiculous claims that the public domain is theft of private property. Paul Heald has done some tremendous research on how all of the hyperbolic statements about how awful the public domain is simply aren’t true. But that’s looking at historical data.

      • DOJ Makes Smart Decision On Music Licensing… Music Publishers Completely Lose Their Shit

        For the past couple of years now, the Justice Department has been exploring the so-called “consent decree” around music publishing. This was an agreement, first made in 1941, and then reviewed in 2001, on how music performing rights organizations (mainly ASCAP and BMI) could operate without violating antitrust rules. Without such consent decrees, there was a quite reasonable fear that the performing rights organizations (PROs) would abuse their monopoly positions. This is not a theoretical argument. If you look around the globe, there are many, many, many, many, many stories of these organizations behaving badly.

        In this case, ASCAP and BMI had been whining that because of those darn internet companies not paying enough, they need to get rid of the consent decree, mainly so that they can do more to jack up rates (there’s more to it, but the end result is they want to be able to withhold rights to force rates up). Of course, in opening up this can of worms, they also got the DOJ to start looking more closely at other practices, including an exploration into so-called split works or “fractional licensing.” The details here can get confusing, but in short: when a work has multiple copyright holders, many have argued that you need to get a license and/or approval from every copyright holder. But if you look at the legislative history of the 1976 Copyright Act, legislators made it clear that under the act, they intended to make it clear that any copyright holder in a work with multiple authors had the right to license the whole work.

08.05.16

Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is Putting an End to Lots of Software Patents; Patent Microcosm Spins and Distracts From This

Posted in America, Deception, Patents at 3:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Still championing patent quality after a dark age of rubberstamping under David Kappos

PTAB

Summary: Hope for the US patent system as some of the most controversial abstract patents are declared invalid and thrown aside

THE ROLE of the PTAB, the scientific collective responsible for abolishing a lot of software patents by proactive action, is increasing. Things are changing very rapidly, but corporate media isn’t reporting (or misreporting) on it. This is good news for opponents of software patents anywhere in the world.

PTAB has enemies. Its enemies are people who profit from patents on software, notably patent lawyers. They are currently discrediting PTAB using the term/notion of “reverse patent trolls” (invalidating bad patents is trolling?!). MIP has had a decent series about PTAB this past week. The earlier part speaks of “authors of a new white paper [who] believe that almost 75% of pharmaceutical patent settlements at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board meet the criterion for inferring a strong likelihood of reverse payment settlement. The paper also suggests a rule to deter attempts to exploit the Board as a holdup device as well as discussing reverse patent trolls” (meaningful and inappropriate term).

“Things are changing very rapidly, but corporate media isn’t reporting (or misreporting) on it.”Lobbyist for software patents, David Kappos, also pushed out a so-called ‘white paper’ without disclosing who was paying him for all that (it’s pretty ugly and it definitely discredits the USPTO where he was previously a Director, the highest position and equivalent of President at the EPO).

Another installment from MIP then gave a detailed breakdown of law firms that profit from all this chaos of poor patent examination at the Patent Office. We recognise many of these firms. MIP said that “Sterne Kessler has become the first law firm to handle more than 500 AIA proceedings, with a particularly strong showing representing defendants. Fish & Richardson is the top law firm for challengers at the PTAB, breaking the 300 petition mark” (Fish & Richardson was mentioned here many times before.

The part which we didn’t quite appreciate was the one where Michael Loney of MIP was cherry-picking like climate change denialists, making it appear like PTAB was on the decline with the headline “July CBM petition filing slumps to lowest level since February 2013″ (skip to third paragraph for context).

PTAB staff may be taking their summer’s break and as Loney later noted, “PTAB Monthly Data and Analysis: July was the second-busiest month of 2016 for petition filing, but covered business method petitions fell to the lowest level since February 2013. Recent decisions from the Board include cancelling claims on a patent that had been used to sue more than 250 defendants” (CBMs are part of a broader picture).

“This is good news for opponents of software patents anywhere in the world.”To put things in perspective: “The month seems particularly strong when compared with that time of year in previous years. July in 2015 and 2014 was a relatively quiet month with both June and August of those years having at least 50 more petitions filed than the July figure.” Another article took note of 11% litigation decline last month, showing that the system was gradually correcting itself. To quote, “407 cases were filed in US district courts in July, with two new plaintiffs leading the way and entities such as Shipping and Transit, Uniloc, Sportbrain and Guyzar adding to their 2016 totals” (these are mostly patent trolls).

MIP looked more closely at one particular case and said: “The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has invalidated all the claims of a patent owned by storage software company Boxbee in a post-grant review (PGR) proceeding brought by Netsirv and Local Motion. This is the third final written decision in a PGR, all of which have resulted in patents being invalidated.”

It is hardly surprising. PTAB typically demolishes the patents it looks into, leaving patent lawyers rather scared and bashful (in the face of their clients). A software patents lobbying site, for example, got so upset at PTAB that Gene, its founder, tried cursing at it (“impotence”). Here is a new take about PTAB in the “Post-Alice World”. It says: “Only 16% of the Board’s eligibility decisions fully reversed the eligibility rejections, and none of the other 84% of the applications have been allowed despite the effort and the expense of the appeal.”

“PTAB typically demolishes the patents it looks into, leaving patent lawyers rather scared and bashful (in the face of their clients).”Yes, so what? They’re obviously trying to discredit PTAB, a cornerstone of AIA. Here is one patent attorney leaning on Bascom, in spite of the case's old age (they’ll refer to it forever because they’re running low on supportive cases), saying it “turns this on its head by holding that the Patentee must proffer prior art to show 101 validity. Alice shifts burden of proof.” A sponsored “REPORT” (i.e. paid marketing) from IAM repeats this same talking point. They just can’t help it, can they? PTAB combined with Alice is a nightmare to them and all they can do it ridicule Justices, call PTAB “impotent” (low blow), and mislead clients into believing that nothing has changed.

“Lawyers are liars,” my wife told me years ago. She had heard that saying quite a lot. It certainly is the case when it comes to a lot of patent lawyers, at least those who are pushing their agenda into articles (self promotion disguised as ‘analyses’). █

The USPTO and Legal System Are Tightening Patent Scope, Which Means Virtually No Software Patents Anymore

Posted in America, Patents at 8:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

…Not even if the algorithms are run on some “general purpose computer” (whatever that means!)

Time is tight

Summary: Software patents and lawyers who depend on them are running out of time and running low on spin/cherry-picking/excuses

YESTERDAY we wrote about video streaming patents and a notorious podcasting patent getting invalidated, with admission from the USPTO that it granted in error (prior art, not just Alice). Some software patenting proponents caught up with it and posted a link to the full decision: “Dist. Of DE Kills 2 Video Streaming Patents with Alice/ 101: http://assets.law360news.com/0824000/824998/04313306922.pdf …”

The word “kills” is intended to give this a negative connotation, just like “attacks” and “death squad” (same person uses these words a lot).

This wasn’t a CAFC decision and that’s actually noteworthy because nowadays the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) is a lot more likely to invalidate/reject software patents based on Alice. Speaking of CAFC, a new article by Dennis Crouch speaks of scope limitation induced by “consisting of” inside patents. To quote:

Although our attention over the past few years has focused more on eligibility and definiteness issues, claim construction continues to befuddle the courts. In MultiLayer Stretch Cling Film v. Berry Plastics (Fed. Cir. 2016), the Federal Circuit has offered a split interpretation of the patent’s Markush group claim element.

The asserted cling-film claim requires “five identifiable inner layers with each layer being selected from the group consisting of LLDPE, VLDPE, ULDPE, and mLLDPE resins.”

So here we have another example of tightening patent scope, other than what’s related to Alice.

Speaking of Alice and CAFC, Troutman Sanders LLP wrote in the software patenting proponents’ site earlier today, noting that according to CAFC, “Software means plus function claims Indefinite for failure to disclose algorithm,” or in other words software patents are not “function [if you] then disclose a “general purpose computer” as the structure performing that function.”

This is noteworthy because efforts to pass/sneak in software patents in India, Europe and New Zealand have relied on attempts to ascribe physical properties to software by stating in the patent application that it runs on some machine (typically just some ordinary off-the-shelf PC or server). To quote the funnier part from the above: “The Court also affirmed that the this means-plus-function term was indefinite. In the case of computer-implemented functions, the specification must disclose an algorithm for performing the claimed function. The patents-in-suit did not disclose an operative algorithm for the claimed “symbol generator.” The function of generating symbols must be performed by some component of the patents, but the patents did not describe this component.”

So the patent/s did not even describe an algorithm, let alone pseudo-code!

It definitely looks as though patent lawyers are growing nervous, seeing year after year how more and more abstract patents get thrown down the toilet/wastebasket, essentially devaluing the remainder (those not tested in the court or in PTAB, which we shall write about next). █

Even Corporate Media Calls BlackBerry a Patent Troll

Posted in America, Patents at 8:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The IP Hawk on BlackBerry

Summary: Transition from production to so-called ‘licensing’ (i.e. patent shakedown), as Microsoft has been doing against Android/Linux/ChromeOS, compared publicly to patent trolling

BlackBerry is gradually becoming more of a patent troll. We warned about this several years ago and now it’s officially happening. We wrote about this earlier in the day yesterday and shortly afterwards we found the article “The New Patent Troll: BlackBerry” (via The IP Hawk, who actually wrote it).

What’s nice to see here is that our prediction was correct. It’s sad to see once-practicing companies resorting to these tactics because their sales or market share are minuscule and products not compelling/competitive anymore.

Yesterday we mentioned Forbes suggesting that it’s possible Nintendo can come under many software patent lawsuits. Some in the patent-centric press are now wondering aloud if Nintendo will use patents for revenue, as means of deriving money from Pokemon GO:

With all due respect, this blogger remains skeptical about these several expressions of seemingly limitless optimism for Nintendo’s IP potential on mobile. He can never forget the valuation of nearly $2.5 billion dollars or more that was coming from the investment community in 2011 regarding the Kodak patent portfolio, here. When the dust settled in the court-managed proceedings, the patent portfolio was sold for only approximately $500 million dollars, here. This blogger has not deviated from the sense that the initial estimate was as much (or more) about hope, prayer, and investment house spin as an indication of genuine market value.

For that reason, when Mr. Fischer suggests that the company can unlock IP licensing revenues—of company patents– ranging from $290 million to $570 million, this blogger needs to ask: What is there in the company’s patent portfolio (separate apart from licensing of the character rights), that supports such an amount? Indeed, how is the value of this estimate range reached?

Well, software patents haven’t a foothold anymore, so suggesting that companies will shell out hundreds of millions of dollars for these is totally disconnected from reality. As for BlackBerry, it is suing in Texas now, perhaps hoping that this defunct and bias ‘legal’ system would favour its patents (which to be fair include quite a few hardware patents, not just software patents). █

Links 5/8/2016: ROSA Fresh R8, GNU C Library 2.24

Posted in News Roundup at 7:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Creating affordable solutions with open source tools

    Open source is often the heart of many civic technology solutions because using open source leverages the minds of many. Small web solution providers, in particular, often turn to open source as a way to deliver services without having to reinvent the wheel. I recently found out about Digital Deployment, a civic web solution provider in Sacramento, that leverages open source, and so I asked them to share their story with me. I chatted on the phone with Chief Operating Officer Sloane Dell’Orto and Lead Software Engineer Dennis Stevense.

  • Cogito, Ergo Sumana

    Advice on Starting And Running A New Open Source Project: Recently, a couple of programmers asked me for advice on starting and running a new open source project. So, here are some thoughts, assuming you’re already a programmer, you haven’t led a team before, and you know your new software project is going to be open source.

    I figure there are a few different kinds of best practices in starting and running open source projects.

  • FCC Settlement Requires TP-Link to Support 3rd-Party Firmware

    In a win for the open source community, router maker TP-Link will be required to allow consumers to install third-party firmware on their wireless routers, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced Monday. The announcement comes on the heels of a settlement requiring TP-Link to pay a $200,000 fine for failing to properly limit their devices’ transmission power on the 2.4GHz band to within regulatory requirements. On its face, new rules about open source firmware don’t seem to have much to do with TP-Link’s compliance problems. But the FCC’s new rule helps fix an unintended consequence of a policy the agency made last year, which had led to open source developers being locked out of wireless routers entirely.

  • Events

    • Why You Should Speak At & Attend LinuxConf Australia

      Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend at FOSDEM 2016, where he and I co-organize the Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues, Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).

      Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact, because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning (local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife, sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • 10 reasons you should use LibreOffice and not Microsoft Word

      The Document Foundation just released version 5.2 of its fully open source office suite LibreOffice. This release brings many new features and UI improvements. When I got the press release, I started updating LibreOffice on my MacBook. But here’s the thing: I’m also a user of Microsoft Word.

      That made me pause and consider why I use LibreOffice when I am forking over $99 a year to Microsoft. The flash of introspection surprised me. I’m an unabashed open source and Linux fan, but I am kind of agnostic when it comes to the tools I use. I use what works for me. So I reached out to my followers on Google+ and Facebook to learn about their reasons for using LibreOffice.

      Here are some of the many reasons why people, myself included, love LibreOffice.

    • Finding Alternatives to Microsoft Excel

      For example, if you are looking for software to install on your Windows-, OS X- or Linux-based computer so you can work without an internet connection, consider free, open-source suites like LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice. Along with word-processing and presentation applications, both suites include a spreadsheet program called Calc that uses the .ods format — but can open and save files in Microsoft Excel’s native format.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Embracing Open Source Software: Advantages and Risks

      Many business and government ­organizations rely on open source software (OSS). One of the most common and widely known ­examples is the Linux operating system. While the use of OSS can provide numerous advantages such as inexpensive and particularly robust software that has been debugged and ­optimized by ­numerous ­programmers, there are also attendant risks. This article explores OSS and its use generally in commercial settings. An ­overview of OSS is provided along with a discussion of its ­popularity with programmers and several associated risks. Additionally, a brief description of ­various OSS licenses is provided. A ­follow-up ­article will provide a strategy for developing a policy to ­manage OSS use.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • European countries awarded for their “star” commitments

      IRM attributes “starred” status to selected commitments included in countries’ National Action Plans (NAP). These commitments “represent exemplary reforms that have potentially transformative impact on citizens in the country of implementation”, OGP said.

    • Open Access/Content

      • The largest Wikipedia gathering in South Asia kicks off

        Wiki Conference India 2016 (WCI), the largest gathering of contributors to Wikipedia and its sister projects in South Asia, will be held during August 5-7 this year in Chandigarh, India.

        The first iteration of this event was five years ago in 2011. The event is focused around South Asian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects. Hundreds of participants, including over 100 scholarship holders from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, will participate in this three-day event. A team of volunteers representing several Wikimedia communities across the country and three Wikimedia affiliates—Wikimedia India, Punjabi Wikimedians and Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program—are working together to make this event a success.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • EOMA68: > $60k pledged on crowdsupply.com

        crowdsupply.com has a campaign to fund production of EOMA68 computer cards (and associated peripherals) which recently passed the $60,000 mark.

        If you were at DebConf13 in Switzerland, you may have seen me with some early prototypes that I had been lent to show people.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • CP/M Creator Gary Kildall’s Memoirs Released as Free Download

      The year before his death in 1994, Gary Kildall—inventor of the early microcomputer operating system CP/M—wrote a draft of a memoir, “Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the Evolution of the Personal Computer Industry.” He distributed copies to family and friends, but died before realizing his plans to release it as a book.

      This week, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, with the permission of Kildall’s children, released the first portion of that memoir. You can download it here.

      Wrote Scott and Kristin Kildall in an introductory letter: “In this excerpt, you will read how Gary and Dorothy started from modest means as a young married couple, paved a new path for start-up culture, and embraced their idea of success to become leaders in the industry. Our father embodied a definition of success that we can all learn from: one that puts inventions, ideas, and a love of life before profits as the paramount goal.”

    • E-mails show how UK physicists were dumped over Brexit

      UK researchers are suffering because of the country’s vote to leave the European Union — and a British physicist has now gone public with one such tale of woe.

      Paul Crowther, who heads the physics and astronomy department at the University of Sheffield, has shared e-mails from late July that explain why researchers in his department were suddenly dropped from an EU collaboration. The European coordinator for the consortium felt that Brexit put UK-based researchers in a “very awkward position” and that their participation would “compromise the project”.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Why the GMO Labeling Bill Obama Just Signed Into Law Is a Sham—and a National Embarrassment

      It is known as the DARK Act—Denying Americans the Right to Know. It was signed by President Obama last Friday in the afterglow of the Democratic National Convention, without fanfare or major media coverage. The bill’s moniker is apt. With a few strokes of his pen Obama scratched out the laws of Vermont, Connecticut and Maine that required the labeling of genetically engineered foods.

      He also nullified the GE seed labeling laws in Vermont and Virginia that allowed farmers to choose what seeds they wanted to buy and plant. And for good measure he preempted Alaska’s law requiring the labeling of any GE fish or fish product, passed to protect the state’s vital fisheries from contamination by recently approved genetically engineered salmon.

    • Rave On: Music, Ecstasy and the Real Tragedy of Corporate Drugs

      Drug use doesn’t begin at raves, it begins when children as young as three are diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and are placed on Ritalin. As of 2010, according to the National Health Interview Survey, 5.2 million kids between the ages of 3 and 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD. According to the University of Utah’s Genetic Science Learning Center, “Ritalin is a stimulant like cocaine” and “may cause changes in the brain over time.” Further, up to “50% of adolescents in drug treatment centers report abusing Ritalin.” Yet a vague evaluation by a doctor or teacher of too much “squirminess” can lead a youngster to spend an adolescence on meds. The none too subtle message? If you have a problem, pop a pill.

    • The Washington Vaccination Ploy: Puerto Rico and the Zika Quandary

      Should you fear receiving the needle from a stranger? Yes. Should you fear receiving it from a person you know all too well as a historical abuser? Even more so. Empires do it, states do it, and even local agencies do it. Let’s all, as it were, vaccinate for all in this perverted paraphrasing of the Cole Porter song, the assumption that the medical facility cures, and the giver and administrator knows all.

    • Add Russia’s Olympic Doping Scandal to the Rich History of Cheating in Sports

      Of the 387-member Russian team, more than 100 have already been banned, including 67 from the glamour sport of track and field, according to a recent ruling by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.

      Not that cheating is necessarily a communist hallmark. Athletes from capitalist countries do it, too.

      In the most celebrated Olympic scandal, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was disqualified after winning the 100-meter dash at the 1988 Seoul Olympics when he was found to have used the steroid stanozolol.

      The most celebrated Olympian who was never quite caught was the United States’ Carl Lewis, who won nine Olympic gold medals from 1984 to 1996. In 2003, Lewis acknowledged testing positive three times before the 1988 Olympics. He got off with warnings from U.S. officials, although, under the rules, he should have been prevented from competing in Seoul, where he won gold medals in the 100 meters (after Johnson defaulted) and long jump.

      After the scandal, Lewis wasn’t exactly contrite.

      “There were hundreds of people getting off,” Lewis said in 2003. “Everyone was treated the same. … It’s ridiculous. Who cares? I did 18 years of track and field, and I’ve been retired five years, and they’re still talking about me, so I guess I still have it.”

    • Why Florida’s Medical Marijuana System Is Ripe for Corporate Takeover

      In June 2014, the disgraced former CEO of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) signed Florida’s medical marijuana bill into law. It was a fitting beginning to a regulatory process that has been marred by shadowy fraud in the selection of lucrative vertically integrated licenses in what could become one of the largest medical marijuana markets in the country. The state appears poised to double down upon the fraud, and in keeping with Governor Rick Scott’s legacy of putting healthcare profits before people, some of the new law’s provisions could shield corporate revenues at the expense of fragile patients.

      This is the picture painted by Freedom of Information Act requests, Sunshine Law requests and public reports pointing to perjury and fraud on the part of Alpha Foliage and its partner Surterra Therapeutics, one of only five nurseries granted oligopolic power over Florida’s entire medical cannabis market. The corruption may lead all the way to the governor’s office and it seems some of Florida’s powerful agricultural companies have wielded their influence over existing medical marijuana laws to add dangerous provisions in their financial favor.

    • EPA protected Monsanto’s corporate profits by hiding the truth about glyphosate and cancer for decades

      Is it really possible that the EPA – which is supposed to stand for Environmental Protection Agency, by the way – actually hid the truth about the toxicity of one of Monsanto’s top-selling herbicides ?

      According to researcher and consultant, Dr. Anthony Samsel, the answer would be an unequivocal yes. Dr. Samsel claims to have gained possession of EPA documents that reveal the cancer-causing effects of glyphosate. In fact, Samsel states that these documents contain information tying glyphosate to cancer beginning in the 1970s.

      Glyphosate is the primary ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide known as Roundup, which is an extremely popular product that is used across the world in the cultivation of GM crops. Dr. Samsel has been researching the effects of glyphosate for many years, though he notes that much of his work has not been taken seriously and often dismissed.

      Along with fellow researcher, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Dr. Samsel has authored several studies on the potentially negative effects of glyphosate use. Though their work was previously unrecognized, many who initially dismissed their research are now beginning to pay more attention.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Risk From Linux Kernel Hidden in Windows 10 Exposed at Black Hat [Ed: “Alex Ionescu, chief architect at Crowdstrike” – well, enough says. CrowdStrike Microsoft-tied. CrowdStrike are the same chronic liars who recently accused Russia of DNC leaks despite lack of evidence. The corporate press cited them. How can GNU and Linux running under a piece of malware with keyloggers and back doors be the main security concern?]
    • Italian-based Android RAT spies on mobiles in Japan and China, say researchers

      Researchers discover an Italian-based Android RAT designed for spying that is targeting mobile devices using their unique identification codes

    • keysafe

      Have you ever thought about using a gpg key to encrypt something, but didn’t due to worries that you’d eventually lose the secret key? Or maybe you did use a gpg key to encrypt something and lost the key. There are nice tools like paperkey to back up gpg keys, but they require things like printers, and a secure place to store the backups.

      I feel that simple backup and restore of gpg keys (and encryption keys generally) is keeping some users from using gpg. If there was a nice automated solution for that, distributions could come preconfigured to generate encryption keys and use them for backups etc. I know this is a missing peice in the git-annex assistant, which makes it easy to generate a gpg key to encrypt your data, but can’t help you back up the secret key.

      So, I’m thinking about storing secret keys in the cloud. Which seems scary to me, since when I was a Debian Developer, my gpg key could have been used to compromise millions of systems. But this is not about developers, it’s about users, and so trading off some security for some ease of use may be appropriate. Especially since the alternative is no security. I know that some folks back up their gpg keys in the cloud using DropBox.. We can do better.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Colin Powell’s Former Chief of Staff Thinks Hillary Clinton Is Too Eager to Resort to War

      This is a useful conversation that ranges beyond the realm of the lesser-evil cliché, and one that answers these key questions: What exactly is “the playbook,” and why does onetime George W. Bush aide Lawrence Wilkerson say Hillary Clinton comes straight out of it?

      Wilkerson, who served as former Defense Secretary Colin Powell’s chief of staff in the Bush II White House, is the one to whom The Real News Network’s Paul Jay turns, in this TRNN video clip, to gauge Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s approaches to foreign policy issues as well as to potential and actual armed conflicts.

    • Trident in a time warp: party politics vs defence needs

      As Britain and Europe reeled from Brexit Theresa May rushed through the vote on Trident replacement. Was this strong leadership or our human security being sacrificed to expediency?

    • “People’s Tribunal” Launched in Haiti to Commemorate 101 Years of U.S. Occupation

      Thursday, July 28, when Hillary Rodham Clinton took to the stage to accept the Democratic nomination to be the first female candidate of a major political party for president, was also the 101st anniversary of the U.S. military occupation of Haiti that lasted nineteen years.

      Hundreds of people took to the streets and filled a gym named after president Stenio Vincent, who negotiated the departure of the U.S. Marines in 1934, to launch the People’s Tribunal on U.S. Occupation/Domination. The march began at Fort National, of historic significance. Equally significant was the rapprochement of various segments of Haiti’s progressive movements, often fragmented along political lines.

    • Needing an Exit from Afghan Quagmire

      The failure of U.S. policy in Afghanistan has been obvious for years, but neither President Bush nor President Obama wanted the defeat hung on their legacies, so the bloody folly goes on, a test for the next president, says Alon Ben-Meir.

    • Hiroshima: the Crime That Keeps on Paying, But Beware the Reckoning

      The decision to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a political not a military decision. The targets were not military, the effects were not military. The attacks were carried out against the wishes of all major military leaders. Admiral William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in his memoirs that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender…” General Eisenhower, General MacArthur, even General Hap Arnold, commander of the Air Force, were opposed. Japan was already devastated by fire bombing, facing mass hunger from the US naval blockade, demoralized by the surrender of its German ally, and fearful of an imminent Russian attack. In reality, the war was over. All top U.S. leaders knew that Japan was defeated and was seeking to surrender.

    • The Saudi Role in the 9/11 Attacks

      On 27 November 2002 a bipartisan commission was established by Congress to investigate the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. By the time the commission was created, President George W. Bush had characterised the attacks as “acts of war”, adding that “freedom and democracy are under attack”. It was therefore to be expected that anyone who was actually, or even imagined to be, involved in these attacks was going to be labelled as an enemy.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • What we may expect from recent Wikileaks on Turkish politics

      In his latest book, The Uprising, “Bifo” Berardi (2012) borrows some concepts from one of the most important figures in the study of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, in order to describe the prevailing social impasse: instead of engendering a radical transformation or revolutionary upheaval, systemic disruptions in the social field increasingly consolidate and even give a boost to the power of the dominant paradigm, process, or group.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • California to set power regulations on computers

      California, the state where the personal computer business was born and eventually revolutionized society, is about to be home to another change that figures to have a permanent impact on the computer industry.

      By all indications, by the end of this year the California Energy Commission will adopt energy efficiency guidelines for computers, becoming the first state in the nation to do so.

      The agency estimates it will add about $18 to price of a computer but promises it will save customers and businesses much more in energy savings.

    • To Save Energy Or Not, That Is The Question.

      Unless the state is going to run all IT, this just can’t work. Whatever throttle, limit or setting California requires will either have some means of circumvention or be counter-productive.

    • Are We Looking at a Mass Extinction Event?

      If you or someone you know needs proof that global climate change is real and is happening before our very eyes, you could go to the “State of the Climate Report” put together by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

    • Major Amazon dam opposed by tribes fails to get environmental license

      Brazil’s environmental regulator Ibama decided on Thursday to shelve the environmental license request for a hydroelectric dam on the Tapajós river in the Amazon, a project that had been opposed by indigenous tribes and conservation groups.

      Ibama’s licensing office ruled the dam’s backers had not presented information in time to show its social and environmental viability. They halted the 30bn reals (£7.2bn) project. In April, Ibama had suspended the licensing process that began in 2009 after criticism by Brazil’s indigenous affairs department, Funai.

      With installed capacity of about 6.1 gigawatts, the dam proposed by state-run Eletrobras, Brazil’s largest power utility holding, and a group of other electricity companies, would have been one of Brazil’s biggest.

      But it would have flooded 376 sq km (145 sq miles) of Amazon rainforest that is home to some 12,000 Munduruku Indians, according to Greenpeace.

  • Finance

    • Trade Deals Like the TPP Put Corporate Polluters Above the Law

      The Obama administration’s historic rejection of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline marked the first time a major fossil fuel project was denied over climate change concerns. The decision capped a contentious years-long fight, and helped spark a broader grassroots movement aimed at keeping fossil fuels in the ground, which scientists have increasingly warned is necessary if we hope to limit global temperatures to manageable levels.

      But TransCanada would not take no for an answer. Soon after the rejection, the company announced it would sue the United States government for $15 billion in lost profits under a tribunal system in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) called Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). This system, which the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership would dramatically expand, allows foreign investors to bypass U.S. courts and challenge American laws in a corporate-friendly arbitration system. The Keystone XL case shows how the ISDS system puts corporate polluters above the law and threatens global action on climate change.

    • Don’t make crude assumptions about young people’s attitudes to the EU

      It has become a mantra that, as a matter of natural course, younger people are pro-EU and that therefore the future looks bright for the Remain camp. This is not reflected either in the recent history of UK voting or opinion polling, or indeed of current surveys in other EU countries.

      The unmentioned story of the EU referendum is that to win it, the Leave camp had to alienate one surprisingly eurosceptic age group over a very short period. The 18 to 24-year-old voter.

    • IRS Launches Investigation of Clinton Foundation (Video)
    • Why has Britain stopped striking? Workers no longer feel empowered to act

      Striking in Britain has now reached an all-time low. Last year saw the fewest workers go on strike since records began in 1893. Is this a cause for celebration, a victory for partnership between capital and labour? The answer is a firm no.

      Although striking is a last resort for workers on account of the lost wages incurred, the fact that only 170,000 days were lost to strikes in 2015 (compared with 29.5m in 1979) indicates just how weak the vast majority of workers feel they are in today’s labour market. It shows workers perceive themselves as ever more powerless to collectively stand up against the increasingly common employment practices of the likes of Sports Direct, Deliveroo and Hermes. Some companies now require employees to shoulder what were previously employer responsibilities (such as national insurance, pensions and sick pay) and be subject to pernicious performance management targets and monitoring.

    • Mike Pence Loves ALEC and Keeps Pushing Public School Privatization, Despite Lousy Indiana Record With Charters and Vouchers

      Mike Pence is a hardcore right-winger playing the long game, especially when it comes to privatizing public schools.

      It’s not just that the Republican vice-presidential nominee and Indiana governor last weekend told a roomful of deregulation-obsessed executives and lobbyists in Indianapolis, “You are the model for Washington, D.C., after this election. You really are.”

      The nation is “at a fork in the road,” Pence said at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual meeting, referring not only to who would be president for the next four years but who would control the Supreme Court for the “next 40 years.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Spoiler Myth: Clinton Has More Problems Than Jill Stein and the Bernie or Busters

      Now that Hillary Clinton has wrapped up the Democratic Presidential nomination with the endorsement of Bernie Sanders, her supporters have transitioned to denigrating progressives who affirm they are “Bernie or Bust” by supporting Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein over Clinton. Senator Sanders has affirmed the importance of continuing the political revolution, and many of his supporters are choosing to do that outside of the Democratic Party.

      Critics against Stein cite Ralph Nader and his running mate, Native American activist Winona LaDuke, as the spoilers of the 2000 election, in which he received over 90,000 votes in Florida, the state Gore lost by just over 500 votes. Had Gore won Florida, he would have won the general election, but those who smear Nader as a spoiler are ignoring other contributing factors to that election. Bill Clinton’s impeachment in December 1998 inspired helped inspire over 300,000registered Democrats in Florida to vote for Bush in the general election. According to Florida exit polls, only a small percentage of Nader supporters would have voted for Gore instead of Bush, with most citing they wouldn’t have voted at all. The Supreme Court ruled, controversially, to halt the recount in Florida. A study conducted by the Progressive Review in 2002 analyzed whether Al Gore’s polling prior to the general election inversely changed with Ralph Nader’s and no correlation was found. Voter turnout in Florida for the general election in 2000 was 70 percent, according to the Florida Division of Elections, a few percentage points lower than each general election Florida since then. Across the country in 2000, more than 100 million eligible voters didn’t cast a ballot.

    • Did You Know That AARP Is A Paying Member Of ALEC?

      Here is a real shocker. AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) has been a paying member of the notorious right-wing, Koch-tied lobbying organization American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) since at least 2014.

      Yes, that AARP, once known for protecting the interests of senior citizens and fighting to protect Social Security and Medicare. Yes, that ALEC — an organization dedicated to, among so many other things, privatizing Social Security and Medicare, and getting rid of public-employee pensions. AARP apparently joined ALEC even as many corporations were fleeing thanks to exposure of ALEC’s reprehensible actions.

      Just wow.

    • Smearing Stein: Media as Propaganda

      Jill Stein, the Green Party’s nominee for president, has been the sudden target of attacks from all corners of online media since the official end of Bernie Sanders’ campaign at the Democratic National Convention. Outlets like the Washington Post, New York Magazine and Gizmodo have assaulted Stein by using out-of-context quotes to assail her, wrongly, for being anti-vaccination and anti-WiFi, which is a code for being “anti-science.” This allows us a unique opportunity to confirm the structural role of the media as hypothesized by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent: that the media is a propaganda arm for the elite and powerful, and is used to condition us to accept the bounds of socio-political discourse as set by the ruling class. It also shows us the desperate need we have for an alternative media culture to counteract mainstream discourse.

      The attack on Stein (and not, conveniently, on Gary Johnson), is linked to the need by the elite to de-legitimize A.) critics of neoliberal policies and B.) potential alternatives to the political status-quo. Trump and Clinton have had and will have no discussion about thirty years of neoliberalism and austerity. Sanders gave a voice to those within the Democrats who were willing to question, but since his defeat momentum on the left has shifted to Stein and the Green Party. It is, granted, still early, but the outpouring of support means there is a possibility the left could begin to regroup outside the Democratic Party. Real success for Stein could mean a permanent presence on the national stage for the left, to which a president Clinton or Trump would have to answer and which would be able to build an entirely different ideological discourse in the United States.

      What is the role of the media in this scenario, one that explains the current froth about Stein? Although the public is rarely allowed a glimpse behind the curtain, almost all media in the United States is controlled by just a few large corporations. In the era of mass communication, the media has usurped the role formerly played by the Church as a primary source of information and the bounds of discourse. Private corporations are interested in making a profit, and ensuring the economy continues to produce those profits. Marx once opined that “the ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” and in an era of (potential) mass political upheaval, the media plays an active role in silencing dissent to those ideas. Indeed, they are linked to the continued profits generated by the political order. Political candidates and parties that challenge and threaten to upend this are typically subject to vigorous criticism if they threaten to shift the political discourse or take power: witness the barrage of negative stories and editorials on leaders like Hugo Chávez or new political parties like Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain.

    • Could Hillary Lose?

      Could Hillary lose? If she were running against a Republican whom the Party’s grandees and the capitalists behind them liked, someone like Mitt Romney, the answer would be Yes.

      After eight years of President Drone, the Republican would have a clear advantage. It wouldn’t even matter if that Republican were to pander, say, to the Ted Cruz element in the GOP base, the way that Romney pandered to the Tea Party. The smart money would still be on him.

    • I Spent the Day with Trump’s Undying Fans in Maine

      Somehow, my press credentialing e-mails from the Trump campaign keep getting blown off the porch of the Intertoobz.

      So, on Thursday, I decided to be just another face in the crowd at an event at the Merrill Auditorium, a lovely old piece of big government memorabilia attached to City Hall here. I applied through the website, and I got my confirmation that I was invited to be a guest at what the website said was going to be a “town hall” with the Republican candidate for President of the United States. Doors would open at 7 a.m. for a 10 a.m. start. No, wait. The doors would open at 11 a.m. for a 2 p.m. start. Hold on. The doors will open at noon for a 3 p.m. start. Technically, you’re not running late if you keep changing the time.

      I assumed that the last e-mail was the final one, so I got to the venue at 9:30 on Thursday morning. There already was a line. People stood in the shadeless plaza, broiling and being heckled from all over the sky by raucous seagulls. (You’d have sworn Tippi Hedren was in line, wearing a God, Guts, and Guns tanktop.) A lot of the people were elderly, and most of them were white and pale. (For the record, I am both.) You’d have thought the campaign would have kicked in a few pallets of Trump Water for the faithful.

    • For Progressives: a Moment of Grief, Pause and Reorientation

      In this frantic rush for “unity,” the DNC is trying to silence dissent and critical thought about where we are now and how we got here. Even PBS’s Washington Week in Review featured guests this week, who referred to Sanders’ convention delegates as “hecklers” because they dared to show support for their candidate at their party’s convention. The mainstream media’s patronizing tone aims to shame Sanders’ supporters, who it now blames for any division within the Democratic Party, accusing progressives of being “in denial” and “being a baby.”

    • Beyond Clinton vs. Trump, Green Party Convention Kicks Off

      The Green Party kicked off its national convention in Houston, Texas on Thursday, where presumptive nominee Jill Stein will present a third-party challenge to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

      The convention will run from August 4-7. The proceedings are expected to include keynote speeches from scholar and activist Dr. Cornel West, who endorsed Stein over Clinton after Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race, and Philadelphia-based activist YahNé Ndgo. Local Green Party candidates for office will also appear.

      Stein is expected to accept her party’s nomination on August 6.

      On Wednesday, CNN announced it would host a Green Party town hall on August 17—offering the party a rare chance to access the large media platform usually reserved for establishment candidates.

    • 2016 Is the Best and Worst Year to Be Jill Stein

      On a sweaty Sunday afternoon in late July, John Griffin happened upon Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, in his North Philadelphia neighborhood. Joined by a couple dozen people, Stein was pointing out the economic inequality and environmental degradation in the area, which she referred to as an “open-air prison.” Griffin, 37, who works security and facilities maintenance at a church, had a Bernie Sanders button pinned to his white T-shirt. “I love Bernie,” he told Stein.

      “I love Bernie,” Stein repeated. Then she ticked off areas where she was promising more than Sanders had: guaranteeing a living-wage job to every American who wants one; canceling all student debt; cutting military spending in half. “She’s awesome,” Griffin said afterward. “No one else is in the middle of the ghetto, in the middle of the ’hood, trying to campaign.”

    • We The People Tossed Out of Trump Rally For Unspeakable Crime aka Holding Up Our Country’s Founding Document

      So this happened Thursday in Portland: The orange cretin was lying and blathering on to a rapt audience of whoever these racist, ill-educated, uncomprehending people are when a group of protesters stood and mutely held up, echoing Khizr Khan, pocket versions of the U.S. Constitution. Because this was a Trump rally, the crowd booed, hissed, hollered “U.S.A.!”, tried to rip one book from its owner and screamed, “Traitor!” as the miscreants, reportedly members of the progressive Maine People’s Alliance, were hauled out. The ACLU loved it; they responded on Twitter with, “Glad to see people are standing up for constitutional principles using their ACLU pocket Constitutions!” And what’s not to love: Great visuals, unprecedented levels of irony if anyone there knew the meaning of the word. We think Constitution-waving should definitely become a thing.

    • Donald Trump Will Leave a Lasting Stain on the GOP, Even if He Loses

      To Republicans who hope to emerge from the Donald Trump fiasco with any shred of political viability or self-respect, I offer some unsolicited advice: Run, do not walk, to the nearest exit.

      I’m speaking to you, House Speaker Paul Ryan. And you, Sen. John McCain. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—along with so many other elected Republicans and party stalwarts. You are not fools. You are well aware that the erstwhile Party of Lincoln has nominated for president a man wholly unfit to hold the office.

      I realize that puts you in a tough spot politically. Breaking with the party’s standard-bearer, chosen by voters in primaries and caucuses, would surely mean short-term pain. For some of you it could be politically fatal. But sticking with Trump, as far as I can see, will almost surely be worse—for you, for the party, and potentially, heaven forbid, for the country you have sworn to serve.

    • Talking Lawn Sign

      It’s time to make up your mind
      the primary’s over and so is your sign
      You were feeling the Bern
      Now you know it’s her turn-
      put up a sign for Jill Stein

      Can you forgive the DNC
      Faking neutrality
      And putting in the fix
      For their nominatrix
      In the name of D-mockracy?

    • Europe’s “Bought Journalists”

      One day, historians will wonder how it was that the EU, a wealthy and ostensibly unified polity with a population of over 500 million people and an extremely deep and sophisticated history of indigenous intellectual production, came to have its public discourse dominated by the narrow and often quite parochial concerns of the elites of another country (right down to their absurd and largely unconditional devotion to a small and bellicose apartheid state in the Middle East) located halfway around the globe.

    • Waiting on Putin, The Dream Candidate

      Washington really needs an Arch Enemy, a guy who looks like a Bond villain with nuclear weapons he’ll brandish but never use.

      Putin.

      Americans are already well-prepared by the old Cold War to see Russia as an evil empire, and Putin does look the part. A new Cold War will require America to buy more military hardware, plus discover new places like the Baltic states to garrison. It might even straighten out a NATO confused about its role regarding global terrorism.

      Forget Trump and Clinton; Putin is the political-military-industrial complex dream candidate.

    • Clinton Camp Courts Hackers in Vegas

      n 2016, can Hillary Clinton be the candidate of the hacker crowd?

      That was the question posed at a fundraiser Wednesday at the annual Black Hat security conference, an affair that brings thousands of hackers and deep-pocketed security firms to the Nevada desert to learn about the latest and greatest in computer exploits.

      Amid a program packed with technical presentations on computer security, the fundraiser represented an unusual addition and has had a polarizing effect on some long-time attendees of the conference, who consider the event for Clinton out of step with the conference’s hacker ethos. A conference that begins, for example, with a presentation on “Memory Forensics Using Virtual Machine Introspection for Cloud Computing” really shouldn’t end with a partisan political event, some Black Hat veterans privately groused Wednesday. And for these old-timers, who reminisce about the conference’s heyday in the late 1990s, when glitzy corporate sponsorships and booths didn’t dominate the event as they do now, a Clinton fundraiser seems the final deathknell for the event’s counterculture status.

    • Poll: Clinton up 9 points on Trump nationwide

      The Democratic nominee retains her edge over Trump when the race becomes a four-person contest. There Clinton takes 45 percent to Trump’s 34 percent, leaving the GOP’s presidential nominee still trailing her by 9 points. Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson ranks third with 10 percent, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein nabs 5 percent.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Anurag’s masterclass on censorship

      The festival, which will kick-start on August 11 in Melbourne, will see the participation of the filmmaker and other celebrities like Rishi Kapoor, Fawad Khan, Richa Chadha and Radhika Apte. In a statement, Anurag said, “I can put forth my point of view and talk about how censorship is so pointless in the day and age of the Internet. I am really looking forward to interacting with the students.”

    • Pro-independence candidate to send ‘blank’ election mailouts in protest of censorship

      A pro-independence candidate in the upcoming Legislative Council election has said he will send a “blank” election mailout to voters, after reports that the Electoral Affairs Commission censored other mailings.

      Chan Chak-to of the Kowloon East Community group chose to send out mailings with conspicuous blank spaces and phrases like, “You can ban speeches, you can ban candidacies, but ideas are bulletproof,” and “My political view is [blank].”

      Chan was one of the rare pro-independence candidates who were allowed to run in this election, while most other independence advocates were banned for participating.

      “We believe that, according to reports, the election platforms we have made ready have the ‘sensitive phrases’ listed, and they will not be able to be posted,” he said. “We wanted to give up on sending the mailouts, but after the political screening [of candidates], we wished to present the truth to you.”

    • British woman held after being seen reading book about Syria on plane

      Free-speech groups have condemned the detention of a British Muslim woman after a cabin-crew member reported her for “suspicious behaviour” while reading a book about Syrian culture on a flight to Turkey.

      Faizah Shaheen, a psychotherapist in Leeds, was detained by police at Doncaster airport on 25 July, on her return from her honeymoon in Turkey. A Thomson Airways cabin-crew member had reported Shaheen on her outbound flight two weeks earlier, as she was reading the title Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline.

      Police officers questioned Shaheen for 15 minutes under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, under which the police can detain individuals without grounds for suspicion of involvement in criminal activities, including terrorism.

      [...]

      Jo Glanville, director of English PEN – which supported the book’s publication with a grant towards translation – said Thomson Airways should be “highly embarrassed about this gross act of misjudgment”.

      “The current culture of anxiety around extremism now means that even our reading material has become grounds for suspicion of terrorist activity,” she said. “The freedom to read any book, no matter the subject, is a fundamental cornerstone of our liberty.” Glanville also called Schedule 7 a “continuing problem” and said it was overdue for reform.

      Zaher Omareen, the co-editor of Syria Speaks, condemned Shaheen’s detention as a “despicable incident”.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Here’s How Your Facebook Feed Is About to Change [Ed: still a propaganda, surveillance and censorship cesspool. What Facebook labels “clickbait” is excuse for even less neutrality so that they can demote views Zuckerberg and friends dislike. So now Facebook can censor useds [sic] for “hate”, “troll”… and finally… “clickbait”… which is so vague that it’s a broad brush.]

      The company has tried to minimize clickbait before, but this time, Facebook says it has gone farther, categorizing phrases often used in clickbait headlines and looking at which websites publish those stories.

    • Comcast wants to sell your Web history to advertisers
    • Comcast wants its broadband users to pay for their privacy
    • Comcast Thinks It’s Totally Chill to Charge For Privacy
    • Comcast supports higher prices for customers who want Web privacy
    • Comcast Wants to Charge for Privacy

      Ars Technica , Gizmodo, ZDNet, and a host of others are reporting that Comcast claims that the FCC has no authority to limit or prohibit the internet provider from distributing web histories to advertisers.

    • This Engineer Started a Tor-Based Internet Provider to Fight Surveillance

      UK lawmakers are currently closing in on their biggest expansion of government surveillance powers since the Snowden revelations—but one network engineer is determined to not let privacy go down without fight.

      The Investigatory Powers bill—championed by former Home Secretary and current UK prime minister Theresa May and sometimes called the “Snooper’s Charter”—would create an expansive new legal regime for government mass surveillance in the UK, effectively legitimizing many of the programs exposed by Snowden. Among other things, it controversially proposes requiring that all internet service providers in the UK keep tabs on their customers’ internet activity, forcing them to retain so-called Internet Connection Records, or ICRs, for 12 months, and hand that data over to the authorities upon request.

      But as the UK’s upper house prepares to vote on final amendments to the bill, engineer Gareth Llewelyn is readying his own technical countermeasures. Earlier this year, Llewelyn started building his own non-profit internet service provider that runs on the Tor anonymity network. His goal: Design a system that will frustrate the new mass-surveillance regime by making it technically impossible to censor content or comply with government requests for subscribers’ internet records.

    • Labour deputy leader calls on PM to halt plans to wipe old Companies House data

      The Labour party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, has called on Theresa May to intervene to stop the UK government agency Companies House from deleting information about firms that have been shut down. Without older records on dissolved companies, it will be much harder to spot when criminals try to set up new businesses to defraud the public, or to combat money laundering.

      Currently, the details of dissolved companies are kept for 20 years. Companies House, which holds key data on nearly 4 million UK businesses, is considering reducing that to six years according to The Guardian, even though the associated extra costs are minimal, as the price of digital storage continues to fall.

      The mass deletion is in response to an increasing number of requests from business people demanding the “right to be forgotten,” according to The Times. “Individuals and their reputation management firms have contacted Companies House claiming that its retention of records revealing an association with struck-off companies is personally damaging and a breach of data protection laws.”

    • FBI Releases Secret Spy Plane Footage from Freddie Gray Protests

      In response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI has released more than 18 hours of video from surveillance cameras installed on FBI aircraft that flew over Baltimore in the days after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015. The videos, which were released to the ACLU before being posted online by the FBI this week, offer a rare and comprehensive view of the workings of a government surveillance operation. While the release of the footage addresses some questions, it leaves others unanswered.

    • Security Sense: You’re Not as Interesting to the NSA as You Think You Are

      Now having said that, the feds and the cops are not high up the list in my personal “threat model”. There are other people for whom well-resourced state actors are a serious threat. Political dissidents. Free speech proponents in authoritarian countries. Criminal actors. But for these guys, there’s an easy solution: turn off the biometrics, limit login attempts and use a strong PIN or password. There are many other “opsec” steps beyond this they may take too of course, but the point is that these devices can be configured more securely for those who need it by disabling certain usability features.

    • U.S. Cloud Firms ‘Out Innovated’ Competitors in Wake of NSA Leak

      Despite dire predictions of revenue losses in the wake of a leaked U.S. spy agency’s electronic surveillance program three years ago, U.S. cloud providers have instead “out innovated” local competitors to keep a firm grip on the European market, a market watcher says.

      U.S. cloud providers were widely expected to be hurt by local business and regulatory efforts to safeguard European data following the 2013 release of documents linking U.S. tech firms to National Security Agency surveillance programs.

    • Good Ruling In California Protects Anonymity Of Online Critics — Even When The Information Was False

      Over and over again we’ve seen people try to interpret anything someone says about them that they don’t like as defamatory. But just because you don’t like what’s said, that doesn’t make it defamatory — and that can also apply even if the statements actually were false.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • After The Age Of The PC, Welcome To The Age Of The PD — The ‘Personal Drone’

      As that rightly notes, there’s a world of difference between today’s small drones — “consumer” in this context means anything weighing more than 0.5lbs — and traditional aircraft. But in many ways, it’s exactly the same difference between the very first PCs, and the mainframes and minicomputer systems that had existed for decades. In that respect, we can see the 500,000 registered drones as an indication that we are now truly in the age of the PD — the Personal Drone.

      The conference also touched on a key concern raised by Karl Bode last year, who was worried that over-strict regulation of drones might kill off some promising new business models.

    • Sheriff Raids House to Find Anonymous Blogger Who Called Him Corrupt

      After a watchdog blog repeatedly linked him and other local officials to corruption and fraud, the Sheriff of Terrebone Parish in Louisiana on Tuesday sent six deputies to raid a police officer’s home to seize computers and other electronic devices.

      Sheriff Jerry Larpenter’s deputies submitted affidavits alleging criminal defamation against the anonymous author of the ExposeDAT blog, and obtained search warrants to seize evidence in the officer’s house and from Facebook.

      The officer, Wayne Anderson, works for the police department of Houma, the county seat of Terrebone Parish — and according to New Orleans’ WWL-TV, formerly worked as a Terrebone Sheriff’s deputy.

    • Stealing the spectacle

      The new Polish xenophobia cannot be explained only by political economy, but also needs to be understood in terms of political aesthetics.

    • U.S. Human Rights Observers Harshly Interrogated By Israel and Booted For Being Muslim

      Five individuals carrying American passports say they were branded “terrorist” and mistreated by Israeli security, then got no help from their own government.

    • Six books Muslim (and non-Muslim) women should add to their reading list

      These books on faith and feminism will force you to reevaluate your stereotypes of Muslims.

    • What’s Emancipation Day to the Caribbean Working Class?

      On 1 August 1838, enslaved Africans in the British Empire won their emancipation from slavery. Emancipation Day is now commemorated throughout the Anglophone Caribbean as a public holiday or national observance. Emancipation was not a gift from Britain or White abolitionists. It came from the accumulated covert and overt acts of resistance by enslaved Africans.

    • Top 10 Reasons the ACLU Fights for Breastfeeding Rights

      A few weeks ago, a mom named Jessie Maher was breastfeeding her baby in the cafeteria of a Target store in Connecticut when a belligerent man approached and said she was “F*ing disgusting” and “nasty.” Fellow shoppers and Target employees quickly sprang to Maher’s defense, shielding her from the man.

      “You shouldn’t be ashamed of feeding your baby,” one of them said to Maher. “This is a beautiful moment right now. If he doesn’t like it, he can go.”

      Maher posted a video of the incident that quickly went viral, generating more than 8.5 million views and an outpouring of support from fellow nursing mothers.

    • Does DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge Need A Safety Protocol?

      Today, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the R&D arm of the US military) is holding the finals for its Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) competition at DEF CON. We think that this initiative by DARPA is very cool, very innovative, and could have been a little dangerous.

      In this post, we’re going to talk about why the CGC is important and interesting (it’s about building automated systems that can break into computers!); about some of the dangers posed by this line of automated security research; and the sorts of safety precautions that may become appropriate as endeavors in this space become more advanced. We think there may be some real policy concerns down the road about systems that can automate the process of exploiting vulnerabilities. But rather than calling for external policy interventions, we think the best people to address these issues are the people doing the research themselves—and we encourage them to come together now to address these questions explicitly.

    • Door to justice finally opens in El Salvador [Ed: complex history there]

      As the door finally opens for war criminals to face justice in El Salvador, the law can start serving the country’s poor.

    • Anarcha-Feminisms

      Every piece in Perspectives offers material for a feminist and anti-racist anarchism that builds solidarity with revolutionaries, activists, and organizers who do not readily identify with the term “anarchist.” There’s plenty in the issue that can expand anarchism’s horizons. Consider Julia Tanenbaum’s U.S. anarcha-feminist history of the 70s decade and Hillary Lazar’s notion of “interlocking oppression”– inspired by Black feminism. Colleen Hackett offers thought-provoking “psy-ence fiction” lessons from teaching in a women’s prison, and Theresa Warburton thinks through different ways we generally relate anarchism to feminism. Laura Hall develops a comprehensive “Indigenist eco-queer anarcha-feminist” vision, and Zoe Dodd and Alexander McLelland offer an imminently practical horizontal Hep C/HIV treatment model cultivated from health crisis work. Romina Akemi and Bree Busk provoke readers with “sexual dissidence” and a multi-sectoral organizing plan, and Kelsey Cham C. develops an account of developing political consciousness (including language’s power) through addiction. Finally, there are some short and informative book reviews tucked in nicely at the issue’s end.

    • Culture Clash: When Violence Against Women Is Accepted, Lawful And Expected

      Last New Year’s Eve it was reported that 2000 men sexually assaulted 1200 women in Cologne, Germany. Immediately, politicians and pundits jumped to make the connection between the rash of violence against women and the influx of refugees. And each time another incident takes place, the battle between political positions is reignited. One liberal politician in Germany noted that the debate must be centered around “no means no” and not around “whether refugees should be deported” or allowed safe haven in Western countries, and I agree with this completely. This is not a refugee issue. It is a case of incongruent cultural practices. Men from societies that reject women’s rights must reform their attitudes and practices if they wish to exist in Western societies in which women are treated as equals. But more broadly, this sort of antiquated thinking must change.

    • Malaysian man charged with rape escapes jail after marrying 14-year-old victim

      A Malaysian man charged with raping a 14-year-old girl has avoided prison after he married her in a case that has sparked anger from rights groups and calls for a ban on child marriage and justice for victims of sexual violence.

      Ahmad Syukri Yusuf, 22, was charged with statutory rape of the girl late last year and faced up to 30 years in jail and whipping for the offense, but he later married the teenager under Islamic law, according to prosecutor Ahmad Fariz Abdul Hamid.

      The prosecutor said a court in Kuching, in Malaysia’s eastern state of Sarawak ruled there was no need to proceed with the case after Ahmad Syukri submitted a marriage certificate and the girl withdrew the complaint.

    • Video: Black lives matter: shutdown

      “1,562 deaths in police custody in my lifetime. 0 convictions”. As Black Lives Matter protesters set up blockades in London, Birmingham and Nottingham, here’s their video explaining why it’s time for a shutdown.

    • How can we change political discourse?

      The day after the referendum Facebook was full of comments like these, only they were less curious and more angry. This is shameful, they said. Why could so many be so stupid. Some even called for ‘un-friending’ the Leavers. The friendly appeal on my news feed just a week before- ‘could you explain your reasons to me?’- had been replaced by bitterness and recrimination “F**k this. I am ashamed to be British”. It felt as though the country had lost its innocence.

    • The Voting Rights Act, 2.0

      The Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965, helped enfranchise millions of African-Americans over the decades. Speaking before a bipartisan gathering of members of Congress, his Cabinet, civil-rights leaders and the press, Johnson said of African-Americans: “They came in darkness and they came in chains. And today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds.”

      The Voting Rights Act was renewed and extended several times during the last half-century. Then, in June 2013, a divided U.S. Supreme Court, voting 5-4, gutted the law. Almost immediately, Southern states began passing restrictive voting laws, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of voters. Three years later, however, this new generation of Jim Crow-style laws is facing federal court challenges, and they are being thrown out or significantly weakened, one by one.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T, Comcast Fight Utility Pole Reform To Slow Google Fiber’s Arrival In Nashville

      We’ve talked a few times about how incumbent broadband providers often use their ownership of city utility poles (or their “ownership” of entire city councils and state legislatures) to slow Google Fiber’s arrival in new markets. In California and Texas, AT&T has often been accused of using the process of pole attachment approval to intentionally block or slow down the arrival of competitors. AT&T also recently sued the city of Louisville for streamlining utility pole attachment rules intended to dramatically speed up the time it takes to attach new fiber to poles.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • When its comes to “deadwood”, leave it in the State of South Dakota and out of Trademark Office policy

        Last month, Guest Kat Mike Mireles published a post— “The USPTO Moves to Clear ‘Trademark Deadwood’.” Mike reported on the latest steps intended by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to clean “deadwood” from the trademark registry. For several years, the claim has been expressed (not just in the U.S.) that there are too many unused registered trademarks, with the result that the registry suffers from trademark clutter. Moreover, it is claimed, unless we get control of the deadwood issue, the task of trademark clearance will one day become well-nigh impossible.

    • Copyrights

      • MPAA Anti-Piracy Cutbacks Lead to “Bullying” Lawsuit

        The ASA, formerly known as the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, is being sued by its former managing director for discrimination and bullying. A decision by the MPAA to reduce funding to the group led to Mark Day, a former MPA legal counsel, being dismissed while he was on sick leave.

      • Getty Sued Again Over Abusing Copyright Law, Licensing Images It Has No Rights To

        Getty hasn’t been having a very good past few weeks. After getting sued last week by famed photographer Carol Highsmith, after a Getty subsidiary demanded money for her posting her own photographs (which she had donated to the Library of Congress), it’s being sued again by independent press agency/wire service Zuma. Zuma claims that Getty was offering 47,048 images of its images for licensing, despite not actually having a license to do so.

        The full lawsuit is pretty short on details, so it’s difficult to assess the legitimacy of the lawsuit. In fact, the lack of detail in the filing makes me wonder if there’s a lot more to this story. Most of the filing focuses on highlighting how Getty has rapidly been buying up other photo licensing/stock photo sites, and using that fact to make the assertion (without further evidence) that Getty does not do enough due diligence to make sure the photos it offers for license are properly authorized. It may very well be that Getty screwed up here, but it seems like the complaint should include a few more details. Instead, there’s a lot of innuendo.

08.04.16

Links 4/8/2016: Dumping Windows, WARHAMMER Comes to GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 6:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source reshaping vendor business models – Wikibon

    A new trend among enterprises to make open source software a priority in their criteria for new infrastructure and application use will impact venture capital investments, startups, established IT vendors and cloud providers, writes Wikibon Lead Cloud Analyst Brian Gracely in “Open Source Software: Reshaping Vendor Business Models” on Wikibon.com. In this second part of Gracely’s examination of the impacts of open source, he looks at all four of these aspects of the vendor ecosystem.

    Open source companies, with the exception of Red Hat Inc., have struggled to achieve profitability, making venture capitalists less willing to invest in them. Open source-centric startups that already have achieved their initial funding now must find a way to monetize the business as they approach new funding rounds. An increasing number of established IT providers are becoming heavily involved in open source, while their proprietary solutions face increasing pricing pressure from open source competition.

  • Broadband Forum backs open source SDN

    There has been a stand-off brewing between the Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) and OpenDaylight – two open source software defined networking (SDN) platforms pushing for network transformation at a massive scale – attracting membership signatures of operators hungry for next generation broadband services.

    Adding to its growing list of supporters, ON.Lab has recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Broadband Forum to extend its collaborative work to the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) Project community – an open source reference implementation combining SDN and NFV to bring datacenter economics and cloud agility to the Telco Central Office.

  • Open Source OVN to Offer Solid Virtual Networking For OpenStack

    Open Virtual Networking (OVN) is a new open source project that brings virtual networking to the Open vSwitch user community and aims to develop a single, standard, vendor-neutral protocol for the virtualization of network switching functions. In their upcoming talk at LinuxCon North America in Toronto this month, Kyle Mestery of IBM and Justin Pettit of VMware will cover the current status of the OVN project, including the first software release planned for this fall. Here, Mestery and Pettit discuss the project and its goals and give us a preview of their talk, “OVN: Scalable Virtual Networking for Open vSwitch.”

  • Sony’s Hero Open Source Developer Title for May-June Awarded to XDA RD Bumble-Bee

    Of the many OEMs that we talk about here on XDA-Developers, only a very few actually work for and with the community. Most are all talk, but actions speak louder than words, and only a handful truly speak.

    Sony is one of those OEMs that continues to foster relationships with the developer community, with several initiatives in place that promote external developers to work on Sony devices. Heck, the Sony Xperia Z3 was the ONLY device outside of Nexus and Android One devices to have had the Android N Developer Preview released for it.

    One of Sony’s pro-Open Source initiatives is the Hero Open Source Developer Program. Under this program, Sony recognizes and rewards developers that contribute to the Open Device projects. The developer with the most accepted commits to the SonyXperiaDev github during the preceding two months stands to win a device from Sony as a reward. The winner for the period of May-June is none other than Shane Francis, aka XDA Recognized Developer Bumble-Bee. Shane has won a Sony Xperia X Performance for his efforts and contributions to the AOSP for Xperia Projects, including helping with the fingerprint scanner on the Z5 on AOSP. We congratulate Shane for his prize from Sony, and thank him for his contributions to open source.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Awards $585,000 to Nine Open Source Projects in Q2 2016

        Last quarter’s Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS)-awarded projects are diverse, but they have one thing in common: they believe in innovation for public benefit. Projects like Tails, PeARS and Caddy are paving the way for the next wave of openness, which is why Mozilla has allocated over $3.5 million to the MOSS initiative in support of these and other open source projects. We’re excited to share the program’s progress this quarter, which includes $585,000 in awards, nine new projects supported and two new tracks launched.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Drug lobby plans counterattack on prices

      Washington’s powerful drug lobby is gearing up to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a post-election ad war pushing back against politicians from both parties who have savaged its members over drug prices.

      The massive campaign by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — expected to start positive by highlighting drugs that save or prolong lives — will dwarf the $20 million that health insurers spent on the iconic “Harry and Louise” campaign credited with sinking Hillary Clinton’s health reform plan in the early 19

    • Big Pharma Plans Massive Ad Blitz to Fight Criticism of Drug Prices

      The pharmaceutical lobby is gearing up for a massive, multi-million-dollar post-election ad blitz to fight the shifting rhetoric surrounding drug prices, Politico reports.

      Skyrocketing drug prices have become a central issue in the 2016 election cycle, bolstered by recent bipartisan legislation that aims to wrangle back control of the market and outspoken criticism from Bernie Sanders and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

      Now, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) is planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to push back on politicians from both sides of the aisle—a campaign that “will dwarf the $20 million that health insurers spent on the iconic ‘Harry and Louise’ campaign credited with sinking…Clinton’s health reform plan in the early 1990s,” reports Politico’s Sarah Karlin-Smith.

    • On Eve of Olympics, Top Investigator Details Secret Efforts to Undermine Russian Doping Probe

      In a blistering public critique on the eve of the Olympics, the former chief investigator for the World Anti-Doping Agency claims his efforts to investigate Russian doping were repeatedly delayed by WADA’s president, who preferred to privately settle matters with Russian officials.

      Jack Robertson, who left the agency in January, said he was forced to leak information to the media in order to pressure WADA president Sir Craig Reedie to act and, even then, he says, the agency sat on credible allegations that suggested Russian doping extended far beyond track and field.

      Ultimately, Robertson says, the investigation delays have allowed the president of the International Olympic Committee — who has reportedly been supported by Vladimir Putin — to claim that the committee didn’t have enough time to determine whether it should ban all Russian teams. The result is that Russia may still have one of the largest delegations in Rio.

    • Law, Order and the Wall: Would Trump and Pence Fuel the Drug War?

      Writing about what drug policy might look like under a Trump administration is not easy. Donald Trump’s views on drugs have changed radically over the years, and the Republican nominee’s rambling statements on the subject suggest that they are shaped by gut reactions and political opportunism, not ideology or a deep understanding of social currents and medical science.

      Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has a clearer track record on drug policy because he has actually held political office, but some of his positions are so archaic that the Trump campaign may wish to keep them off the national stage.

      Let’s try a thought experiment to make this a bit easier. Imagine that I’m 16 years old and Trump and Pence are my parents. Let’s not worry about the circumstances by which they became my two dads; this is my imaginary scenario, and I say it doesn’t matter. All three of us are sitting in a suburban living room, with busts of Ronald Reagan and Mel Gibson peering down from the mantle overhead. Pence has just discovered a small bag of marijuana that I’ve been hiding in a drawer full of soccer socks.

    • Monsanto in India: Meet the New Boss – Same as the Old Boss?

      In capitalism, the state’s primary role is to secure the interests of private capital. The institutions of globalised capitalism – from the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO right down to the compliant bureaucracies of national states or supranational unions – facilitate private wealth accumulation that results in the forms of structural inequalities and violence (unemployment, poverty, population displacement, bad food, poor health, environmental destruction, etc) that have become ‘accepted’ as necessary (for ‘growth’) and taken for granted within mainstream media and political narratives.

    • Philip Morris gets its ash kicked in Uruguay; where will it next blow smoke?

      Philip Morris International just lost a six-year battle to block Uruguay’s strong cigarette warning labels, which cover 80 percent of the front and back of cigarette packs, including graphic photos of the damages of smoking.

      The decision was made by the World Bank’s trade tribunal, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the world’s the leading body to settle international investment disputes.

      Philip Morris became the first tobacco company to take on a country in an international court, and it took on one of the smallest. The company argued that Uruguay had violated terms of an investment treaty with Switzerland by enforcing anti-smoking laws. The operational headquarters for Philip Morris International is in Lausanne.

    • Kazakhstan Suspends Cattle Imports From Russia Over Anthrax Outbreak

      Kazakhstan has suspended cattle imports from Russia amid concerns over an anthrax outbreak in northwestern Siberia.

      The Kazakh Agriculture Ministry says the imports have been suspended as of August 3.

      Russian officials say the anthrax outbreak in Yamalo-Nenets region has killed a 12-year-old boy, and more than 20 local residents have been diagnosed with the bacterial disease.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Donald “Dr. Strangelove” Trump and some of the Times We almost had a Nuclear War

      I have long wondered why no one in Hollywood has remade Stanley Kubricks’s 1964 “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I learned to Stop worrying and Love the Bomb.” They’ve remade almost everything else from the 1960s, but that classic Peter Sellers film languishes in black and white and I’m not sure most Millennials have seen it.

    • [Older] UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria: ISIS is committing genocide against the Yazidis

      The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) is committing genocide against Yazidis, according to a report, “They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis”, issued today by the independent international Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. The report by the Commission of Inquiry also determined that ISIS’s abuse of Yazidis amounts to crimes against humanity and war crimes.

    • Czech president warns of migrants’ ‘barbaric acts’

      Czech President Milos Zeman has said migrants pose a security threat to his country. He also criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policies.

    • One Beheaded Child Here and There…

      One incident here and there — up to and including beheading a child — will not make you a terrorist group, but buying $245 of gift cards for an FBI actor will make you a terrorist.

      That’s not to say Young isn’t a dangerous man or that he should work as a policeman in any organization. But even there, it’s not clear what kind of dangerous person he is. He likes military weapons, Nazis, Islamic terrorists, and may beat his spouse. The FBI, of course, chose to focus on the Islamic terrorism rather than the domestic abuse or Nazism. Even then, by far the most frequent “incriminating” details cited in the affidavit against Young describe his unhappiness about FBI surveillance (including that they spoke to his family in 2010 before they interviewed him when the FBI first had concerns about his associations) and his efforts to thwart it. The FBI presented this operational security as incriminating even though they deemed him not to have violated the law in several earlier reviews, the presumption being that every person who has been investigated should therefore be willing to undergo persistent surveillance for the foreseeable future.

      The closest Young actually came to joining a terrorist group was in 2011 when he “had been” with rebels working to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi (the FBI improbably creates the impression that they somehow didn’t monitor his two trips to Libya after investigating him for months leading up to these trips, not even after he was stopped by Egyptian authorities). A description later in the affidavit explains he must have been hanging out with the Abu Salim Martyrs Brigade, a group that arose out of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which the US has variously considered a terrorist group or not as its global interests dictated, though which they treated like rebel partners in 2011. Just as the US now considers Harakat Nour al-Zenki worthy of its financial support, in sums delivered in far greater increments than $245 gift cards.

    • French MPs Visit Crimea: Suggesting Early End to Sanctions

      A delegation of 11 French lawmakers and senators arrived in Crimea on July 28 to take part in celebrating Russian Navy Day in Sevastopol.

      There are no grounds to keep anti-Russian sanctions in place, said the head of the delegation Thierry Mariani, addressing the Crimean Parliament in Simferopol. Republican MP Jacques Myard also emphasized the importance of lifting the sanctions.

      In July 2015, a group of 10 French deputies visited Crimea for the first time despite domestic and European criticism. Back then the lawmakers said that what they saw was completely different from the picture painted by Western media. They say the same thing now after having seen the situation with their own eyes.

    • Fissures in the Empire

      Washington has raised the cost of being a member of its Empire too high. Vassals such as France and Germany are beginning to exercise independent policies toward Russia. Observing the cracks in its Empire, Washington has decided to bind its vassals to Washington with terror. Most liikely what we are witnessing in the French and German attacks is Operation Gladio.

    • Terrorism as a Word and Epithet

      The word “terrorism” – classically defined as violence against civilians for political effect – has become an epithet hurled at despised groups while not against favored ones, a challenge of hypocrisy and propaganda, explains Michael Brenner.

    • Reaching Beyond the Candidates

      What would it take to cause Hillary Clinton to distance herself from the newly launched bombing campaign in Libya? Or call for a congressional debate on it? Or suggest the obvious: that the war on terror isn’t working?

      Of course it won’t happen. But the fact that it sounds so absurd — almost as fanciful as the notion of movie characters stepping off the screen into real life — indicates how illusory, how unglued from reality, American democracy is at the presidential level. It’s a spectator sport — mud wrestling, say — doled out to us as entertainment by the media in sound bites and poll numbers.

    • After the Coup, Turkey is Being Torn Apart

      Coup attempt and purge are tearing Turkey apart. The Turkish armed forces, for long the backbone of the state, are in a state of turmoil. Some 40 per cent of its generals and admirals have been detained or dismissed, including senior army commanders.

      They are suspected of launching the abortive military takeover on 15-16 July, which left at least 246 people dead, saw parliament and various security headquarters bombed and a near successful bid to kill or capture President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

      In response, Erdogan and his government are carrying out a purge of everybody from soldiers to teachers connected in any way to the movement of the US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen accused of organising the coup attempt.

    • Brazil Committee Votes for Rousseff Final Impeachment Trial [Ed: completing the coup]

      Brazil’s Senate impeachment committee recommended putting suspended President Dilma Rousseff on trial for illegal financial transactions, paving the way for her permanent ouster within a month.

      A report by Senator Antonio Anastasia accused Rousseff of taking credits without congressional authorization and through state banks, violating the Constitution. The report was approved by 14 senators in favor and 5 against. It now goes to the floor of the Senate for an Aug. 9 vote.

      Acting president Michel Temer has fanned investor confidence with pledges to rein in a near-record budget deficit and adopt more market-friendly policies to pull Latin America’s largest economy out of its deepest recession in decades. Yet he requires Rousseff’s permanent ouster to gain more legitimacy for controversial measures that include cutting pension pay and deregulating labor laws.

    • FBI Had Undercover Agent at Scene of “Draw Muhammad” Shooting in Texas

      When two men opened fire at the “Draw Muhammad” contest in a Dallas suburb in 2015, the FBI had an undercover agent on the scene, newly filed court documents reveal.

      On May 3, 2015, two men from Arizona armed with assault rifles — Elton Simpson and his roommate, Nadir Soofi — attacked a convention center in Garland, Texas, where Pamela Geller had organized the “First Annual Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest.” The two attackers shot a guard outside the convention center and were then killed in the parking lot by Texas police.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Irish agriculture faces emissions dilemma

      Ireland is facing a classic conflict, pitching economic growth targets against the need for action on climate change.

      On one hand, Ireland’s planners want to see significant growth in its food and agriculture industry – a sector that is one of the main pillars of the country’s economy, accounting for about 8% of gross domestic product.

      On the other hand, the country − along with other members of the European Union (EU) − is committed to lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by “at least” 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.

    • The Frackopoly Comes to Power

      In 1964, a group of wealthy funders instigated a radical insurgency that reshaped the political landscape and weakened democracy. Although their ultraconservative presidential candidate in 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater, was defeated in a historic landslide victory by Lyndon B. Johnson, the election spurred the development of a long-term strategy to take back control of the nation.

    • Break the silence on Azerbaijan oil workers’ deaths

      Nine months after 31 workers drowned in Azerbaijan’s worst-ever oil industry disaster, the country’s authorities have still not said a word about how it happened or what mistakes could be avoided in future.

      Most of the victims were thrown into the water when a lifeboat smashed against the side of production platform no. 10 at the Guneshli oil field in the Caspian sea, as they tried to escape a fire during a force 10 gale on 4 December last year.

      The Oil Workers Rights Protection Organisation (OWRPO), a campaign group, says state oil company managers broke safety laws for the sake of keeping production going, and that workers did not even have life jackets on during the attempt to evacuate the platform.

  • Finance

    • Mark Carney: ‘Timely’ measures should stop UK sliding into recession

      Bank of England governor Mark Carney has said today’s (4 August) historic package of measures was put together because the outlook for UK growth has “weakened markedly” since the Brexit vote.

      The Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted to cut interest rates to 0.25% from 0.5%, where they have been for seven years. It will also boost its quantitative easing by another £60bn ($70bn), bringing the programme up to £435bn.

      It also announced a new Term Funding Scheme (TFS) to reinforce the pass-through of the cut in interest rates and the purchase of up to £10bn in UK corporate bonds.

      He said: “The banks have no excuse not to pass this cut onto their customers.”

      The Bank did not rule out a further cut if deemed necessary.

    • Carney Quantifies Gloom With BOE Stimulus Debate at Crunch Point

      Mark Carney is about to put numbers on the gloom.

      Six weeks after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union sent shock waves across the nation, on Thursday the Bank of England governor will present a detailed assessment of what it means for the economy as well as his plan of action. With initial reports showing the U.K. may be headed for recession, he’ll need to balance a realistic picture of what’s in store against the prospect of being labeled a doom-monger.

      The Monetary Policy Committee’s first post-Brexit analysis is set to drive its debate over how to tackle weaker growth and faster inflation. With business and consumer sentiment faltering, the pound slumping and industries from airlines to manufacturers warning of a negative fallout, economists expect Carney to unveil a suite of stimulus.

    • Peter Allard vs. Barbados: Investor argues breach of environmental laws

      Peter Allard vs. Barbados: Investor argues breach of environmental laws

      Peter Allard, a Canadian investor who owns a nature sanctuary in Barbados, has brought an ISDS claim against Barbados. In a nutshell, he grounds his claim on the failure of the government of Barbados to enforce its own environmental law which, as a result, has polluted his sanctuary. He is also accusing Barbados of refusing to abide by its international obligations under the Convention on Wetlands and Convention on Biological Diversity.

      The actions and inactions by Barbados, according to the investor, have destroyed the value of his investment in the sanctuary. The claim is brought under Canada – Barbados Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT).

      The sanctuary, which is an eco-tourism facility, consists of almost 35 acres of natural wetlands situated on the Graeme Hall wetlands, a site protected under the Convention of Wetlands of International Importance in the south coast of Barbados. Mr Allard, as written in his notice of dispute, made investment in this sanctuary with the purpose to conserve the environmental heritage of Barbados.

    • Universal Basic Income Will Likely Increase Social Cohesion

      I think we should avoid letting our ideologies inform our opinions on matters of social and economic policy. What matters is scientifically observed evidence. I support the idea of providing everyone with an unconditional basic income not because I just think it’s the right thing to do, and the best way to make ongoing technological unemployment work for us instead of against us, but because such an overwhelming amount of human behavioral evidence points in the direction of basic income.

      In their opinion pieces for the week-long series about universal basic income published in September by the Washington Post, I was struck by how both Oren Cass and Jonathan Coppage expressed a distinct lack of knowledge of the evidence we have available to inform our opinions on giving people money without strings attached, by citing none of it. Science involves testing our hypotheses. They both expressed the shared hypothesis that giving people additional income in the form of a basic income would somehow reduce social cohesion, and that it is growing social inequality that’s leading to economic problems and not the other way around. We can test such a hypothesis by simply looking at what actually happens when people are provided unconditional cash, and comparing it to a control group of those who aren’t.

    • No Walls in the Global Village

      Besides the fact that the misguided working class will not find their salvation in isolationism, the “leave us alone” tendency of the British blue collar populace is ironic, to say the least. Beyond ironic, this sentiment is nothing short of hypocrisy and utter disrespect to millions of people that have been exploited for centuries. A nation that for centuries knew no walls and respected no borders — back when it pillaged four continents, from the riches of Africa to the treasures of Indochina and the entire Indian subcontinent, is now crying foul, demanding a wall and asking to be left alone.

    • Oligarchs Are Feeling Right at Home in the Democratic Party

      In April of 1999, the new leaders of the Democratic Party — or, as the Wall Street Journal called them, the “chief theorists of the Third Way” — came together for a major conference in Virginia.

      The goal of the conference, attended by such prominent figures as President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was to set forth a new agenda for Democratic politics, one that would eschew traditional notions of “tax and spend” liberalism and articulate a way forward, one that held appeal beyond the constituencies fostered by the New Deal coalition and its successors.

      In an introductory speech, Al From, founder of the then-surging Democratic Leadership Council, succinctly worded the fundamental values of the so-called New Democrats.

      “Its first principle and enduring purpose is equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none,” From proclaimed. “Its public ethic is mutual responsibility. Its core value is community. Its outlook is global, and its modern means are fostering private-sector economic growth — today’s prerequisite for opportunity for all — and promoting and empowering government that equips citizens with the tools they need to get ahead.”

    • Jeremy Corbyn Launches Bold Progressive Vision to Transform UK

      Leader of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn announced a 10-point plan on Thursday designed to “rebuild and transform” the U.K. while undoing the damage wrought by privatization schemes and concerted attacks on the public good.

      Corbyn launched his plan with a series of social media messages, including this short YouTube video explaining the need for a national transition:

      The ten pledges include: An economy that works for all; Secure homes for all; Security at work; Secure our National Health Service and social care; A free national education service; Action to secure the environment; Democracy in our economy; Cut income and wealth inequality; Act to end prejudice and injustice; and Peace and justice abroad

      Corbyn’s announcement comes as he battles to retain his leadership position in the Labour Party, fighting off a challenge from Owen Smith, a more centrist Labour MP and former lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry. The two will square off in a debate Thursday night.

      Read the full set of policy pledges here.

      Like Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in the U.S., Corbyn has been seen as a progressive champion fomenting a populist insurgency against entrenched interests of powerful elites represented by the Tories, other right-wing parties like UKIP, and factions of Labour’s own liberal center-left.

    • After Cambridgeshire’s NHS deal collapses, the future of Staffordshire’s similar £1.2billion sell-off is mired in confusion

      Cambridge’s ‘UnitingCare’ deal and its advisors have been discredited, and NHS England promises to investigate a similar planned huge NHS sell-off in Staffordshire – but local bosses seem to have their heads in the sand.

    • The Decline in Homeownership

      The homeownership rate fell again in the second quarter of 2016, hitting the lowest rate in more than 50 years, more than 6 full percentage points below the peak bubble years. This is both good news and bad news.

      It is good news because homeownership is not always good for everyone at all points in their lives. The building, banking and real estate industry have worked hard to make renting seem un-American. While homeownership can be a useful way for families to accumulate wealth, it’s not generally advisable for people not in a stable employment and family situation.

      The transaction costs associated with buying and selling a home are roughly 10 percent of the sales price, which comes to almost $25,000 for a typical home. This is a lot of money to throw away for someone who has to move after a year or two because of losing a job or a family break-up. Of course the lost money to the homeowner is income for bankers and realtors.

      The other reason it might be a good thing to see a declining homeownership rate is that it seems some markets are again rising into bubble territory. The bottom third by sales price of homes in Miami saw a 55.6 percent price increase over the last three years. By contrast, rents have risen just 10.4 percent. In Chicago the price of the bottom third of homes increased by 40.7 percent in the last three years, while rents rose by 6.9 percent.

      There are several other cities in which prices in the less expensive segment of the market are rising precipitously. It would be a good thing if moderate income families didn’t buy into bubble inflated markets yet again.

    • London Falls Behind New York and Hong Kong in Most Expensive City Rankings

      London has been knocked from its perch as the world’s most expensive city to live and work in after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

      The U.K. capital is now third behind New York and Hong Kong, according to research on global cities from property broker Savills. The research examines the costs for an employee to live in rented housing and work in an office for a year.

      London had spent the last 2½ years at the top. But it fell in July because of the drop in sterling against the dollar and cooling U.K. real-estate markets, both of which accelerated after the EU referendum in June.

    • World Bank’s New Rules Condemned for Disregarding People and Planet

      Lending further support to the United Nation’s characterization of the World Bank as a “human rights-free zone,” the notorious lender is expected to approve new policies Thursday that have been widely condemned by rights advocates for endangering human rights and the environment.

    • New World Bank Policies Imperil Environment and Land Defenders

      Just 5 months since the murder of Honduran environmental defender Berta Caceres, the Bank is passing new safeguards that do more harm than good.

    • Why Say No to the TPP? Corporations Already Have Too Much Power

      It took two days for 60 members of the Cowboy and Indian Alliance to plant the heirloom seeds by hand. It was the spring of 2014, and there were prayers, burning of sage and sweetgrass, and, one by one, volunteers pressed the red corn seeds into the earth of Art and Helen Tanderup’s farm in Neligh, Nebraska. There, along the Ponca Trail of Tears, the Ponca people in 1877 were forced to leave their homeland after planting their corn seeds, many dying along the way or starving when they arrived in Oklahoma. But the sacred red seeds were being planted again in Nebraska for the first time in more than 100 years.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • [Older] Top spy: Despite intelligence ‘war’ with Russians, it’s too soon to blame them for DNC hack

      Spy chief James Clapper said Thursday that U.S. intelligence services are facing a “version of war” with Russia — but it’s too soon to blame the old Cold War rival for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails.

      He said it’s also too early to say whether the people who leaked those emails are trying to throw the presidential election to Donald Trump, as Hillary Clinton’s campaign has charged.

      “I don’t think we’re quite ready yet to make a call on attribution,” Clapper said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. “There are just a few usual suspects out there.” Additionally, he said, “We don’t know enough to ascribe motivation regardless of who it might have been.”

    • Donald Trump’s Tiff With Paul Ryan Symbolizes Growing Divisions in the GOP Over Corporate Power

      Donald Trump refused to endorse Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan in his primary election on Tuesday, drawing attention to Paul Nehlen, Ryan’s insurgent challenger, who has adopted many of the same themes as the real estate mogul.

      While stopping short of endorsing Nehlen, Trump credited him with running a “very good campaign.” The primary is on August 9. The two recently had a warm exchange on Twitter:

      In many ways, Nehlen is evidence that Trump’s messaging has found its footing in down-ticket Republican races.

    • Why Hope Has Power in This Gut-Wrenching Election Year

      No wonder thousands of Americans are supporting third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein and protesting both conventions. In such a challenging time, how do we keep our eyes and energies fixed on our goal of real democracy? Hope is key. It is an essential ingredient for change.

    • Trump’s Ultimate Sacrifice (Video)

      Award-winning animator Mark Fiore is having a tough time following all of the Republican presidential candidates antics, so he condensed a few into his latest animation. Watch the clip and read Fiore’s thoughts on Trump below.

    • The Danger of Excessive Trump Bashing

      The prospect of Donald Trump in the White House alarms many people but bashing him over his contrarian views on NATO and U.S.-Russian relations could set the stage for disasters under President Hillary Clinton, writes Robert Parry.

    • Khizr Khan’s Son Sacrificed His Life for a War That Never Should’ve Happened

      Clinton’s rhetoric on the Muslim world might be friendlier than Trump’s, but her record is much bloodier.

    • Promises of Peace, Realities of War

      With Donald Trump, and with the political habits that engendered his gaining the Republican nomination, these reasons for discrepancy between campaign hopes and in-office performance are present in abundance. Trump illustrates splendidly the clinical definition of the personality disorder known as narcissism.

    • How the GOP’s Cynical Election Strategy Is Imploding

      As Donald Trump enmeshed himself in a bitter fight with the parents of an American Muslim military hero — and Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and John McCain looked to put distance between themselves and their party’s presidential nominee — there’s actually worse news for Republicans.

      Several important court victories for voting rights since Friday could dramatically remake the campaign for Congress and the White House, and this time, GOP leadership may have a harder time distancing themselves from un-American tactics.

    • State of Fear: Trump v. Clinton

      Shudders of fear emanate from the institutions of the United States establishment as Donald Trump claims the leadership of the Republican Party. The Washington Post, one of the leading national newspapers, ran an editorial with a clear headline: “Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy” (July 22). The Post is owned by Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, who had previously run afoul of Trump. The Republican leader had accused Bezos of anti-trust violations; the allegation was that he had used his paper to push for a corporate tax policy that would benefit his retail company. Such behaviour has become normal in U.S. society, where large firms see it as their right to influence state policy. Trump’s unpredictable stances have meant that on occasion he goes after his fellow billionaires for the way they have crafted the system (he has admitted that his real estate deals have also been advantaged by such coziness with elected officials). A characteristic Trump conspiracy theory might now assume that Bezos’ paper is going after Trump only because of this dust-up earlier in the year. Trump, his supporters say, is a “blue-collar billionaire”, a rich man with a poor man’s sensibility. The billionaires do not like him because he is willing to criticise them.

      That unpredictable part of Trump has meant that he has seized upon several criticisms of U.S. policy that have become standard in the U.S. Left. First among these is his position against the kind of free trade agreements—such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—that allow U.S. firms to move to parts of the world where labour costs are lower than in the U.S. Even The Post had to acknowledge that this part of Trump’s appeal “has resonated with many Americans whose economic prospects have stagnated”. This is also why the Democratic Socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders, was able to appeal to so many Americans who had seen their aspirations reduced to dust. This large segment of American —from West Virginia coal miners to Michigan factory workers—“deserve a serious champion”, says The Post, “and the challenges of inequality and slow wage growth deserve a serious response. But Mr Trump has nothing positive to offer, only scapegoats and dark conspiracy theories.”

    • Messages for the Future From the Margins of the DNC

      While covering the Democratic National Convention (DNC) last week, I found myself seeking a community context for the events in Philadelphia — what does this convention mean to the local voters, particularly those not connected to one party or another? Moreover, what does the historic nomination of Hillary Clinton mean for different groups of women around the country — Latina women, working-class women, queer women, single mothers? And of course, what does the convention mean to those who left disappointed, who stood in silent protest and marched outside the DNC gates to protest political elitism, reeling from the knowledge of party bias?

      [...]

      The real power at the DNC was not the spectacle unfolding onstage. It was the messages of these local leaders and activists — messages for the future, messages of continued efforts, relentless energy and a healthy sense of possibility. What follows is the transcript of our interviews with these inspiring messengers of change.

    • Here’s a Terrifying Truth: Trump Could Win

      The strongest single predictor of Trump support is a trait called “authoritarianism.” It’s a mindset that political scientists have only recently found a way to identify and measure, but it will be the key to this election — because the army of Trump authoritarians is large — and it is growing.

    • 20 of Trump’s Blunders that Would Lose the Election for Clinton (If Clinton Had Done Them)

      Trump gets away with a lot. I mean, a lot. He’s made so many mind-blowingly idiotic missteps that it’s hard to remember them all. Some of these missteps are so egregious that I suspect they would completely ruin Clinton’s chances of getting elected if she had made them. Yet Trump’s followers don’t seem to care how much he lies, breaks the rules, and makes a fool out of himself. Perhaps this has to do with Trump’s support base consisting primarily of uneducated white people. Or perhaps it has to do with the zeitgeist of anti-intellectualism that imbues contemporary American conservatism.

    • First Evidence Surfaces of Foreign Money Pouring into U.S. Elections After Citizens United

      Six years ago, President Obama warned the nation that foreign corporations could soon pour money into the U.S. election system thanks to the Supreme Court Citizens United decision. Now, direct evidence has emerged for the first time showing a foreign company has indeed donated money to a federal campaign. Documentation obtained by The Intercept shows a company owned by Chinese nationals donated $1.3 million to Jeb Bush’s super PAC after receiving advice from a prominent Republican lawyer. To talk more about the exposé, we are joined by The Intercept’s Lee Fong, who co-wrote the multi-part series “Foreign Influence.”

    • The Decay of American Politics

      To contrast the virtues and shortcomings of Stevenson and Eisenhower with those of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald Trump is both instructive and profoundly depressing. Comparing the adversaries of 1956 with their 2016 counterparts reveals with startling clarity what the decades-long decay of American politics has wrought.

      [...]

      But let’s not just blame the candidates. Trump and Clinton are also the product of circumstances that neither created. As candidates, they are merely exploiting a situation — one relying on intuition and vast stores of brashness, the other putting to work skills gained during a life spent studying how to acquire and employ power. The success both have achieved in securing the nominations of their parties is evidence of far more fundamental forces at work.

    • My View: Both Trump, Rio Olympics earn gold in hyperbolic hurdles

      Both Trump and the Olympics position themselves as philanthropic, donating to both charities and fulfilling grandiose promises to the host city. But as with Trump, whose donations have proved to be more phantom than opera, the great benefits that the Games supposedly bestow on everyday people in the host city have turned out to be more aspirational than inspirational. Look no further than Rio de Janeiro. Hosting the Olympic Games was supposed to jumpstart the cleanup of the city’s waterways. But today Guanabara Bay and the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon, which will soon host Olympic water-events, look more like scenes from the Old Testament, plagued by massive fish die-offs and sludgy carpets of trash clogging the shoreline.

    • The D.N.C. and the Summer of Discontent

      The scheme succeeded only modestly. The D.N.C. chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigned, but she was already in trouble: Bernie Sanders supporters believed that her bias toward Clinton had cost their candidate the nomination, even though Clinton won nearly four million more primary and caucus votes. In any event, Bernie-or-Bust delegates streaming into Philadelphia did not require foreign inspiration to agitate against Clinton. Sanders, for his part, made clear that he was over the imbroglio and was committed to unity in order to defeat Trump. “It is easy to boo,” he scolded a catcalling delegation from California on the second day. “It is harder to look your kids in the face who would be living under a Donald Trump Presidency.”

    • New York Times Relentlessly Biased Against Trump, Reports New York Times

      An astonishing piece appeared in the New York Times (NYT) recently. It reported a fierce bias in the Times’s coverage of politics and current affairs, most notably when it comes to Donald Trump. The bias turns up not just in the opinion pages but in the News, reports Liz Spayd, the new “public editor,” a position once called the ombudsman.

      But the surprise does not end there. Spayd’s report is based on letters from liberal readers, which are filling her inbox to overflowing. Here are some examples that she cites:

      “You’ve lost a subscriber because of your relentless bias against Trump — and I’m not even a Republican,” writes an Arizonan.

      “I never thought I’d see the day when I, as a liberal, would start getting so frustrated with the one-sided reporting that I would start hopping over to the Fox News webpage to read an article and get the rest of the story that the NYT refused to publish,” writes a woman from California.

    • Watch a Year’s Worth of Trump Supporters Spouting Vitriol, Racism, Fascist Rhetoric

      It’s no secret that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump fills his speeches with nationalism and xenophobia.

      And in a three-minute video published by the New York Times late Wednesday, a collection of clips from the divisive nominee’s rallies throughout the past year reveals how Trump’s chilling rhetoric is being channeled by his followers.

    • The Kremlin may savor Trump – but still might prefer Clinton

      Is Donald Trump “our man?”

      That’s the question that Komsomolskaya Pravda, a leading Russian tabloid, asked its readers on Wednesday, summing up a debate that has intrigued and exasperated readers from the Capitol Beltway to the Moscow Ring Road.

      In the United States, Trump’s professed affinity for Vladimir Putin as a strong leader, and his offbeat statements, including a call on Russia to release the rest of Hillary Clinton’s emails after a hacking attack on the Democratic National Committee, prompted surprise and some breathless derision of him as the “Siberian candidate.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Police Get Facebook To Kill Livestream Of Standoff Which Ended With Suspect Being Shot To Death

      A 23-year-old woman, and mother of a 5-year-old child, is dead. She was killed by police officers who came to serve a warrant for failure to appear charges stemming from a March 11th traffic stop. That this ever escalated to the point where bullets started flying is incomprehensible. Then again, much of what the woman, Korryn Gaines, did was incomprehensible.

      Gaines apparently considered herself a “sovereign citizen,” which meant she chose not to recognize whatever laws she felt weren’t worth following — like registering her vehicle, insuring it, and equipping it with valid plates. Instead, she chose to make plates of her own out of cardboard that made some sort of statement about her sovereign citizen status. The traffic stop on March 11th escalated into an altercation with officers, resulting in more charges being added to the traffic violations.

      [...]

      While the assertions made here may be true, the fact that law enforcement can make third-party recordings disappear is highly problematic. While the full statement shows the Baltimore County PD has asked Facebook to retain the video as evidence and will be seeking a search warrant to access the recording, the fact is that the recording will now be in the hands of law enforcement, rather than the public.

      If any video of the standoff was captured with body cameras, it will be a long time before it’s made public — if it ever is. While very few recordings are truly objective, the one recording of the standoff whose existence can be confirmed is now (mostly) gone. And the unanswered question is whether or not the situation would have been handled differently if the officers knew the public was watching.

    • Woman Fatally Shot By Police Had Facebook Account Deactivated During Standoff

      Some viewers told Gaines, who had her 5-year-old son nearby, not to listen to negotiators, said Baltimore County Police Chief James Johnson. Authorities filed an emergency request to Facebook, successfully petitioning the company to suspend Gaines’ account. About an hour later Gaines’ social media accounts were taken offline.

      “Gaines was posting video of the operation, and followers were encouraging her not to comply with negotiators’ requests that she surrender peacefully,” a spokesperson for the Baltimore County Police Department said. “This was a serious concern; successful negotiations often depend on the negotiators’ ability to converse directly with the subject, without interference or distraction during extremely volatile conditions.”

      By the time the standoff was over Gaines would be fatally shot by police and her son injured by a bullet. The incident highlights the relationship authorities have with social media platforms like Facebook at a time when people are increasingly filming and broadcasting their interactions with police.

    • Rose Must Fall: censorship at UCT

      Rose is foreign affairs editor of Jyllands Posten, the magazine which, in 2005, published a set of cartoons titled ‘The Face of Muhammad’. One of them was a drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. The cartoons, which many Muslims considered blasphemous, sparked international furore as other newspapers around the world reprinted the images. Mobs set fire to the Danish embassies in Syria and Lebanon, protesters clashed with police, and would-be assassins attempted to murder Rose and the illustrator, Kurt Westergaard. Altogether, 139 people were killed in the protests.

      The TB Davie Memorial Lecture celebrates ‘the freedom to explore ideas, to express these and to assemble peacefully’. Previous speakers in the series, which began in 1959, include Howard Zinn (1982), Noam Chomsky (1997), Alan Kors (2006), and Nadine Strossen (2011).

    • Erdogan’s Coup Survival: Don’t Call It Democracy

      Nihad Awad, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) executive director, is in Turkey this week. It isn’t clear why, but Awad is taking advantage of his travels to post upbeat photographs celebrating that country’s recent failed military coup.

      Last month, a faction of Turkey’s military tried to oust Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has consolidated power and steered his country away from the secular ambitions laid out by modern founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and toward a decidedly Islamist state.

    • Turkey’s president ramps up censorship amid post-coup purge

      Since the coup attempt on July 15, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been giving many interviews to international media, trying to defend what the observers named the #TurkeyPurge—the unprecedented scale of mass dismissals and detentions of state employees from all branches of the government.

    • Anurag Kashyap to take a masterclass on movie censorship
    • Anurag Kashyap to Give Master Class on Censorship in Australia
    • Anurag Kashyap to talk censorship in Australia
    • After multiple face-offs with censor board, Anurag Kashyap to give a masterclass on censorship
    • How to access Tor, even when your country says you can’t
    • Pluggable Transports Help Tor Users Go Around State-Level Censorship

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Australians threaten to take leave of their census

      2016 Australian census stores names and addresses, prompting privacy, security outrage.

    • UAE recruiting ‘elite task force’ for secret surveillance state

      Italian security expert Simone Margaritelli divulged details of the project after recently travelling to Dubai for a job interview that turned out to be for what he described as an “extremely shady” surveillance system.

      Margaritelli is a mobile security researcher who lives in Rome and works in the research and development team at the San Francisco-based mobile security company Zimperium.

      He was targeted for recruitment by the UAE partly because of his work on BetterCap, an open source tool that eavesdrops on online communications.

    • Microsoft Pitches Technology That Can Read Facial Expressions at Political Rallies

      On the 21st floor of a high-rise hotel in Cleveland, in a room full of political operatives, Microsoft’s Research Division was advertising a technology that could read each facial expression in a massive crowd, analyze their emotions, and report back in real time. “You could use this at a Trump rally,” a sales representative told me.

      At both the Republican and Democratic conventions, Microsoft sponsored event spaces for the news outlet Politico. Politico, in turn, hosted a series of Microsoft-sponsored discussions about the use of data technology in political campaigns. And throughout Politico’s spaces in both Philadelphia and Cleveland, Microsoft advertised an array of products from “Microsoft Cognitive Services,” its artificial intelligence and cloud computing division.

      At one exhibit, titled “Realtime Crowd Insights” a small camera scanned the room, while a monitor displayed the captured image. Every five seconds, a new image would appear with data annotated for each face – an assigned serial number, gender, estimated age, and any emotions detected in the facial expression. When I approached, the machine labeled me “b2ff,” and correctly identified me as a 23-year-old male.

    • Comcast Tells The FCC It Should Be Able To Charge Broadband Users A Premium For Privacy

      A few years back, we noted how AT&T had begun charging broadband users a significant premium if they wanted to opt out of the company’s Internet Essentials advertising program. Under that program, AT&T uses deep packet inspection to track consumer browsing behavior around the Internet — down to the second. By default, AT&T users are opted in to the program. If they want to opt out of this data collection, consumers need to not only navigate a confusing array of options, but they also need to pay $44 to $62 more per month. AT&T, in typical fashion, has actually claimed this is a “discount.”

      With the FCC’s Title II and net neutrality rules upheld, the agency is now considering new basic broadband privacy protections primarily focused on two things: ensuring ISPs properly disclose what’s being collected and sold, and ensuring that ISPs provide customers with clear, working opt-out tools. But the agency is also considering banning ISPs from turning your privacy into an expensive luxury option.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Australia: Appalling Abuse, Neglect of Refugees on Nauru

      About 1,200 men, women, and children who sought refuge in Australia and were forcibly transferred to the remote Pacific island nation of Nauru suffer severe abuse, inhumane treatment, and neglect, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said today. The Australian government’s failure to address serious abuses appears to be a deliberate policy to deter further asylum seekers from arriving in the country by boat.

      Refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru, most of whom have been held there for three years, routinely face neglect by health workers and other service providers who have been hired by the Australian government, as well as frequent unpunished assaults by local Nauruans. They endure unnecessary delays and at times denial of medical care, even for life-threatening conditions. Many have dire mental health problems and suffer overwhelming despair – self-harm and suicide attempts are frequent. All face prolonged uncertainty about their future.

    • My Mother, Stopped for Driving While Black

      When the police pulled their guns on my mother, I reached for my phone and told her to be calm and do as they say.

      My parents and I had just been swarmed by police cars, sirens blaring, as we drove on I-64 through Virginia. Shock and fear consumed my family as we came to a stop and were ordered out of the vehicle at gun point. A third car even showed up to stop traffic.

      The officers then arrested my mother without any explanation. I felt helpless.

      As I questioned the police about why they stopped us, a family of three just driving along and minding our own business, a passing white motorist stopped his car. He gave the police officers a thumbs-up and told them, “We support the great job you’re doing.”

      I was stunned.

      My parents sought asylum in the United States from Eritrea many years ago. We work hard and obey the rules. But that’s not enough. In a sad twist of fate, our family has stumbled into institutional injustice in a new form.

    • Is democracy incoherent?

      Is democracy illusory and troublingly incoherent? Or is an ideal democracy yet to be fully realised?

    • Woman Livestreams Her Supervisor Asking for Sexual Favors

      Makana Milho, 21, is a transgender woman who was in the process of completing six days of community service on account of a theft charge. During that time, Milho was allegedly assaulted by the city worker who was supervising her community service. According to the Honolulu Star Advertiser, Harold Villanueva Jr., 47, pinched Milho’s buttocks and said he would send her home early in exchange for sex acts. Villanueva also bragged about preying upon other community workers for sex.

      Milho recalled that Philando Castile’s girlfriend had recorded his shooting by a police officer. “I do watch the news,” said Milho, “I saw one lady who Facebook-lived her boyfriend’s death. I just did it.”

      Milho uploaded the video to Facebook and received nearly 200,000 views, before taking it down after she received a flurry of hateful backlash. Before taking it down, she tagged the police department. The video led to an investigation of Villanueva and he was arrested on sexual assault charges.

    • New York Makes Playing Pokemon Go, Other Online Games A Sex Offender Parole Violation

      While I don’t play Pokemon Go, I’ve still found the public hysteria surrounding the game to be endlessly entertaining. I’ve laughed as “get off my lawn” types bitch and moan simply because people are having harmless fun in ways they don’t understand. I’ve chuckled as Pokemon Go players forget that the rules of reality still apply while in augmented reality. And I’ve laughed at the absurd new lawsuits popping up to try and cash in on the phenomenon.

    • Will Bill Bratton’s Resignation Slow Down the Militarization of the NYPD? Not Likely

      NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton, a key architect of “broken windows” policing who hyped so-called terror threats to wrangle big buys of military-style gear, announced Tuesday that he is stepping down from his position as the most powerful law enforcement figure in the country.

      The revelation came as protesters staged an occupation of City Hall Park demanding that Bratton step down. Meanwhile, the FBI is launching an investigation into police corruption in the top ranks of the NYPD and federal prosecutors are considering charges for the police killing of Eric Garner. Grassroots organizations immediately celebrated the ouster

    • New York’s newest protesters are right: it’s time to defund police

      My professor friend AJ and I led a walking tour of college students earlier this week about protest and policing in New York City. Between our stop at One Police Plaza, where “broken windows” policing was unleashed on our city, and the site of Eric Garner’s death on Staten Island, we stopped at the newest occupation in town at City Hall Park.

      Mayor Bill de Blasio had just announced police commissioner Bill Bratton’s resignation as we walked through the park, quickly achieving one of the occupying group’s three ambitious goals when they appeared on Monday. The other two call for defunding the NYPD and using some of that money for reparations for survivors of “police terrorism”.

      The group, Millions March NYC, makes a solid point: it is imperative to defund police departments across the country immediately, redirecting that money instead to black futures and the marginalized. Because while reparations paid to next of kin for police abuse is already a billion-dollar business, there is no need for anyone to be executed in the first place.

    • Wrongfully Convicted Louisiana Man Asks Justice Department to Investigate New Orleans Prosecutors

      Throughout the 1990s, senior New Orleans prosecutor Jim Williams kept a model electric chair on his desk. The chair held photographs of five African-American men his office had helped place on death row. He considered it a major achievement and was pictured with the chair in a 1995 issue of Esquire magazine.

      Years later he was quoted in a Los Angeles Times article, saying of his career as a prosecutor: “It got to the point where there was no thrill for me unless there was a chance for the death penalty.”

      Of the men photographed, two have since had their sentences commuted to life, one won at a retrial, and two have been exonerated.

      On Tuesday, John Thompson, one of the exonerated men, filed a 29-page complaint with the Justice Department. Thompson, 54, petitioned for a federal investigation of what he and his lawyers call “a pervasive and unapologetic pattern of unethical improper conduct” perpetrated by Williams and his colleagues at the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office.

    • Canada Finally Launches Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women

      Rights groups have long called for such an inquiry, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigned on a promise to establish one.

    • Canada unveils inquiry into murdered indigenous women

      For over a decade, indigenous community leaders and human rights advocates across Canada have urged Ottawa to formulate a national strategy to address high rates of violence against indigenous women and girls.

    • In Historic Move, Obama Grants Clemency to 214 Prisoners

      President Barack Obama on Wednesday issued a record-breaking 214 commutations for people serving drug-related sentences in federal prison—the largest single-day granting of clemency in U.S. history.

      The commutations bring the total of people granted early release under Obama’s administration to 562, more than the past nine presidents combined, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). It is Obama’s third use of his clemency powers this year.

      “The president made history today. President Obama granted more commutations today alone than any president has granted during their entire time in office since the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson,” said Cynthia W. Roseberry, project manager for Clemency Project 2014, a working group of lawyers and advocates that provides free legal assistance to people who meet the criteria for early release.

    • 11-year-old Boy Forces Pence to Explain Allegiance to Trump

      Which is why at a political rally featuring Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence in North Carolina on Thursday, it was an 11-year-old boy named Matthew who forced the adult on the stage into an awkward situation by asking him to explain exactly where he stands when it comes to his running mate Donald Trump.

      “I noticed that you’ve been softening up some of Mr. Trump’s policies and words, is this going to be your role in the administration?” asked the young boy when called upon – a question that despite its apparent earnestness drew immediate laughter from the crowd.

    • “Beef with Byron”: the restaurant on the frontlines of the immigration debate

      In comparison with recent actions where cockroaches, locusts and crickets were released into central London restaurants, Monday’s demonstration at the Holborn Byron Burger restaurant was of a more orderly nature. Beneath the front window of the establishment, closed for the day by the impending picket, a crowd gathered to demand justice for those members of Byron staff recently deported to Brazil, Nepal, Egypt and elsewhere. The staff had been summoned to early morning training sessions that transpired to be a Home Office immigration raid. Byron have claimed the training session was not collusion, despite many consistent testimonials to the contrary by deported staff. This seems to be a lie that evidences the wrongdoing the company sense it has committed.

    • Castles in the Sky

      Elena of Avalor is Disney’s new princess. She has been branded as the “First Latina Princess,” and hailed as a milestone for diversifying the Disney brand, and also reaching out to one of the fastest-growing consumer markets (and youngest demographics) in the country. She’s basically a brown-tinted version of the generic template: sparkly dress with baroque-slash-victorian aesthetics, the hint of an hourglass shape without distracting cleavage, wavy brunette hair betraying no ethnic peculiarities, and of course, a tiara. There’s something comforting about seeing an underrepresented group grafted so seamlessly onto the quintessential icon of femininity. But as always, the pages of this fairy tale are slightly frayed around the edges.

      We’re moving past the days when all fairy tales were festooned with lily-white virgins and virile patrarchs, and the oddball side characters aren’t encoded with vile ethnic caricatures masquerading as off-color animals—the cackling crow, the conniving Siamese cats. Now the heroine is a lady of color and in this royal family at least, there’s the lilt of a creole.

    • The Voting Rights Acts in the Era of Jim Crow 2.0

      The appeals court wrote, “The new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The judges found that the North Carolina Legislature and governor, under Republican control since early 2011, offered no proof of voter fraud—the primary Republican justification for enacting restrictive voting laws. Or as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump warned with no evidence, “We may have people vote 10 times.”

    • Malware Linked to Government of Kazakhstan Targets Journalists, Political Activists, Lawyers: EFF Report

      Editors Who Exposed Corruption, Political Opponents of Authoritarian Government’s President, and Their Legal Teams Were Sent Malware

      San Francisco—Journalists and political activists critical of Kazakhstan’s authoritarian government, along with their family members, lawyers, and associates, have been targets of an online phishing and malware campaign believed to be carried out on behalf of the government of Kazakhstan, according to a new report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

      Malware was sent to Irina Petrushova and Alexander Petrushov, publishers of the independent newspaper Respublika, which was forced by the government of Kazakhstan to stop printing after years of exposing corruption but has continued to operate online. Also targeted are family members and attorneys of Mukhtar Ablyazov, co-founder and leader of opposition party Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan, as well as other prominent dissidents.

      The campaign—which EFF has called “Operation Manul,” after endangered wild cats found in the grasslands of Kazakhstan—involved sending victims spearphishing emails that tried to trick them into opening documents which would covertly install surveillance software capable of recording keystrokes, recording through the webcam, and more. Some of the software used in the campaign is commercially available to anyone and sells for as little as $40 online.

    • The Propaganda War With Putin
    • ‘We Have to Have Disability as Part of Our Discussion’ – CounterSpin interview with David Perry on disability and police violence

      When behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey asked the Florida police officer why he had shot him, given that he was lying on his back with his hands in the air, the officer’s answer was, “I don’t know.” Later this was amended for what was apparently deemed an acceptable alternative: He’d meant to shoot Arnoldo Soto, the 23-year-old man with autism holding the toy truck, whom Kinsey was trying to help.

      The spotlight that Black Lives Matter and other activists have forced onto police brutality and overpolicing of African-Americans can’t help but shed light on other aspects of the problem as well, including the frequency with which those killed by police are people with disabilities.

      Our next guest’s work, however, suggests that being at risk is not, so far, enough to get them an appropriate role in media’s coverage of the story. David Perry is a disability rights journalist and associate professor of history at Dominican University. He’s co-author, with Lawrence Carter- Long, of a new white paper for the Ruderman Family Foundation on media coverage of law enforcement use of force and disability. He joins us now by phone from Illinois. Welcome to CounterSpin, David Perry.

    • The Left’s Abandonment of Females

      In her first PMQ (Prime Minister’s Questions) last week, Theresa May took aim at Jeremy Corbyn, ironising his welcome to her: “You refer to me as the second woman Prime Minister, in my years here in this House I’ve long heard the Labour Party asking what the Conservative Party does for women—well, just keep making us Prime Minister.” And while May’s comments drew laughter in Parliament, she has put her finger on an issue plaguing the left in the UK and beyond. And the left has a woman problem which extends far beyond the lack of a party leader uniquely, but also involves the elision of women’s voices, especially on issues concerning, paradoxically, women. And this sort of problem within the left runs from the political theatre all the way through academia and publishing. What a woman on the left is allowed to say is still largely administered out by males who either applaud or cast her out of the party. And this elision of women is taking place within government and publishing, both in the UK and the USA.

      There is a pattern among many leftist publications which consider themselves to be “anti-sexist” to engage in patently sexist practices by shifting away from from issues that specifically affect women or by taking sides in debates where women’s bodies and lives are suddenly rendered commodity. Suddenly the tone of what is acceptable historical materialism shifts radically when women are pointing out issues that pertain to their reality. Quite suddenly there is no room for debate and where there is a need for discussion about issues that directly effect women, the left is largely abandoning the voices of women as both political constituents and political thinkers.

    • The Dangerous Fantasies of Jeffrey Goldberg

      In Goldberg’s fantasy, Israel is as enlightened as he is: liberal, democratic and just. Don’t you dare try casting doubt on that – Goldberg’s liberalism won’t tolerate it. He will praise freedom of expression in Israel, as he did at a Haaretz conference in Palo Alto last November, and will say that Israelis’ freedom of the press and lively public debate is what makes Israel so popular in America. But from now on, it will have to be without Haaretz and the lively public debate it fosters about Zionism among Jewish Americans.

      According to Goldberg, Haaretz is doing something unforgiveable: it’s shattering his fantasy. Because of an op-ed piece in which two American-Jewish historians explain why they’ve abandoned Zionism, as well as a piece of my own (“Yes, Israel is an evil state,” July 31), the liberal Goldberg has decided he’s had enough of Haaretz. He tweeted to his 107,000 Twitter followers that these sort of pieces make him sick. Neo-Nazis, he said, have been distributing my op-ed, so he was going to have to “take a break” from Haaretz.

      I would love to know who those neo-Nazis are. After all, neo-Nazis and the radical right are now some of Israel’s best friends. Did Goldberg mean to say that BDS advocates are neo-Nazis? And besides, I’m not sure I understand. What, the pieces are true, but it’s only the way they’re used that angers Goldberg? Should they not be published because neo-Nazis disseminate them? Or are the articles not actually true?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Techdirt Reading List: The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries Of Trans-Atlantic Battle

        Baldwin’s book goes into even more detail on centuries upon centuries of battles around copyright law — what it’s for, what it’s designed to do and the inevitable tensions it runs into as modern technology changes. It also highlights how some of the battles are really cultural and national battles — with ideas around openness and sharing stemming more from the American side, while the stronger focus on making copyright solely about protecting creators coming from a more European tradition. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise — things like the Berne Convention which massively expanded copyrights came from a European push and the US was very late in adopting it. But sometimes people get so focused on the expansion of copyright driven by the US film and recording industries that we forget that they were simply co-opting ideas from Europe. Either way, it’s an excellent read to put more of our copyright wars into context.

      • Even The Usual Defenders Of The RIAA Are Pointing Out They’re Simply Lying About YouTube

        To be clear, looking at the details from Midia itself, it’s not saying that only 2% of the videos are unauthorized, but 2% of music video views on YouTube are of unauthorized videos. And that’s still an important point. It suggests that, contrary to what the industry likes to claim, the kids these days aren’t spending very much time at all using YouTube to watch unauthorized streams. It’s almost non-existent. The same report also found that music represents just 12% of all YouTube viewing time. That kinda shows how the claims of the industry about how YouTube is supposedly only successful because of music uploads is complete hogwash.

      • Copyright Office to FCC: Hollywood should be able to killswitch your TV

        20 years ago, Congress ordered the FCC to begin the process of allowing Americans to buy their pay TV boxes on the open market (rather than every American household spending hundreds of dollars a year renting a trailing-edge, ugly, energy-inefficient, badly designed box that is increasingly the locus of networked attacks that expose both the home LAN and the cameras and mics that are more and more likely to be integrated into TVs and decoder boxes) — now, at last, the FCC is doing something about it.

      • Why Is The Copyright Office Lying To Protect The Cable Industry’s Monopoly Stranglehold Over The Cable Box?

        The FCC’s attempt to bring some much needed competition to the cable box has birthed an absolute torrent of lobbying shenanigans by the cable and entertainment industries. They’ve pushed a flood of misleading editorials in major papers and websites claiming the plan is somehow racist and will unveil a piracy apocalypse. They’ve nudged Congressional campaign contribution recipients to bash the plan as an extreme case of government over-reach. They’ve also managed to convince the press and some FCC staffers the idea is an attack on copyright, when copyright has absolutely nothing to do with it.

        Quick background: under the FCC’s original proposal (pdf), the FCC wants cable companies to provide programming access to third-party hardware vendors without the need for a CableCARD, the goal being to generate competition in the space resulting in better, cheaper and more open cable boxes. Under the proposal cable operators would be able to use any copyright protection or DRM standard they choose to deliver this content to companies like Google, Amazon or TiVO — and the FCC has repeatedly stated any final rules would respect existing copyright and financial arrangements between cable and the customer.

        But because the plan would cost cable providers $21 billion annually in rental fee revenue and result in more open cable boxes (more likely to direct viewers to third party streaming competitors), they’ve been trying to use a false definition of “copyright” to protect its monopoly stranglehold over cable hardware. And now, the cable industry has another ally in their attempt to mislead the press and public on this subject: The United States Copyright Office.

      • Copyright Office Jumps Into Set-Top Box Debate, Says Hollywood Should Control Your TV

        The Federal Communications Commission has a plan to bring much-needed competition and consumer choice to the market for set-top boxes and television-viewing apps. Under the FCC’s proposed rule change, pay-TV customers would be able to choose devices and apps from anywhere rather than being forced to use the box and associated software provided by the cable company, ending cable companies’ and major TV studios’ monopoly in the field.

        But major entertainment companies are trying to derail this effort and keep control over TV technology. Central to their argument is a set of misleading claims about copyright law. Hollywood thinks that copyright holders should be able to use licensing agreements to place whatever restrictions they like on how people can access their content.

        Unfortunately, the Copyright Office has sent a letter to Congress supporting those claims. The letter is wrong as a matter of law, and it’s also bad policy. Rather than promote innovation, the Copyright Office offers ideas that would be hostile to choice and innovation in all kinds of information technology, not just pay TV.

      • China’s Home-Grown Version Of Spotify Shows How To Make Money In A World Of Digital Abundance

        The fact that the best-known music streaming service, Spotify, is still struggling to turn a profit despite its huge popularity, is often held up as proof that making money in a world of digital abundance is almost impossible. Of course, here on Techdirt, we’ve published many posts about people and companies that have adopted various innovative strategies to get around the problem. But what about music streaming as a mass medium: will it ever be possible to make money in this sector?

Apple’s Lawsuits Against Android Are Helping Patent Trolls, Canadian Android OEM BlackBerry Turns to Texas for Trolling

Posted in America, Patents at 3:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

BlackBerry is not a friend but growingly a troll as business prospects sour

Blackberries

Summary: Apple’s “thermonuclear” war on Android is helping parasites, venue-shifting to Texas remains a problem, and BlackBerry fulfills our expectation of becoming a patent assertion entity (practically a troll) down south in Texas

OVER THE years GNU/Linux became just “Linux” (a misnomer) and nowadays many people know it as “Chrome OS” or “Android”. Patents on software profoundly affect those platforms (Microsoft claims to “own” some of these platforms and demands “licensing” at the point of a gun) and this highlights the longstanding problem for Free/libre software; it is inherently incompatible with software patenting. Things become even stranger when patent aggressors like Sony, Ericsson and BlackBerry embrace Android while suing other Android players. We wrote about this many times before.

OpenTV’s patents have been mentioned here for quite some time, including earlier this year (a district court found OpenTV’s patents ‘abstract’ under Alice). Like many companies out there, it envies Apple’s wealth and decides to sue Apple (knowing that Apple might be willing to settle, using its deep pockets for calm rather than endless disputes/appeals in courts). Well, the case has just been settled [1, 2], but it’s a relatively small case compared to the upcoming SCOTUS case of Apple against Samsung. Pro-Apple sites and few other sites note that the case could help patent trolls. To quote Inside Sources:

When the Supreme Court decides in October whether Apple is entitled to the total profit of Samsung smartphones for infringing on Apple patents, the ruling could stretch from Silicon Valley into America’s heartland.

If the nation’s highest court upholds both federal district and appeals court decisions ordering Samsung to turn over its total profit from select Galaxy smartphones for infringing on three Apple design patents, the fallout in patent litigation will have an especially hard impact on the farming sector, an industry expert said Tuesday.

Leroy Watson of the agriculture non-profit National Grange said the subsequent wave of patent trolling predicted by numerous experts would have a severe impact on the next generation of telecommunications-equipped farming equipment.

The threat of a lawsuit for the total profit from the sale of such equipment, which commonly serves only a niche market of non-wealthy consumers, will deter innovators from developing those products, setting the agriculture industry technologically back by a generation, according to Watson.

The pro-Apple site, Apple Insider, chose the headline “Tech firms worry Supreme Court win for Apple over Samsung could benefit patent trolls,” so here is another reason to cheer for the Android OEM.

Earlier this week we wrote about some US professors who effectively sidle with patent trolls. Matt Levy, writing in a trolls-friendly site for a change, says today that “Opposition to Venue Reform Misses Target”. This is consistent with what Levy has campaigned on for a number of years in his (and CCIA‘s) blog, Patent Progress.

In other noteworthy news, BlackBerry — as we have feared for years — is becoming like a patent troll in Texas. It uses its patents to shake down competitors. BlackBerry’s CEO* says “We have today about 44,000 patents.” Irrespective of quality for sure, given this irrational number (no company can make this number of groundbreaking innovations). According to this report from the trolls-friendly IAM: “The move [Texas suit against Avaya] comes just over a year since Blackberry announced itself as a major player in the monetisation space with an agreement signed with Cisco, in which the Canadian company not only secured a cross-licensing deal but also “a license fee from Cisco”. Another royalty-bearing deal was done with an unnamed company around the same time. Since then, the company has also signed two more deals with Canon and International Game Technology, both of which look to contain a royalties element to them; while in January it emerged that late last year Blackberry had sold a portfolio of patents to investment firm Centerbridge Partners for as much as $50 million.”

If BlackBerry isn’t saved by Android, then not much will be left of this company other than a textbook definition of patent troll (no products, just shakedowns and litigation). █
______
* Involved in the Microsoft-connected Silver Lake and was involved in Turbolinux, which sold out to Microsoft with a notorious patent deal.

Multimedia Software Patents Declared Invalid in the United States

Posted in America, EFF, Patents at 3:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The long and destructive tail of faulty or shoddy patent examination

A snake

Summary: A look at a highly destructive software patent (on podcasting) reaching a dead end only after the well-funded EFF stepped in and another new court decision which ruled a video streaming patent invalid

TECHRIGHTS spent many years writing about the infamous “podcasting patent” — a patent which was used to shake down many small businesses and even hobbyists. Not only was such a patent not justified to begin with; it deliberately targeted those without incentive to fight back in court (as it’s expensive).

The EFF stepped in some years back and two days ago it reported the latest in a press release by Daniel Nazer. It says:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will urge a federal appeals court at a hearing Thursday to find that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) correctly invalidated key claims of a patent owned by Personal Audio, which had used the patent to threaten podcasters big and small.

EFF is defending a USPTO ruling it won last year in its petition challenging the validity of key claims of Personal Audio’s patent. EFF argued, and the USPTO agreed, that the claimed invention existed before Personal Audio filed its patent application.

So even the USPTO, which granted this patent in the first place, agreed/admitted/acknowledged that it had made an error. How many people and businesses have so far been harmed (financial impact, health impact etc.) by this terrible judgment? Who will be held accountable for it? There will never be proper compensation, let along a refund. Even without Alice — as the above clearly notes that it boils down to prior art — this patent should never have existed.

Looking elsewhere in the news, patent lawyers (as usual, Tyrus Cartwright from Seyfarth Shaw LLP in this case) only cover (or cherry-pick, or scrape the bottom of the barrel for) cases that end up in favour of software patents*, but if one looks a little further at the latest in the docket (patent lawsuits, not PTAB), “Video Streaming Patents [Are Found] Invalid Under 35 U.S.C. § 101″. To quote: “The court granted defendant’s motion for judgment on the pleadings because the asserted claims of plaintiff’s video streaming patents encompassed unpatentable subject matter and found that the claims were directed toward an abstract idea. “[T]he claims are directed to an abstract idea because the claims are not directed to an improvement in computer functionality, and the physical components of the claim merely provide a generic environment for carrying out the abstract idea. . . . The court is not persuaded that the claimed invention results in an improvement to computer functionality. [Plaintiff] did not invent the technology that converts video files into streaming format. . . . Moreover, [plaintiff] was not confronted with the problem of how to combine conversion technology and the Internet, or how to associate identification tags with video files. At most, the claims merely automate a sequence of known steps using conventional technology so that a human is not burdened with various manual steps. . . . The ordered arrangement of such conventional features provides no discernable benefits to computer functionality. This stands in stark contrast to claims which achieved such improvements to computing technology.””

Software patents die every week if not every day in the US (PTAB decisions are more frequent than court decisions). Things have gotten so out of hand for software patents proponents that they doubt Yahoo’s patent portfolio is worth much at all; today Forbes asks, “could Pokemon Go’s profit engine be derailed by challenges to the software patents underlying the game?”

Well, not really. Nintendo can afford going to court and since software patents typically die there, Nintendo will endure. In fact, post-Alice it’s unlikely that any firm (even patent troll) will bother suing. █
_____
* In this case [PDF], “patents-in-suit are directed to inventions that verify the delivery and integrity of electronic messages” as judged by PTAB, not actual courts. Not all avenues/means have been exhausted and the analysis is not as thorough as can be.

« 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