01.10.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Going after the scapegoats at the top would only backfire, patently so…
Summary: A look ahead at what basically constitutes another phase in the EPO’s effort to fire high-profile critics and scare the rest of them
THERE HAS not been much public output regarding the EPO as of late. EPO accounts (Web site, Twitter etc.) are barely active, SUEPO administrators are away, and “EPO President, Mr. Battistelli,” told me one person today, “will be in South America-Colombia on January 29, talking about Unitary Patents.” Here we have evidence that UPC lobbying carries on. Thou shalt not interfere with Battistelli’s Grand Plan.
“The EPO’s management made a grave mistake when it attempted to silence dissent rather than quell is by mutual understanding, concessions, recognition, etc.”A staff protest is just a week and a half away (support for the EPO staff unions is seemingly at an all-time high), coinciding with some decisions regarding the fate of staff representatives.
The EPO’s management made a grave mistake when it attempted to silence dissent rather than quell is by mutual understanding, concessions, recognition, etc. Various members of staff now pass around fliers, the SUEPO’s bulletin, links to news sites, links to the Web site of SUEPO and so on. The more people read, the most they support the unions and resent their management. The staff is now overwhelmingly in support of SUEPO and it follows what SUEPO is saying, be it in the SUEPO Web site or even the occasional bulletins. “It used to be called “SUEPO inform”,” one reader told us, “and was essentially a local affair of The Hague. There was more or less four incarnations of SUEPO, one for each main sites [DH, BE, MN, VI], in addition to the staff representations, with different, sometimes non-converging, agendas and personalities. Battistelli seems to manage the unthinkable: unite the sites in one force.”
“Battistelli seems to manage the unthinkable: unite the sites in one force.”
–AnonymousThe accusations against SUEPO figureheads are shocking not because they’re severe but because they’re indicative of a desperate effect by EPO management to crush all unions (starting with the biggest one, SUEPO). If all goes as planned, within just a few days staff of the EPO will be notified of these ludicrous allegations. There is no legal process, as there is no separation between the accuser, the judge, the executioner etc. It’s quite a circus! It’s theatre rather. It’s designed to only give the impression of due process, but it’s done in secret because it follows North Korean standards. It would embarrass any European country, even those formerly part of the Soviet Union. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Well, Linux is running significant fraction of cellphones these days… but usually very old and very patched kernel. But maybe we can run mainline kernel with free userland?
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Here is the sordid tale of how I made a payphone run Linux. I’m not so great at hardware hacks, and it shows. My bumbling exists for your amusement.
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Kernel Space
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Liquorix is the Linux kernel spin that’s optimized for “desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads.” Liquorix isn’t a fork of the Linux kernel but just a specialized configuration of the kernel and does include some out-of-tree patches. Among the changes for Liquorix right now are enabling Zen interactive tuning, hard kernel preemption, budget fair queue, AuFS support, and it’s basically an anti-debugging kernel in order to ensure faster performance.
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Graphics Stack
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This year we should finally see the release of the highly anticipated AMD Zen processors that will hopefully better position their processors to compete with Intel. However, one of the unanswered questions about this next-gen platform is whether it will support Coreboot as an optional open-source firmware to replace the proprietary UEFI/BIOS.
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Applications
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As you may know, Simple Image Resizer (SIR) is an open source tool written in C++ and created via the Qt GUI toolkit, for batch resizing, rotating and converting images. Also, it has a feature for adding frames or text and apply color and gradient filters to the images, some functions to manipulate the histogram and works with multiple photos by splitting the tasks on the processors.
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Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.
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Since 3.18.0 there have been two new firmwares for the Kobo eInk devices. For the very recently released firmware release 3.19.5761 I have updated my collection of patches and features. As with previous mega-package, I prepared updates for all three hardwares, Mark4 (Glo), Mark5 (Aura), and Mark6 (GloHD), but only the one for Mark6 is tested by myself.
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Proprietary
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Telegram Desktop is an open-source and cross-platform Telegram client for Linux. The client has support for notifications, sending messages and media files, and inserting emoji.
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Telegram Desktop is an open-source and cross-platform Telegram client for Linux. The client has support for notifications, sending messages and media files, and inserting emoji.
While the Telegram Desktop client is still under development, it allows the users to send and receive messages from the Linux desktop, has a feature for synching across all the supported platform, so you can read your mobile notifications from both the computer and your phone, without missing anything. Also, it has file transfer support and the users can create groups for up to 200 people and send broadcast messages. Unfortunately, support for sending voice messages has not been implemented yet, the users can only listen or download received voice messages.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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The guys over Unvanquished, a free and open-source FPS (First-person shooter) game for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems have just returned from their Winter holidays and released the first Alpha build for 2016.
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SDL 2.0.4 is the release that most notably enables Mir and Wayland support by default! It was just by chance I stumbled across the new release earlier today and doesn’t seem to really be advertised. SDL 2.0.4 was long overdue and besides enabling the Mir and Wayland back-end support by default it also adds IBus IME support, support for EmScripten and Google Native Client, modern CPU feature detection, Vivante video driver support, and much more.
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Slime Rancher is the tale of Beatrix LeBeau, a plucky, young rancher who sets out for a life a thousand light years away from Earth on the ‘Far, Far Range’ where she tries her hand at making a living wrangling slimes. With a can-do attitude, plenty of grit, and her trusty vacpack, Beatrix attempts to stake a claim, amass a fortune, and avoid the continual peril that looms from the rolling, jiggling avalanche of slimes around every corner.
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For those not keeping an eye on the latest SteamOS updates, a new beta was pushed out a few days ago! It’s good to see Valve keeping up with new hardware support.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE Frameworks 5.18.0 has been released by the KDE Community, and its developers have upgraded a large number of packages and fixed a ton of problems.
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After switchig to a notebook with higher resolution monitor, I noticed, that the FLTK based ICC Examin application looked way too small. Having worked in the last months much with pixel independent resolutions in QML, it was a pain to see the non adapted FLTK GUI. I had the impression, that despite of several years of a very appreciated advancement of monitor technology, some parts of graphics stacks did not move and take advantage. So I became curious on how to solve high DPI support the hard way.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME developer Bastien Nocera has landed support in GNOME Settings Daemon for supporting the airplane (WiFi and Bluetooth) hot-keys with small notification overlays.
The enable/disable Bluetooth and airplane/WiFi keys on many laptops should now work with GNOME for displaying small notifications when pressing these keys. This is building off the rfkill D-Bus service and new work being done in gnome-settings-daemon for audio jack notifications.
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As we were working on audio jack notifications, and were wondering whether the type of notification we’d pop up in this case could be reused in other cases, I encountered a feature request that could now be solved easily with the rfkill D-Bus service we added to gnome-settings-daemon for the 3.10 release.
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Prolific GNOME contributor Jasper St. Pierre has landed new tiling code into the Mutter window manager / compositor. This new tiling code is fully rewritten and based around constrained edges rather than tiling states. The new mode allows for one free-floating edge that can be resized and this new code also supports corner tiling.
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Red Hat Family
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There are a large number of websites providing various forms of ratings on stocks and in particular Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT). They include crowd-sourced research portals as well as those from professional research analysts. Both can be helpful in helping investors make informed decisions when it comes to picking stocks.
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As it reflects the theoretical cost of buying the company’s shares, the market cap of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) is currently rolling at 14468.62, making it one of the key stocks in today’s market. Hence, the existing market cap indicates a preferable measure in comprehending the size of the company rather than its worth.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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This release fixes numerous security issues. All users must upgrade as soon as possible.
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This was my eighth month as a Freexian sponsored LTS contributor. I was assigned 8 hours for the month of December. It’s also the month in which I (re)learned an important lesson.
I decided to take another run at backporting the security fixes for Quassel. Unlike the first time, I was successful at getting the fixes backported. Then I ran into another problem: the changes took advantage of new features in c++11 such as std::function.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu Touch operating system is also going to provide support for encryption of user data; developers have revealed.
It wasn’t a secret that Ubuntu Touch will get encryption, but it’s also not listed as an upcoming feature. It’s buried in a wiki entry with plans for Ubuntu Touch, but it’s nice to see that it’s still being considered, even if it’s not going to arrive anytime soon.
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Unity’s controversial online search feature is being disabled by default in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, due for release in April.
Search terms typed into the Unity 7 Dash search bar will only show local file, folder and app results. No search terms will be sent to Canonical or passed to third party results providers, as is currently the case.
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This article is fairly late onto the scene but my original articles about the Raspberry PI are all becoming a little bit long in the tooth and so it is time to revisit them and make them relevant for 2016 and beyond.
In this guide I will show you how to buy a Raspberry PI, introduce you to some key accessories, introduce you to some non-key accessories and also show you how to set up the operating system.
Other guides will be following on from this to show how to connect using SSH and via VNC so that you don’t need it plugged into a monitor/television.
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Phones
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Android
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BlackBerry Priv owners can now take advantage of BlackBerry’s Virtual Expert tool on Android. The free download lets users check the health of their handset’s battery, and carry out a number of diagnostic tests on things like the display, camera, speakers, and more.
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2015 was a year for the record books in information and cyber security. Dozens of new vulnerabilities were uncovered, and government organisations, businesses and individuals continued to find themselves victims of high-profile data breaches.
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If there’s one event which is guaranteed to signal the start of a new year in tech, it’s the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which took place this year between January 6th and January 9th in Las Vegas.
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Don’t let the dreary name fool you – Casio’s new Android Wear smartwatch is definitely worth getting excited about, especially if you’re the type of person who loves nothing more than wading through wild streams and gutting spear-caught salmon.
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Big Data Analytics software revenues will experience strong growth, doubling its current global 2015 revenue of $36.20 billion (US Dollars) to $73.77 billion by 2021 and reaching $81 billion by 2022, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12% in the next seven years, according to Strategy Analytics IoT Strategies report “Big Data Analytics: The Internet of Things (IoT) Differentiator.”
Strategy Analytics says that much of Big Data Analytics software will be open source which is less expensive than proprietary software. It will also have the ability to run on commodity hardware, which OEM vendors are betting will help broaden its appeal to small and midsize (SMBs) and midsize enterprises (SMEs).
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Events
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BITA IT Show, the biggest IT exhibition in western India is coming to town on 24-26 January, We will be there promoting Li-f-e. If you are in this part of the world, drop in to check it out.
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CMS
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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As reminded this weekend by Red Hat developer Mark Wielaard, GCC 6 will warn you about misleading code indentations.
Among the numerous GCC 6 features to have been built up over the past year was the new -Wmisleading-indentation warning. This warning will notify you when it appears there is code that wasn’t indented properly and so may not match the intended logic of the developer.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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PHP 7 was just released over one month ago but there is already much work going into PHP 7.1, the next major update to this widely-used web programming language…
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Yahoo plans to lay off 10 percent of its workforce as early as this month.
The reorganization would eliminate 1,000 positions at the troubled company, according to Business Insider, citing sources close to the situation. Cuts are expected across the board, but will hit Yahoo’s media business, European operations and platforms-technology group harder than the rest of the company.
“A team is working on it and they want to do it this quarter,” a source told Business Insider. The company has not commented on the report.
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Although we don’t yet know the date of the EU referendum, it is likely to be in 2016, and we already have had a great amount of polling for it. An average of EU referendum polls in December 2015 put the ‘Remain’ camp on 45.1%, the ‘Leave’ camp on 39.1% and ‘Don’t Knows’ on 15.4%. Excluding don’t knows, that’s a Remain-Leave split of 54%-46%. This lead is smaller than it was at other points in 2015, however; in June, the Remain campaign’s lead was 14 points. It’s now 6. In June, YouGov showed Remain leading by a 54-46 margin; they now show Leave leading by 51-49.
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There have been a ton of reports in the media that Twitter developers are working on the ability of users to tweet longer messages that go far beyond the current 140 character limit. The company may even go as far as allowing a 10,000 character limit for tweets.
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Health/Nutrition
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One of 2015’s food trends, in fact, was a craze for healthy maize. Organic, GMO-free corn products like Kiddylicious Sweetcorn Rice Rounds, Off the Cob Sweet Corn Tortilla Chips, Pipsnacks Popcorn and Pop Art Snacks Tandoori Yogurt Popcorn tantalized health-conscious taste buds at the 61st Annual Summer Fancy Food Show last summer in New York City.
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The government’s chief advisor on health ignored more than 80 studies to produce her new Puritanical guidelines on booze – which asks Britons to forego their Friday drink.
Civil servant Dame Sally Davies has drawn up the lowest recommendations in the West: there is no “safe drinking level”, her team declared.
The question is what justification was used to get there. The answer isn’t pretty for “evidence based” policy.
Repeated studies have shown that alcohol in moderation prolongs life: it reduces the risk of heart disease and strokes. In fact the benefits of alcohol in preventing strokes and heart disease are far clearer than the negatives of drinking.
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Former pharma CEO Martin Shkreli, widely reviled for dramatically hiking the price of a life-saving drug used by HIV and cancer patients, is in good company.
Starting at the beginning of 2016, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. quietly jacked up the U.S. prices of over 100 of its drugs, some by nearly a fifth.
Reuters reported the findings on Friday, citing statistics from the information services company Wolters Kluwer that were included in a research note from by UBS Securities.
“UBS said Pfizer increased prices by 20 percent for anticonvulsant Dilantin, hormone therapy Menest, angina drug Nitrostat, Tykosyn for irregular heartbeat, and antibiotic Tygacil,” Reuters noted.
“The analyst report said U.S. prices were raised on a total of 105 Pfizer drugs,” the outlet continued. “No price reductions were reported.”
Pfizer’s drug hike is consistent with broad industry trends.
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These days — thanks to mounting scientific research and the Hollywood movie Concussion — the public is much more aware of the fact that playing football can damage your brain. So now the question is: What, if anything, can be done to make the most popular sport in America safer?
Recent research suggests the answer to that question might be counter-intuitive: getting players to take off their helmets.
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire found that regular helmetless-tackling drills reduced the number of overall head impacts suffered by the participating players by 28 percent. This reduction was the result of removing helmets only for five minutes of drills after a few select practices — in this case, twice a week during the three-week preseason and once a week during the regular season.
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“In football there are so many head impacts because their heads are protected,” Swartz told ThinkProgress. “The helmets, while they do serve a function, also introduce a false sense of security.”
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Security
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On New Year’s eve, the BBC website and iPlayer service went down due to a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The attack peaked up to 602 Gbps, according to the claims made by the New World Hacking group, who took the responsibility of the attack. In another recent attack, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s main campaign website was also targeted by the same group.
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If you thought MD5 was banished from HTTPS encryption, you’d be wrong. It turns out the fatally weak cryptographic hash function, along with its only slightly stronger SHA1 cousin, are still widely used in the transport layer security protocol that underpins HTTPS. Now, researchers have devised a series of attacks that exploit the weaknesses to break or degrade key protections provided not only by HTTPS but also other encryption protocols, including Internet Protocol Security and secure shell.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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As the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have repeatedly warned, “We must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.” This will require good faith negotiations to end the nuclear arms race and achieve nuclear zero. And these negotiations must be convened and led by the US and Russia, the two most powerful nuclear-armed countries in the world.
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The global aerospace and defense industry is out of its doldrums. According to a new report by the accounting firm Deloitte, “the resurgence of global security threats” promises a lucrative “rebound” in defense spending.
The report alerts investors that “revenue growth” is “expected to take a positive turn” due to the terrorism and war in the Middle East and the tensions in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea.
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Sophie Kasiki stared at the photograph of a young English-speaking boy in a camouflage uniform and black bandana covered in Arabic calling for unbelievers to be killed in the latest Islamic State propaganda.
Her eyes welled and she swallowed hard. “That could have been my son,” she said, her firm voice wavering. “That’s hard for me to say and makes me want to cry. I would have killed us both rather than let him become a killer, rather than let him fall into the claws of those monsters.”
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Council of Foreign Relations resident skeptic Micah Zenko recently tallied up how many bombs the United States has dropped on other countries and the results are as depressing as one would think. Zenko figured that since Jan. 1, 2015, the U.S. has dropped around 23,144 bombs on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, all countries that are majority Muslim.
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Indigenous people of Bolivia are proudly in possession of their own land.
Venezuela has been inspiring the entire Latin America and the world by its internationalism and determined struggle against Western imperialism.
Chile, step by small step, has been dismantling the grotesque legacy of Pinochet’s dictatorship, moving firmly towards socialism.
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Despite claims to the contrary, strong stances have not always worked in the past against North Korea. Ronald Reagan was in office in 1986 when plutonium was first produced in a North Korean reactor. They continued their program under President George H.W. Bush, producing enough plutonium to make 1-2 bombs.
During Bill Clinton’s presidency, North Korea froze its nuclear production, though it continued testing missiles until deterred by American pressure.
In 2002, President George W. Bush took a strong stance against North Korea by including them in the “Axis of Evil” with Iran and Iraq. A year later, Pyongyang restarted their reactor and by 2005 produced another 15 kg of weapons grade plutonium. In 2006, North Korea is believed to have had between 4 and 13 nuclear bombs and tested a nuclear weapon for the first time.
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The U.S. military flew a B-52 bomber over South Korea on Sunday, in a Cold War-style show of force that was met with concern by human rights campaigners.
American forces made the gesture amid climbing tensions following North Korea’s widely-disputed claim that it detonated a hydrogen bomb test on Wednesday.
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A Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)-supported hospital in northern Yemen was bombed Sunday morning, killing at least four people and wounding eleven—marking the third attack in as many months against a facility associated with the medical charity.
MSF said in a statement that it “cannot confirm the origin of the attack” on the Shiara Hospital, which is located in the Razeh district. But the organization noted that “planes were seen flying over the facility at the time.”
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The Russian air war against al-Qaeda in Syria (the Nusra Front or the Support Front) took a tragic turn on Saturday when a missile hit a downtown government building complex and prison in Maarat al-Numan. It left some 51 or more dead and 70 wounded. The Russians also bombed nearby towns of Saraqib and Khan Shikhun.
Presumably the inmates in a prison run by al-Qaeda were a mixture of other radicals (perhaps Daesh [ISIL, ISIS] and liberals of the former Free Syrian Army. Whether what we would consider criminals were in the prison I don’t know. Al-Qaeda runs its territory in Syria in a Taliban-like way, with morals police and social regimentation. So some prisoners could just be people who didn’t go along with the al-Qaeda state practices. Alarabiya is reporting that some of those killed or wounded were in the downtown market adjacent to the government buildings. Russia needs to be more careful or it will end up simply alienating all the ordinary Sunnis in Syria with these blunt tactics. Locals are demanding that Russia be charged by the international community with war crimes.
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Up to now Obama has shed no public tears for the victims of police violence, whether black, Hispanic, white, or any other. Moreover, when others have championed the right of the victims of police violence to justice, they have come under sustained attacked from the right wing media establishment and the powerful police unions. Consider how the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was threatened with a nationwide boycott of his movies by police unions across the States after he attended a Black Lives Matter march and rally in New York towards the end of last year.
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Politically, the neoliberal vision will mean an overturning and restructuring of the current Supreme Court, possible changes to the existing Constitution, and attempts to remove the duly-elected president from office before his term by various means. Apart from plans to stack the judiciary, as in Argentina, Venezuela’s new business controlled National Assembly will likely follow their reactionary class compatriots in Brazil, and move to impeach Venezuela president, Maduro, and dismantle his popular government – just as they are attempting the same in Brazil with that country’s also recently re-elected president, Rousseff.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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‘Owning ExxonMobil stock is not a business Vermont should be in,’ declared Gov. Peter Shumlin during State of the State address
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The Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles is officially in a state of emergency, according to a declaration by California Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday. The area has been suffering from the effects of a methane gas leak at the Aliso Canyon Storage Facility since late October. At least 2,300 homes have been evacuated, with many more requests pending.
Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas), which owns and operates the storage facility, has been constructing a relief well to stop the leak, which the company was unable to plug in the days and weeks immediately following the breach. The escaping methane has been treated with an odorant and is allegedly causing headaches, nausea, rashes, and other health problems among local residents. The company anticipates completing the relief well by March 15.
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Climate change may have already begun to take its toll of agriculture. New research suggests that drought and extreme heat in the last 50 years have reduced cereal production by up to 10%. And, for once, developed nations may have sustained greater losses than developing nations.
Researchers have been warning for years that global warming as a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – in turn, a pay-off from increased fossil fuel combustion – will result in a greater frequency or intensity in extremes of weather.
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For all the wrong reasons, the summer of 2012 was a historic one for the American Midwest. Plagued by the worst drought the region had seen in decades, as well as weeks of high temperatures, one of the country’s most productive agricultural regions faced massive shortages in its annual corn crop, driving corn prices to a record high.
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The study is the latest evidence of the impacts of climate change, coming just a month after global leaders gathered in Paris to finalize an agreement aimed at curbing greenhouse gases.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to push for maligned deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which critics have called a “giveaway to big agribusiness and food companies that want to use trade deals to attack sensible food safety rules, weaken the inspection of imported food and block efforts to strengthen U.S. food safety standards.”
Over the past 50 years, 75 percent of the world’s biodiversity, soil, and water have been destroyed through the proliferation of mass food production and agrochemicals like pesticides and other synthetics, among other measures.
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For over a decade, both climate activists and scientists have used one word to describe the mass-level changes humans are causing on Earth: Anthropocene. But whether or not this word actually describes a real, measurable geologic time period has been the source of major scientific debate.
Now, a new study is adding fuel to that debate, finding that human influence on the environment changed the planet so dramatically that the world recently moved into a new geological epoch. In other words, there’s scientific proof that we’re living in the Anthropocene, the study’s researchers say.
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Those interested in what new nuclear power can and cannot plausibly contribute to stopping global warming should start with the most objective, independent, and comprehensive analysis done in recent years — the 2015 “Technology Roadmap” from the IEA and NEA. Those agencies’ bottom is line is that, if the industry gets its act together — a big IF, given recent history — new nuclear power can play an important but limited role. This just happens to be what I’ve been arguing consistently on Climate Progress for a long, long time.
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A key reason new reactors are inherently so expensive is that they must be designed to survive almost any imaginable risk, including major disasters and human error. Even the most unlikely threats must be planned for and eliminated when the possible result of a disaster is the poisoning of thousands of people, the long-term contamination of large areas of land, and $100 billion in damages.
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Finance
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Good middle class jobs are continuing to decline. The new jobs are jobs that pay considerably less and often are part-time jobs devoid of benefits. Moreover, the new jobs are going to people outside the prime working age. The unavoidable conclusion is that for the majority of Americans, economic prospects are declining.
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Who do credit card companies make the most money from? Answer: the poor, by far, because they rack up the highest fees and the highest interest expense. Card issuers also make some money on the rich, because they buy a lot of stuff. This generates interchange fees (usually 2-3 percent of the amount charged) that exceed the cost the reward points they dole out to attract these customers.
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Standard & Poor’s 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 6% and 6.2%, respectively, in the biggest ever fall for the first five days of January
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The next Administration should make reducing work time a major focus. In addition to mandated paid sick days and paid family leave — proposals that have received some welcome attention thus far on the presidential campaign trail — policymakers should go much further and enact measures aimed at shortening workweeks and work years. Reducing our workweek and work years will lead to a whole host of benefits, including reduced stress and higher levels of employment.The United States has become an outlier among wealthy countries in having had little reduction in the length of the average work year since 1980. According to the OECD, between 1980 and 2013, the number of hours in an average work year fell by 7.6 percent in Belgium, by 19.1 percent in France, and by 6.5 percent in Canada. By comparison, it declined by just 1.4 percent in the United States. The average worker puts in 26 percent more hours a year in the United States than do workers in the Netherlands and 31 percent more hours than workers in Germany, a difference of more than 400 hours a year.
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Reducing the workweek can also have another benefit: It will bring us to full employment faster.
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On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson released his tax plan, the center of which is a flat tax of 14.9 percent.
Rather than different tax brackets for different income levels and categories, the flat tax levies the same rate on all personal and business income, although Carson’s 14.9 percent rate would only apply to people who have incomes above 150 percent of the poverty level, or $36,375 for a family of four. Those who make less would have to make a small tax payment: “Even those who earn little income will pay taxes, no matter how small their contribution might be,” Carson says in his plan. Currently, 46 percent of Americans don’t have to pay federal income taxes because their incomes are too low.
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Going negative against Bernard Sanders is a bad career move. Every time a political opponent has attacked Sanders, it has served only to strengthen him. We have come to accept attack ads as standard fare in presidential politics. When threatened, Hillary Clinton sharpens her knives and airs ads to eviscerate opponents, while Donald Trump hurls noisy epithets daily. They might want to choose another way to weaken Sanders, because direct, personal attacks tend to backfire.
In 1980, when Sanders ran for Burlington mayor the first time, he started out lower than a long shot, a newcomer running against an entrenched Democratic machine. How could a 39-year-old Jewish guy from Brooklyn attract voters in a small town dominated by native French Canadians and Irishmen?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Jones: “My Deep Concern Is That Donald Trump Is Beginning To Legitimate Some Of The Dark Things That Have Been In Our Country For A Long Time”
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Some registered voters in Iowa received robocalls Saturday from a white nationalist super PAC that urged them to support Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
“I urge you to vote for Donald Trump because he is the one candidate who points out that we should accept immigrants who are good for America,” Jared Taylor said on the robocall, paid for by the American National Super PAC. “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”
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The Donald has already professed his admiration for Vladimir Putin. He’d get along famously with Marine Le Pen.
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The film serves two purposes. Besides the aforementioned hasbara effect, it also tries to salvage what it can of the Obama legacy and create a post facto explanation for why this Presidency has been an almost complete disaster. In that regard, it shapes recent history into a bizarre narrative, failing to mention the words “Cast Lead” or “Protective Edge” while trying to float the preposterous idea that Obama tried to be ahead of history and support the Arab Spring. My own view, while perhaps incorrect, is that he instead succeeded in subverting the genuine democratic uprisings across the region to serve his own ends. When things in Egypt became far too complicated by having a Muslim Brotherhood government across the Sinai from besieged Gaza, a coup was initiated and al-Sisi installed.
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The Tyndall Report, a non-partisan media monitoring firm that has been tracking the nightly news broadcasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC, found that Trump is tromp, tromp, tromping over the airtime of everyone else.
From last January through November, these dominant flagship news shows devoted 234 minutes of prime-time coverage to the incessant chirping of the yellow-crested birdbrain, with no other contender getting even a fourth of that.
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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is on Bernie Sanders’ turf of Burlington, Vermont—where the U.S. senator served as mayor for eight years—for a rally on Thursday night that has rankled police and the mayor while galvanizing the progressive spirit of the democratic socialist’s home base supporters.
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Wisconsin Republicans are insisting that they didn’t intend to allow corporate political donations to remain secret under the recent overhaul of the state’s campaign finance laws.
But secrecy, in fact, has become the distinguishing characteristic of Wisconsin elections. And that is by design.
Sweeping campaign finance changes signed into law by Governor Scott Walker last month allowed corporations, for the first time, to donate up to $12,000 directly to “segregated funds” created by political parties and legislative leaders.
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Censorship
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Once you decide not to show an image for fear of offending people, the number of things people say they find offensive, and therefore worthy of silencing, may well multiply.
So it goes today. On the cover of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo this week, the anniversary of the terrorist slaughter that killed much of its staff in Paris, you will not find any images of Mohammad. The image is a figure of God—the Judeo-Christian visualization of him—with an assault weapon strapped to his back. The text on it, translated from French, says “One year on: The killer is still at large.”
Even though this image does not include Mohammad, the Associated Press, nevertheless, has decided not to pass along images of the cover of the issue to its many, many subscribing media outlets. There actually were some images available from AP content providers earlier, but they’ve been yanked.
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Public anger is growing in Germany over a series of sexual assaults against women in the centre of Cologne on New Year’s Eve, amid suggestions that authorities were slow to act due to political sensitivity surrounding the perpetrators’ ethnicities.
Politicians and police were facing mounting questions on Wednesday over how a crowd of some 1,000 men “of North African or Arab appearance” was able to mass around the city’s main train station on New Year’s Eve, with roving gangs allegedly assaulting dozens of women with impunity.
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German public broadcaster ZDF has apologised for delays in reporting on a wave of sexual assaults blamed on men of Arab appearance amid accusations Wednesday of media self-censorship of the inflammatory issue.
The rash of attacks and thefts in a New Year’s Eve crowd in the western city of Cologne was only widely covered by national media early this week, after police had initially reported no major incidents.
News editors of ZDF’s flagship “heute” (today) evening news programme apologised on social media for not reporting on the incidents at least in its Monday evening bulletin, four days after the attacks.
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It took four days for the German Mainstream Media to report New Year’s Eve mass sex assaults on women by up to 1000 heavily intoxicated immigrants of “Arab or North African origin “, as the German police describe the still-unapprehended perpetrators—now. The internet and social media alone forced the MSM’s hand. And the German political class has plans for that.
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Donald Trump may be testing the boundaries of tolerance on the U.S. campaign trail. But here in Germany, the government is effectively enforcing civility, taking aim at a surge of hate speech against refugees and Muslims.
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Dorit Rabinyan’s novel Borderlife treats a love affair in New York between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, which ends when they return to their respective homes. The novel began being assigned by those inveterate social radicals, the High School Teachers, in Israel. But then senior officials of the ministry of education banned the book. Later they said it wasn’t banned and could be taught, but would not form part of any examination. (In education systems with year-end examinations, elective material that cannot appear on the exam is usually not much taught).
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This week marks the one-year anniversary of the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that killed 12 people, including eight of the magazine’s staff. In typical Hebdo form, the magazine has chosen to mark the event with a provocative cover that features a bearded man representing God with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, accompanied by the text: “One year later: the assassin is still out there.” Their point? Little has changed.
[...]
And yet, one year after some of their cartoonists were murdered for daring to draw the Prophet, they are still under fire for being intolerant of religion. The obsessive critique reveals two key issues: First, despite being attacked by terrorists, the Hebdo artists are still criticized for their worldviews more than the terrorists themselves; and second, leftist politics is caught in a tough bind when it comes to openly debating religion and conflict.
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Via Inside Higher Ed comes one of the weirder stories about college I’ve read in a while.
For years, Michael Persinger has taught an introductory psychology class at Canada’s Laurentian University. Before his first lecture, he has students sign a waiver that they won’t freak out over the ribald and offensive language he uses.
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A New Jersey high school student found herself in a social media storm on Wednesday after she live-tweeted and apparently secretly recorded a trip to her principal’s office.
She said administrators warned her that her comments about Israel and a fellow student on Twitter might have violated a state law against bullying.
The student, Bethany Koval, a 16-year-old Israeli Jew, said she had been reprimanded by administrators at Fair Lawn High School in Bergen County for a tweet that contained a string of expletives directed at Israel and expressed happiness that a pro-Israel classmate had unfollowed her Twitter account.
New Jersey has some of the toughest anti-bullying laws in the nation. After the suicide of a Rutgers University freshman, Tyler Clementi, in 2010, it passed the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, a far-reaching law with stiff penalties for educators who do not sufficiently respond to complaints of harassment or intimidation.
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Privacy
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The networking company said in a blog post published Friday that it will ship product releases in the next six months that remove the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator from NetScreen firewalls. Security researchers have known since 2007 that it contains a weakness that gives knowledgeable adversaries the ability to decrypt encrypted communications that rely on the function. Documents provided by former NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden showed the weakness could be exploited by the US spy agency, The New York Times reported in 2013.
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The real reason online advertising is doomed and adblockers thrive? Its malware epidemic is unacknowledged, and out of control.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 list came out this week and it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list.
On arrival, like a growing number of websites, Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers in order to view the article. After doing so, visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information. Or, as is popular worldwide with these malware “exploit kits,” lock up their hard drives in exchange for Bitcoin ransom.
One researcher commented on Twitter that the situation was “ironic” — and while it’s certainly another variant of hackenfreude, ironic isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe what happened.
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Billed as an opportunity for conservatives to outline their major plans on tackling poverty, the forum comes after months of heightened rhetoric on poverty and inequality—including a poverty tour by then-Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. These events are part of a concerted effort by conservative lawmakers and the media to paint the War on Poverty as a failure, even though the safety net reduced the poverty rate by more than half and lifted 48 million people above the poverty line in 2012.
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The government had on January 1 constituted the panel to look into the revamp of the Censor Board functioning which has been mired in controversies in the recent past. The panel includes filmmaker Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, adman Piyush Pandey and film critic Bhawana Somaaya. National Film Development Council MD Nina Lath Gupta and Joint Secretary (Films) Sanjay Murthy are also part of the panel.
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China is considering a new “social credit” system, designed to rate everyone’s trustworthiness. Many fear that it will become a tool of social control — but in reality it has a lot in common with the algorithms and systems that score and classify us all every day.
Human judgment is being replaced by automatic algorithms, and that brings with it both enormous benefits and risks. The technology is enabling a new form of social control, sometimes deliberately and sometimes as a side effect. And as the Internet of Things ushers in an era of more sensors and more data — and more algorithms — we need to ensure that we reap the benefits while avoiding the harms.
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As of Friday, Jan. 1, 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) decision to begin collecting data on cases of animal cruelty as a Group A offense in the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) went into effect.
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Facebook deliberately crashed its Android app for weeks at a time in a bid to test its users’ dedication to the social network, it has been reported.
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In a huge victory for press freedom, New Zealand’s High Court has ruled decisively in favor of independent journalist Nicky Hager in his case against the New Zealand government for raiding his house and seizing his family’s possessions in 2014.
The court’s decision, which was released on December 17, 2015 just before the holidays, is not only a vindication for Hager and his work, but an important win for all journalists and whistleblowers in New Zealand.
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On Jan.1, a new law prohibiting police from obtaining information from electronic devices without a warrant in most cases went into effect. The new law will not only protect privacy in Oregon, but will also address a practical effect of federal spying.
Sen. Chip Shields (D-Portland), Rep. Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland), Sen. Tim Knopp (R – Bend) and Rep. John Huffman (R-The Dalles) introduced Senate Bill 641 (SB641) last February. The bill prohibits state and local law enforcement officers from using “forensic imaging” to obtain information contained in a portable electronic device except with a warrant, or by consent. “Forensic imaging” means “using an electronic device to download or transfer raw data from a portable electronic device onto another medium of digital storage,” but does not include photographing or transcribing information “observable from the portable electronic device by normal unaided human senses.”
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Before Mattel’s new WiFi-connected, artificially-intelligent toy, Hello Barbie, had even made it onto store shelves, she was already generating terrifying news stories.
“Your child’s talking Barbie doll may be eavesdropping on all of your private conversations,” claimed the New York Daily News. “Creepy,” wrote the Washington Post. “She’s not just creepy. She threatens children’s security,” added the Daily Beast. The New York Times warned that “synthetic friendship could supplant [kids’] real ones.”
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Ben Wizner, a national ACLU attorney and head lawyer for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, will co-teach a seminar at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law this month.
Wizner, director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, will teach the week-long “Liberty and Security in the Age of Terrorism” seminar along with retired four-star Army Gen. David Bramlett.
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David Davis, a Conservative Party MP, told the Times that secrecy surrounding GCHQ’s numerical strength was “a bad opening chapter to this new era of transparency.”
A spokesperson for GCHQ declined to give exact numbers of those employed in the agency and its partners.
“The total number of people working for or with GCHQ constantly fluctuates due to the complex challenges we face and the threats we aim to counter,” the spokesperson told IBTimes UK, adding: “In a complex organization like GCHQ, as you would expect, our core mission is supported by a range of partners including industry and the military.”
GCHQ employed 5,683 full-time staff in August 2014, according to official figures from the UK parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee. MI5 had 3,926 and MI6 2,430 employees.
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A more targeted approach to data collection could have helped French authorities prevent the Paris attacks last year, according to former NSA technical director William Binney.
Binney told a parliamentary committee evaluating the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, however, that bulk data collection could leave analysts with too much information to carry out effective assessments.
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Instead, much of the Investigatory Powers Bill’s focus is on facilitating the practice of mass surveillance.
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He told MPs that “Britain should not go further down this road and risk making the same mistakes as my country did, or they will end up perpetuating the loss of life”.
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Asked why he thinks the UK government is pressing for this kind of approach, Binney’s answer is simple: money.
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He points to the $3.8 billion Trailblazer program to capture internet communications as evidence of this and said that people were moving freely between working for the NSA and working for a contracted firm.
“The contractors were lobbying for this… They were trading the security of the people of the United States and the people of the free world for money,” he said.
When questioned on whether he thought £247 million over 10 years to deploy the powers in the bill would be sufficient, Binney said that this may be enough for retention and storage, but not processing, interrogation or software development.
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He described as “absolute horses**t” the claims by government lawyers that it wouldn’t be possible to sift through data before it was collected.
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William Binney, the former technical director of the NSA, today warned a UK parliamentary committee that proposed mass surveillance laws will damage the country’s national security.
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“If we did everything through analysis and collection smartly, in a targeted way, we’d give privacy to everybody in the world because you don’t take in their data.”
Referring to the 9/11 attacks, Binney suggested that targeted surveillance rather than bulk surveillance could have stopped the whole tragedy from happening.
“All of these people were in knowledge bases already. If they’d taken a targeted approach from the beginning, keeping the data finite, the analysts would have found the threats,” he claimed.
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The Paris attacks might have been prevented if French intelligence services had targeted their surveillance, he told the committee scrutinising the draft bill on 6 January 2016.
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Vodafone, the UK telecoms company, said the government’s bill risked “significantly undermining trust” and rejected any move to require them to hand over data passing over their networks from outside the UK,.
The criticism from the Silicon Valley internet giants is perhaps the most serious for Home Office ministers as it was their rejection of proposed British government requests to require them to hand over their customers’ confidential web data which lay behind the Liberal Democrats’ veto of the last snooper’s charter bill in 2012.
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Binney is also set to argue that the UK government has misled parliament in claiming that MPs and other sensitive groups would be protected under the bill because there is so much data flowing along the pipe it “isn’t intelligible at the point of inception.”
“These statements are false,” he will say. “They were made by someone who does not understand the technology.”
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“It is 99 per cent useless,” Mr Binney said in a letter sent to MPs. “Who wants to know everyone who has ever looked at Google or the BBC? We have known for decades that that swamps analysts.”
He said that strategy had led directly to mistakes that allowed the attacks on 9/11 to go ahead. The US had collected information from the terrorists involved in the attacks, but had not been able to check them because of resources, he claimed.
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For example, Microsoft reported that 82 billion photos had been viewed…
The revelations should be worrisome, according to Martin Brinkmann, founder of Ghacks.net: “While it is unclear what data is exactly collected, it is clear that the company is collecting information about the use of individual applications and programs on Windows at the very least.”
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Civil Rights
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“Innocent until proven guilty” is a phrase that is often bandied about. From popular cop shows on TV to courtroom dramas on the silver screen, this phrase has been repeated over and over again. While we are all familiar with the words, have we become desensitised to the true significance of those four words?
It is human nature to pre-judge. In the high-tension environment of a courtroom, it is easy to get emotionally swayed which could in turn, return a verdict that may not end up serving the course of justice. This is why such rigorous steps have been put in place as the judiciary evolved to ensure that this risk is mitigated. Indeed, this is one of the reasons cited for why jury trials were abolished in Singapore. It was thought that laypersons without a holistic knowledge of the law might be easily manipulated by the machinations of a wily lawyer.
With the advent of the Internet and the rapid evolution of the social media and blogs, which has revolutionalised the spread of information, has the sacrosanct principle of “innocent until proven guilty” fallen to the wayside?
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Since the beginning, the War on Drugs has been about controlling political power–by breaking up Black communities and the dissident left.
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An Ohio judge has elicited chuckles for a poem he wrote to shoot down an inmate’s lawsuit this week. The inmate, Darek Lathan, sued after guards at the Correctional Reception Center in Orient refused to let him go to the bathroom, causing him to have diarrhea in his pants.
Lathan is serving a 17-month sentence for a vandalism conviction. In his lawsuit seeking $2 million in damages, Lathan said the officer wouldn’t let him get out of line to go to the bathroom, even after he told the guard the prison’s cold showers were making him sick.
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A Muslim woman wearing a shirt which read “Salam, I come in peace” was forcibly ejected from a Donald Trump rally Friday night as some supporters of the 2016 presidential candidate reportedly hurled Islamophobic epithets at her.
Rose Hamid, a 56-year-old flight attendant, had attended the rally at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina with a small group of people who wore yellow stars with eight points, a reference to the markers Jews were forced to bear during the Holocaust. The symbols read “Muslim” and “Stop Islamophobia.”
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Take a sweeping look at history and you will discover that almost all movements that mattered started with just one or two people—from the fight to abolish slavery, to the creations of the environmental, trade union, consumer protection and civil rights movements. One voice becomes two, and then ten, and then thousands.
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Everything is a culture war now. It’s everywhere. And it’s impossible to avoid, even in the movies and sports many of us go to in hopes of finding a brief respite from all the yelling we find online and off. Sometimes I just want to watch the game, you know? Maybe flip on the TV and forget for a few hours that Donald Trump could become president of the free world.
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Justices prepare to hear arguments in of case of California teacher and co-plaintiffs who say ‘tyranny’ of unions violates their rights through forced dues
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Justice Samuel Alito has been scouring the land looking for a case to make his mark on history.
Could he find a way to hold a big bank accountable for ripping off millions of consumers? Could he interpret intellectual property law to give more desperately ill people access to essential medicines? Could he hold a chemical company to account for poisoning people and hiding it for decades?
No. Alito apparently decided to make his mark by helping a massive right-wing funding machine crush wages for teachers, nurses, firefighters, cops and prison guards.
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That population has often been on the receiving end of Saudi Arabian posturing on geopolitical issues, especially as they relate to Iran. While the Kingdom might oppose extremist Sunni militant groups like ISIS, it continues to promote extremist views in favor of Sunni predominance in the Muslim world.
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On Thursday, Harney County, Oregon Sheriff Dave Ward met Ammon Bundy in a remote area near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Bundy has been leading an illegal armed occupation of a federal building for almost a week. But Ward greeted Bundy with a firm handshake instead of handcuffs.
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Unique among the countries on earth, the US government insists that its laws and dictates take precedence over the sovereignty of nations. Washington asserts the power of US courts over foreign nationals and claims extra-territorial jurisdiction of US courts over foreign activities of which Washington or American interest groups disapprove. Perhaps the worst results of Washington’s disregard for the sovereignty of countries is the power Washington has exercised over foreign nationals solely on the basis of terrorism charges devoid of any evidence.
Consider a few examples. Washington first forced the Swiss government to violate its own banking laws. Then Washington forced Switzerland to repeal its bank secrecy laws. Allegedly, Switzerland is a democracy, but the country’s laws are determined in Washington by people not elected by the Swiss to represent them.
Consider the “soccer scandal” that Washington concocted, apparently for the purpose of embarrassing Russia. The soccer organization’s home is Switzerland, but this did not stop Washington from sending FBI agents into Switzerland to arrest Swiss citizens. Try to imagine Switzerland sending Swiss federal agents into the US to arrest Americans.
Consider the $9 billion fine that Washington imposed on a French bank for failure to fully comply with Washington’s sanctions against Iran. This assertion of Washington’s control over a foreign financial institution is even more audaciously illegal in view of the fact that the sanctions Washington imposed on Iran and requires other sovereign countries to obey are themselves strictly illegal. Indeed, in this case we have a case of triple illegality as the sanctions were imposed on the basis of concocted and fabricated charges that were lies.
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According to Sam Benson — who goes by the stage name of “Blac Youngsta” — he had just exited a Wells Fargo branch in the upscale community of Buckhead after withdrawing $200,000 in order to buy a new car.
“I come out the bank, I see the police, I’m walking to my car, I see one of them point to my bag like ‘him,’” explained the rapper. “They come bum-rushing me at the car, put me on the ground, putting guns to my head.”
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A few days ago my partner and I were sharing some of our less-pleasant encounters in the New York City subway system. Nothing too outrageous, just the kind of awkward run-ins with mentally unwell people that have long been part of living in this city (and have become harder to avoid as of late). If you live here long enough, you eventually become pretty inured to these moments; but they’re still always a little sad.
Sometimes, though, they’re not so much sad as they are scary. Far more often than not, people suffering from severe mental health issues are harmless. But that’s not always the case. My partner, for example, recounted that once she accidentally — but very slightly — stepped on a woman’s foot. She apologized, but for the rest of the time my partner was on the train, this woman was screaming at her. My partner knew it wasn’t really about her, of course; but it was still a shitty experience.
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A crown court judge has been allowed to rule on sharia cases, in the first case of its kind.
District Judge Shamim Qureshi, who sits at Bristol Crown Court, received permission from the Judicial Office to double as “presiding judge” at the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT).
The MAT was established in 2007 by a hardline cleric, Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, who led an anti-Charlie Hebdo demonstration after 11 of the magazine’s staff were murdered by terrorists.
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is due to launch an independent review into sharia courts and councils amid concerns that a “parallel” justice system is developing in Britain. There are particular concerns that the courts are discriminatory towards women.
Judge Qureshi has overseen MAT, which is based in Nuneaton, Warks, and has four other branches.
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Wasserman-Schultz doesn’t explain how giving people criminal records for smoking pot makes them “safer,” and she appears to still subscribe to the discredited gateway theory that if people start with marijuana, they’re going to end up as heroin addicts.
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When I got back from my winter vacation, America was still being run by a two-term president who believes it’s his job to impose his notions of morality, safety and decency on everyone, often trying to work around the limits the system places on him. This week, Barack Obama is going to institute new restrictions on Americans unilaterally—expanding background checks, closing supposed “loopholes” and tightening the process for law-abiding gun owners—because Congress “won’t act” and also because he believes it’s the right thing to do. Neither of those is a compelling reason to legislate from the White House.
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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker waited just one day after President Obama announced a package of modest gun control reforms before directing his attorney general to explore challenging the new rule — becoming the first governor to threaten legal action over the regulations.
Accusing President Obama of “disregarding the constitutional principles of separation of powers and exceeding his authority as chief executive,” Walker said in a statement that the executive order creates “uncertainty and fear of prosecution for law-abiding citizens who wish to exercise their right to sell firearms lawfully. Forthcoming federal rules could also deprive millions of Americans of their Second Amendment rights without any indication of imminent danger.”
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In 2007, when the Passenger Protection Program (PPP) — copied on the U.S. model — was established in Canada, the Canadian government at the time failed to produce any concrete evidence of the efficiency of such a program. Canada was under a lot of pressure from the U.S. government to have this program and prevent “unwanted” travellers from boarding planes. The problem with this list is that it is shrouded in secrecy. The number of persons listed is not public. It is estimated to be between 500-2,000 persons. The government refused to release the exact number, claiming that this might help the terrorists in their plans to attack or harm us.
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In a perverse sort of way, it’s progress. After months of dog-whistle xenophobia, European authorities have finally started to treat migrants as they would treat any other citizen. They have achieved this by choosing not to make a fuss when migrants are accused of raping and assaulting women.
On New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany, hundreds of men, almost all of reportedly ‘Arabic and North African’ appearance and including many asylum seekers, viciously attacked women who were celebrating in the central plaza, robbing and groping and tearing off clothes. At least one rape complaint has been filed. The police and the press were initially slow to react, and the Mayor of Cologne reacted to eventual protests by suggesting that women should adopt a code of conduct in public and keep an ‘arm’s length’ distance between themselves and strange men.
This is not the first time a European city administration has responded to an outbreak of sexual violence by blaming the women. It is the first time in recent history that the right-wing press has not joined in the condemnation of these wanton strumpets who dare to think they might be able to have a good time without worrying what ‘invitation’ they’re sending to men. Instead, the right wing blames… liberals. Who apparently caused all this by daring to suggest that refugees should be able to come to Europe in safety.
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In her book “Islam and Democracy,” published in 1992, the feminist thinker also analyzed the role that the first Gulf war had in turning the Arab world against the idea of democracy, a concept many have come to conflate with “violence and religion in the west, as perceived by Arab observers of American broadcasts.”
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Sanders has indeed expressed a desire to modify the law rather than simply repeal it, in part because he says gun sellers should not be liable for crimes they could not have anticipated when they sold someone a weapon.”If you are a gun shop owner in Vermont and you sell somebody a gun and that person flips out and then kills somebody, I don’t think it’s really fair to hold that person responsible, the gun shop owner,” Sanders said in October.
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The Oregonian reports that the Pacific Patriot Network has sent armed “security” — some of whom are carrying semi-automatic rifles — to the standoff on Saturday. But an attorney mediating the dispute between Ammon Bundy and federal officials said Bundy wants them to leave.
“We don’t need that. We don’t want it and we’re asking you to leave,” Todd MacFarlane, an attorney mediating the dispute on behalf of the Bundys, told reporters Saturday.
In a press conference Saturday morning, a representative from the Bundy group said they are looking to de-escalate the situation.
Locals in the area of the standoff have, in turn, condemned the Bundy takeover. Residents have expressed fear at the presence of armed militia and asked the outsiders to leave.
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Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 7:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Europeans, including European companies such as Metaswitch (British), continue to suffer from software patents in the United States and from British patent lawyers to whom the whole notion of software development is elusive, grossly misunderstood (they profit from the misunderstanding)
HAVING written literally thousands of articles on this subject, it often feels like repetition even when it isn’t. It’s never repetitive because new cases and new observations come to light. The other day, Patent Buddy fished out this recent court’s decision [PDF]
(originally OOXML) and said that “TX [Texas] Magistrate Report Rejecting Alice101 Ineligibility Argument Against a Firewall Patent” (used against Metaswitch Networks, a British company). We have looked at this 18-page decision and found Alice mentioned in page 3 as follows: “The Supreme Court has held that there are three specific exceptions to patent eligibility under § 101: laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas. Bilski v. Kappos, 561 U.S. 593, 601 (2010). In Mayo, the Supreme Court set out a two-step test for “distinguishing patents that claim laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas from those that claim patent-eligible applications of those concepts.” Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 134 S. Ct. 2347, 355 (2014) (citing Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc., 132 S. Ct. 1289, 1296–97 (2012)).”
“So here we have a British company sued in the capital of patent trolls, by a company called Genband LLC, which is based in Frisco, Texas, the United States (where the lawsuit is also being poorly assessed, determined and ultimately ruled against a foreign company).”Alice is also mentioned many times in page 4, then 14-15 and in page 17 it says: “Metaswitch is likewise wrong to characterize “an application proxy” and “a packet filter” as inherently abstract components because they refer to “broad ‘types’ or ‘classes’ of firewall components and do not require or connote any specific structure.” (Dkt. No. 255 at 24). A hypothetical claim limitation directed to “a cup” might encompass an extensive class of objects of varying shapes, sizes, materials, and functions (a coffee mug, a champagne flute, a disposable paper cup), and thus the word “cup” is abstract in the sense that it spans many different structures. But a cup is not an “abstract idea” in the sense meant by Alice, and neither are the “application proxy” and “packet filter” components recited in the claims. These components are not “building blocks of human ingenuity,” “a method of organizing human activity,” a “fundamental truth,” an “idea of itself,” or the like. See Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2354–56. The “application proxy” and “packet filter” terms refer to specific components that have been construed to perform specific functions within a network. See (Dkt. No. 310 at 7–13). The fact that these components can be implemented in the form of “hardware and/or software” does not change their concrete, network-specific nature.”
So here we have a British company sued in the capital of patent trolls, by a company called Genband LLC, which is based in Frisco, Texas, the United States (where the lawsuit is also being poorly assessed, determined and ultimately ruled against a foreign company). In page 18 it says: “For the foregoing reasons, Claim 12 of the ’561 Patent is patent-eligible under § 101. The Court agrees with Metaswitch that Claim 12 is representative for purposes of the § 101 analysis; the other asserted claims of the ’561 Patent are likewise patent-eligible.”
Here is the court’s conclusion: “For the reasons stated above, summary judgment of no willful infringement should be GRANTED. Partial summary judgment of no indirect infringement prior to April 14, 2014 should be GRANTED. Partial summary judgment of no indirect infringement after April 14, 2014 should be DENIED. Summary judgment of invalidity under 35 U.S.C. § 101 should be DENIED.”
“Why is a British company on the receiving end of software patents when British law clearly does not include but preclude such patents?”This is a classic case where software is being described as non-abstract by trying to tie it to “network” and the likes of that. There is a whole infamous class of “over the Internet” patents and this one too resembles that. The decision cites a case of the world’s largest patent troll, Intellectual Ventures v. Capital One Bank, in page 4 along with Alice and Bilski.
How clueless could the judge be? Did the judge ever write a computer program? Was a degree in some scientific discipline earned/acquired? Was the judge bamboozled by mumbo-jumbo from lawyers? Why is a British company on the receiving end of software patents when British law clearly does not include but preclude such patents? Does US law dominate globally? Well, rhetorical question actually. This is similar to the cases of Finjan, which is a patent aggressor in a similar field of technology.
As a British programmer myself, I cannot help but worry that the Texan courts now threaten the British industry as well. The UPC would make things even worse and there are already signs of that happening with patent trolls that come to Europe and attack from London (Unwired Planet). Apple too is attacking companies from inside Europe, with help from ridiculous software patents that are found invalid by European courts after EPO negligently issues them. Recall the case of Wi-Lan v. Apple, which pro-software patents sites are writing about these days. Why is the industry tolerating this? How can anyone wrongly deduce that this is good for innovation, or in other words, encourages the creation of better computer products, programmes, etc. available in the market?
“Developers of software don’t brainstorm or innovate, they typically take existing building blocks (either Free/Open Source software or proprietary with compartmentalised modules/layers/standards) and combine these to form bug-free and increasingly efficient algorithms.”When patent lawyers, who don’t actually create anything, speak of (or hijack the word) “innovation” we end up with clueless blog posts such as this new one from IP Kat. While EPO coverage from IP Kat has been rather good, much of the rest constitutes UPC promotion, patent maximalism, and clueless prose such as this: “Second is the recurring assertion that the patent system is intended to encourage innovation. There are various implications that flow from this, most notably that any patent that does not further the innovation interest is at odds with the patent system. Weak patents, patent trolls, patent thickets, patent hold-up and other patent undesirables all derive from the underlying assumption that patents are the hand-maiden of innovation. As such, at least in the US, a material driver of proposed patent legislation is to better align the patent system with the needs of innovation. The only problem with this view is that it is not correct. Patents are about encouraging invention and not impeding competition in a manner consistent with the patent grant, where the legal system has developed tools to define invention. Some forms of innovation (however defined) can be expected to flow from improving the manner by which we encourage and protect invention, but innovation is not a surrogate for invention. Introducing innovation as a construct within the patent system, parallel to invention, novelty and inventive step, is simply inappropriate.”
“Software developers don’t “invent”. They write code, and some code may be better than other.”The above says “innovation is not a surrogate for invention”, but these are just clueless repetitions (regurgitations) or rather meaningless/vague terms, none of which actually alludes to or pertains to programming (these words predate computer programs). Developers of software don’t brainstorm or innovate, they typically take existing building blocks (either Free/Open Source software or proprietary with compartmentalised modules/layers/standards) and combine these to form bug-free and increasingly efficient algorithms. Everything is being reused and built on top of existing work. One should expect people who never saw or wrote a computer program to actually grasp this. The comments from readers, who are mostly patent lawyers, are equally clueless or weak. One says regarding “Innovation vs. Invention”: ”
If innovation = ‘new’
Then innovation is one prong of a three-prong test for invention.
The other two prongs are ‘useful’ and ‘non-obvious’
Software developers don’t “invent”. They write code, and some code may be better than other. Lawyers using terms like “innovation” are clueless. They’re reusing terms from centuries ago and another one says
One has to focus on the fact that the patent system is about disclosure of inventions. Although such disclosure may impact innovation, invention and innovation are not the same thing. One looks at various comments distinguishing the two.
What needs to be assessed is whether more (or less) code is generated which is solid and reliable in the presence of 100,000-1,000,000 software patents. Evidence suggests that patents have done virtually nothing to provide an incentive to write better (or more) algorithms; programmers don’t even bother reading patent applications (it’s infeasible). They just get sued, often by trolls that produce nothing at all.
“Evidence suggests that patents have done virtually nothing to provide an incentive to write better (or more) algorithms; programmers don’t even bother reading patent applications (it’s infeasible).”It should be noted that several people sent us links to the above article and several programmers expressed annoyance at this level of ignorance. Why is a system that presents itself as “protecting inventors” (or whatever) run by non-inventors? When will it be geeks and computer science professors running such courts* (if any courts “as such” are necessary at all)? The system, as is, became besieged by parasites preying on software developers, rather than people with the required skills and knowledge. It’s a form of takeover or coup. Programmers need to unite so as to fight to regain control. █
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* I myself have been writing software since I was 14 and it’s what I currently do for a living in many languages and paradigms, as well as (peer) reviewing papers about software for international journals, so the opinions above don’t come from a position of cluelessness but from genuine concern for a scientific discipline which multinational conglomerates want to monopolise as a matter of law.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
English/Original
Publicado en Europe, Patents a las 8:18 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contra EPO
Sumario: Antiguas quejas contra la discriminación contra los Hispano hablentes, ha quedado demostrado actualmente al conversar con personal de la OEP.
El Español – es de acuerdo al algunos criterios y dependiendo las definiciones que uno escoge – el lenguaje más hablado en el mundo (basado en el número de países donde es lengua primaria). Techrights en Espańol es su segundo lenguage tiene árticulos públicados en Español
“El lenguaje Espańol raramente existe en la OEP. Definitivamente NO es tratado como debería y uno no necesita mirar muy atrás para ver como la OEP, basada en Munich máltrata a su personal Espańol.”La OEP díscrimina contra muchos lenguajes Europeos, pero sólo los Espańoles e Italianos tienen los huevos de hacerlo notar, en íncluso pelear acerca de esta materia tán importante (PERPETUAR POWER A TRAVES DE LA DOMINACION DEL IDIOMA, como los ingleses lo han hecho por siglos). La cuenta de Twitter de la OEP SOLO ESCRIBE EN INGLES, promoviendo traducciones automatizadas al día siguiente, pero éstas son inferiores. Aquí esta la herramiente ellos recomiendan (advertencia es una link de la OEP). ¨Tradusca Patentes,¨ dijeron en Twitter hace unos días, ¨viene con un corrector automático, que te permite proponer mejores traducciones¨ (bueno eso es ´crowdsourcing´ hacer a los Españoles ¨voluntarios¨ de las grandes CORPORACIONES – tóntos útiles- para sus propias ganancias).
El lenguaje Espańol raramente existe en la OEP. Definitivamente NO es tratado como debería y uno no necesita mirar muy atrás para ver como la OEP, basada en Munich máltrata a su personal Espańol. Uno de ellos tuvo una crisis nerviosa un par de meses atras después de haber sido maltratado por estos hijos de [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
“Al menos pueden demandar que la OEP, no trata al Español como inexistente”Reciéntemente nos enteramos de otras formas de DISCRIMINACION contra los Españoles en la OEP. ¨Estaba leyendo este artículo,¨ una persona nos escrbió acerca de un artículo que publicamos en Español hace unos días¨, esta persona nos dijo ¨Pedí por Espańol como lenguaje de oposición, cuando estuvimos oponiéndonos a la Regalo de Amazon patente¨, ¨Recibimos una ´amable´ llamda teléfonic así como un corre eléctronico de la OEP diciéndonos que si queríamos Español, teniamos que pagar por un traductor, mientras que alemanes o franceses no tendrían que pagar por traducciones simúltaneas durante los proceduras orales.¨
Esto es revelador? No es cierto?
Decidimos investigar más profundamente esto por que es una queja común (compartida entre miembros de la Unión Europea); sólo los Espańoles tienen suficientemente voz fuerte (más población) y un buen argumento para incluir su lenguaje por que es increíblemente popular, (segundo lugar después del Chino, Arabe, e Inglés depende de la definición de popularity). Se hizo notar este prblema cuando se debatía la viabilidad del Corte Unitaria de Patentes una vez. La gerencia de la OEP quiere aprobar la UPC a todo lugar (CABILDEA POR ELLO ABIERTAMENTE), pero el pueblo Espańol si se organiza apropiadamente puede y DEBE evitarlo. Al menos pueden demandar que la OEP, no trate el idioma Espańol como inexistente. Algunos grupos ya se han quejado pero nada resulto del esfuerzo.
¨Envíamos esta solicitud en Espańol,¨ nos escribió la misma persona (cuyo nombre puede encontrarse en las links si uno esta desesperado de saberlo), y la traducción al Inglés es suya. Pobrecito, termino bajado miles de páginas en la OEP register para ubica el PDF correcto” en este enredo. La carta original es la siguiente (de la FFII):
Bruselas, 07 de mayo 2012
Sujeto: EP927945: el lenguaje de la vista oral de 12 de junio 2012
Estimados Miembros de la Oficina Europea de Patentes,
FFII eV ha recibido su carta del 16 de abril 2012 en relación con la elección de las lenguas de los procedimientos orales con respecto a nuestra oposición a la patente de regalo de Amazon EP927945.
Tenemos la intención de usar el español tanto para los procedimentos por vía oral (habla) como para la interpretación simultánea (escucha).
Saludos cordiales,
Y en Inglés:
Brussels, the 7 may 2012
Concerns: Amazon gift patent EP927945: language of the oral
proceedings of 12 June 2012
Dear Members of the European Patent Office,
FFII eV has well received your letter of 16th of April 2012 regarding the choice of languages of the oral proceedings regarding our opposition to the Amazon gift patent EP927945.
We intend to use Spanish for the both the language of the oral proceedings (speaking) and the simultaneous interpretation (listening).
Best regards,
¨La link para la registración de la OEP está aquí, dijo desafortunadamente su website es inferior que tu no puedes bajar el PDF con wget. Aquí esta nuestra respuesta a su rechazo. Tratando de encontrar el original en texto pleno…¨
“Qué mierda está pasando, cómo devino a tan malo, y porqué los Españoles no vociferan acerca de esto?”Su respuesta oficial esta aquí.
¨Tratando de recuperar el correo electrónico de (la persona) quien es Español,¨ escribió, ¨cuando recibió una llamada telefónica de la OEP que resulta en la siguiente antigua carta…¨
Lo suiguiente no necesita explicación:
Querido jurado,
este correo es privado, no lo replique, etc.
Una seńora hablando alemán de la OEP, acaba de llamar a la oficina. Hablaba como si siguiera un libreto. Pregunta de parte mía, respuesta de ella. Muy bien entrenada. He resumido.
El señor [redactado] ha enviado un fax en Español :-), pero el ESPAÑOL NO ES UNO DE LOS TRES LENGUAJES ACEPTADOS POR LA OEP, Por supuesto dije esto NO ES BUENO para las personas de habla Española en la Unión Europea, bla, bla. La clásica respuesta las tres lenguas oficiales de la OEP, bla, bla, adicionalmente la OEP ofrece a no costo una lista de traductores bla, bla, que podemos contratar (Y PAGAR a diferencia de los demás). Pedi por esta respuesta en escrito, ella dijo que no puede responder a un fax en Español, deberíamos enviarle un fax en uno de los tres lenguajes oficiales de la OEP y luego ella respondería. Pidió que lo hagamos rápido, ya que no se puede enviar faxes en Español desde la OEP.
En conclusión, extrañamente el Español esta siendo relegado por la OEP, mientras que el Francés (con mucha menos naciones que puedn hablarlo) es un lenguaje ¨oficial¨. Lo mismo para el Alemán que no mucha gente lo habla (excepto en Alemania misma). SON LOS MIEMBROS ESTADOS TRATADOS FAVORABLEMENTE DE ACUERDO A SU PODER FINANCIERO opuesto a su audiencia internacional y local (Portuges es más popular que Frances y Alemán, incluso combinados por otro criterio)? Qué mierda está pasando, cómo devino a tan malo, y porqué los Españoles no vociferan acerca de esto?
¨La Oficina Europea de Patentes nos está JODIENDO! Ya es tiempo de hacer algo. O se corrije la situación o Espańa debe abandonar la Unión Europea y su jurisdicción¨
Un Hispano hablante! █
“La Oficina Europea de Patentes es una Corrupta, Maliciosa Organizacion Que NO debería Existir”
–Richard Stallman
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01.09.16
Posted in News Roundup at 6:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
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Kernel Space
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The Oracle Linux team is pleased to announce the general availability of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 4 for Oracle Linux 6 and Oracle Linux 7. This release, based on the 4.1 mainline kernel, delivers many important new features and enhancements engineered for modern cloud infrastructure.
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On January 8, 2016, Oracle, through Michele Casey, announced the release and general availability of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) 4 for the Oracle Linux operating system.
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I’m looking forward to the new kernel. There’s nothing seriously wrong with the version I’m running but there are always a few improvements that could help and from time to time there are new features.
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Graphics Stack
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Friday afternoon I had a call with a few AMD representatives talking about their Linux driver plans for 2016. Here are the details for those wondering about AMDGPU, Vulkan, GPUOpen, and more.
Excited to finally hear some new AMD/Radeon Linux details, I’ll jump straight to the Linux highlights with most already being familiar with AMD’s general announcements last month about GPUOpen, Radeon Software Crimson, etc.
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With this morning’s article about New AMDGPU Details and Looking Forward To Major Radeon Linux Improvements In 2016, there is much to be excited about with the new driver model finally set to roll-out and other open-source projects coming about. However, if you are a relatively new Linux users, you may not know how this whole process began.
If you’ve been a Linux user for a few years or less, or rather have only been reading Phoronix for a short time, be sure to read this weekend: This Is What Started AMD’s Open-Source Strategy from 2011 that looked back on the original events from 2007.
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Applications
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Alexander Wolf from Stellarium, the world’s best free, open source and cross-platform planetarium software, proudly announced today, January 8, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of Stellarium 0.14.2 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating system.
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It would appear that Michael Tunnell, the developer of the uGet download manager software for GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, silently released the fourth maintenance build in the uGet 2.0 series on the first day of 2016.
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uGet (formerly called urlgfe) is a download manager. uGet is a very Powerful & Lightweight download manager application with a large inventory of features. uGet is an Open Source download manager application for GNU/Linux developed with GTK+. It allows you to classify download, and allows you to import download from HTML files. Every category has an independent configuration that can be inherited by each download in that category. uGet uses very few resources while at the same time packs an unparalleled powerful feature set. These features include a Queue, Pause/Resume, Multi-Connection (with adaptive segment management), Mirrors (multi-source), Multi-Protocol, Advanced Categorization, Clipboard Monitor, Batch Downloads, Individualized Category Default Settings, Speed Limiting, Total Active Downloads Control, and so much more!
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A new release, now at version number 0.6.9, of the digest package is now on CRAN. I also just prepared the Debian upload.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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I’ve recently been been writing lots of modern C++ code with variadic templates. For instance , I’ve been trying to make libsigc++ use variadic templates instead of being a mess of generated code.
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Wine or Emulation
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Along with the release comes our year end report for 2015. The following progress report will provide an overview of all the notable changes from the previous stable version, 1.2.1, to this update. Keep in mind many of the changes have been mentioned in previous progress reports, but are mentioned again as a changelog for 1.4.0. The changes since 1.2.1 are so many, some smaller, some quite massive, that it was impossible to write about all of them, but we believe we have nailed all the highlights!
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Today, January 8, 2016, the developers of the PCSX2 software, an open source and cross-platform PlayStation 2 emulator for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems, were proud to announce the release of PCSX2 1.4.0.
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I have mixed emotions about ReactOS. It’s open source. It’s freely available. But, its goal is to be binary-compatible with Windows! ReactOS is not a Linux operating system. In fact, it doesn’t share the UNIX architecture at all. It looks like Windows NT, and it behaves much like Windows NT.
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The Wine development release 1.9.1 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
- A few more deferred fixes.
- Support for debug registers on x86-64.
- More Shader Model 4 instructions.
- Support for the Mingw ARM toolchain.
- Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
http://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/1.9/wine-1.9.1.tar.bz2
http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/1.9/wine-1.9.1.tar.bz2
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The development cycle of the next major Wine release continues today with build 1.9.1, which is the second milestone in the Wine 1.9 Dev series, bringing some interesting new features, as well as over 30 fixes to support more Windows apps and games.
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Games
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Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! That has to be one of the wackiest titles I’ve ever seen, and the developers kindly sent in a key for me to give it a go.
Honestly, it was one I personally wanted to try out for ages, but something always go in the way. I finally sat down, and pushed myself to do it (thanks to the developer for the key!).
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Yesterdays update shows the developers working on Linux performance with this change “Significantly reduced memory usage on Mac and Linux clients”. It’s good to see they are still paying attention to us.
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Valve announced a few minutes ago, January 9, 2016, the immediate availability of a new update for its Steam Beta Client for supported operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.
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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is actually a really great game, and we had a lot of fun playing it a while back on a livestream. One thing I’ve seen people moan about is the sound options on Linux, so it looks like Valve has taken steps to address that.
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I will be keeping an eye on it when they come back with Linux support, as I would like to be wrong on it.
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Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at a hack on PlayStation 4, the itch.io store app, another record for Steam, and more.
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The crew working on the open-source Unvanquished game powered by their Daemon Engine announced their Alpha 47 release last weekend.
Unvanquished Alpha 47 as the first monthly release of 2016 brings Breakpad support for having a built-in crash reporting system. Unvanquished Alpha 47 also has a number of bug fixes, a new “Medistation” model, new movement changes for the “human” players, and a variety of other changes.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Among the many new experiences I have discovered so far, contributing to a project that is devoted to helping other people brings about an unstoppable drive of happiness. The thought of knowing that something that I did was going to benefit someone else in this world is the best feeling and this made me feel more rewarded and fulfilled about my life.
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While the KDE Akonadi PIM storage service has been criticized as being slow, among other complaints, it’s continuing to be developed and improved upon in the Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 world.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME developers have released a new milestone for the upcoming GTK+ 3.20 open source and cross-platform GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit, version 3.19.6.
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Matthias Clasen has released GTK+ 3.19.6 in the road towards the GNOME 3.20 release in March.
GTK+ 3.19.6 has a number of CSS changes, a high contrast inverse theme has been added to GTK+, GTK inspector improvements, various Wayland improvements, and a ton of bug fixes.
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During the past few weeks I have studied about how to work with Gtk. It was necessary since I didn’t have so many experience with it. Also, I have taken a time to understand how Gnome Music works.
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Arch Family
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The voting is over in the first round of our annual GNU/Linux distro poll, which sought an answer to the simple question, “What Linux distro do you currently use most?” The result was a complete surprise, at least to us. By a decisive margin, you voted for Arch Linux. The poll was certainly one for the record books. By the time it was closed to voting, a total of 5,784 of you had cast votes, more than double from any previous FOSS Force poll. The poll was online for approximately one week.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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This is the first review of the year – and will cover the four snapshots 20151231, 20160101, 20160105 and 20160107.
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My second and I believe most important presentation, this year, was about the excellent QA tool actually used to build our distro, “openQA”. As said by it’s motto, “Life is too short for manual testing!”, thus openQA is used to automate testing of the whole distribution (either as a collection or in individual package basis). You can see some test case examples on it’s homepage, you can also fetch the presentation from my github repo (FOSSCOMM_2015 directory) linked in the blog sidebar.
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Slackware Family
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Red Hat Family
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The stock price of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) ended the previous session at 79.49. During the present trading session, the stock’s touched a high of 80.89 and low of 78.97. Red Hat, Inc. Common Stock, a publicly traded company listed on NYQ has a current market capitalisation of 14.47B. The three-month trading history of the stock shows that it has an average trading volume of 1547390.
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Red Hat launched OpenShift 3.1 recently! The next iteration includes a slew of Kubernetes and Docker content. Director of Developer Advocacy Grant Shipley weighed-in onOpenShift 3.1: What’s new, and what’s in store.
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Equities researchers at BMO Capital Markets initiated coverage on shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) in a research note issued on Thursday, The Fly reports. The brokerage set an “outperform” rating on the open-source software company’s stock.
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Zacks Research has given a top Growth Style score to Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT). The score signifies both the company’s financials and its future growth potential. The score has been given based on various factors of the Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement. Stocks that have been assigned with high growth score tend to have the best growth characteristics to help them outperform the market.
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Fedora
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Yesterday we wrote that it looked like Fedora 24 would be delayed and today FESCo has indeed decided to delay the release and all milestones by two weeks, but it might be dragged out to at least three weeks.
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Debian Family
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[GP] I discovered Linux in 1994, but only in 1996 things were serious. By the time I just finished high school and I applied for a job in a local Internet Service Provider. At 15 years I was well known in the local community as I was installing and maintaining several BBSes, so it wasn’t hard to get the job. I can say it was love at first sight. I started with Slackware (was the first distro), but I moved into redhat first and then debian. When I was working for the IBM Linux Technology Center, I was in charge of helping porting Linux to PowerPC and backporting LVM to make it similar to AIX. Sun was also a good playground as they acquired Cobalt, a hardware appliance based on debian. Then I shifted more towards Enterprise Linux adoption with 6 years in RedHat and then I went to Canonical. I was happy to go back to Debian and Ubuntu community, because I still believe that Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) were the real spirit of a Linux community.
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December was the eighth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. It was a bit of a funny month since most of the time most open CVEs were already taken care of by other team members (which is nice) but it resulted in me not releasing a single DLA which feels weird.
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Derivatives
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Today, January 9, 2016, we’ve been informed by Arne Exton about the release and immediate availability for download of his DebEX Barebone Build 160109 GNU/Linux distribution.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Seattle Chaz, one of the developers behind the Ubuntu Studio operating system, announced recently that the wallpaper contest for the upcoming Ubuntu Studio 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) OS has started, inviting all artists to submit their work now.
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It looks like the Ubuntu Touch team added more impressive improvements and new features to the upcoming OTA-9 software update for Ubuntu Phone devices, as we have just been informed by Łukasz Zemczak about the latest landings for the day of January 8, 2016.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 17.3 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.
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According to the latest blog post, the upcoming Linux Mint 18 will be codenamed Sarah. While most of you might discard the name as carrying very little importance other than the fact that it’s just a random codename, fact of the matter is that Linux Mint 18 has been codenamed Sarah because of a very important reason. According to Clem Lefebvre, who is the head of Linux Mint, states that in the languages Arabic, Hebrew and Persian, Sarah’s literal meaning is a woman belonging to a very high rank.
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Linux Mint’s Clement Lefebvre has announced that Linux Mint 18 will be named Sarah. The codenames of major releases use the next letter, from the alphabet, while the point releases’ names start all with the same letter.
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PowerUp Toys has launched a smartphone controlled airplane drone with an open Linux SDK on Kickstarter, letting you stream video to a Google Cardboard HMD.
Most of the drones on display at CES cost many hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. But the biggest benefit of drones — putting a camera in the sky — can be enabled for less as long as you’re willing to make some tradeoffs on range, autonomy, camera quality, and other extras. PowerUp Toys, which has spun our childhood love of paper airplanes into a tidy flying toy business, has done just that with PowerUp FPV.
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Phones
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Android
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Android Wear is no longer just for tech brands. Mechanical and digital watch-making companies are using the operating system to muscle their way into the smartwatch world. The latest to do so is Casio with the WSD F10. It’s not the catchiest name we’ve heard, but the watch does a fantastic job of differentiating itself from the competition, by offering two highly desirable features — a super tough body, and a long-lasting battery mode.
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From a traditional “software engineering” point of view there are two aspects to optimization. One is local optimization where a particular aspect of a program’s functionality can be improved, that is the implementation can be improved, speeded-up. Such optimizations can include changes to the algorithms used and the program’s internal data structures. The second type of optimization is at a higher level, the level of design. If a program is badly designed it will be hard to get good levels of performance or efficiency. Design level optimizations are much harder to fix (maybe impossible to fix) late in the development lifecycle, so really they should be resolved during the design stages.
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Smartphone manufacturer Lenovo will dump US mobile phone pioneer’s name following its acquisition two years ago, hanging up the line on a famous brand
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So the quarterly results period has started in the smarphone wars. First up among Top 10 is Huawei. They revealed that their full year 2015 unit sales were 108 million smartphones. This is up from 75 million in 2014 so a growth of 44% in one year. That locks third ranking for Huawei. They can’t catch Apple (nor Samsung) ahead of them but they also are safely above what Lenovo, LG and Xiaomi behind them could possibly do, meaning we know the full year race, for one ranking. Huawei of China was the world’s third largest smartphone maker of 2015, congratulations. Its not the first time Huawei has been ranked 3rd. They jumped from 5th largest in 2012 to 3rd largest in 2013, but then in 2014, their Chinese rival Lenovo leapfrogged ahead of Huawei by purchasing the Motorola business. This return to 3rd ranking must taste particularly sweet for Huawei in that they achieved that position by organic growth compared to the acquisition method used by Lenovo last time. In terms of market share my preliminary estimate for Huawei is 7% for the full year, down from 7.8% in 2014. Huawei has become only the fourth smartphone maker ever to record a year of selling 100 million smarthpones (Samsung does three times that, Apple twice that, and Nokia once sold just over 100 million just before new CEO Stephen Elop destroyed the company’s smartphone business).
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It’s been an interesting week at CES 2016 so far, and while there’s been all sorts of talk about the ‘Smart Home’ and the Internet of Things, Wearables and Virtual Reality have been the biggest draws. Fitbit introduced their new fitness-focused smartwatch, the Oculus Rift went up for pre-order, we had fun with the VIVE from HTC and Huawei and Samsung introduced new watches. Both Samsung and Huawei have similar smartwatch produces on offer with the Huawei Watch and the Gear S2, but the latter can take and make phone calls. It looks like this ability is coming to the Huawei Watch, and perhaps Android Wear across the board, sooner than we first thought.
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Yes, I know: Most mobile developers tend to make apps for iOS first and then bring them to Android. However, there are also a lot of terrific Android apps out there that are, to the best of my knowledge, exclusive to the platform and can’t be found on Apple’s App Store. Inspired by this video from HowToMen on their picks for the top 20 Android apps to use in 2016, I’ve picked out seven terrific Android apps that you won’t find on any iPhone. Let’s check them out!
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The search engine giant Google has removed 13 malicious apps from the Google Play store. The company took this step after it was notified by the security researcher that these apps made unauthorized downloads to the Android devices.
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Google delivers another EPIC update in the form of Android Marshmallow, a truly huge and awesome platform for phones and tablets
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Gartner predicts that there will be 26 billion IoT devices installed in 2020, that they will generate $300 billion in revenue for hardware manufactures, and that the overall impact on the economy will be around $1.9 trillion.
This proliferation of data thanks to the IoT can be daunting, but its strength is that it enables all new fields of applications, in particular around big data. Organizations are very eager to tap into this new market and its opportunities, but are a bit nervous about taking this first step. When entering a new field of activities, very often there is an associated learning curve and barrier to entry. Fortunately, with the Internet of Things, it’s not as complex or expensive as it seems. This hardware evolution, which has quietly crept up on us, can be managed by leveraging another technology evolution of equally enormous proportions: open source software.
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As the platform is open source, it’s possible to write your own, more complex, code using free tools from Texas Instruments. The WiFithing hardware is based on TI’s Energia system-on-a-chip, and TI provides tools for writing and delivering C++ code. WiFithing also provides developers with its firmware, so you can modify code as necessary and reflash devices with your own version of WiFithing’s firmware.
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This article is a new episode of the Free Messenger Heroic Saga (Tox, Matrix, Tor Messenger). I highly recommend to read it for comparison. Privacy – very important thing for everyone today and tomorrow it may be a myth in the world of mega corporations, user tracking, automatic email parsing, security agencies with full access to everything and everyone.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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As you may know, Thunderbird is an open-source e-mail client and chat client developed by Mozilla. Among others, it has support for email addresses, newsgroup, news feed and chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter) Client, managing multiple accounts. Also, it has support for different themes and its power can be extended by plugins.
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As you may know, Mozilla Firefox is among the most popular internet browsers available, being very appreciated by FOSS users.
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While we cover news about open source software from time to time, today we’ll be telling you about an open source hardware from one of the most respected advocates of open source technologies. Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox browser and Thunderbird, is working on its upcoming IoT single-board computer called Chirimen. Earlier this December, Mozilla announced that it’s
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Databases
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The other databases performing well this year were PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and MariaDB.
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CMS
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So what has happened? Many themes use the wp_title function to ship out title tags. After a short period of deprecation WordPress developers instantiated the function, but in a way that it doesn’t work with older themes. Perfect.
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NFV and SDN
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BSD
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Thanks to work done by Netflix and NGINX, a new, drop-in-replacement sendfile syscall has been written for FreeBSD that is much faster.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We continue to rely on the expertise of the free software movement to inform our initiatives and strategies. Taking the first step into our next thirty years, we want to hear your feedback, your suggestions, and your vision for the future of the FSF.
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The Free Software Foundation is more than 30 years old now and in charting a potential new course for the organization, they are looking for your help by filling out a survey.
The FSF is looking for “your feedback, your suggestions, and your vision for the future of the FSF.” Now through the end of the month they are running a survey for helping plot the new course for the Free Software Foundation.
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Public Services/Government
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Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has selected an open source electronic patient record (EPR) to improve the recording and sharing of patient data across its hospital and community sites.
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Openness/Sharing
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Singular “they,” the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening.
In a landslide vote, the language experts chose singular they over “thanks, Obama,” ammosexual, “on fleek,” and other contenders for this annual award given to the most significant term or word in the past year.
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Science
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In June, the Environmental Protection Agency released a draft report on fracking that concluded the practice has not led to “widespread, systemic impacts” on drinking water. Now, the agency’s own advisory board is taking some issue with those findings.
In a draft peer review report released Thursday, the EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) said that it had concerns regarding the agency’s conclusion in the fracking report. Namely, it found that the EPA failed to “clearly describe the system(s) of interest (e.g., groundwater, surface water) nor the definitions of ‘systemic,’ ‘widespread,’ or ‘impacts.’” In addition, the review board said it was “concerned that this statement does not reflect the uncertainties and data limitations described in the body of the Report associated with such impacts.”
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“Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth.” So begins one of the more depressing scientific papers I’ve ever read.
What follows in “The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene,” a new study published in Science, is a laundry list of human sins that, in total, add up to what its authors say is irrefutable evidence that Earth has entered a human-driven geological epoch that began midway through the 20th century and continues today.
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Health/Nutrition
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Almost 31,000 Americans died from drinking in 2014, a nearly 40 percent increase since 2002.
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Campbell Soup’s announcement that it will become the first U.S. company to begin labeling genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in its products garnered accolades on Friday from food and safety groups, who heralded the development as a “significant win” for transparency.
“The decision by Campbell’s sends a clear message to Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association which have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat GMO labeling laws,” Ronnie Cummins, the international director for advocacy group Organic Consumers Association, said in a statement.
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Drug shortages have jumped more than five-fold from 2008 to 2014, following a 7-year decline, and access issues are hurting emergency departments, researchers reported in Academic Emergency Medicine.
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The children of Flint will need more than new declarations of emergency, state-level resignations and public apologies to help reverse the damage that has been done to their young bodies and developing brains. And now is the time for the state to step in with a proven strategy to help the most vulnerable citizens among us.
The tragic crisis in which too many Flint children have been poisoned by lead from drinking toxic water after lax state regulatory oversight requires an immediate and significant investment in proven interventions that already exist. That is why Michigan’s Children calls on the state to step in – without delay – to increase funding to Early On services, a proven and existing program that helps families with infants and toddlers birth to age three who have a developmental delay or a diagnosed health condition that could lead to such delay. Elevated lead is one of those health conditions that result in automatic eligibility for Early On due to its strong connection to cognitive impairment and developmental challenges.
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It’s hard to believe that in 2016, people in the United States are contending with poisoned water, but that’s the sad, frustrating, outrageous problem facing many today in Flint, Michigan. Although Governor Rick Snyder finally declared a state of emergency, the problem has persisted for over a year, affecting almost 100,000 people, many of whom will feel the repercussions of this for years to come in the form of chronic health problems from lead exposure.
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The lead contaminated water crisis in Flint, Michigan is receiving increased national attention—yet what the people of the Rust Belt city urgently need to receive is clean drinking water.
Republican Governor Rick Snyder on Thursday offered a second apology for the crisis, saying it’s an “unfortunate situation.” That problem, which began as the city was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, has left 200 children below the age of six with confirmed elevated blood lead levels, spurred calls for Snyder’s ouster, and prompted filmmaker Michael Moore to say the governor has to go to jail, as he “effectively poisoned, not just some, but apparently ALL of the children in my hometown of Flint, Michigan.”
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It’s not just midlife whites – mortality rates for whites ages 25 to 34 are also increasing
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As a developer, I wouldn’t really like the idea of doctors meddling with my code, so why is it that some people in the IT and business community are so happy to meddle around in the domain of doctors, giving such strong opinions about something they have no expertise in?
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For the last 9 years I have been the medical director of an NHS service providing confidential help to doctors and dentists with mental health problems, seeing a rising number of doctors week on week.
But our patients have changed.
In our early days the ‘typical’ patient was an older male (GP or psychiatrist) with alcohol problems.
Now nearly half of all new patients are under 30 years old. They come to us with depression, anxiety and symptoms akin to posttraumatic stress disorder. Many have worked in the NHS only a few years. They started out bushy tailed and bright eyed, but end up ‘burnt-out’ (a polite euphemism for depression) after only a few years working. Our youngest patients are only a few months qualified and many are in their Foundation years.
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Security
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Hackers were behind a cyber attack on Ukraine in December that had real offline consequences: A blackout that killed electricity to roughly 700,000 homes.
On December 23, around half the homes in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region lost power for at least a few hours. Initially reported in Ukrainian media as being caused by hackers, cybersecurity experts have now confirmed that was the case, saying the power company was infected with malicious software.
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US authorities are to escort Maxim Senakh out of Finland within a month. They suspect him of stealing millions of dollars from infected computer servers in the US, Finland and elsewhere.
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Researchers find Linux.Encoder 3 version still uses buggy encryption and allows file recovery
Much to the delight of security researchers, a group of malware creators are currently having difficulty getting cryptographic implementations right in their ransomware. This has not happened once but thrice.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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As far as we know, the perpetrators of the November attack on Paris were radicalized by each other, in specific neighborhoods in Europe.
According to the complaint filed against his Enrique Marquez, the friend who got him guns, Syed Rizwan Farook, adopted radical beliefs after consuming the lectures, videos, and magazine of Anwar al-Awlaki. In fact, Farook and Marquez moved towards planning an attack in 2011, in the immediate wake of the drone killing of Awlaki and his son. As to Tashfeen Malik, Farook’s wife, while she did some searches on ISIS just before Farook started an attack on his workplace, public reporting suggests that like the French terrorists, she adopted extreme beliefs through relationships formed in brick and mortar life.
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Saudi Arabia is yet again adding to its trail of destruction in its war in Yemen, and its tactics are drawing condemnation from the United Nations. The Saudi’s latest actions include firing missiles on civilian buildings in the capital, Sanaa—striking a wedding hall, the Chamber of Commerce, and a center for the blind—as well as dropping US-made cluster bombs on at least two of Sanaa’s residential neighborhoods.
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It was December 16, 2013, just hours into a civil war pitting President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, the largest tribe in the country, against Riek Machar, his former vice president and a Nuer, the second largest tribe. The war has defied ceasefires and continues to this day despite a peace deal signed in August.
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Question 1– How many governments has the United States overthrown or tried to overthrow since the Second World War?
Answer: 57 (See William Blum.)
Question 2– How many of those governments had nuclear weapons?
Answer— 0
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In my opinion, a lot of the mockery of the North Korean nuclear test—the silly little man with his silly little bomb—is racism that reassures. It evokes the explanation for why many poor rural whites adopted a posture of racial exclusion instead of class solidarity with poor rural blacks in the American South: “because ‘If you ain’t better than a ****, who are you better than?’”. We may have our problems, in other words, but at least we’re not North Korea.
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El Salvador says will make arrests over notorious massacre of Jesuit priests; Guatemala arrests over a dozen former officials for rights abuses
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U.S. military officials say an American Predator drone crashed Thursday in Iraq but say it was not shot down by enemy fire.
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Sitting ducks, in other words, people that are easy to kill. This is why they are targeted, obviously. A “hard target”, on the other hand, is an individual, structure, or institution that is very hard to inflict much damage on by any organization other than a technologically advanced military. The Pentagon (with the exception of 9/11), White House, Congress, Homeland Security, the elites who can afford round-the-clock protection, all these come to mind. These “hard targets”, although safe from attack, are usually the ones chiefly responsible for whatever danger from terrorism that we “soft targets” are exposed to. Blowback, the retaliation by those angered at Western interventionism, is our lot in life in the thick of War on Terror hysteria.
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Apparently not content to rest on those dubious laurels, Saudi authorities followed that high water mark by executing 47 people – by beheadings and firing squads – on New Year’s Day alone. It was the highest number of executions in a single day in the kingdom since 1980, when Saudi authorities publicly beheaded 63 Sunni fundamentalists behind the takeover of the Kaaba during the 1979 Hajj.
The majority of those killed on January 1 were alleged terrorists convicted on charges stemming from the country’s al-Qaeda insurgency, which wreaked havoc across Saudi Arabia in the mid-2000s. Four, however, were Shiites – including the internationally revered Ayatollah Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, a vocal advocate for the kingdom’s oppressed Shiite minority.
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Say hello to the Marshall Islands, the tiny, heroic island nation in Micronesia, with a population just over 70,000. This former U.S. territory, which still bears the terrible scars of 67 aboveground nuclear blasts between 1946 and 1958, when this country used it as an expendable nuclear test site, has engaged the United States – and, indeed, all nine nations that possess nuclear weapons – in lawsuits demanding that they comply with the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and begin the process of negotiating global nuclear disarmament.
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Morning was several hours off when passengers boarded the ill-fated bus bound for Nairobi. Among them, teachers heading home for the long holidays started to doze off, others murmured quietly.
An hour into the journey from Mandera in northern Kenya, Osinga Atibu was awoken from his reverie by the sound of gunfire. Masked men, armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, forced the driver to a shuddering halt. A short while later, the terrified passengers were ordered off the bus, non-Muslims singled out, and forced to lie face down on the ground.
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The Saudi mass beheadings on January 2 proved nothing new to a world that well knows Saudi Arabia is still a tribal police state with a moral code of medieval barbarity. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni-Muslim country that executes people for witchcraft, adultery, apostasy, and homosexuality (among other things). And the Saudi regime is perfectly willing to torture and kill a Shi’a-Muslim cleric for the crime of speaking truth to power, knowing that that judicial murder will inflame his followers and drive the region toward wider war. The Saudi provocation is as transparent as it is despicable, and yet the Saudis are held to no account, as usual.
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The U.N. has asked Yemen to reverse its decision to expel a top U.N. human rights official after cluster-bomb complaints.
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The spectrum is broad but in an odd sense. The spectrum is basically center to extreme right. Extreme right. Way off the spectrum. The Republican Party about 20 years ago basically abandoned any pretense of being a normal political party. In fact, the distinguished, respected conservative commentators, from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank, like Norman Ornstein, described the Republican Party as a radical insurgency which has abandoned parliamentary politics. They just don’t want anything to happen. Their only policies are “don’t do anything” or bomb. That’s not a political party.
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Still, recalling that it was a Democratic U.S. president (Jimmy Carter) who first provided the resources that made Osama bin Laden a force to be reckoned with and that leading Democrat Hillary Clinton voted (as a U.S. Senator) for Bush’s invasion, responsible observers of U.S. policy need to give the current Democratic president, Barack Obama, and the next one, his former Secretary of State, Hillary, equal credit for growing deadly Sunni extremism. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have pursued aggressive policies of regime change that have opened the door for jihadist expansion. They have done so over and against the opposition and warnings not just of peace activists but also of top U.S. military analysts and officials.
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This is rather odd because who needs propaganda when the Russians can read the Western media themselves and see firsthand all the lies it puts forth about them and the demonizing of Putin. There are several political-debate shows on Russian television where they invite Western journalists or politicians; on one there frequently is a really funny American journalist, Michael Bohm, who keeps regurgitating all the western propaganda, arguing with his Russian counterparts. It’s pretty surreal to watch him display the worst political stereotypes of Americans: arrogant, gullible, and ignorant. He stands there and lectures high ranking Russian politicians, “explaining” to them the “real” Russian foreign policy, and the “real” intentions behind their actions, as opposed to anything they say. The man is shockingly irony-impaired. It is as funny to watch as it is sad and scary.
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Transparency Reporting
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Just recently, we discussed the revelation that former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s emails were deleted right as he was exiting office — despite being ordered by a federal court to preserve all communications relevant to a summons quota lawsuit.
The city claimed it was a clerical error, but the plaintiffs pointed out that, despite the retention order being issued in 2010, the city had yet to produce a single email from Kelly’s account in response to its discovery requests.
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Michael Morisy — founder of FOIA clearinghouse MuckRock — has been waiting since February of 2012 for the FBI to hand over information on its GPS tracking devices. Specifically, Morisy was looking for information on any devices it deactivated/recollected after the Supreme Court (US v. Jones) declared the warrantless, long-term tracking of individuals could amount to a Fourth Amendment violation.
The decision didn’t explicitly state GPS tracking devices now needed to be accompanied by warrants, but it was enough that the FBI began shutting down its 3,000 devices. (It turned most of them back on a month later after securing the proper paperwork. Only 250 or so were permanently switched off. And, of course, the FBI grumbled about having to obtain warrants for devices it had already deployed, because the Fourth Amendment doesn’t do anything but slow down law enforcement.)
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There’s plenty to complain about when discussing the federal court’s document filing system known as PACER. Lots.
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Then there’s the fact that PACER hands over PDFs like the pages are rolling off the Xerox. To access a digital file, you’ll be paying $0.10 a page. Sure, it caps at $3.00 (30 pages) but that’s only per individual PDF. Download another from the same case and you’re back to square one, paying a dime a page. Opinions are free, which helps, but everything else steadily adds up.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Activists say new system is step in the right direction, but reveals bias that favors household pets over farm animals
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Rising temperatures and reduced rainfall will make the flow of rivers less dependable, affecting supplies to the electricity generators that rely on them.
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US presidential candidate joins the Bahrain royal family and Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox America whose aircraft have all fallen foul of the EU’s emissions trading scheme
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If you thought 2015 was unusually hot, you were right. Last year was the second hottest on record in the United States since data collection began in 1895, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday.
Last year was also the 19th consecutive time that average temperatures in the U.S. exceeded the 20th century average, which means everyone born after 1996 has only experienced warmer than normal temperatures. NOAA also reported that December was record warm for the contiguous United States, with temperatures at 6°F above average. Twenty-nine states had their warmest December on record, while no state was record cold. The last time the country saw a warmer December was in 1939.
This year-over-year trend could continue in 2016. For this winter, NOAA said in October that above-average temperatures are forecast across much of the West and the northern half of the contiguous United States. Temperatures are also predicted to be above-average in Alaska and much of Hawaii.
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Every five years, the government tries to tell Americans what to put in their bodies. Eat more vegetables. Dial back the fats. It’s all based on the best available science for leading a healthy life. But the best available science also has a lot to say about what those food choices do to the environment, and some researchers are peeved that new dietary recommendations released yesterday seem to utterly ignore that fact.
Broadly, the 2016-2020 dietary recommendations aim for balance: More veggies, leaner meats, try some fish! Oh, and eat way less sugar, no more than 10 percent of your total diet.
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There are two interesting things going on here. First is Koch’s disappointment that his money doesn’t buy him more influence. It’s easy to laugh at that, but he’s probably right. He’s raised a lot of money. But it’s hard to see that Republican views have changed in his direction much. The entire party denies climate change and wants to lower taxes already, so there was no work to be done there. But a less aggressive foreign policy? An end to corporate welfare? Turning down the volume on social issues? Koch is right: all his money has had no effect on that. It’s only had a significant effect when he’s pushing in the same direction that the GOP wind is already blowing.
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Arctic sea ice is melting at a record pace – and every summer looks grimmer. This past summer saw the ice pack at its fourth-lowest level on record, and the overall trend in recent decades suggests this will only continue.
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There’s no question about it. A new epoch—the Anthropocene—has begun.
So says an international group of geoscientists, in a paper published Friday in the journal Science. They point to waste disposal, fossil fuel combustion, increased fertilizer use, the testing and dropping of nuclear weapons, deforestation, and more as evidence that human activity has pushed the Earth into the new age that takes its name from the Greek anthropos, or human being.
Some argue the new era began in the 1950s, the decade that marks the beginning of the so-called “Great Acceleration,” when human population and its consumption patterns suddenly speeded up, and nuclear weapons tests dispersed radioactive elements across the globe.
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Finance
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But basic income is much more than that because it addresses the basic human right without which all other rights are impossible: the right to material existence.
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Americans of prime working age, 25 years old to 54 year old, only received 16,000 or 5% of the new jobs.
Those aged 46 to 54 lost 165,000 jobs. In other words, middle aged people are losing their jobs before they can provide for their retirement.
There are 527,000 more Americans working multiple jobs in December 2015 than in December 2014.
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Clinton’s most lucrative year was 2013, right after stepping down as secretary of state. That year, she made $2.3 million for three speeches to Goldman Sachs and individual speeches to Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments, Apollo Management Holdings, UBS, Bank of America, and Golden Tree Asset Managers.
The following year, she picked up $485,000 for a speech to Deutsche Bank and an address to Ameriprise. Last year, she made $150,000 from a lecture before the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
To put these numbers into perspective, compare them to lifetime earnings of the median American worker. In 2011, the Census Bureau estimated that, across all majors, a “bachelor’s degree holder can expect to earn about $2.4 million over his or her work life.” A Pew Research analysis published the same year estimated that a “typical high school graduate” can expect to make just $770,000 over the course of his or her lifetime.
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Paul Krugman does his best to analyze the current economic crisis and venture a guess about whether it will trigger a worldwide economic catastophe in Friday’s column.
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Neoliberalism has facilitated the emergence of the ‘corporate’ university, which dangerously prioritises market rationality and public relations over academic freedom.
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Unless you come from an obscenely rich family, one of the first things you find out when you hit adulthood is that your future might depend on your willingness to take on debt. Do you want to go to college? You’ll probably need a loan for that. Need a car? That’s going to require a loan. Ready to put down some roots and settle in a permanent place of your own? Unless your name is Mr. or Ms. Money Bags, get ready to borrow.
And the fact that borrowing is a part of adulthood isn’t even the bad news. If you were paying attention as a child, you saw that one coming. The bad news is that your car, education, and house are only the tip of the debt iceberg. Beneath the sea is a whole other landmass of ways the world wants to keep you in the red.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Nuclear weapons have always had a habit of inviting games of perception. Will the state in possession of a nuclear option make use of it? Obviously, there is always precedent that any state with an option will, at some point, make do with it. The importance here is one of perception.
The DPRK has tended to be in the business of mastering perceptions over reality for much of its existence. In many ways, it has had to. In the face of a dominant United States, a retreating Russia, and a China that has proven to be more qualified about its support, Pyongyang has become more boisterous and terrier-like in its pronouncements.
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User-generated content offers new ways of covering ‘black hole’ stories such as the Syrian conflict. But how do journalists make sense of what is happening on the ground?
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Donald Trump says the crowd for his speech Thursday night in Burlington was 25,000.
Untrue, according to the city police chief.
About 2,000 people lined up starting at 4:30 a.m. for access to the Flynn Center, Chief Brandon del Pozo told the Burlington Free Press. The Trump campaign instituted a loyalty test at the door and allowed into the 1,400-seat Flynn Center only people who professed support for the candidate.
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Sanders noted that the American worker is making far less today “in real, inflation adjusted for dollars” than thirty years ago, and that Trump is tapping into the anger that’s creating. “What I am saying is you have a right to be angry. Let’s create an economy that gets to the root cause of greed and corporate greed. Let’s take them on.”
“You know what Trump is saying?” he asked. “The cause of your problems is that Latino tomato picker who’s making $8 an hour, or that Muslim engineering student — that’s the old-fashioned scapegoating, it’s doing what demagogues always do.”
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A Muslim woman was kicked out of a Donald Trump rally on Friday night for no apparent reason. The woman, Rose Hamid, told CNN that she “came to the rally to let Trump supporters see what a Muslim looks like.” She stood silently with a t-shirt that read “I Come In Peace.”
About halfway through the rally, held in Rock Hill, South Carolina, some people in the crowd “turned pretty ugly” toward the woman, shouting “epithets.” She was then escorted out by security.
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Michael has presumably had a rough day. Nine hours working as an exterminator takes a physical toll on the 45-year-old, who didn’t go to college, makes $33,000 a year, and relies on a steady swarm of pests to pester people in his 90% rural county.
But home, with a glass of wine and Fox News, he’s excited to hear from the only candidate who’s making any sense these days: Donald Trump.
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Fox News devoted numerous segments to reports of mass sexual assaults committed in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve by men “having a ‘North African or Arabic’ appearance,” using the story to fearmonger about the “direct threat” posed by “how fast you allow … Syrian refugees into this country.” This reporting stands in contrast to Fox’s history of downplaying sexual assaults when it doesn’t fit their anti-refugee agenda.
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Censorship
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A Canadian company has offered to provide the Bahraini government with internet censorship technology, according to a tender published on Thursday—the latest in a string of questionable partnerships the company has forged in recent years.
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Censorship of any kind has to be individual wherein a person who does not like something should not watch or read it, said eminent author Nayantara Sahgal here on Friday.
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Well, Politwoops has been resurrected, and here to tell us how great that is, is the new CEO of Twitter, the company that initially killed it off.
[...]
It’s a nice, well-crafted message, to be sure. That said, it wouldn’t feel right to laud Twitter for about-facing a terrible attempt to knee-cap the usefulness of its own site. If Twitter is a platform chiefly about inter-expression, then hiding any of that expression is antithetical to its very purpose. Reinstating a service primarily useful to the public, once murdered out of deference to the elite class, is self-evidently the right thing to do, and the only lesson to be learned here is that Twitter’s initial treatment of Politwoops was a major mistake to begin with.
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Notorious file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has just started operating from a new .MS domain name. Notably, The Pirate Bay already registered the new .MS extension many years ago but it didn’t use it as a primary domain until now. If we recall the recent troubles faced by the website operators over the copyright issues, the future of .MS domain name seems very uncertain.
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A committee led by Shyam Benegal may have been set up to look into revamping the Censor Board. But if not censorship, then what system should films be subjected to?
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A new HuffPost/YouGov survey found majority support for the position that colleges should punish students who engage in racially offensive speech.
Respondents consisted of 1,000 random adults from around the country—not just college students, in other words. Fifty-three percent agreed that colleges should discipline students for making racially insensitive comments. Just 28 percent disagreed, and 19 percent weren’t sure.
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Privacy
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Over the holiday break, Congress was up in arms over a Wall Street Journal report revealing lawmakers’ private conversations with Israeli officials and interest groups were swept up by the National Security Agency during the US-Iran nuclear negotiations. But these aren’t the only congressional communications collected by the NSA.
How vast is the dragnet? On what other national policy matters has NSA surveillance impacted Members of Congress? A congressional investigation remains long overdue, but these revelations should prompt Congress to create a Church Committee for the 21st Century.
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Five years ago, news broke that the NYPD was engaged in an expansive domestic spying operation targeting American Muslim communities for surveillance, mapping and infiltration. Two lawsuits were filed in the New York federal courts in response to these practices and in defense New York City Muslims’ – and all minority communities’ – right to equal treatment and religious freedom.
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Xinjiang, home of the China’s muslim Uighur minority, has long been the world’s laboratory for Internet repression. Faced with widespread local unrest, and online debate, China has done everything it can to enforce its vision of the Net in the region, from imprisoning bloggers and online publishers, to quarantining the entire Xinjiang network from the rest of the Internet for over ten months in 2009. Nonetheless, Xinjiang residents still circumvent censorship and surveillance in the pursuit of privacy and free expression. They use virtual private networks and other methods to get around the Great Firewall. They use popular messaging apps that they have heard could defend them against surveillance, like WhatsApp and Telegram.
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Once again, it appears the only way to make our nation’s intelligence oversight committees care about surveillance is to include them in the “fun.”
Fervent surveillance apologist Dianne Feinstein had zero fucks to give about the steady stream of leaks until it became apparent that the CIA was spying on her staffers while they put together the Torture Report. Likewise, many members of the House Intelligence Committee couldn’t be bothered to care much about domestic surveillance until they, too, were “inadvertently” included in the NSA’s dragnet.
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After halting its internet surveillance targeting German companies and officials last May, the country’s BND intelligence agency has resumed its spying operations in collaboration with the NSA, according to Reuters.
German media reported that collaboration between the two agencies have started up again at the Bad Aibling surveillance station and that the BND has resumed supplying intelligence to the NSA.
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If you’ve been following the news about ad blockers, you might have heard about Forbes asking its readers to turn off ad blockers to access its content. Apparently the site promised to provide an “ad light” version of its site that provides less ads or something like that.
Well one guy, Brian Baskins, turned off his ad blocker and promptly got some pop-under malware on the Forbes site.
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The United States faces a profound choice. It can continue to work in a world of blurred lines and unilateral demands, making no concessions on surveillance and denouncing privacy rights as protectionism in disguise. Yet if it does so, it is U.S. companies that will suffer.
Alternatively, it can recognize that globalization comes in different flavors and that Europeans have real and legitimate problems with ubiquitous U.S. surveillance and unilateralism. An ambitious strategy would seek to reform EU and U.S. privacy rules so as to put in place a comprehensive institutional infrastructure that could protect the privacy rights of European and U.S. citizens alike, creating rules and institutions to restrict general surveillance to uses that are genuinely in the security interests of all the countries.
More broadly, the United States needs to disentangle the power of a U.S.-led order from the temptations of manipulating that order to its national security advantage. If it wants globalization to continue working as it has in the past, the United States is going to have to stop thinking of flows of goods and information as weapons and start seeing them as public goods that need to be maintained and nurtured. Ultimately, it is U.S. firms and the American economy that stand to benefit most.
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There’s an excellent article in Foreign Affairs on how the European insistence on data privacy — most recently illustrated by their invalidation of the “safe harbor” agreement — is really about the US talking out of both sides of its mouth on the issue: championing privacy in public, but spying on everyone in private. As long as the US keeps this up, the authors argue, this issue will get worse.
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It’s been a month since Juniper admitted that its firewalls had back-doors in them, possibly inserted by (or to aid) US intelligence agencies. In the month since, Juniper has failed to comprehensively seal those doors, and more suspicious information has come to light.
U Illinois researcher Stephen Checkoway has revealed that Juniper’s backdoor was only possible because the company added a known-insecure random number generator, Dual_EC, years after the company had started using a more-secure alternative, ANSI X9.31, deliberately introducing a vulnerability into its product.
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At least a hundred thousand military, civilian, and contractor personnel at the Defense Department have been subjected to a “continuous evaluation” or total surveillance of their electronic activities and communications. The surveillance is part of the department’s “Insider Threat” program and raises concerns about the extent to which whistleblower communications are being intercepted.
According to a 2015 report to Congress obtained by Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News, “Multiple pilots and concept demonstrations using ‘push’ and ‘pull’ capabilities to conduct continuous evaluation” have been used to monitor personnel with access to classified information.
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Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s largest startup factory, is rejiggering responsibilities at the executive level and adding more staff. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and of Google’s onetime slogan “Don’t be evil,” replaces Sam Altman as managing partner of Y Combinator’s main accelerator program, which helped launch companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, and Stripe.
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No matter what you’ve heard about the Tor network, the basics of the service are simple: Tor keeps anyone who uses it safe, secure, and anonymous on the Internet.
Originally created by the U.S. Navy, Tor can be used to browse the Web anonymously, send and receive private communications, or make other computer software anonymous by integrating it with Tor software.
Tor’s reputation, however, is less straightforward. Many equate the anonymity the network provides with those who decide to use it for illegal purposes. From terms like “Dark Net” and ”Deep Web” to who actually uses the privacy software, here’s everything you need to know about Tor.
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Civil Rights
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…the natural ‘commons’ is turned into a potential new source of value which can be speculated on by investors…
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Life in UK’s indefinite immigration detention regime evokes the ‘barbed wire disease’ experienced by ‘enemy aliens’ interned during the World Wars. We must learn from our past to end detention.
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In this video from The Guardian, Younge describes the ascent of rightwing populist leaders as the result of democracy in crisis…
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Today, three and a half years later, The Wall Street Journal reports that the city wants to find its way out of bankruptcy by wriggling out of its police abuse settlements.
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At least 18 migrants are among the 31 people believed to have carried out a spate of attacks on women at a New Year’s Eve celebration in Cologne, Germany. More than 170 criminal complaints have been filed, the majority of which claim sexually motivated attacks. A spree of similar attacks across Europe has been used to justify fears that so many Middle East and North Africa natives will not be able to fully integrate into European societies.
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Anne Case and Angus Deaton recently wrote a paper that’s gotten a lot of attention. One of the minor ways it’s gotten attention is in the way a lot of people talk about it: as the Deaton paper, or the Deaton/Case paper, despite the fact that it’s traditional in economics to list authors alphabetically.
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A POPULAR LEFT-WING Brazilian congressman known for his leadership in the social justice movement is trying to fend off a major backlash from his left flank while he travels in Israel. The legislator, Jean Wyllys, has angered much of the base of the leftist Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), which he represents, after participating in a conference at an Israeli university with deep ties to human rights abuses against Palestinians and then defending that decision with anti-Palestinian talking points common among hard-core Israel defenders. Wyllys’ unexpected stance is one of the most powerful cases yet to highlight the tried-and-true tactic of exploiting liberal social issues to generate left-wing support for militarism.
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Says “guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” drive north from New York and Connecticut to sell drugs and knock up local girls.
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“You’s don’t like me and I don’t like you.”
That’s how Gov. Paul LePage began his press conference on Friday to formally address the racially charged remarks he made this week about drug dealers with names like “D-Money” and “Smoothie” coming to “impregnate” young white girls in Maine.
LePage’s opening line, which he cited as a quote from the film “Rocky,” was aimed squarely at media and reporters in the room.
“I made one slip up,” he said. “I was going impromptu and my brain didn’t catch up to my mouth.”
“Instead of saying Maine women, I said white women,” he added. “I’m not going to apologize to the Maine women for that because if you go to Maine, you will see we are 95 percent white.”
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Sigh. Our racist imbecile of a governor Paul LePage is making news again for projectile vomiting moronic words out of his face – this time, blaming Maine’s real, ruinous, death-dealing heroin epidemic on imaginary black dudes named D-Money, Smoothie and Shifty, who come here from New York and Connecticut to sell dope, impregnate white girls, maybe rap a bit and then go home. After everybody freaked out that he actually out loud said those things, he sorta lumbered through an even more stunningly offensive non-apology that utterly, miraculously missed the point, blathering about how his “brain (sic) didn’t catch up to my mouth” and why are these lefty bloggers out to get him for One Little Slip-Up and anyway who said anything about race, not him, nope, uh uh. Twitter was on it. Samples: “The governor of Maine’s comments are disgusting. D-money, smoothie & shifty are actually stand-up guys once you get to know em” and “Je suis smoothie.”
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He did add that perhaps his brain was slower than his mouth. “Instead of ‘Maine women,’ I said ‘white women’ and I’m not going to apologize to the Maine women for that because if you go to Maine, you’ll see that we’re essentially 95 percent white.”
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The shooting comes at a time when police deaths are actually at a low point, but when anti-Islam incidents — where American Muslims are harassed, shot, or have their houses of worship damaged or destroyed — are on the rise.
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Philadelphia police officer Deric Lewis was recently arrested for the third time, after being arrested on two other occasions and losing his job as a result. In his two previous arrests, Lewis was charged with assault and reckless endangerment, and was reported as being violent in both situations.
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The Obama administration must see Turkey under the reign of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for what it is.
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The Foreign Secretary says ‘just to be clear, these people were terrorists’ – despite at least four of the 47 being arrested over political protests. Rights groups say Britain continues to ‘parrot the propaganda’ of its Middle East ally
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“Respect us! We are not fair game, even when we’re naked,” Moiré’s sign read.
The 32-year-old Swiss artist stood on the square outside Cologne’s world-famous cathedral for around 20 minutes on Friday morning, watched by members of the public and a few police officers, who joined the group of onlookers but took no action against Moiré.
“I stand for women’s freedom to move freely. For the things we’ve achieved in the past 50 years – for women’s emancipation,” Moiré told Bild.
“I don’t want people to trample on these values and for women to have to adapt themselves. Women must be able to live their values of freedom, with self-determination and self-awareness,” she said.
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But media reports speculated that charged officials could incur heavy penalties for computer hacking under the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — a law that has been used to convict malicious hackers but has also been used to prosecute more innocuous online behavior, such as downloading documents or using a shared password.
Internet activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide after the Justice Department charged him with criminal hacking under the CFAA for downloading documents from a research database. He was facing up to 35 years and $1 million in fines for downloading millions of academic articles.
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Two Palestinian refugees, both born in Iraq, were arrested in Sacramento and Houston respectively on Thursday for terror related charges. The arrests have already elicited responses from certain U.S. governors who vowed to not accept Syrian refugees.
“This is precisely why I called for a halt to refugees entering the U.S. from countries substantially controlled by terrorists,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said in a statement, according to Fox News. “I once again urge the President to halt the resettlement of these refugees in the United States until there is an effective vetting process that will ensure refugees do not compromise the safety of Americans and Texans.”
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A New York City high school teacher says she was fired after teaching her class about the Central Park Five — a case involving five black and Hispanic men who were accused of raping a jogger as teenagers but later exonerated after spending between six to 13 years in prison — because administrators were worried the lesson would “rile up” students of color.
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Last month, dozens of news outletsshared a “bombshell” story about a cabal of neo-Confederate police officers in Dothan, Alabama. The officers had allegedly been systematically planting evidence on innocent black men for decades, resulting in hundreds of wrongful convictions.
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Drug law enforcement operations in the US killed people at the rate of more than one a week last year.
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San Francisco police want onlookers to turn their smartphone camera on suspected criminal activity — instead of police behavior.
The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) is reportedly developing a crime-reporting app, Fight Crime SF, that will allow citizens to submit photos and video of suspected criminal activity. The app doesn’t have a release date but is expected to be released to the public early this year, according to SFD spokeswoman Officer Susan Merritt’s statements in a recent issue of the police union’s journal.
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France’s far right benefits from almost everything in the country: a broken economy; a still-rising unemployment rate; job insecurity and a fear of loss of social status; an endangered welfare system and public services; a repellent “European project”; a wave of migration, heightened by chaos in some Arab countries; coordinated attacks planned by those who claim to act in the name of Islam. And a Socialist Party that for almost 30 years has shared with the right the responsibility for neoliberal policies now locked in through European treaties, and a project of remaining in power indefinitely by presenting itself every election as the last defence against the Front National (FN).
[...]
Like the far right, the mainstream right likes to lambast the politically correct.
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More than a million requests for asylum; dozens of boats landing daily on Greek and Maltese beaches; a record number of deaths in the Mediterranean; armies sent in to control borders — migration in 2015 was exceptional in scale, and has challenged how the EU functions. Between August and October, Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia all reintroduced border controls to try to stem the influx.
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When a criminal justice system born in Native American genocide and Black slave patrolling finds itself in conflict with conservative white Christian landowners, it short-circuits.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation caught T-Mobile and its bombastic CEO John Legere in a huge lie, and instead of addressing the findings, Legere is quickly becoming unhinged. Here’s the short version: T-Mobile has been claiming that its “BingeOn” program, which offers some free video from select partners to customers, and also downgrades the quality of all other video as part of an opt-out program, is collectively a form of video “optimization.” Three days ago, the EFF published an investigation that exposed T-Mobile’s marketing language for the euphemistic misdirection it is: instead of “optimizing” video streams, the company has been identifying video traffic and then throttling that traffic to 1.5Mbps.
In other words, it’s the biggest fuck you to net neutrality that any company has dared since the FCC passed new rules in 2015. And John Legere wants you to thank T-Mobile for it.
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DRM
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Aesthetics and hardware aside, iPhone 6 does not have a single usability advantage over its rivals. None whatsoever. Moreover, the ultra-restrictive way you must do things is frustrating and maddening and utterly sub-100 IQ. Fine for people who believe California is the center of the Universe, less so for people who can spell cynicism without getting confused. I will not partake in this silliness. Which means the moment my bunch of Apple stocks finally makes some kind of a profit, I will most likely dump them all back into the shares sea. There is no reason to keep investing in this. All I wanted was to play an MP3 file. That’s all I asked. Won’t let me play? Won’t give you my money. Fair deal. And you’re welcome, dear readers. I’m suffering so you don’t have to. We’re done.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A merger between agricultural biotech giants Monsanto and Syngenta is becoming likelier by the minute. The proposed merger has generated much commentary and speculation in the business world as well as among anti-GMO activists since the resulting corporation would control 45% of the global seed market and 30% of the agrochemical market (1).
In 2015 the US-based Monsanto tried to buy Syngenta twice, and was twice spurned by the European corporation. But Monsanto is not the only suitor. Syngenta has also been courted with similar buyout bids by Germany’s BASF and Asian corporate colossus ChemChina.
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On April 8, 2013, the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, Inc., filed a New Drug Application claiming to be able to cure hepatitis C. They received the FDA’s coveted Breakthrough Therapy Designation, which is is given to drugs that show significant treatment advantages to existing options.
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 7:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Force-fed like malnourished children
Summary: The same old vanity and the abusive behaviour of Microsoft is showing again, as the company disregards the will of users and essentially takes over their machines, putting Orwellian levels of surveillance on them (in the name of ‘security’, of course!)
THE WORLD’S most aggressive software company (which doesn’t even make all that much software, as a lot of the code gets acquired, not developed) is forcing people to change. It is imposing its spyware, Vista 10, on people’s PCs unless they’re savvy enough to stop it.
“Say goodbye to this abusive behaviour from Microsoft as it’s only going to get worse in future years.”According to this article, one needs to actually follow guides to manage to prevent Microsoft from doing this. “If you’re using a PC running Windows 7 or 8,” it explains, “you may be getting a little sick of endless popup screens telling you to upgrade to version 10. And you may be worried about inadvertently installing the upgrade as part of a security update. Microsoft will start pushing out a Windows 10 upgrade as a recommended, virtually mandatory, update very soon (it’s right now only an optional download). Some people are tempted to turn off Windows Update completely to avoid getting the new operating system – don’t.”
Well, don’t, indeed. Just install GNU/Linux on the PC. Say goodbye to this abusive behaviour from Microsoft as it’s only going to get worse in future years. Microsoft inadvertently made it known some days ago that it is stalking Windows users in real time. This one new article says: “We now know just how much Windows 10 is spying on everybody, and it’s all thanks to Microsoft itself. In a Windows Blog post, Microsoft details a number of stats related to Windows 10 usage. However, these usage stats inadvertently reveal how much data the company is collecting on Windows 10 users.”
“When North Korea does something similar by creating its own warped distribution of GNU/Linux the Western press jumps/capitalises on the old news to berate GNU/Linux, not when Vista 10 does the same or worse.”If it was some small company doing the same thing, there would be severe consequences, like having their offices raided by law enforcement and employees escorted into custody in handcuffs. Microsoft, however, is very well connected with the US government and with the NSA. Microsoft gives them advantage on the espionage front. When North Korea does something similar by creating its own warped distribution of GNU/Linux the Western press jumps/capitalises on the old news to berate GNU/Linux, but not when Vista 10 does the same or worse.
Microsoft has already kick-started FUD tactics, warning people that they’ll get hurt (in the security sense) if they don’t ‘upgrade’. Now is a good time to dump Windows altogether. █
“You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”
–Al Capone
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Posted in America, Asia, Patents at 7:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Companies can now literally steal other companies’ products because they claim that patent infringement is “theft”
![Executed](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/executed-1174057.jpg)
Death penalty: killing people to demonstrate that killing is wrong
Summary: Companies from the US are trying to teach companies from China that ‘stealing’ (alleged patent infringement) is wrong by basically stealing (literally!) their products in a trade show in the US, even though both China and the US have a notoriously low bar for patenting (includes abstract concepts, as long as they’re not framed as such)
TWO countries where the quality of patents is notoriously low (hence a high number of patents) are China and the US. We wrote many articles about it before. Quite a few Chinese companies are now building up/amassing stocks of thousands of patents, catching up with their US-based counterparts (which manufacture all their products in China anyway). Who benefits from this? Conglomerates and their lawyers, at everybody else’s expense.
“Quite a few Chinese companies are now building up/amassing stocks of thousands of patents, catching up with their US-based counterparts (which manufacture all their products in China anyway).”Years ago we showed how trade shows had been transformed into raiding opportunities [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13], causing a major scene out in public, degrading confidence, and destroying the reputation of certain events/trade shows. These raids are now a reality in the US because Onewheel from Future Motion decided to go litigious with patents and actually confiscate another company’s products, which it can make itself in China. This has raised quite a few eyebrows. What would attract east Asian companies to America (or the US), where you can officially — but without notice — be raided over patents? All this disruptive U.S. Marshals’ involvement because of patents alone? As a little background to this, see TechDirt‘s coverage: “One of the big stories coming out of CES this week is the bizarre situation in which US Marshals showed up here at the event yesterday and completely shut down the booth of a Chinese company, named Changzhou First International Trade Co. This happened after a judge granted a motion for a temporary restraining order, filed by US company Future Motion, following a seven minute hearing about the matter, in which Changzhou was not present and had no say. [...] In other words, there’s a fair bit of evidence to support that the patent infringement case is fairly strong. That said, it still seems quite troubling for US Marshals to then get involved and completely shut down Changzhou First International Trade Co.’s booth at CES right in the middle of the show, when the company doesn’t get a chance to present to the judge until January 14th, long after CES has packed up and left town.”
This story involves a Chinese company coming to the US. China and the US have some things in common when it comes to patents, as both countries’ patent offices (SIPO and USPTO) have very low-quality patents and approve almost everything (poor quality control). Patents for patents’ sake, regardless of the consequences! In the US, unless you’re a rich and highly determined defendant, you never know if a patent is worth something unless challenged for years in the courts. USPTO examination is being grossly rushed, so prior art search is somewhat of a joke. We wrote about this for years. There is this new article titled “U.S. and Chinese Courts’ Software Patent Requirements” and it says that “In China, software inventions that comprise only rules and methods for intellectual activities are not patentable. Thus, a claim that describes an algorithm, mathematical rules, or computer program “as such” and alone may not be patented. However, software inventions that comprise both rules and methods for intellectual activities and technical features of means in order to solve technical problems and obtain technical effects can be patented. Software that (a) uses a technical solution to (b) solve a technical problem concerning (c) a law of nature, may comprise patent eligible subject matter and are subject to patent law protection. The subject of the patent must pass the three part test and still must satisfy the basic requirements for patentability—novelty, non-obviousness, and usefulness—the same as in the U.S.”
“A lot of startups in the US are rightly worried about software patents.”Notice the use of the term “as such” and recall how Brimelow arguably brought to Europe or made it possible to bring to Europe software patents.
A lot of startups in the US are rightly worried about software patents. A couple of days ago somebody published “Arguments you can make against software patents as a startup CTO” [via Bessen and Henrion].
To quote some bits from it:
Most software engineers believe that software patents are bad for innovation, and shouldn’t exist. Unfortunately, this isn’t a good argument against filing for software patents, since it’s essentially a complaint about the rules of the game, but as a startup CTO you still have to play the game, regardless of what you think of the rules.
Many CTOs of seed or A-round companies find themselves under pressure from non-technical co-founders and investors to spend time and money on software patents. While I don’t always win the debate, I can say with confidence that the return on investment on all of this time and effort was precisely $0 in every case.
[...]
When people ask about my “IP defensibility” strategy, I generally argue for trade secrets. They’re free, require no effort, you’re not disclosing potentially important information to competitors, and they basically lack any of the other shortcomings I describe above.
IBM’s Manny Schecter/Schechter has just published this paper. It speaks about the effects of Alice on business method patents, not just software patents, which Schecter and his employer support [1, 2]. “Many sources track aspects of PTAB outcomes,” says the abstract, “but none have specifically analyzed CBM outcomes at both the institution and final decision stages by ground. Practitioners, policymakers, patentees, and petitioners can benefit from an empirical analysis of outcomes. Our study analyzes CBM outcomes according to the basis for the challenge and examines whether the Supreme Court’s ruling in Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 134 S.Ct. 2347 (2014) (Alice) makes § 101 grounds more popular in CBM petitions. We also investigate the effect of Alice on CBM petition filing and success. We determined that there were more § 101 challenges in CBM filings post-Alice.”
Patent lawyers are rightly worried (for themselves) that a lot of patents would no longer withstand challenges in/from a court of law. There is more uncertainty for them. Whether or not these patents are worth something, injunctions, embargoes and even raids remain a scary prospect to companies that actually produce things. █
“Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.”
–Dwight Eisenhower
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01.08.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
English/Original
Publicado en Europe, Patents a las 4:20 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
La manera correcta es la más lenta, es lo que las PYMEs europeas están consiguiendo al momento.
Sumario: Abogados de Patentes de Barker Brettel LLP inádvertidamente revelarón que incluso para aquellos que son cercanos a la OEP pueden ver los obvios problemas de PACE (acelerar el proceso de aplicaciones de patentes para las grandes CORPORACIONES) como si la línea rápida so se atascaría si todos se registrarían por ella.
El programa PACE de la OEP es una VERGUENZA y ESTAFA por que actualmente favorece sólo a las grandes corporaciones, muchas de ellas ni siquiera europeas. Esto destruye mitos (del equipo de la OEP dedicado a crear mitos [para ¨mecer¨ a la gente) y claramente interfiere con toda la propaganda que la OEP disemina en Twitter y en su propio sitio web, así como en varios sitios de noticias donde se pinta a la OEP como el ¨amigo¨ de Europa y el protector de inventores vulnerables.
“El completamente discriminatorio régimen favorece aquellos que aplican en masa, por ello es inherently BENEFICIOSO sólo para las grandes empresas.”“La OEP recientemente publicó una notificación con respecto a cambios a y aclaraciones del procedimiento de PASO a implementarse este mes (enero 2016),” escribió Barker Brettell LLP (abogados de patente cuyo sitio de Web hace su próposito bastante aparente incluso en su homepage). Ellos publicaron algunos comentarios en los medios de comunicación de los abogados sobre el ASOLAPAMIENTO sobre lo que escribimos en inglés y luego en español (recientemente publicamos la traducción española, literalmente hace unos cuantos minutos). Los abogados dicen que los cambios de “la OEP , en particular, tiene un impacto en solicitantes que aplican en masa (volumen) y quiénes actualmente petición PACE en todas las aplicaciones. Todavía no se ha comprobado sin embargo, cómo la OEP limitará el número de aplicaciones por PACE un solicitante puede hacer.”
Bueno esto NO se espera que sea efectivo. El entero discriminatorio *régime favorece aquellos que aplican al por mayor, por ello es *inherentemente BENEFICIOSO A EMPRESAS GRANDES. Más tarde este mes compartiremos al público más historias de PYMEs europeas que cada vez más han sido conscientes (y se quejaron por ello) de las prácticas discriminatorias de la OEP en contra quienes son pequeños e impotentes. █
“El poder de observación cuidadosa es llamado cinismo generalmente por quienes no lo han adquirido.”
–George Bernard Shaw
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The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day