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06.18.16

Links 18/6/2016: KDE Plasma 5.7 Beta, Robolinux 8.5

Posted in News Roundup at 3:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How a student in India got started with open source

    I have always been an open source enthusiast. And when I heard about the awesome community from my brother I just couldn’t wait to join in. He has always motivated me to do great things. I’m always enthusiastic to learn new things. Contributing to open source organizations, meeting amazing people and communities, and, of course, a deep interest of writing code have motivated me to join the summer training. I believe that I am able to achieve all these things after I joined the summer training and the great community DGP LUG.

  • Open Versus Closed: Addressing The IoT Standards Problem
  • Here’s how developers should choose open source components wisely [Ed: WhiteSource self promotion]

    An open source component can be inappropriate for a developer in many ways. Starting from the risks the component is exposed to, to its license policy, developers have to keep a lot of things in mind while selecting the right piece for their tech puzzle. In an exclusive conversation with TechGig.com, Rami Sass, CEO and Co-Founder of WhiteSource, shared tips for selecting right open source components with developers. Read on.

  • Open-Source Test Automation Tools and You

    There’s a shift to open-source mobile test automation tools happening today among developers and QA. And it’s not just happening in mobile testing. Many mature technology sectors are adopting lightweight, vendor-transparent tools to fulfill the need for speed and integration.

    As with many free and open-source software markets however, a plethora of tools complicates the selection process. How do you know what to spend time learning, integrating and deploying in your own environment?

  • Lack of open source support continues to pose IT challenge

    Open source software and hardware continue to infiltrate the data center, but the lack of professional support remains a top business and IT concern.

  • Events

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Healthcare

    • New hospital in Houston selects open source EHR vendor

      Sacred Oak Medical Center in Houston, opening in August, will use the OpenVista electronic health record system of Medsphere Systems. The inpatient behavioral health facility will open with 20 beds and plans to expand over time to 80 beds.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • pfSense 2.3.1 FreeBSD Firewall Gets New Update to Patch Web GUI Security Issues

      Chris Buechler from pfSense announced earlier today, June 16, 2016, that there’s a new maintenance update available for the pfSense 2.3.1 FreeBSD-based firewall distribution.

      pfSense 2.3.1 Update 5 (2.3.1_5) is a small bugfix release for the pfSense 2.3.1 major update announced last month, and since pfSense now lets its maintainers update only individual parts of the system, we see more and more small builds like this one, which patch the most annoying issues.

    • ART single thread performances

      ART has been the default routing table backend in OpenBSD for some months now. That means that OpenBSD 6.0 will no longer consult the 4.3 BSD reduced radix tree to perform route lookups.

      The principal motivation for adopting a new tree implementation can be explained in three letters: SMP.

      I’ll describe in a different context why and how ART is a good fit in our revamp of OpenBSD network stack. For the moment, let’s have a look at the single-thread performances of this algorithm in OpenBSD -current.

    • parallel-lib: New LLVM Suproject
    • LLVM Has New “parallel-lib” Sub-Project

      This new parallelism library is described as “[hosting] the development of libraries which are aimed at enabling parallelism in code and which are also closely tied to compiler technology. Examples of libraries suitable for hosting within the parallel-libs subproject are runtime libraries and parallel math libraries. The initial candidates for inclusion in this subproject are StreamExecutor and libomptarget which would live in the streamexecutor and libomptarget subdirectories of parallel-libs, respectively.”

  • Public Services/Government

    • GSA CTO headlines WT open source breakfast

      The use of open source software is pretty much a forgone conclusion in the federal market but we are just now starting to scratch the surface of its power to disrupt the market.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • New open source ‘GreenWeb’ to mobile battery while browsing internet

      A new, open source computer programming framework that could make the web significantly more energy efficient, allowing people to save more battery power while browsing on mobile devices, has been developed by researchers including one of Indian-origin.

      Scientists developed what they are calling “GreenWeb,” a set of web programming language extensions that enable web developers to have more flexibility and control than ever before over the energy consumption of a website.

      “Because user awareness is constantly increasing, web developers today must be conscious of energy efficiency,” said Vijay Janapa Reddi from University of Texas in the US.

    • Rumors of COBOL’s demise have been greatly exaggerated: Meet GnuCOBOL

      A recent article on Slashdot points out with some chagrin that the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Veterans Affairs in the United States still use COBOL, originally invented in 1959, based on work by the late Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. The implication is—and has been for some years in the IT community—that COBOL is a completely dead language. Not so! In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world’s business ran on COBOL, and surveys in 2006 and 2012 by Computerworld found that more than 60% of large financial organizations use COBOL (more, in fact, than use C++, a much newer language), and that for half of those, COBOL was used for the majority of their internal code. The COBOL standard has continued to be updated, with the most recent change being in 2014.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open standard for UK emergency services

      The United Kingdom is introducing an open standard for IT systems used by emergency services, the country’s Digital Service announced on 23 May. The ‘Multi-Agency Incident Transfer’ (MAIT) standard is to harmonise the exchange of information within the emergency responder community to streamline the flow incident information between agencies.

Leftovers

  • Microsoft’s Office Plans Are a Confusing Mess

    Last week, I tried to get a subscription to Microsoft Office. I expected to simply find an Office license that included what I needed for a simple price. Instead, I discovered that Microsoft’s Office licenses are infuriatingly complex, making it nearly impossible for anyone to get what they need without overspending.

  • Why LinkedIn Will Make You Hate Microsoft Word

    IF Microsoft has its way, the vast membership of LinkedIn, the business networking site with more than 433 million members, will be instantly available to you while you use Microsoft products like Outlook or Skype. How many of LinkedIn’s members do you want to consult while also using Excel or typing away in Word? Microsoft is betting it’s a lot; this is part of its rationale for its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, announced on Monday.

    The companies’ chief executives, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn, explained their reasons for the deal in a PowerPoint presentation distributed to investors. In the center of a graphic titled, “A professional’s profile everywhere,” was a picture of an anonymous LinkedIn “professional” with arrows pointed outward to seven Microsoft products.

  • Microsoft buys Wand to improve chat capabilities

    Satya Nadella wasn’t kidding when he said earlier this year that he believed in using chat as a platform for computing. Microsoft just bought Wand, a chat app for iOS, to further that vision.

  • Science

    • Will We Ever Really Get Flying Cars?

      If you listen to some entrepreneurs and investors, the flying car – a longstanding staple of science fiction – is right around the corner. Working prototypes exist. At least two companies already take orders for the vehicles, with deliveries promised next year.

      The last decade has seen the introduction of practical consumer videoconferencing, voice recognition, drones, self-driving cars and many other items that once were found only in science fiction stories. It therefore might seem plausible that practical flying cars are around the corner. They aren’t. Indeed, massive safety, infrastructure and technology problems make them a near impossibility.

    • Physics test suggests cats understand gravity, Japanese researchers say

      Of all the furry ambush predators on the planet, domestic house cats — some 600 million of them — are among the most numerous. Their ancient evolutionary history does not always feel so ancient, as anyone who has lobbed a catnip mouse at a tabby or wiggled a defenseless ankle near a kitten can attest.

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Fired DEQ official pleads Fifth in Flint water probe

      The fired head of the drinking water division of the Department of Environmental Quality invoked her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination through her attorney this morning after receiving an investigative subpoena in the Flint water crisis investigation.

      Brian Morley, a Lansing attorney representing Liane Shekter-Smith, said a hearing was held Thursday morning in Wayne County Circuit Court after he objected on Shekter-Smith’s behalf to an investigative subpoena seeking her testimony in Attorney General Bill Schuette’s Flint drinking water investigation, which is headed by Royal Oak attorney Todd Flood.

    • European Council Approves First-Ever Analysis Of Drug Prices With Look At IP Rights

      The 28 European Union governments today were expected to give final approval to a first-ever plan to analyse medicines competition in Europe, with reference to drug prices, generics and biosimilars, and intellectual property rights. The final version was watered after what sources said was heavy industry lobbying, compared to a leaked version published in Intellectual Property Watch two weeks ago, but still retains some strong provisions regarding pricing and competition.

    • WHO/PAHO New Response Plan For Zika Until December 2017

      A new response plan for a strategic response to the Zika virus has been announced by the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization.

      The revised Zika Strategic Response Plan includes elements such as integrated vector management, sexual and reproductive health counselling, and health education.

    • European Council Conclusions On Steps To Combat Antimicrobial Resistance

      The 28 European Union member governments have concluded next steps for addressing antimicrobial resistance, with a strong emphasis on reducing use of antibiotics in animals, but also including a call for new business models.

      There does not appear to be a mention of price, intellectual property rights, or del-inkage of price from the cost of R&D, but there is a call for new business models as follows:

      “actively engage in initiatives and proposals to implement a new business model to bring new antibiotics to the market, including models in which investment costs or revenues are de-linked from sales volumes;”

  • Security

    • Thursday’s security updates
    • Network Security: The Unknown Unknowns

      I recently thought of the apocryphal story about the solid reliability of the IBM AS/400 systems. I’ve heard several variations on the story, but as the most common version of the story goes, an IBM service engineer shows up at a customer site one day to service an AS/400. The hapless employees have no idea what the service engineer is talking about. Eventually the system is found in a closet or even sealed in a walled off space where it had been reliably running the business for years completely forgotten and untouched. From a reliability perspective, this is a great story. From a security perspective, it is a nightmare. It represents Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous “unknown unknowns” statement regarding the lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.

    • The average cost of a data breach is now $4 million

      The average data breach cost has grown to $4 million, representing a 29 percent increase since 2013, according to the Ponemon Institute.

    • The story of a DDoS extortion attack – how one company decided to take a stand [iophk: “yet another way that cracked MS machines are big money”]

      Instead of simply ordering his company to defend itself in conventional fashion he was going to write to all 5,000 of Computop’s customers and partners telling them that on 15 June his firm’s website was likely to be hit with a DDoS attack big enough to cause everyone serious problems.

    • Mozilla Funds Open Source Code Audits

      As part of the Mozilla Open Source Support program (MOSS), the Mozilla Foundation has set up a fund dedicated to helping open source software projects eradicate code vulnerabilities.

    • Intel Hidden Management Engine – x86 Security Risk?

      So it seems the latest generation of Intel x86 CPUs have implemented a Intel hidden management engine that cannot be audited or examined. We can also assume at some point it will be compromised and security researchers are labelling this as a Ring -3 level vulnerability.

    • Smart detection for passive sniffing in the Tor-network

      If you haven’t yet read about my previous research regarding finding bad exit nodes in the Tor network you can read it here. But the tl;dr is that I sent unique passwords through every exit node in the Tor network over HTTP. This meant that is was possible for the exit node to sniff the credentials and use them to login on my fake website which I had control over.

    • Lone hacker, not Russian spies, responsible for Democratic Party breach

      RED-FACED SECURITY OUTFIT CrowdStrike has admitted that the Russian government wasn’t responsible for a hack on the Democratic Party after lone hacker Guccifer 2 claimed that he was responsible for the breach.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Islamic State committing genocide against Yazidis: U.N.

      Islamic State is committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq to destroy the religious community of 400,000 people through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes, United Nations investigators said on Thursday.

      Such a designation, rare under international law, would mark the first recognized genocide carried out by non-state actors, rather than a state or paramilitaries acting on its behalf.

    • Labour MP Jo Cox dies after being shot and stabbed as husband urges people to ‘fight against the hate’ that killed her

      The husband of Jo Cox urged people to “fight against the hatred” that killed his wife on Thursday night, after the Labour MP was murdered by a gunman on the steps of her constituency surgery, Robert Mendick, Gordon Rayner and Nicola Harley write.

      On a dark day for democracy, Mrs Cox, a 41-year-old mother of two, was shot three times and repeatedly stabbed by a killer screaming “Britain first”.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • Finance

    • TPP, TTIP don’t seem to be coming around after all – here’s why

      The two protectionist agreements masquerading as free trade agreements, TPP and TTIP, appear to be meeting serious resistance – TTIP in particular. This makes the entire coup attempt unlikely to succeed.

      As detailed in the book Information Feudalism: Who owns the Knowledge Economy?, the United States reacted to its industrial obsolescence – as accented primarily by the ascent of Toyota and the fall in Detroit of the late 1970s – by hijacking a number of global fora and attempting to push through so-called Free Trade Agreements that were little more than attempts to redefine value, production, and economy in a way that forced the rest of the world to pay rent to the United States, in order to safeguard its dominant position going forward.

    • The problems with referendums in general, and the Brexit one in particular

      The first problem comes from there never having been a need – in an objective sense – for this EU referendum.

      By “objective” I mean that there was no external reason – such as a new EU treaty or similar proposal – for a referendum to take place in June 2016.

      As such, it can be described an objectively pointless referendum.

    • Let’s drug-test the rich before approving tax deductions, US congresswoman says

      Gwen Moore to propose bill requiring tests for returns with itemized deductions of more than $150,000, in response to right’s ‘criminalization of poverty’

    • Bolivia rejects ‘offensive’ chicken donation from Bill Gates [iophk: "just as knowledgeable about chickens as anything else"]

      But Bolivia’s government, led by anti-imperialist president Evo Morales, says the South American nation already produces 197 million chickens annually, and has the capacity to export 36 million. Bolivia’s pride is justified: the country’s economy has nearly tripled in size over the last decade, with its GDP per capita jumping from $1,200 in 2006 to $3,119 in 2015. The IMF predicts that Bolivia’s economy will grow by 3.8 percent in 2016, making it the best performer in South America.

    • So Britain, are you ready to enter the United Kingdom of Ukip?

      Right now, in the Ukip bunker, there is a search going on. It is urgent. It is probably desperate. It is the search for a tone. The emotional Rolodex of Nigel Farage is being riffled through in the hope it might throw up something usable. Top presentational aides have been dispatched on a vital quest to find the outer limits of his range. The journey is unlikely to detain them very long. Yet at the most recent reckoning Farage stands a few disputed percentage points away from being acclaimed – like it or not – the most extraordinarily successful British politician of a generation. Globally, he may soon be seen as reflecting us.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Four in ten have lost confidence in media

      Almost four-tenths, or 38 per cent, of Finns have lost their confidence in the traditional media, finds a recent survey.

      “The numbers are astonishingly high: four in ten have reservations about journalistic content,” Ville Pitkänen, a researcher at Think Tank e2, reveals while shedding light on the preliminary results of the survey in his blog on Puheenvuoro.

    • Lonelygirl15: how one mysterious vlogger changed the internet

      In June 2006, a 16-year-old girl began a video blog on YouTube. Her name was Bree, she’d been lurking in the burgeoning community for a while. She was a self-described dork, she thought her hometown was really boring – “Maybe that’s why I spend so much time on my computer …”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Publication censorship of new physics ideas – a sort of pseudo-science
    • ‘A battle against censorship was never fought like this’

      Did you ever have a brush with censorship in the past and do you think it is time the Cinematograph Act, 1952, is overhauled?

      No, I have never experienced such a major censor problem with my movies before. In fact, a battle against censorship has never been fought like this before, that it became a movement. As we move ahead with time, the laws related to art and culture need to be reassessed, including the Act we have for film certification.

    • Highly-Dubious Spiritualist Making Highly-Dubious Claims Loses Highly-Dubious Defamation Lawsuit Against Critic

      Trivedi can simply stand near a bottle of water, transfer some of his powerful energy, and sell this bottled water to you at a presumably healthy markup. Among other things, the energized water can supposedly go full Lazarus on your flora.

      [...]

      And, even under the complete lack of scrutiny provided by pay-for-play “scientific journals,” the studies Trivedi claims back up his miracles have nothing approaching scientific methodology contained in them. One claiming Trivedi was able to introduce bacterial mutations simply by waving his hand over some Petri dishes is deftly summed up this way by a slightly more sympathetic blogger at “Integral World.”

    • Facebook Suppresses Story Critical of Black Lives Matter; Censorship Alive and Well Despite Zuckerberg Assurances

      Last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg hosted a summit with “leading conservatives” at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif. offices, in which he sought to ease concerns about a liberal bias in the social media company’s “trending” features.

      Whether that problem has been fixed or not, it appears that Facebook is currently engaging in “viewpoint discrimination” in another way, namely in its service which allows users to “boost” a story, for which Facebook receives a fee.

    • Court Says Free Speech Rights For Prisoners Not ‘Clearly Established,’ Gives Pass To Retaliatory Actions By Officials

      While it’s true that prisoners enjoy fewer rights than Americans who’ve never been convicted of a crime, their rights are by no means nonexistent. Except in some cases… where bits and pieces of protected speech vanish into the gaps between established prison guidelines and case law directly addressing the matter.

      That’s an admittedly unclear summation of the appeals court decision finding a federal prisoner’s rights weren’t violated when he was removed from a halfway house and placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for publishing an article about his prison experience.

    • Federal Prisoner Who Blogged For HuffPost Has No First Amendment Rights, Court Rules

      A blogger who wrote for The Huffington Post while serving a federal prison sentence didn’t have a First Amendment right to publish an article critical of prison conditions, an appeals court has ruled.

      Daniel McGowan, an environmental activist whose prosecution for “eco terrorism” was the subject of an award-winning film, was finishing his seven-year term at a Brooklyn halfway house when he wrote a HuffPost blog post that contained details about a secretive prison where he had spent years in isolation.

    • Is Twitter Censoring Non-Politically Correct Viewpoints?

      The folks running Twitter may be too young to have heard of George Orwell, or perhaps they simply do not care that their new advisory council sounds frighteningly Orwellian. Either way, the brand new “Twitter Trust and Safety Council” seems like a board ready to censor comments in deference to political correctness.

      It doesn’t help that among the more than 40 organizations that make up the council, one finds such groups as the “Dangerous Speech Project,” a group with ties to the liberal John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and to financier George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

    • What happens when private limitations on freedom of speech get endorsed and expanded by government?

      The European Commission is requesting/requiring Facebook, Twitter, and others to police their networks against undesirable political opinions and bad speech. This is cause for concern on a number of levels.

      Facebook’s community standards have long banned certain topics from being discussed – quite notably, anything resembling nudity.

      This is an effect of Facebook being a child of the culture it was founded in, the United States of America. If Facebook had been built in Germany, nudity would not have been a problem at all with Facebook, but there would instead be a complete ban on anything even resembling hate speech rallies, which there i
      In this, we can observe that all cultures have their taboos and their intolerance of certain subjects. Paul Graham has an excellent essay on the matter called “What you can’t say”.

    • Banned: Film censorship has deep roots in Ky.

      Free speech comes with a price: tolerance for unpopular opinions.

      In recent weeks, the First Amendment has struggled against pressures. On college campuses, “safe zones” chill debate. Online, a proposal to combat terrorism includes hitting the internet kill – silencing all speech to fight extremism.

      These events should concern everyone. Unrestricted speech is a fundamental liberty in America, but this was not always the rule. Not long ago, Kentucky’s censors monitored the movies, editing out unpopular ideas.

    • Facebook Still Deleting Non-Offensive Posts For Being Offensive

      Another day, another example of Facebook’s attempt at applying automated morality going poorly. For a site designed for little else beyond expressive speech, I suppose some erroneous applications of any kind of puritanism would go awry. Perhaps then you might have forgiven Facebook’s mistaking a children’s illustration for man-horse-fucking, or the algorithm’s inability to recognize satire.

      But you would think that, in the wake of the tragic shooting that occurred at a nightclub in Orlando, one member of the LGBT community’s perfectly cogent and innocuous rant wouldn’t be gobbled up the by censor algorithm as being offensive. Here is the author’s tweet complaining about its removal (twice), including a screenshot of the text, so that you can get an idea of what was taken down.

    • Beyond Udta Punjab: Cinematic Masterpieces that Dodged Censorship

      The ongoing Udta Punjab controversy has fanned the debate on censorship yet again. Now everyone wants the system to be abolished, for such practices cannot exist in a liberal democracy. It’s important we realise that censorship is a tight slap on the face of creative expression, and our films only deserve to be rated, not edited by CBFC.

    • Media Monitoring Africa formally complains to Icasa about SABC ‘censorship’

      In May, Media Monitoring Africa, supported by the SOS Support Public Broadcasting Coalition and the Freedom of Expression Institute, lodged papers with the complaints compliance committee of the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) over the public broadcaster’s decision to ban coverage of violent protests.

    • SABC has until Monday to oppose Media Monitoring Africa complaint

      The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) has given the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) until Monday to oppose a complaint by Media Monitoring Africa against its new broadcasting policy.

      Last month, the SABC decided it would no longer air footage of protesters destroying public property, arguing that it might encourage others to follow suit.

      Media Monitoring Africa believes this is a clear form of censorship.

      Icasa has agreed with Media Monitoring Africa, which laid the complaint two weeks ago, that the matter is urgent.

    • Harrisburg, PA Mayor Picks And Chooses Who The ‘Real’ Journalists Are

      We talk a lot around here about stories with people trying to determine what “real journalism” is. Those stories tend to veer towards the incredibly dumb, with most centering on a misunderstanding of what journalism actually means in the digital age. For a long time, journalism was an alchemy performed by a select few wizards, horded by a few outlets, which vetted and locked up their product. Today, of course, the barriers of entry to doing any kind of journalism are lower and the ability to distribute that kind of work is virtually unlimited. And, despite what you might hear from some grumpy folks who prefer the good ol’ days, it turns out that smaller websites and independent citizens can journalism really well!

      But not everybody has gotten that memo, apparently. Take Eric Papenfuse, Mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He has recently, and apparently surprisingly, decided to ban anyone working for website PennLive to the weekly meetings and briefings the rest of the press is allowed to attend.

    • Company Uses DMCA to Censor and Expose Critical Blogger

      Marketing and sales company Smart Circle is using the DMCA to uncover the identity of a critical blogger. The company obtained a subpoena directed at WordPress, stating that the blogger in question violates their copyrights by publishing modified images of its key employees.

    • sFilm festival shines spotlight on human rights
    • Censorship Harms Burma’s Chance for Reconciliation
    • Christian Movie Studio Stole Plot of God’s Not Dead, Lawsuit Alleges
    • Screenwriters Accuse Christian Movie Studio Of 9th Commandment Violations Over General Script Ideas
    • A big change is happening at Reddit after its Orlando shooting fiasco
    • After Orlando, Are Social Media Sites Encroaching On Users’ Free Speech?
    • Reddit Will Adjust Algorithm To Censor Trump Supporters Following Orlando Shootings
    • Censorship laws need to be re-assessed: Kareena Kapoor Khan

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Malaysian university investigating leaked slides claiming Islam introduced ‘manners and cleanliness’ to Hindus

      The head of one of Malaysia’s oldest universities has announced there will be a “thorough investigation” after it came under fire when a set of controversial religious education slides leaked online.

      The slides, part of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia’s (UTM) Islamic and Asian Civilisation Studies course, reportedly claimed Islam introduced “manners and body cleanliness” to early followers of Hinduism.

      According to Indian broadcaster NDTV, the slides also claimed Hindus consider dirt on their bodies “as part of their religious practice to achieve nirvana,” and that the early foundations of the Sikh faith came about after founder Guru Nanak combined Islam and Hinduism, something he had a “shallow understanding” of.

    • B’desh college lecturer chopped by Islamists for his remarks on Baghdadi killing!

      A group of Muslim criminals knocked on the door of Ripan’s house near the college campus around 4:30pm and started indiscriminate stabbing on him when he opened the door, said Prof Hiten Chandra Mandal, principal of the college. The style of attacks resembles with the Jamiat-ul-Mujaheedin-Bangladesh (a local operative of Islamic state in Bangladesh) method of hacking the Kaffirs as believed.

    • Australian Electoral Commission Refuses To Allow Researchers To Check E-Voting Software

      The fact that Techdirt has been writing about e-voting problems for sixteen years, and that the very first post on the topic had the headline “E-voting is Not Safe,” gives an indication of what a troubled area this is. Despite the evidence that stringent controls are still needed to avoid the risk of electoral fraud, some people seem naively to assume that e-voting is now a mature and safe technology that can be deployed without further thought.

    • Who are Britain First? Far-right group founded by a Scot distances itself from Jo Cox killing

      POLICE investigating the murder of MP Jo Cox say they are probing possible links to right-wing extremism.

      People reported that the man who targeted the mum-of-two shouted “Britain First” before launching their attack on the MP.

      Police have since detained Kilmarnock-born Thomas Mair in connection with the incident.

      Temporary Chief Constable Dee Collins of West Yorkshire Police said: “We have now confirmed that just before 1pm yesterday Jo was attacked and sustained serious injuries from both a firearm and a knife.

    • Misogyny Didn’t disappear, It Evolved.

      So, when it comes to women being accepted in The Tech World, sure it’s gotten better. A lot better. But that strong dislike for women in our field exists just under the skin of some men. They know they can no longer gain the support and the ‘at-a-boy’ slaps on the back for approaching and demeaning a woman in public. In fact, they know they well be rejected and punished for doing so. The only difference between then and now? They do it in the wee hours of the morning with bricks, knowing that they would be rebuked by their peers for assaulting a woman in public…like in The Old Days.

    • Leaflets found in Muslim school ‘describe music and dancing as acts of the devil’

      Leaflets denouncing music and dancing as ‘acts of the devil’ have been found at a Muslim faith school in Birmingham, school inspectors have warned.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Chattanooga Mayor Says City’s Gigabit Network (Which Comcast Tried To Kill) To Thank For City’s Revival

      While hardline free marketeers and incumbent ISPs often try to paint city-owned broadband networks as the pinnacle of government-sponsored disaster, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke this week credited the city utility’s gigabit broadband service as a major contributing factor for the city’s re-invention.

    • Cable TV Subscribers Still Unhappy, New Consumer Reports Survey Shows
    • Vint Cerf imagines a self archiving internet – one that could lead to a more open future

      What would a self archiving internet look like? At the recent Decentralized Web Summit hosted by the Internet Archive, Vint Cerf, one of the computer scientists hailed as a founding father of the Internet, gave a thought provoking talk on the future of the Internet. At an event where high level discussion was the norm, Vint Cerf shared his thoughts on a relatively basic concept with a very understandable goal – preserving the world’s knowledge. The Internet is the focal point of all of humanity’s knowledge, and soon it will be the focal point of all of humanity’s activity.

    • Crims set up fake companies to hoard and sell IPv4 addresses

      IPv4 addresses are now so valuable that criminals are setting up shell companies so they can apply for addresses, then resell them to users desperate to grow their networks.

      Criminals are doing so because there are no more IPv4 addresses left: the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) ran out in September 2015.

    • The Giant Zero, Part 0.x

      Back in October, my keynote at New Media Days in Copenhagen was titled “The Internet: Not Just Another Medium”. Although most of the talk was new, the core concept is was one I first presented at the Berkman Center three weeks earlier: that it helps to think of the Net as a “giant zero”. Now that I’ve given the talk twice and thought about it for a month more, I’m almost ready to make the same case in text.

    • Tim Wu Joins NY AG’s Office In Shaming ‘Abysmal’ Cable Broadband ISPs

      Last fall, we noted how New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office had launched an investigation into awful broadband service quality. In and of itself that was nothing particularly interesting (especially given Schneiderman’s history of grandstanding), though what made the inquiry of note is the office’s hiring of Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who first coined the term “net neutrality” back in 2002. With Wu as the AG’s “senior lawyer and special adviser,” Schneiderman sent letters to NYC area broadband incumbents Verizon, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable — questioning whether they actually deliver the speeds they advertise.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Advocate General Szpunar considers Rubik’s Cube shape mark invalid
    • DTSA: Temporary Restraining Order for Former Employer [Ed: these are anti-whistleblowing laws. Europe now has one too.]

      In one of the first written decisions based upon the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), Judge Tigar has granted Schein’s motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking former employee Jennifer Cook “from accessing, using, or sharing” allegedly stolen confidential data. Cook was a sales representative for Schein’s dental-supplies business and left to join competitor Patterson Dental. The TRO also prohibits Cook “from soliciting, contacting, or accepting business from any HSI customers assigned to her while she was employed by Plaintiff.” In addition to the standard fiduciary duty employees owe to their employer, Cook had also signed a confidentiality and non-solicitation agreement.

    • Apple Copied iPhone 6 Design From A Chinese Smartphone, China Rules
    • Beijing Regulators Block Sales Of iPhones, Claiming The Design Is Too Close To Chinese Company’s Phone

      This one was so easy to predict. For the past couple of decades, completely clueless US politicians and bureaucrats (and tech company execs) have been screaming about how China “doesn’t respect” our intellectual property. They demanded that China “get more serious” about patents and respecting IP. And for nearly a decade we’ve been warning those people to be careful what you wish for. Because, now China has massively ramped up its patent system, often by using odd incentives, but rather than helping American companies that demanded it, pretty much every patent lawsuit in China has been about a Chinese company punishing or blocking foreign competition. This is because the Chinese aren’t stupid. It’s a country that has thrived on protectionism, despite global efforts to “open up trade,” and here it realized that the West was handing them the perfect trade barrier: one that let them say they were doing what the West wanted, while giving it the perfect excuse to block out foreign competition.

      So, while clueless US and European IP bureaucrats celebrated China issuing so many patents, they totally missed that they’d actually given away everything.

    • BLOG: If iPhone sales are banned in China, we might see the end of the eBay era in the US

      For that, Apple can largely thank the general decline in the availability of injunctive relief following the Supreme Court’s decision in eBay v MercExchange. Apple’s rivals in China, however, don’t seem to have the same problems.

    • Trademarks

      • Coke defends against opposition to ‘ZERO’ trade marks

        More than one trademark practitioner has probably asked herself how soft drink giant Coca-Cola goes about protecting its various ZERO-based trade marks. A window to this question can be found in the recent ruling of the United States Patent and Trademark Office decision in connection with oppositions filed by Royal Crown Company and Dr Pepper/Seven Up Inc.

      • Vice Media Settles With Indie Band ViceVersa, Showing That Trademark Bullying Totally Works

        A while back, we wrote about the hilariously bullying cease and desist notice Vice Media, a billion dollar media company, sent to ViceVersa, an un-signed punk band. At issue, according to Vice Media, was the band’s name and trademark application, both of which the media company declared would damage its own brand and confuse customers. Neither of those claims was remotely true, but they bullied in the way that only bullies can.

      • Vice Settles Trademark Dispute With Indie Band ViceVersa

        In April, Vice Media ordered an unsigned band to change its name. The company, which is reportedly worth billions of dollars, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Los Angeles trio ViceVersa arguing the band’s name and logo were too much like Vice’s. (In November, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had reportedly signed off on ViceVersa guitarist Christopher Morales’ application to trademark the band’s name.) Today, both parties reached a settlement over the trademark dispute. In a statement, ViceVersa’s lawyer wrote: “After a few weeks of negotiations, the two parties have come to an amicable agreement. Changes have been made to the band’s trademark details as registered with the USPTO, thus narrowing the scope of their services. ViceVersa will continue using their name and logo as they please and Vice Media will go about their $2.5 billion business.” Reached for comment, a Vice spokesperson said: “We’re glad this worked out for both parties, and we wish the band the best of luck.”

    • Copyrights

      • Supreme Court Makes It (Slightly) Easier To Award Attorneys’ Fees For Bogus Copyright Lawsuits

        You may recall the Kirtsaeng case that we covered a few years back, in which a student, Sudap Kirtsaeng, had been sued for copyright infringement by publishing giant John Wiley for buying English-language textbooks in Thailand (that were cheap) and then reselling them to students in the US. It was a classic arbitrage situation. Wiley insisted that this was infringing, while Kirtsaeng pointed to the First Sale doctrine, allowing people to resell physical products they’ve legally purchased, even if they include copyright-covered content. Wiley’s argument against first sale is that it only applied to content that was “legally made under this title.” Thus, since the textbooks were made in Thailand and not under US copyright law, First Sale didn’t apply. The Supreme Court, thankfully, rejected that argument 6 to 3, and said that first sale does apply. That was good.

        The case then went back to the lower courts where Kirtsaeng sought to have Wiley pay his legal fees. The lower court and the appeals court both rejected this request, arguing that the standard for assigning attorneys’ fees in copyright cases was whether or not the plaintiff bringing the case had an “objectively reasonable” argument — and noting that with 3 of the 9 Justices eventually siding with Wiley, the case was likely “objectively reasonable,” even if it failed in the end. This argument also reached the Supreme Court and on Thursday, the Justices decided to tweak the standard.

        Very similar to the case it decided earlier in the week concerning patent damages (and, in fact, it cites that case in this ruling), the Supreme Court rejects the purely “objectively reasonable” standard test as being too “rigid.” It’s pretty clear that the court thinks that lower courts should have some leeway in determining the appropriate remedies, rather than sticking to a set of strict guidelines.

      • Copyright Trolls Slammed in UK House of Lords

        Copyright trolls operating in the UK will be doing so a little less confidently this morning after being slammed in the House of Lords yesterday. Lord Lucas named and shamed several companies involved in the practice, describing them as scammers and extortionists while urging the government to take action.

      • Pirate Bay Co-Founder Must Pay Record Labels $395,000

        Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde may have thought he’d left the notorious site behind, but the legal system has other plans. The Helsinki District Court has just ordered him to pay $395,000 to record labels including Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI, after their content was shared illegally via the platform.

      • Pirate Bay Co-founder Must Pay $395,000 Fine To Record Labels, Court Orders

        A Finnish court has ordered the Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde to pay record labels a sum $395,000. This decision came after various record labels accused the torrent website of sharing their artists’ contents illegally. Even though Sunde has left the website many years ago, he continues to face numerous problems.

      • Top EU Court Advisor Makes A Strangely Sensible (But Only Provisional) Copyright Ruling On The Lending Of eBooks

        The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s highest court, has a slightly unusual procedure for delivering its judgments. After a case has been referred to it by a national court, one of the CJEU’s top advisors, known as an Advocate General, offers a preliminary opinion. This is meant to provide guidance to the judges considering the case, and generally indicates how the CJEU will rule. But it is by no means binding, and judges have been known to go completely against the advice offered to them. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen in a copyright case currently before the EU court.

      • Libraries Should be Able to Lend eBooks, Says EU Advocate General

        The EU is one step closer to adopting a universal legal policy enabling libraries to lend ebooks. Earlier today Advocate General Maciej Szpunar published a nonbinding advisory opinion which said that libraries should be able to lend ebooks just like they do paper books.

      • E-books fair game for public libraries, says advisor to top Europe court

        Electronic books should be treated just like physical books for the purposes of lending, an advisor to Europe’s top court has said.

        Maciej Szpunar, advocate general to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), said in an opinion published (PDF) Thursday morning that public libraries should be allowed to lend e-books so long as the author is fairly compensated.

      • AG Szpunar says that time-limited e-lending is allowed under EU law and interpretation of copyright norms must evolve with technology

        Those above are – in a nutshell – the questions currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Vereniging Openbare Bibliotheken v Stichting Leenrecht, C-174/15, a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Rechtbank Den Haag (District Court of The Hague, Netherlands).

        This reference has arisen in the context of proceedings brought by the association of Dutch public libraries which, contrary to the position of Dutch government, believes that libraries should be entitled to lend electronic books included in their collections according to the principle “one copy one user”. This envisages the possibility for a library user to download an electronic copy of a work included in the collection of a library with the result that – as long as that user “has” the book – it is not possible for other library users to download a copy. Upon expiry of the e-lending period, the electronic copy downloaded by the first user becomes unusable, so that the book in question can be e-borrowed by another user.

      • Appeals Court Gives Big Loss To Record Labels In Their Quixotic Lawsuit Against Vimeo For Lipdubs

        The record labels basically will find no innovation that’s not worth suing, and so back in 2013 they sued the online video hosting/streaming site Vimeo, in part because the site had created a popular genre of videos known as “lipdubs” where people would lip sync to a song in a video. In the fall of 2013, the district court rejected most, but not all, of the record labels’ arguments about the DMCA. The labels had argued that Vimeo lost its DMCA safe harbors for a variety of reasons, including not having a reasonable repeat infringer policy (and by “reasonable” the labels claimed it had to be the same as YouTube’s), red flag knowledge, and the fact that because Vimeo lets people download videos there’s no safe harbor. The court rejected basically all of those arguments — but did leave open the possibility that red flag knowledge might apply if Vimeo employees had watched some of the videos at play in the case. There was also one very problematic part of the ruling, which is that the court said that pre-1972 sound recordings do not qualify for the DMCA’s safe harbors because of the weird quirk of copyright law history by which pre-1972 sound recordings are not actually covered by federal copyright law (but, instead, various state laws and common law).

      • Supreme Court Clarifies Copyright Attorney Fees: Reasonable Defense Not a Presumptive Excuse

        In Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons (2016), the Supreme Court has vacated the Second Circuit’s ruling denying attorney-fee awards in the copyright case – but offered a balanced opinion that places a number of limits on when fees may be awarded.

        The opinion holds the reasonableness of the losing party’s position should be a substantial factor. I.e., the more reasonable that position, the less likely that fees should be awarded. However, objective reasonableness is not the ‘controlling factor.’

      • Wikimedia: If Copyright Law Ain’t Broken, Don’t Fix It

        The organization behind Wikipedia has warned that tinkering with the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA could interfere with its already effective handling of copyright issues. Charles M. Roslof, Legal Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, says that a “takedown, staydown” system would be both expensive and likely to chill free speech.

06.17.16

Benoît Battistelli Admits That UPC is Not a Done Deal, in Spite of His Expensive PR and Misleading Media Coverage That He Had the EPO Pay Untold Millions For

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 5:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Buying the media and even panels to mislead the public about UPC still not enough?

Truthdig with Chomsky
Like “Unitary patent” or “EU patent” or “Community patent”: Not unitary, not for the EU, not for the community, or whatever euphemism they’re using this year in corruptible (for sale) media

Summary: The corporate coup which Benoît Battistelli is spearheading at the expense of the EPO’s very existence has gone way too far (and become far too expensive), especially now that he publicly admits that it might never actually materialise and his misguided vision might never happen

THE Frenchman Benoît Battistelli is destroying the EPO. It’s no wonder so many people, especially his own employees (including some in management), want to get rid of him but don’t know how. He has become an existential risk to the EPO, for reasons we shall cover in the rest of the weekend (due to lack of time). Some believe that he wants to be the head of the UPC, potentially a replacement of many of the functions which exist presently (but not for much longer) at the EPO. Under Battistelli, for example, patent quality has been severely harmed. He destroys the entire appeals process (to hide this decline in quality) which might be gone soon, unless he’s sacked or steps down. ‘Production’ the ENA way doesn’t take into account quality, just short-term profit, which is being thrown away at propaganda and festivals which glorify Battistelli. This might be expected from sports and celebrities (like FIFA), but not from an inherently scientific institution like the EPO.

“This might be expected from sports and celebrities (like FIFA), but not from an inherently scientific institution like the EPO.”Earlier this month we showed how Battistelli had wasted MILLIONS of Euros* to generate puff pieces such as this new one from India (no research/investigation required, just copy-pasting the PR). James Nurton, who ‘interviewed’ Battistelli several months ago (softball questions), now does a puff piece about the whitewashing/lobbying event, demonstrating yet again that journalism, especially ‘professional’ journalism (i.e. salaried), is driven by high agenda (like interests of subscribers) rather than reality. UPC pushers were given the same platform yesterday, presumably under the assumption that people who would profit from the UPC know it best. In comments at The Register “BREXIT” is alluded to as a possible solution, one day after The Register published a piece chastising the FT (Financial Times) for its UPC puff piece, essentially advancing a gateway to patent trolls, software patents and everything that’s rogue in the megacorporations-leaning USPTO. Battistelli has apparently been paying British media (Financial Times) for UPC propaganda under the guise of events coverage.

The level of disgust at this stage is very high and it’s directed not only at Team Battistelli but also the journalists whom Battistelli essentially passed money to (can we say “bribed”?) in order for them to become his mouthpieces.

“The level of disgust at this stage is very high and it’s directed not only at Team Battistelli but also the journalists whom Battistelli essentially passed money to (can we say “bribed”?) in order for them to become his mouthpieces.”Yesterday we found patent lawyers (i.e. people who can profit from the chaos UPC would generate) offering ‘analysis’ (advocacy) of the UPC [1, 2, 3]. But Europe is more than just “IP [sic] lawyers,” to use the term from WIPR‘s headline. The interests of Europe and of patent examiners (or scientists for that matter) are very different; sometimes they’re direct opposites.

One particular article stood out from the rest yesterday. It’s titled “Brexit would scupper Europe’s unitary patent plans, says EPO president” and it helps confirm that we were all along right about UPC not being a certainty (the same tactics of self-fulfilling prophecies were also used when it was called “EU patent” or “Community patent”). To quote the article:

A Brexit victory would totally ruin the timeline for the long-planned EU unitary patent due to come into force in early 2017, the president of the European Patent Office has told Ars.

“If the ‘out’ vote wins then we have a big question mark—nobody knows what will happen,” Benoît Battistelli said.

The so-called unitary patent is expected to offer dramatic savings over the traditional European patent as there will be no need to approach each country individually. In addition, a single European Union patent court will be established. “The Unitary Patent Court (UPC) is needed because if you have a unitary patent, you need a unified litigation system. It should not be possible that a court in France would decide on a case in the UK, or vice versa,” said Battistelli.

“So the countries involved have decided through a treaty—not an EU regulation—to create a UPC. I think it is not well understood what a step forward this will be, because for the first time there will be an international court that will be competent for litigation between private parties,” he added.

As before, we urge patent examiners and other people who realise Battistelli ‘fronts’ for multinational giants (recipients of special treatment) to antagonise the UPC by all means possible. This can help get Battistelli thrown out of the helm, with or without the Administrative Council doing its job. Contact politicians regarding the UPC and explain to them why their nation must not tolerate (and certainly not ratify) the UPC, just as it oughtn’t touch the TTIP and TPP with a 10-foot bargepole. █
_______
* Batttistelli is estimated to have spent up to 7 MILLION Euros on a few hours of silly festival. Imagine the waste and all the other things that could be done with that money.

Canonical’s and Red Hat’s Shameful War Against One Another… and Against the Already-Marginalised Linux Media

Posted in GNU/Linux, Red Hat, Ubuntu at 4:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Or: why I hardly cover GNU/Linux news (with original articles) anymore

The feuding cups

Summary: In an effort to trip each other up and in order to become the ‘industry standard’, Canonical and Red Hat hurt each other and alienate the media (what’s left of it)

TECHRIGHTS, with the exception of the daily links, does not cover GNU/Linux matters all that often. Not anymore. There’s a reason for this and it’s not just the growing role of software patents in the destruction/elimination of software freedom.

I wouldn’t be the first person to state that the GNU/Linux world can be harsh and brutal. People have free speech, which is absolutely fine (I’m a big opposer of censorship and self-censorship). But what happens when people cross the line of common sense and begin to personally attack writers and pundits? What happens when they do this on behalf of big and wealthy corporations? A lot of the abuse I received from the Mono crowd over the years (unimaginable abuse, comparing me even to a criminal) is ever more fascinating now that those very same people are Microsoft employees.

“A lot of the abuse I received from the Mono crowd over the years (unimaginable abuse, comparing me even to a criminal) is ever more fascinating now that those very same people are Microsoft employees.”I recently encountered or was the eyewitness of truly shameful attacks on Phoronix, both from developers and from sites like Reddit, which effectively blacklisted Phoronix, calling it “blogspam”. Reddit is full of censorship for those who don’t know it yet (our daily links have many articles about its political censorship too), but it’s rather unbelievable if not cynical when they block the whole of Phoronix (recently the subject of renewed debate over there and maybe a reversal/overturning of the ban, for the first time in a very long time).

The point I am trying to get across here is that it’s not easy to cover GNU/Linux news because there’s always someone, somewhere who isn’t happy. Thick skin is required. I hardly cover GNU/Linux matters (compared to past years), though it’s not because I’m offended or put off by personal attacks; it’s because I don’t always feel appreciated for the investigative work which I do. I generally snub any PR person or company spokesperson. I don’t trust them. I try to come up with an independent point of view; so do some journalists like Sam Varghese, who have earned nothing for that other than scorn and abuse.

I am not alone in this. Not many people are willing to speak out about it, perhaps fearing backlash. Consider Canonical with their disgusting blacklists of journalists who are not sucking up to Canonical and swallowing every ounce of Kool-Aid from Canonical, as pointed out not just by yours truly but also other bloggers/journalists (both privately and publicly, with those who do so privately fearing that these blacklists would treat them even more maliciously if they dared to rant).

“I try to come up with an independent point of view; so do some journalists like Sam Varghese, who have earned nothing for that other than scorn and abuse.”Red Hat is not much better by the way. The giant Linux firm is alienating people who often/always write out of passion, not for profit (financial gain) or for glory. Red Hat has a massive PR operation now (publicly and behind the scenes) and it’s not something which is pleasant to see because it reminds me of how Microsoft games the media, often bordering the unethical. When companies hire patent lawyers they tend to bring a lot of their (the latter’s) self-serving anti-etiquette and the same thing happens when companies hire PR people. Mass-mailing people is just one of their professional ‘skills’ and — at risk of saying something politically-incorrect — these tend to be women, preferably attractive women (this gives more impact to their work, along various different aspects beyond the scope of this post).

The other day I noticed a certain flamewar brewing between Red Hat and Canonical. They try to keep it on ‘low fire’, but it’s impossible to ignore the bigger picture.

openSUSE’s Twitter account, for example, wrote: “Of course kudos also go to http://flatpak.org . But canonical at least trying to behave and collaborate deserves respect” (that’s a polite way of saying that Fedora/Red Hat does not collaborate or does not deserve respect). Prior to that openSUSE mentioned Swapnil Bhartiya and said: “Kudos to @Canonical for working with other distributions on a new method of packaging applications #linux #respect https://twitter.com/swapnilbhartiya/status/743555291535519744″

“I soon learned of Fedora employees bashing the media wherever they could because some sites wrote about Canonical’s Snap initiative being an actual competitor to their Flatpak universal binary package.”OpenSUSE is trying not to take sides. They first retweeted Swapnil’s tweet saying “Kudos to Canonical for working with other distributions.” And then they say “Also kudos to http://flatpak.org” (as if someone from Fedora got in touch). In another tweet or a bunch of them we see what indicates that there is strong rivalry between Canonical and Red Hat. It makes us bloggers/journalists feel like collateral damage (or ‘tools’), and unlike these people who push us around, we don’t receive huge salaries for our work. For me, reporting is a purely voluntary activity with no financial gain. I decided to ask around and find out what the heck was going on, having seen how Red Hat strong-armed some distributions into embracing the “Red Hat way” — to the point where Canonical had to abandon some of their own projects.

I soon learned of Fedora employees bashing the media wherever they could because some sites wrote about Canonical’s Snap initiative being an actual competitor to their Flatpak universal binary package.

As a reminder for those who are not paying close enough attention, Flatpak is loosely connected to Systemd, probably Red Hat’s most controversial ‘lock-in’ at the moment. On the other hand, Canonical is trying to push its own ‘standards’, which it can probably do given its dominant position on the desktop (and almost on the server as well).

“Red Hat was apparently so pissed off by the whole thing that one Fedora employee (i.e. Red Hat) started chastising reporters.”One interesting fact I have learned is that several days ago Canonical basically spoon-fed some sites a so-called ‘scoop’, in order to ‘generate’ some coverage for Snaps. Not so atypical or unexpected from Canonical, but there we go…

Red Hat was apparently so pissed off by the whole thing that one Fedora employee (i.e. Red Hat) started chastising reporters. That employee was James Hogarth. He baselessly started accusing Softpedia on the fedora-devel mailing list, claiming that Softpedia said, to quote, “Canonical state that they have been working with Fedora developers…” (this was not said at all). There’s this reply from Michael Catanzaro of the GNOME Project. At that time, he took James Hogarth’s words for granted, assuming that Softpedia claimed something it didn’t. Here is a later response from him:

Just for the record… the Softpedia article doesn’t actually say “Canonical state that they have been working with Fedora developers to make this the universal packaging format.” It does say they’ve been “working for some time with developers from various major GNU/Linux distributions” and that “the Snap package format is working natively on popular GNU/Linux operating systems like [...] Fedora [...],” so it’s clear why there was confusion, but it doesn’t say that they’ve been working with Fedora specifically.

Later on Hogarth cited his colleague, Adam Williamson, with a rather offensive piece (“Canonical propaganda department”), adding “AdamW responds to the Canonical Snappy PR piece.”

“But either way, accusing publications of saying something they did not say is unfair, and it reflects badly on the community as a whole.”Michael Hall from Canonical said on Reddit that they talked with some Fedora people at some point (Michael Hall’s statement here is equally informative). But either way, accusing publications of saying something they did not say is unfair, and it reflects badly on the community as a whole.

I have a personal grudge with Canonical over how they treat media, having witnessed online friends becoming victims of theirs, but I didn’t think Red Hat would stoop down to this level as well. What we are basically witnessing here is a bunch of Red Hat (‘Fedora’) employees attacking the media over Snap/Flatpak war. They want the media to take sides and get upset that the media isn’t telling the story the way they want it to.

This isn’t some kind of epic rant from me, just an observation of something that I noticed in the past. If Softpedia folks and Phoronix (Michael Larabel) can be treated like enemies because they attempt to amicably — without controversy — cover GNU/Linux news, then what hope is there for more outspoken bloggers like myself? It’s sad as it’s not just one case; the above is symptomatic of something that has been going on for years and that’s why I don’t cover Linux issues such as Systemd. It’s almost suicidal. It’s nothing but trouble. Self-censorship ensues.

“They’ll need to learn to respect the media or earn no respect in return.”Why do journalists need to be abused for attempting to cover the news, even when they cover it correctly? There’s also this on LWN (Jimbob0i0 is James Hogarth) where, again, it’s said that Softpedia claimed something it didn’t.

Red Hat needs to respect people’s views, even when these views are not correct (in this particular case these views are correct). They’ll need to learn to respect the media or earn no respect in return. They need to work better with the media or have no media at all, except that which they pay for, e.g. their opensource.com propaganda rag (it spends much of its time just peddling a book that helps pretend Red Hat is “open”, based on the CEO’s words).

The above scenario is corrosive and harmful to the relationship between Free software developers and media. Why are they all still wondering why the GNU/Linux ecosystem is not united? Why the fragmentation? Why some many hundreds of distros? That’s why. █

06.16.16

Links 16/6/2016: Slackware Live Edition 1.1.0, Qt 5.7 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Dell XPS 13 Skylake (2016) review: A lot for a Linux user to like

    In the end I decided to put openSUSE on the laptop as it worked the best for me. I installed Arch Linux and couple of other distros in VirtualBox so I can play with them. I can run two VMs at the same time without any compromise on speed.

    As far as the laptop goes, I love it. And I’ll give it serious consideration when it comes time to replace my MacBook. The only issue that may hold me back is the lack of HiDPI support by many apps. But that will change with time.

  • Linux operating system

    Linux has grown in popularity due to its more flexible and customisable nature compared to its more popular counterparts Windows and Mac.

  • Desktop

    • Remix OS Creators Announce New Android PCs, Partnership with Android-x86 Founder

      Today, June 16, 2016, Jide Technology, the creators of the well-known Android-x86-based Remix OS, have announced an official partnership with Android-x86′s founder as well as the availability of multiple new Android PCs powered by Remix OS.

      Jide Technology has grown a lot in the last couple of years, and today they are proud to announce that the company is already capable of making partnerships with various hardware manufacturers to ship Android PCs and 2-in-1 tablets with Remix OS pre-installed. What this means is that they will thus allow users to run Google’s Android operating system on more devices as their primary desktop environment.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mesa 12.0 3D Graphics Library to No Longer Provide a Single VAAPI Driver Backend

        Collabora’s Emil Velikov has announced the release and general availability of the third and likely the last RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Mesa 12.0.0 3D Graphics Library.

        Mesa 3D Graphics Library 12.0.0 Release Candidate 3 arrives more than a week after the second RC version, bringing a total of 111 changes to most of the included graphics drivers and components. The full changelog has been attached at the end of the article just in case you’re wondering what’s new in this update.

      • Here’s my own Linux OpenGL vs Vulkan test for Dota 2, not much difference for me

        I would love to run some Windows 10 tests in comparison, but Windows wanted to update which slowed everything down, Steam kept going to a 0b/s download for Dota 2 and it’s just…so slow. I will hopefully do a Windows 10 comparison when Windows actually plays nicely. I was on it for half an hour and it only got to 40% done on updates, so it would probably take all night to do that + the tests.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Qt 5.7 released

        I’m very happy to announce that Qt 5.7 is now available. It’s been only 3 months since we released Qt 5.6, so one might expect a rather small release with Qt 5.7. But apart from the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, we have managed to add a whole bunch of new things to this release.

      • Qt 5.7.0 Officially Is Out
      • KDE e.V. Joins Advisory Board of The Document Foundation

        Today we are delighted to announce that KDE e.V. is joining the advisory board of The Document Foundation, the foundation backing LibreOffice and the Document Liberation Project. The Document Foundation also joins KDE e.V.’s group of advising community partners as an affiliate.

        The KDE Community has been creating Free Software since 1996 and shares a lot of values around Free Software and open document formats with The Document Foundation, and brings the experience of running a Free Software organization for almost two decades to their advisory board. Both organizations are working in the OASIS technical committee for the OpenDocument Format. We also collaborate on common aspects of development of office software, such as usability and visual design. The affiliation of KDE e.V. and The Document Foundation on an organizational level will help to move forward with the shared goal of giving end users control of their computing needs through Free Software.

      • KDE Doing a Survey for Input on our Mission
      • KDAB, Qt 3D and the Release of Qt 5.7

        Some of you may know that Qt 3D is going strong almost entirely due to the work of the KDAB team, led by Dr. Sean Harmer and Paul Lemire. You can read all about its near demise and ultimate rescue here – it’s quite a story, and started with the release of Qt 4.

        Now we are approaching another major chapter in the Qt 3D story, as Qt 5.7.0 is released along with a fully supported stable Qt 3D module. Qt 3D offers a high-level facility for 3D graphics, paving the way for making 3D content a first class citizen in Qt applications. This is big news!

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Gtk+ Versioning

        New thoughts are being expressed about Gtk+ versioning.

        There is something about numbering. Whatever. The numbering of Gtk+ versions is a problem I do not have. A problem I do not expect to have. Hence “whatever”.

        But there is also a message about stability and it is a scary one.

      • Long term support for GTK+

        The record (in terms of commit history) seems to not support your position — as much as you think everyone else is “delusional” about it, the commit log does not really lie.

        The 2.24.0 release was cut in January, 2011 — five and half years ago. No new features, no new API. Precisely what would happen with the new release plan, except that the new plan would also give a much better cadence to this behaviour.

      • Batch Renaming – Call for design ideas
      • Learning about scenario tasks

        For the internship, we have been following a schedule where we research topics about usability testing. After that “research” phase, we’ll start building our usability tests. And we are almost finished with that “research” phase.

      • GUADEC 2016

        In case you use GNOME, the GUADEC conference is also for users. In case you’re wondering if you’ll fit in: Everyone is usually super friendly. First year you go you go to see talks and maybe a few drinks (alcohol is optional). Second year you talk more with the people you met from last year. Third year onward the talks are an excuse to go and the only talks you see are the ones where the speakers asked you to please attend :P

      • Are you planning to attend LAS GNOME?

        I loved attending the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC). I want to go back, but travel to Europe is a bit expensive. And it’s hard to get away for such a long trip. So I’m not to make it for this year’s GUADEC.

  • Distributions

    • News about Pisi Linux

      For example, Pisi 2.0 is said to bring two features that I’ve always appreciated: a live disk (it was about time!) and an iso image writer to USB.

    • New Releases

    • Slackware Family

      • Slack Live 1.1.0, Licensing History, Reviving PCs

        The top story in Linux news today was the release of Slackware Linux 1.1.0 featuring the latest Slackware-current and Plasma 5.6.5. Elsewhere, Christopher Tozzi penned a history of Open Source licenses and the Free Software Foundation published their first in a series of licensing resource guides. Douglas DeMaio blogged some of the latest news from Tumbleweed and Swapnil Bhartiya rounded up the best lightweight distros for your older PC.

      • KDE 5_16.06 for Slackware -current

        It’s that time of the month again, where the three main software collections of the KDE community have had new releases. Time to package and release for Slackware!

      • Slackware Live Edition 1.1.0 comes with the latest Plasma5 on ISO

        ISO images for Slackware Live Edition based on the liveslak 1.1.0 scripts and using Slackware-current dated “Wed Jun 15 06:13:17 UTC 2016” are available as of now (I missed the 3rd update Pat made to slackware-current today but I think that’s acceptible). The Plasma5 variant contains the latest packages which I made publicly available earlier today.

    • Red Hat Family

      • NethServer 6.8 Officially Released, Based on the CentOS 6.8 Operating System

        Softpedia has been informed today, June 16, 2016, by Alessio Fattorini, that the final release of the NethServer 6.8 server-oriented, open-source, and free GNU/Linux operating system is now available for download.

      • 4 lessons about open organizations I learned offline

        I’m a member of two non-profits in my city. One of them is a sporting league, the other a community initiative to save a bit of land from commercial development. Both organizations are member-run. No one is paid to participate and external funding is minimal; in fact volunteers pay membership dues each year. Neither has a “CEO” or “board chair” position (other than those members arbitrarily give). These small non-profits barely have web presences—let alone a connection to the open movement.

        Traditional business models function through rigid hierarchies, while open organizations use flexible teams to ensure maximum efficiency. We often associate “open” with “online” because certain technologies seem integral to remaining flexible in diverse communities. My offline communities have taught me four lessons about the ways open organizational principles don’t necessarily rely on the digital technologies we tend to associate with them.

      • Voice of the Masses: Have you changed your mind about Systemd?

        Systemd, the “bag of bits” that originally started as an init system but has since taken over a lot of the lower-level plumbing of GNU/Linux, has a controversial history. Some distributions were quick to take it up, whereas others were more hesitant, arguing that it was subject to feature-creep and violated some long-standing Unix principles.

      • Migrate to Systemd Without a Reboot

        Yesterday I was fixing an issue with one of the servers behind kallithea-scm.org: the hook intended to propagage pushes from Our Own Kallithea to Bitbucket stopped working. Until yesterday, that server was using Debian’s flavour of System V init and djb’s dæmontools to keep things running. To make the hook asynchronous, I wrote a service to be managed to dæmontools, so that concurrency issued would be solved by it. However, I didn’t implement any timeouts, so when last week wget froze while pulling Weblate’s hook, there was nothing to interrupt it, so the hook stopped working since dæmontools thought it’s already running and wouldn’t re-trigger it. Killing wget helped, but I decided I need to do something with it to prevent the situation from happening in the future.

      • Why Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst says “office gossip” is not such a bad thing in your business

        Backstabbing banter, unconfirmed fact swaps and low blows are all fair definitions of the word “gossip”.

        So workplace gossip is a HR nightmare, right?

        Not necessarily, says Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst.

        “Rule of thumb when it comes to office gossip: If you have more truth telling at the water cooler than in meetings, you’ve got a problem,” Whitehurst told Business Insider.

        “You want to get to a place where people feel safe to share their thoughts, feelings, and opinions about a situation, beyond the water cooler.”

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Phabricator RPMs for RHEL, Fedora

          If you work with Phabricator, by engaging with Kolab (for example), you may be interested to know about our Infrastructure and Tools repositories.

          These contain Phabricator’s stable branches for Phabricator itself, arcanist and libphutil.

        • Fedora Cloud FAD 2016 Report

          The Fedora Cloud Working Group met on June 7 and 8 in Raleigh to work on deliverables for Fedora 25 and beyond. As it turns out, we had a really productive set of discussions and have some good ideas for the Cloud Working Group going forward.

        • Keeping Busy with Side Projects

          This doesn’t just apply to side projects. Even with my work in the Fedora Project, I bounce between projects. Some days you’ll see me spend time hacking on Infrastructure projects, helping with updates to servers, fixing services that go down randomly at 3am (I’m a night owl, so I’m up anyway). Other days you’ll see me working on the packages I maintain, keeping them updated or fixing bugs that people report on them. Other days I’ll work on Fedora’s plethora of web applications, fixing bugs or writing Haskell clients to interact with them (finding and reporting bugs as I go). Still other days you’ll see me work on the Websites team and pretend to be a designer. If I didn’t have this freedom to move around between projects, I would not have lasted very long in the Fedora community. It is this freedom to move between projects that makes Fedora so interesting to me.

    • Debian Family

      • Reproducible builds: week 59 in Stretch cycle
      • The road to debconf 2016, tourism and arts.

        I didn’t have high hopes as there obviously are many more talented peers around me who understand FOSS and Debian at a much more fundamental, philosophical as well as technical level than me. Much to my surprise though, about a month (and around two or three weeks just before the event was about to take place) I got the bursary/sponsorships for food, accommodation as well as travel. I was unsure that the remaining time was enough to get a visa hence declined that time around.

      • On discomfort and new groups

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • OnePlus 3 to Become an Unofficial Ubuntu Phone, Development Will Start Soon

            We had a quick chat today with Marius Gripsgård from UBports.com, a group of independent developers trying to port Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system to as many devices as possible, about an upcoming port to OnePlus 3.

            Yes, you’re reading it right, OnePlus 3 is about to become an unofficial Ubuntu Phone, as Mr. Gripsgård informs Softpedia today that he already ordered the device and will start development, porting of Ubuntu Touch, as soon as it arrives.

          • Canonical Releases Snapd 2.0.8 with Universal Snaps, New Desktop Interfaces

            On June 15, 2016, Canonical’s David Callé proudly announced the availability of an updated version of the snapd tool for Snappy Ubuntu Core and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating systems.

            snapd 2.0.8 is now live, coming one month after the release of snapd 2.0.3 to bring various improvements to the technology Canonical uses to interact with the Snappy infrastructure of Ubuntu Core, a variant of the Ubuntu Linux OS designed for embedded and IoT devices.

          • How high will Shuttleworth’s snap initiative fly?

            Over the last 12 years since he started the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical, has made many efforts to bring about what he has characterised as unity in the Linux community.

            Of course, whenever he has suggested such initiatives — like universal release schedules, for example — he has always had a vested interest in them himself. Nothing wrong with that, if the initiatives were also benefitting the Linux community at large.

            But given that he has rubbed up far too many people the wrong way, his initiatives have generally failed to gain acceptance. And his latest move, to have a single packaging format for Linux packages, something he calls snap, has already brought out opposition.

          • Developer to port Ubuntu Touch onto OnePlus

            If all goes according to the UBports team’s plans, OnePlus 3 may unofficially be powered by Ubuntu Touch. Ubuntu developer, Marius Gripsgård from UBports.com told Softpedia that they had acquired a OnePlus 3 and would soon be porting Ubuntu Touch onto it.

          • Ubuntu’s snaps come to other Linux distros
          • Ubuntu’s ‘Snap’ packages may be the future of software installation on every Linux PC

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Ubuntu MATE Linux: It’s Not Rocket Science

              Granted, this was no deep dive into the belly of the beast, but it was a positive first step in introducing me to the world of Linux on a machine that was otherwise gathering dust in my closet. In comparison to how it ran with Windows XP, I was impressed with how quickly everything responded in Ubuntu MATE — though cautiously optimistic because I know that’s how it tends to go with newly installed operating systems. It’s only been a week so far since the installation, so I’ll see if it still plays nicely after being shackled to my habitually unreasonable human demands for a little longer.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Scality S3 Server Now Generally Available
  • Scality Releases Open Source S3 Server
  • Scality Releases S3 Server Open Source Version of Its S3 API
  • Migrating to Nextcloud 9
  • Chef’s open source tool lets applications automate infrastructure provisioning
  • Chef Habitat Project Embeds IT Automation Code Within Applications
  • Chef launches Habitat open source project to develop ‘application automation’
  • Chef cooks up a new open-source application automation project

  • Events

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Why you can’t win by focusing on software

      Boris Renski, co-founder and CMO of cloud computing services company Mirantis, wrote a blog post today sending a dire warning to the software industry. In his words: “numbered are the days of any company whose core business is pinned to selling licenses or subscriptions to infrastructure software bits.”

  • Databases

    • Splice Machine releases dual-engine RDBMS to open source

      Splice Machine, the startup behind a dual-engine relational database management system (RDBMS) powered by Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, last week announced that it would release that technology to open source.

      Splice Machine uses resource isolation — separate processes and resource management for its Hadoop and Spark components — to ensure that large, complex online analytical processing (OLAP) queries don’t overwhelm time-sensitive online transaction processing (OLTP) queries. The hybrid architecture allows you to run analytical workloads and transactional workloads concurrently — a boon for use cases ranging from digital marketing to ETL acceleration, operational data lakes, data warehouse offloads, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, web, mobile and social applications and operational applications.

  • Education

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • ZFS: Apple’s New Filesystem That Wasn’t

      In the 7 years since ZFS development halted at Apple, they’ve worked on a variety of improvements in HFS and Core Storage, and hacked at at least two replacements for HFS that didn’t make it out the door. This week Apple announced their new filesystem, APFS, after 2 years in development. It’s not done; some features are still in development, and they’ve announced the ambitious goal of rolling it out to laptop, phone, watch, and tv within the next 18 months. At Sun we started ZFS in 2001. It shipped in 2005 and that was really the starting line, not the finish line. Since then I’ve shipped the ZFS Storage Appliance in 2008 and Delphix in 2010 and each has required investment in ZFS / OpenZFS to make them ready for prime time. A broadly featured, highly functional filesystem takes a long time.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open Source Software Finds its Sweet Spot in the Public Sector

      For more than sixteen years, James Passingham, Chief Technical Officer at Foehn, has pioneered the development of communication systems using open source software. Here, James explains where government policy encouraging the use of open source is bearing fruit.

      It was some four years ago, with the founding of the Government Digital Service (GDS), that open source software first came into the public sector limelight. Under the direction of Liam Maxwell, Government CTO at that time, the ‘Better for Less’ report that he co-authored set out the policies that gave government IT management the remit to pursue the advantages of two specific technologies – cloud and open source software.

    • Life cycle support also a priority for open source

      Open source software development projects and public administrations have similar concerns about software support. The two also share an approach to classify software requirements, concludes the EU-FOSSA project, a software security audit project on open source by the European Commission and the European Parliament.

    • Romania augments eProcurement portal

      Romania’s electronic procurement portal ‘e-licitatie’ now provides more information on the public procurement process, the portal announced on 8 June. Users can now find preliminary information on planned calls for tender, and can learn how to bid for national and European contracts.

    • EU eGovernment factsheet

      The European Commission published this week an update to its eGovernment factsheet. The previous version was from 2015. This factsheet update is the last in the suite of 34 covering eGovernment in Europe. The text presents an overview of the state and progress of eGovernment in Europe and at the European Commission.

      On the political level, this 2016 update casts a light on numerous strategic directions, programmes and initiatives promoted at European level in order to deliver sustainable, economic and social benefits from a Digital Single Market. One of these programmes is the freshly launched EU eGovernment Action plan 2016-2020 substantiated into 20 concrete actions. This plan strives for efficient, inclusive, user friendly and end-to-end digital public services in EU by 2020.

    • Adullact about to unveil revamped repository

      Next week, France’s platform for civil servants working on free software, Adullact, will unveil its revamped software development platform and repository. At its 6th annual congress, the association will also launch a label to highlight and reward French public administrations contributing to free software.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • A Brief History of Free and Open Source Software Licensing

      Open source software licenses may not excite people as much as open source code, but they have been just as important in keeping software free. Open source licensing as we know it today didn’t always exist, however. It evolved as programmers developed more sophisticated strategies regarding their intellectual property.

      Below is a look at the major milestones in open source licensing history. It doesn’t cover every twist and turn. That would take a book.

      But it outlines the major arc in open source licensing strategies, from the days when free software promoters disdained licenses altogether through present-day battles about software licensing and the cloud.

    • Licensing resources series: A Quick Guide to GPLv3

      One of our main goals here in the Free Software Foundation’s Licensing & Compliance Lab is education. Over the years we have created a wide breadth of tools and resources to help users and developers understand free software licenses and related legal issues. We’ve been doing this for so long that some resources, published some years ago but still very relevant, aren’t consulted as often as they could be. With all these great tools available, we thought it would be good to take some time to highlight individual resources that you may not know about. With that, we are starting a regular series of articles, each promoting a particular tool or resource to help you understand the legal side of free software.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Marty the 3D printed open-source robot for STEM education launches on Indiegogo

        The robots are coming and 3D printing is partially to blame for the impending invasion. Similar in concept but different in execution to the 3D printed WireBeings robot we covered a few months back, Marty the Robot is a being promoted through a new indiegogo campaign that’s hoping to introduce robotics to younger generations.

  • Programming/Development

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Microsoft Updates Office for iPhone with OpenDocument Format Support

      Microsoft has just rolled out a new update for its Office productivity suite on iOS devices, so iPhone and iPad users can now benefit from important additions, such as support for the OpenDocument format.

      All productivity apps included in the Office suite have been updated to version 1.22, which, according to the listings added in the App Store, comes with support for exporting a document to the OpenDocument Text (.ODT) format.

      No other change is included in the release notes, although some other bug fixes and performance improvements are very likely to be part of the update, but the addition of ODT format support for exporting is anyway a pretty important thing.

Leftovers

  • Admins in outcry as Microsoft fix borks Group Policy

    Microsoft’s most recent security update is causing problems with Windows Group Policy settings.

    Users on Reddit and Microsoft support forums are reporting that after the MS16-072 update was installed, changes were made in Group Policy object (GPO) settings that left previously hidden drives and devices accessible.

    “I installed windows patches last night and this morning found out that there were a number of issues with my GPOs,” writes one admin.

    “Example: desktop image would not show up, A, B, C and D drives that were meant to be hidden from users are now showing up.”

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • ‘Pharmaceutical Companies Have Pressured Doctors, Suppressed Evidence’

      In 2014, a class of drugs known as opioids were involved in more than 28,000 deaths, or 61 percent of all drug overdose deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The rate of opioid overdoses has tripled since the year 2000. Recent data show two different but related trends: an increase in so-called illicit opioid overdoses, largely due to heroin, and then this 15-year increase in overdose deaths involving prescription opioid pain relievers. Those drugs, like oxycodone and hydrocodone, or brand names like OxyContin and Vicodin, account for more than 16,000 fatal overdoses each year. The CDC says they’re comfortable using the term “epidemic” to describe the crisis.

  • Security

    • BadTunnel Bug Hijacks Network Traffic, Affects All Windows Versions

      The research of Yang Yu, founder of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, has helped Microsoft patch a severe security issue in its implementation of the NetBIOS protocol that affected all Windows versions ever released.

    • ‘BadTunnel’ Bugs Left Every Microsoft Windows PC Vulnerable For 20 Years [Ed: no paywall/malware in this link]

      Microsoft is today closing off a vulnerability that one Chinese researcher claims has “probably the widest impact in the history of Windows.” Every version of the Microsoft operating system going back to Windows 95 is affected, leaving anyone still running unsupported operating systems, such as XP, in danger of being surreptitiously surveilled.

      According to Yang Yu, founder of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, the bug can be exploited silently with a “near-perfect success rate”, as the problems lie in the design of Windows. The ultimate impact? An attacker can hijack all a target’s web use, granting the hacker “Big Brother power”, as soon as the victim opens a link or plugs in a USB stick, claimed Yu. He received $50,000 from Microsoft’s bug bounty program for uncovering the weakness, which the researcher has dubbed BadTunnel. Microsoft issued a fix today in its Patch Tuesday list of updates.

      “Even security software equipped with active defense mechanisms are not able to detect the attack,” Yu told FORBES. “Of course it is capable of execute malicious code on the target system if required.”

    • Getting Things Wrong From The Beginning…

      GNU/Linux and never had any problems with software the rest of the school year. I’ve been using GNU/Linux ever since and have had no regrets. It’s been the right way to do IT. My wife saw the light a few years ago. She was tired of years of TOOS failing every now and then and needing re-installation. Once her business started using a web application, she had no more need of TOOS, none.

    • Intel x86s hide another CPU that can take over your machine (you can’t audit it)

      Recent Intel x86 processors implement a secret, powerful control mechanism that runs on a separate chip that no one is allowed to audit or examine. When these are eventually compromised, they’ll expose all affected systems to nearly unkillable, undetectable rootkit attacks. I’ve made it my mission to open up this system and make free, open replacements, before it’s too late.

    • Hackers Show How To Hack Anyone’s Facebook Account Just By Knowing Phone Number

      By exploiting the SS7 flaw, a hacker can hack someone’s Facebook account just by knowing the associated phone number. This flaw allows a hacker to divert the OTP code to his/her own phone and use it to access the victim’s Facebook account. The security researchers, who have explained the hack in a video, advise the users to avoid adding their phone numbers to the public services.

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Hacking News: ISIS Twitter Accounts Hacked By Anonymous, ISIS Hacker Faces 25 Years In Prison

      An Anonymous-affiliated hacker has painted numerous ISIS Twitter accounts with gay pride messages and pictures in support of the Orlando shooting victims. On the other hand, a 21-year-old hacker has pleaded guilty to helping ISIS and he is scheduled to get a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Teaching Kids About Genocide

      Public schoolchildren in Michigan are now required to learn about the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide as part of their social studies curriculum, according to a law Governor Rick Snyder signed on Tuesday.

      While most students in Michigan no doubt learn about the Holocaust already, the new law would require teachers in public schools to spend a certain amount of time on these topics. Between eighth and 12th grades, schools must spend a combined six hours on genocide education, specifically the Holocaust—in which, during World War II, Nazi Germany killed 11 million Jews, Roma, and other ethnic minorities—and the Armenian genocide—in which Ottoman Turks killed 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1920. While Turkey denies a genocide took place, 29 countries and 45 U.S. states use the term “genocide” to refer to the killings.

    • Dalai Lama Urges Suu Kyi to Address Buddhist-Muslim Tensions

      Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has a moral responsibility to try to ease tensions between majority Buddhists and minority Rohingya Muslims, her fellow Nobel laureate, the Dalai Lama, said on Monday.

      The Tibetan spiritual leader said he had stressed the issue in meetings with Suu Kyi, who came to power in April in the newly created role of state counsellor in Myanmar’s first democratically elected government in five decades.

      “She already has the Nobel Peace Prize, a Nobel Laureate, so morally she should… make efforts to reduce this tension between the Buddhist community and Muslim community,” he told Reuters in an interview in Washington.

      “I actually told her she should speak more openly.”

      Violence between majority Buddhists and minority Muslims in recent years has cast a cloud over progress with democratic reforms in Myanmar. Rights groups have sharply criticised Suu Kyi‘s reluctance to speak out on the Rohingya‘s plight.

      The Dalai Lama said Suu Kyi, who won worldwide acclaim and a Nobel Peace Prize as a champion of democratic change in the face of military persecution, had responded to his calls by saying that the situation was “really complicated.”

    • Florida Man Falsely Connected by Fox News to Orlando Shooter Receives Death Threats

      Not long after last Sunday’s deadly shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a news story published by Fox News suggested that the shooter, Omar Mateen, had been radicalized by his connection to a local imam.

      Citing anonymous officials, the report claimed that a man named Marcus Dwayne Robertson, also known as Abu Taubah, had been “rounded up,” along with several of his associates, in connection to the attack. The official quoted in the article, described as “a law enforcement source familiar with Robertson’s history of recruiting terrorists and inciting violence,” claimed that Mateen had been a student of Robertson’s online Islamic seminary.

    • Democrats Embrace Secretive, Flawed Terror Watchlist in Fight Against Gun Violence

      Democratic leaders came out in force on Wednesday in favor of a proposal to prohibit Americans who are on federal government terrorist watchlists from purchasing firearms. A group of Democratic senators waged a fillibuster on the Senate floor. And after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump announced that he intends to meet with the powerful National Rifle Association to discuss a similar restriction, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton welcomed him to the cause.

    • Why Did FBI’s Multiple Informants Fail to Catch Omar Mateen in a Sting?

      Normally, when the FBI identifies a Muslim mouthing off about joining ISIS, they throw one or more informants at him, develop his trust, then have him press a button or buy a plane ticket to Syria, which they use to arrest the guy.

      That didn’t happen here. While they did record the conversations between these informants and Mateen, they never got him to do something they could arrest him for.

    • Violence Begets Violence: The Orlando Shootings and the War on Terror

      We can rail against ISIS, hate crimes, terror threats, Islamic radicalization, gun control and national security. We can blame Muslims, lax gun laws, a homophobic culture and a toxic politic environmental. We can even use the Orlando shooting as fodder for this year’s presidential campaigns.

      But until we start addressing the U.S. government’s part in creating, cultivating and abetting domestic and global terrorism – and hold agencies such as the FBI and Defense Department accountable for importing and exporting violence, breeding extremism and generating blowback, which then gets turned loose on an unsuspecting American populace – we’ll be no closer to putting an end to the violence that claimed 50 lives at an Orlando nightclub on June 12, 2016, than we were 15 years ago when nearly 3,000 individuals were killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

    • Bridging Divides of a New Cold War

      As NATO steps up military maneuvers near Russia’s borders and congressmen fume about “Russian aggression,” a delegation of Americans including former U.S. officials is looking for face-to-face ways to encourage peace, writes Ann Wright.

    • Jo Cox shooting: Eyewitnesses describe moment Labour MP shot outside constituency office

      Eyewitneses have described the moment Labour MP Jo Cox was shot outside her consitituency office in Birstall.

      Ms Cox is believed to be a in a “critical condition” and has been airlifted to Leeds General Infirmary. The Labour MP was shot while holding an advice surgery for her constituents.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • WikiLeaks will release new Clinton emails to add to incriminating evidence, Julian Assange says, in “big year ahead”

      Julian Assange, editor-in chief of WikiLeaks, says the whistle-blowing journalism organization will soon be publishing unreleased emails from Hillary Clinton.

      Clinton, the Democratic Party presidential front-runner, has been under criminal investigation by the FBI for using a personal email account on a private server in her home that contained top-secret information.

      Assange doesn’t believe that Clinton will be indicted, but argues that the government has more than enough evidence, in both her emails and in the dealings of the Clinton Foundation, if it were truly committed to doing so.

      “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton,” Assange said. “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”

      Assange made these remarks in an interview with the British ITV network on Sunday. The host noted WikiLeaks has been “taking interest” in Clinton’s use of the private email server.

    • Authorities Arrest an IT Worker From the Panama Papers Law Firm

      When Edward Snowden went public as the NSA whistleblower in 2013, few were surprised that a system administrator was behind the spy agency’s leak. Inside administrators who hold the keys to an organization’s data kingdom are a much greater threat to security than outside hackers.

      Now it appears another technical insider may be connected to a leak at Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the heart of the massive Panama Papers scandal. A computer technician employed by Mossack Fonseca’s Geneva office was arrested this week on suspicion of removing “large amounts of data” from the law firm’s network, according to Swiss newspaper Le Temps. Le Temps reported that the worker was arrested after the law firm filed a complaint accusing him of unauthorized access and breach of trust, and of stealing a large amount of confidential data. Investigators also seized computers in the law firm’s Swiss office.

    • Air Force, Lockheed Martin Combine Forces To ‘Lose’ 100,000 Inspector General Investigations

      The Air Force says there’s no evidence of malicious intent, as far as it can tell. But there’s also no evidence of competence. Why is it that files related to oversight of a government agency have no apparent redundancy? It’s small details like these that show the government generally isn’t much interested in policing itself.

      If anything’s going to be recovered, it’s going to be Lockheed’s job, and it’s already spent a few weeks trying with little success. There may be some files stored locally at bases where investigations originated, but they’re likely to be incomplete.

      While I understand the inherent nature of bureaucracy makes it difficult to build fully-functioning systems that can handle digital migration with any sort of grace, it’s completely incomprehensible that a system containing files collected over the last decade would funnel into a single storage space with no backup. It’s one thing if this was just the Air Force’s fault.

      But this is more Lockheed’s fault — and despite its position as a favored government contractor — it’s also known for its innovation and technical prowess. Neither of those qualities are on display in this public embarrassment. And if it can’t recover the data, it’s pretty much erasing more than a decade’s-worth of government mistakes, abuse, and misconduct. And while no one’s going to say anything remotely close to this out loud, there has to be more than a few people relieved to see black marks on their permanent records suddenly converted to a useless tangle of 1s and 0s.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Indonesia Yet to learn from their mistakes: Haze & Indonesia counterparts

      Singapore cannot step further to enter Indonesia’s legal domain on the issue of forest fires because the two countries do not have an agreement in the matter, said Indonesia’s Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar.

      “The protocol on forest fires in the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act (THPA) is a multilateral agreement, so there was never a bilateral agreement between Indonesia and Singapore, that must be remembered,” Dr Nurbaya said during a breaking of fast session with reporters on Monday (Jun 13).

      She was responding to a question about Singapore’s Transboundary Haze Pollution Act (THPA) which it passed in 2014 to go after companies that start fires or let their concessions burn.

      Indonesia has taken issue with Singapore’s attempts to act against companies responsible for the haze-causing forest fires that choked parts of Indonesia and the region. Jakarta previously objected by lodging a strong protest through its ambassador in Singapore.

      Dr Nurbaya said that she has explained to Singapore’s Foreign Minister that the THPA is controversial, and that it is being continuously discussed on the Asean’s sub-regional ministers level between Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand.

    • Celebrating 10 Years of Ocean Conservation

      The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument, later named Papahānaumokuākea, was established by Presidential Proclamation 8031 on June 15, 2006 using the Antiquities Act. It was created to protect an exceptional array of natural and cultural resources. It encompasses 139,797 square miles of the Pacific Ocean and is home to more than 7,000 marine species, one quarter of which are found only in the Hawaiian Archipelago.

  • Finance

    • TPP’s Corporate Sovereignty Chapter A ‘Threat To Democracy And Regulation’

      When the negotiations for the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada were concluded in September 2014, the text was finally released after years of secrecy. At the time, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put together what remains the best overall analysis of the main text’s 1598 pages, in a series of studies collectively called “Making Sense of CETA.” The same organization has now published a set of analyses looking at key aspects of TPP, entitled “What’s the big deal? Understanding the Trans-Pacific Partnership”.

      They are all worth looking at, but Techdirt readers will probably be particularly interested in one called “Foreign investor protections in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” It’s by Gus Van Harten, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto, Canada, and a well-known commentator on trade law and policy. The first part of his analysis provides a good summary of the world of corporate sovereignty, or investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) as it is more formally known. The later section looks at some new research that provides additional insight into just how bad corporate sovereignty is for those of us who are not insanely rich.

      For example, Van Harten quotes some recent work showing that 90% of ISDS fines against countries went to corporations with over $1 billion in annual revenue or to individuals with over $100 million in net wealth. Similarly, the success rate among the largest multinationals — those with turnovers of at least $10 billion — was 71% in the 48 cases they initiated, compared with a success rate for everyone else of 42%. So any claim that ISDS is equally useful to all companies, including small and medium-sized businesses, is not borne out by the facts.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • More people turning to social media for news: study

      Around half of the people in 26 countries surveyed by Reuters, including Australia, say they use social media as a source of news each week, with one in 10 saying it was their main source.

    • Social media ‘outstrips TV’ as news source for young people

      Of the 18-to-24-year-olds surveyed, 28% cited social media as their main news source, compared with 24% for TV.

    • NPR Retracts False Claim About Terror and Politics, But Doesn’t Tell Listeners the Truth

      As Husseini noted in a response on his own blog (6/15/16), the correction does little to explain the significance of Temple-Raston’s mistake: She had speculated that ISIS might intentionally attack the United States in the run-up to the November elections, possibly in order to help elect Donald Trump, since “they would be able to perhaps get more recruits because of the way he talks about Muslims.” Though noting there was no evidence that this was happening, Temple-Raston claimed that “it’s happened in the past”—which is how she led in to her false statement that “the more conservative candidate ended up winning” in the Spanish election immediately following the Madrid train station bombing.

    • Hillary Wants to Bring Back Bill. She Shouldn’t.

      Why would Hillary threaten workaday Americans with another poke in the eye from her con man spouse?

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Consumer Groups Say AT&T, Comcast Violate Privacy Law By Hoovering Up Cable Box Data Without Full User Consent

      In addition to the $21 billion made annually by cable set top box rental fees, cable companies make untold billions from monetizing the user viewing data these boxes help collect. That captive revenue alone is the driving force behind the pay TV sectors histrionic opposition to the FCC’s plan to open the sector up to third-party hardware competition. Consumer viewing and behavioral data is an immense cash cow, one the cable industry has occasionally threatened to take even further — with patents on tech that lets the cable box literally watch or listen in on American living rooms.

      While things haven’t quite reached that level of total information awareness yet, consumer groups this week filed a formal complaint with both the FTC and FCC arguing that things have gone far enough. Public Knowledge, the Center for Digital Democracy and Consumer Watchdog have filed formal privacy complaints with both the FCC and FTC saying that major cable companies routinely fail to inform consumers about the degree in which their viewing data is collected, stored and monetized via ye olde cable box.

    • An abandoned NSA Cold War spy station in Berlin has been turned into an artists’ playground

      “Go to Teufelsberg,” he replied confidently, before going on to explain that Teufelsberg is an abandoned listening post in West Berlin that the US National Security Agency (NSA) once used to intercept East Berlin and Soviet communications…

    • The Forest for the Trees

      When I first started seeking out other victims, about six months ago, I did not want to formally report any of the stories I had heard from Jake’s victims to the Tor Project or others, for two primary reasons. First, that my main motivation in this was to ensure that these behaviours stopped, and it was not clear to me that any traditional punitive “justice” measures would achieve such. Second, I feared retaliation from Jake, as well as retaliation towards any of the victims whose stories I would divulge. Multiple victims at the time expressed that they didn’t want me to tell The Tor Project, later admitting they feared retaliation to be extremely likely, as well as difficult to combat.

    • A California County Breaks New Ground for Surveillance Transparency

      Last week, a county in California encompassing much of Silicon Valley set a new standard in local surveillance transparency after months of activism by residents and allies from across the bay area. Their efforts, and the policy it enabled, suggest an overlooked strategy in the national battle to curtail unaccountable secret mass surveillance.

      While federal agencies play a controversial role in monitoring Americans, their local counterparts also conduct similar activities—not only in the context of counterterrorism, but even for the sake of routine public safety. While concerns about the militarization of local police have long united Americans across the political spectrum, the metastasis of surveillance platforms across local police departments, county sheriffs, and state highway patrols too often went largely unnoticed until recently.

    • Snowden Disclosure Prompts Backlash in Scotland

      Top government officials in Scotland are under pressure to explain their knowledge of a secretive police surveillance unit that was exposed in documents leaked by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

      On Tuesday, cabinet secretary for justice Michael Matheson was grilled in the country’s parliament about the so-called Scottish Recording Centre and its previously undisclosed involvement in covert surveillance operations.

    • National Security Agency (NSA) Exploring Use Of Biomedical Device Data

      The National Security Agency (NSA) is interested in collecting information from biomedical devices for national security purposes, according to recent statements made by the agency’s deputy director, Richard Ledgett. Under- and unprotected devices in the Internet of Things (IoT), including medical devices, could be both a help and a hindrance to intelligence agencies like NSA, he said, providing them with a wealth of information and potentially exposing them to terrorist surveillance.

    • Why Microsoft Wanted LinkedIn

      LinkedIn, for its part, has been struggling; in February, its stock dropped more than forty per cent in a single day, after it announced a forecast that fell far short of what analysts had expected. The company’s C.E.O., Jeff Weiner, has blamed its recent troubles largely on a broader economic slowdown; LinkedIn’s business model relies on charging employers and employees for premium services, like sending messages to strangers, and when the economy isn’t thriving headhunters and workers tend not to be as willing to pay for connections. But the dominance of Facebook, among other big rivals, has also made it harder for LinkedIn, whose ad business competes with Facebook’s, to survive as an independent company. As Nicholas Lemann wrote in a Profile, last year, of the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, “Silicon Valley is obsessed with ‘scale,’ and LinkedIn is, as yet, insufficiently enormous.” On Monday, Weiner acknowledged as much. “Imagine a world where we’re no longer looking up at Tech Titans such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, and wondering what it would be like to operate at their extraordinary scale—because we’re one of them,” he wrote.

    • FBI Sues To Block Disclosure Of Surveillance Cameras Locations Because It Would Violate The Privacy Of Those Surveilled

      Another injunction request has been filed in response to a Phil Mocek public records request pertaining to Seattle’s power utility. This time, Mocek and MuckRock (through which Mocek’s requests have been routed) are not named as defendants. It’s only the city of Seattle and its public utility (Seattle City Light) being named as defendants, but Mocek’s public records request is specified in the federal court filing [PDF]. (h/t Mike Scarcella)

      This time, the plaintiff isn’t a multinational corporation. It’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The nexus for the FBI’s attempt to block further disclosures to Mocek (and other requesters like local new station KIRO) is its remora-esque relationship with Seattle’s public utility. After a long paragraph utilizing terms like “tradecraft,” “concealments,” and “advanced electronic surveillance,” we finally get to the real reason the FBI wants the court to keep the city of Seattle from handing out any more public utility documents to requesters.

    • House eyes new chance to reform surveillance
    • House to Vote on Curbing NSA Surveillance in Wake of Orlando
    • Privacy Advocates Aim to Use Defense Spending Bill to Protect Encryption
    • House Intel Boss, Rep. Devin Nunes, Lying To Congress About Attempt To Stop Encryption Backdoors
    • Congressman Cites Orlando Tragedy as Reason to Fight Surveillance Reform

      The head of the House Intelligence Committee is hand-delivering a letter to colleagues on Capitol Hill, demanding they not restrict the FBI’s surveillance power — and citing the recent mass shooting in Orlando as justification. The letter opposes a proposed amendment that would put an end to FBI “backdoor” searches of an NSA database of foreign intelligence without judicial oversight.

      “The national security threats to the United States and its allies are greater today than at any point since 9/11. To keep Americans safe, our intelligence community needs to fully employ every tool available to it,” Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., wrote in the letter obtained by The Intercept, cosigned with Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga.

    • Government Surveillance Can’t Prevent Attacks Like Orlando. We Shouldn’t Expand It Now.

      There’s much that’s depressingly familiar about the news coming out of Orlando, where Omar Mateen committed the worst mass shooting of its kind in U.S. history: the heartbreaking images and stories of survivors and the relatives of those gunned down; the almost immediate offering of empty platitudes by politicians conspiring to do nothing about yet another bloodbath carried out with a high-powered weapon; the just-as-immediate resort to naked bigotry by the ignorant and the unscrupulous; the eagerness to declare the shooter in some way associated with foreign terror threats before the bodies of the dead are cold.

    • Inside the GCHQ doughnut, code breakers face up to our encrypted future [Ed: puff piece.]

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • ‘Ferguson Effect’ is a plausible reason for spike in violent US crime, study says [Trevor Timm: "If the police are too afraid to do their job due to transparency and public scrutiny, isn't that the police's fault?"]

      A new justice department-funded study concludes that a version of the so-called “Ferguson Effect” is a “plausible” explanation for the spike in violent crime seen in most of the country’s largest cities in 2015, but cautions that more research is still needed.

      The study, released by the National Institute of Justice on Wednesday, suggests three possible drivers for the more than 16% spike in homicide from 2014 to 2015 in 56 of the nation’s largest cities. But based on the timing of the increase, University of Missouri St Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld concluded, there is “stronger support” for some version of the Ferguson Effect hypothesis than its alternatives.

    • Dozens of news orgs demand DOJ release its secret rules for targeting journalists with secret National Security Letters

      Freedom of the Press Foundation recently filed a huge brief in the organization’s case demanding that the Justice Department release its secret rules for targeting journalists with National Security Letters. And in related news, a coalition of 37 news organizations – including the New York Times, The Associated Press, USA Today, Buzzfeed, and tons more – filed an amicus brief in support of the Freedom of the Press Foundation case, demanding that the Department of Justice do the same.

    • Dozens of news orgs demand DOJ release its secret rules for targeting journalists with National Security Letters

      A coalition of thirty-seven of news organizations—including the New York Times, the Associated Press, NPR, USA Today, and Buzzfeed—filed a legal brief over the weekend in support of Freedom of the Press Foundation’s case demanding that the Justice Department release its secret rules for targeting journalists with National Security Letters (NSLs).

    • CIA Files Show Prisoner Waterboarded 83 Times Would Have Cooperated Before Torture

      A cache of declassified documents has revealed new details about the CIA’s torture program. Among other findings, the records show a prisoner who was waterboarded 83 times was likely willing to cooperate with interrogators before the torture. The account from medical personnel who helped with the first waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah deals a major blow to the CIA’s insistence it gained crucial information through torture.

    • CIA Releases New and Gruesome Details on Its Torture Program

      The CIA released 50 new documents yesterday relating to its post-9/11 torture and rendition program. Despite the many disclosures that have come in the course of our decade-long fight to reveal the details of the program, the new revelations still have the capacity to shock.

    • New CIA Documents Reveal More Horrors of President Bush’s Torture Program

      The CIA on Tuesday released dozens of documents detailing its torture and rendition program under the Bush administration, from the horrific treatment of detainees to the agency’s 2002 plan to ask the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) not to prosecute interrogators.

      The heavily redacted trove of more than 50 documents was published in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the ACLU last year, which sought records referenced in the U.S. Senate’s damning report on the CIA’s program—commonly referred to as the torture report—released in December 2014.

    • New York Lawmakers Race to Toughen Oversight of Nurses and Other Professionals

      Spurred by concerns about problem nurses, New York lawmakers are racing to pass legislation to toughen oversight of more than 50 types of licensed professionals in the state.

      Earlier this month, Senate and Assembly committees unanimously passed bills that would allow the state Education Department to suspend licenses more swiftly and compel more reporting of criminal convictions and misconduct. A ProPublica investigation published in April found New York lagged behind other states in these regards, citing examples of nurses who retained their licenses even after being charged with or convicted of violent crimes.

    • It’s Not Me, It’s You: Tips for Strong Relationships With Sources

      Later this week, many of the nation’s best investigative journalists will be gathering in New Orleans for the annual Investigative Reporters & Editors conference. They’ll swap ideas, learn new skills and hopefully return to their hometowns to dig with renewed fervor. Full disclosure: I serve on the board of IRE, so can be totally unbiased in saying that I think the organization is the best resource in the universe for investigative reporters.

    • British Politics Descends Into Nativism and Farce, and Trump Hasn’t Even Arrived Yet

      With just over a week to go before Britons vote on whether or not to leave the European Union, the campaign for “independence” from the EU has turned farcical and deeply nasty, with nationalists relying heavily on anti-immigrant hysteria and racism to make their case.

      And it turns out that Donald Trump has chosen next Friday, June 24 — the day the referendum votes will be counted — to visit his mother’s ancestral homeland, Scotland. Trump’s avowed purpose is to celebrate the reopening of a golf resort he owns there, but the timing suggests he may be hoping to be on hand to cheer the success of a reactionary political movement based on the same sort of appeals to nativism and xenophobia that have served him so well in America.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Safari 10 dumps Flash, Java, Silverlight, QuickTime in the trash

      Apple has taken its turn at the hammer, and added its own i-Nail to the coffin of Flash.

      Over at the Webkit blog, Ricky Mondello of the Safari team writes that Safari 10, due in the northern fall, will “behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed”.

      Instead, it will try to default to HTML5 for content like video, and Safari will not ship with an exception list. If a site only offers Flash, the user will have to explicitly switch it on for that site and add it to their own exceptio

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Citigroup Sues AT&T For Saying ‘Thanks’ To Customers

        Whenver we discuss a particularly egregious case of trademark abuse, usually centered around the trademarking of some insanely common word or phrase, there’s always at least one instance of “that joke” in the comments. You know the joke I’m talking about: well, I’ll just trademark X and sue everyone, where X=super-common word or phrase. For example: “I’ll just trademark “trademark” and sue anyone who uses a trademark!”, or, “I’ll just trademark “the” and sue everyone who uses it!” These jokes play on the common problem of generic terms being granted trademarks, but of course they are examples so ridiculous that it couldn’t happen for those specific words and terms. Still, to our lovely commenters, we say, “Thank you.”

      • Citigroup trademarks “THANKYOU” and sues AT&T for thanking clients

        Who knew? Banking giant Citigroup has trademarked “THANKYOU” and is now suing technology giant AT&T for how it says thanks to its own loyal customers. This is “unlawful conduct” amounting to wanton trademark infringement, Citigroup claims in its federal lawsuit.

        Here is a copy (PDF) of the trademark certificates and trademark applications connected to what Citigroup is calling its “THANKYOU Marks.”

    • Copyrights

      • ISP Association Nominates Copyright Troll As ‘Internet Villain’

        The UK’s trade association for providers of Internet services have nominated a notorious copyright troll for the much coveted title of “Internet Villain of the Year”. ISPA UK, which counts the major ISPs and Google as members, shortlisted TCYK LLC for its “speculative invoicing” campaign against Internet account holders.

      • EFF, Public Citizen Enter Legal Battle That Started With Defamation But Is Somehow Now All About Copyright

        Copyright is supposed to be a limited-use protection for creative works. The “limited” part went away with endless term extensions and auto-copyright for any creation attached to a “fixed medium.” These days, copyright is the magical cure-all that doesn’t actually cure anything. It’s a weapon to be wielded dishonestly and inelegantly against the ignorant, in hopes of limiting speech to only what IP abusers like.

06.15.16

Benoît Battistelli Apparently Breaks the Rules Again and Says That Transparent Trial is Unlawful, Threatens Those Involved

Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Battistelli seems to have had another tantrum/temper attack which he’s already quite infamous for

Battistelli versus EBoA

Summary: The effort to make the hearing (or ‘trial’) secretive backfires on Battistelli as the media (that which Battistelli isn’t paying or manipulating with PR agencies he spends millions of Euros on) catches up and reports more widely the absurdity of this whole situation

We have already published numerous articles about the so-called ‘trial’ against a judge who said the truth about the EPO [1, 2, 3, 4]. The more one knows about it, the more infuriating it can become (it seems as though the judge is being defamed in the media, probably with direct involvement from Team Battistelli and maybe FTI Consulting as well).

As of midnight (a few hours ago), The Register has this article (screenshot above) which summarises some of the latest developments (but not all). To quote:

President of the European Patent Office (EPO), Benoit Battistelli, has been caught threatening an independent appeals board looking into the case of a judge he summarily dismissed.

In an extraordinary turn of events in Munich this week, a planned public hearing of the organization’s “Enlarged Board of Appeal” was abandoned after it said it had received a “threatening letter” demanding that the hearing be held in private.

The board did not say who the letter was from or precisely what threats it contained, but several sources have confirmed it was sent by Battistelli, and in it he warned the appeal board that holding its hearing in public was “unlawful.”

It is not known what Battistelli threatened to do if the board continued with its plan to hold the meeting in public, but under recent reform plans that his office has drawn up, the EPO president has introduced a range of measures that would effectively give him the right to hire and fire the president of the – supposedly independent – Board of Appeals.

According to those familiar with events, the appeal board responded to the letter by pointedly asking the chair of the EPO’s Administrative Council whether he agreed with the letter’s contents.

According to a brief public statement made just before the appeal board shut down its meeting, the chair refused to disown its contents. In response, the appeal board refused to continue with its disciplinary proceedings.

Someone also leaked to us SUEPO’s report. Since we already saw the original and can confirm it is the same, including the typos (like “treats” instead of “threats”), we might as well paste the comment below and add the formatting to it:

Further details, according to an internal post of SUEPO:

15/06/2016

Enlarged Board of Appeal dismisses the case against the DG3 member amid treats by the EPO President Battistelli

Newsflash

Public oral proceedings before the Enlarged Board of Appeal (“the Enlarged Board”) were scheduled to start yesterday, 14 June, at 9.00h, to decide on the request for removal from office of a member of the Boards of Appeal by the Administrative Council (Article 23(1) EPC). The Administration required members of the public to enrol on a list with their name and the information whether they were EPO employees or external to the Office. About 25 badges allowing entry to room 109 were then distributed essentially according to the order of the list.

The hearing did not start as scheduled. During most of the day a conference in camera (i.e. not the hearing as such) took place. The discussion apparently centred around a letter sent a few days ago by the President of the Office to the Enlarged Board. Essentially, it appears that the President condemned the decision to make the hearing public as “unlawful” and affecting the proper functioning of the Office. The exact content of the letter is, however, unknown.

The Enlarged Board apparently perceived the letter as a threat and asked the Chairman of the Council whether the Council endorsed – or not – the position taken by the President. Apparently the EBA did not receive a clear and/or reassuring answer.

The Chair only officially opened the hearing at about 17:15h. In the presence of the public, a decision along the following lines was announced (note: this is not verbatim):

The EBA received a letter from an authority which is not a party to the proceedings and which they perceive as a threat. The AC, as the disciplinary and appointing authority of the members, was asked whether it endorsed that letter. The Chairman of the AC did not distance himself from the letter. Under these circumstances, the Board cannot continue the proceedings and consequently does not propose to remove the respondent from office.

After the above announcement the Chair requested the public to leave the room.

SUEPO central

One person wrote about the typo, which is also in the original:

How nice of the President to have distributed treats to staff.
Jolly ungrateful of the EBA to have complained about this.

Here is a more serious comment:

Presumably, such a letter passed over the desk of the head of the legal division. It beggars belief that he didn’t consider the ramifications this would have on the case being heard. Having received such a communication seeking to influence the decision of the EBoA members, the members could have each declared themselves unable to take part in accordance with A.24(2) EPC but instead took the pragmatic decision to end the proceedings. Well done!

“Here [is] a further summary of the recent events,” says this commenter, linking to an article of Mathieu Klos from Juve (quite a few people have spotted this report by now, but we need an English translation).

The thing about this judge is, Battistelli tried to get rid of him repeatedly, i.e. many times, over a long of period of time (causing stress to the judge whose wife was apparently somewhat involved too — not the first time we heard of a spouse being subjected to abuse by proxy, probably by Team Battistelli), costing the Office reputation, money, time, and productivity.

Here are some tidbits from the article:

http://www.juve.de/nachrichten/namenundnachrichten/2016/06/eklat-am-epa-battistelli-greift-in-amtsenthebungsverfahren-ein

(link to a Google translation)

Ugly: the Court had requested the testimony of 3 witnesses from the Investigative Unit, but the President did not authorize them to depose because they could reveal how the computers were monitored, while the has always maintained that proper rules were followed …

A broader overview of this article was as follows:

The apparent source of the Juve article is the accused BoA member’s lawyer, Senay Okyay. This lends it some authority.

But where is Battistelli’s threat? From the other reports here, I would have assumed it was explicit: “If you hold these proceedings in public, then I will do [something bad]“.

But according to Juve, Frau Okyay merely reports that “The President described a public hearing as unlawful by the statutes of the Office.”

Certainly, it was both wrong and stupid for Battistelli to attempt to interfere directly like this. The right people to argue this issue were the Admin Council’s representatives (who are of course employed by Battistelli). Perhaps they had already tried and lost.

But in different circumstances, I think an appeal board or a national court would just have ignored such an intervention, perhaps rebuffing it with some trenchant comments. And then they would have continued to make an independent decision about whether to hold the proceedings in public.

So what this incident underlines is the fragile state of relations between the Boards of Appeal and Battistelli. Because of all the very real threats that Battistelli actually has made to the Boards (unwelcome reforms, removal to Berlin or Vienna), they are ultra sensitive.

The result is that the Enlarged Board feels threatened by a letter which, in different circumstances, they might just have ignored. They fear how Battistelli might retaliate, even if he makes no explicit threat.

The independence of the Boards of Appeal is still as big an issue as it ever was.

Questions remain, however, about whether it all ended and whether the judge will get his job back (it might be impossible as long as Battistelli remains in Office, simply because he would not reconcile). To quote a comment about this:

I wonder whether the Enlarged Board really closed the case, by taking a final decision on the merits. All reports are a bit vague on this point. If a decision had been taken, it would probably have been announced with the public present. It would make sense to simply put the whole procedure on hold, since every decision would be tainted by interference in the independence.

This approach would leave the current request from the Council in pending, with the procedure suspended. The nice side effect is that any new request – #4 according to my count – would not be admissible, due to the procedure still pending.

Another person wondered: “Did Juv[e] not also report that the President refused to allow witnesses from the EPO to be heard? Hardly a threat admittedly, but certainly interference.”

“It is rather revealing that Battistelli cannot stand the idea that his defamation of a judge will become evident and lay bare for all to see; maybe there’s also an element of penis envy because the judge is far more qualified than Battistelli and so are his colleagues at the board.”Battistelli cannot recognise a fair trial because it’s not his area. He is not a scientist and not a judge either. The accused judge is both. It is rather revealing that Battistelli cannot stand the idea that his defamation of a judge will become evident and lay bare for all to see; maybe there’s also an element of penis envy because the judge is far more qualified than Battistelli and so are his colleagues at the board. They’re just a lot more modest and professional. Battistelli is coming to grips with his inability to get his outlandish desires fulfilled (something he rarely encounters these days), whereupon he just acts like a spoiled brat instead. It’s self-discrediting.

What next for Battistelli? Buying some more media contracts and enhanced PR cooperations? How can the public be distracted/taken away from all that negative publicity now that it’s in the mainstream media? EIA2016 is already old news and millions of Euros down the toilet. This was just a truly stupid and spurious festival whose real purpose was to glorify or launder the reputation of a serial human right abuser, whom a retired high-level judge spoke about to Juve, making a comparison to torture sites and repeatedly shaming Battistelli (with his own reputation as a famous judge on the line).

At this stage, Battistelli would be wise to step down like Ciaran McGinley. He might lose his job (or face immense pressure) later this month anyway. █

Update: As of moments ago, someone posted an excellent explanation of why what Battistelli had done is totally unacceptable. To quote it in full:

The President described a public hearing as unlawful by the statutes of the Office.

Yes, of course: the narrative now is “The President only wanted to help and they overreacted”.

Please, read again Art 23(1) EPC:
(9) Unless and to the extent that the Enlarged Board decides otherwise, the proceedings shall not be public and shall be confidential.

Clearly, the Enlarged Board had decided otherwise, and in general they seem to be well-versed in the procedure – contrary to the President who has previously attempted to convince the AC to dismiss the member of the BoA without even passing through the EBoA, as the rules require.
If the Enlarged Board had decided otherwise, the President should have no say in that.

I think an appeal board or a national court would just have ignored such an intervention

They probably would, with the difference that:
1) Angela Merkel would never write a letter to some judges to tell them how to proceed:
2) the proceedings in a national court are public. Not so at the EPO, where Secret Trials are held on the pretense of confidentiality.

You did not refer to the fact that the President barred the witnesses from the Stasi – ehm, Investigative Unit, to appear at the proceedings.

Let me explain you why.

When the computers in the public – public – area of the Office were put under control, there was no request to the Data Protection Officer. The request was made only after the guy was caught doing whatever he was doing.

From the article Welcome to EPOnia, the strange land of European patents that is outside the law:

A strange letter from the head of the EPO’s Investigative Unit to the organisation’s internal data protection officer asked whether the spying described above “would have been authorised”—implying the request was being made after the fact. Also curious is the handwritten authorisation on the document, which is dated December 3, 2014—exactly when the Board of Appeals member was suspended for “alleged dissemination of material which was, as was also alleged, defamatory.”

Which means that the data collected from the public computers were obtained illegally. They cannot be used.

(Btw, Techrights has still a copy of the request to the DPO with the date clearly visible.)

Had the witnesses of the IU confirmed this, in a public proceedings, the case would have crumbled. So, the President barred them because their deposition could have helped the defendant.

To conclude, the president is trying to interfere with the proper administration of justice: did the Enlarged Board really overreact?

There is something rather awkward about the following comment because it seems to give Battistelli a carte blanche and it also dismisses the claim (which we heard from several sources) about a “threat”. The comment says:

The President’s refusal to allow EPO witnesses to be heard is neither a threat nor interference. However, it does weaken the case against the accused BoA member.

Perhaps requesting that the oral proceedings be public (guessing that the President would then withhold the witnesses) was a clever tactic by Frau Okyay?

Regarding the first line/sentence, it seems to have gone far beyond “refusal to allow EPO witnesses,” but we don’t know enough because it’s all shrouded in secrecy — a secrecy induced by Battistelli himself (no wonder).

As for the second paragraph (above), the rules are very clear about this and Battistelli disregards the rules.

Benoît Battistelli’s Façade Continues: Exploiting Terror Attacks Again, Throwing Expensive Parties at the EPO’s Expense, Crushing More Workers’ Rights

Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 9:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Like watching a flower being squashed to perfume oneself

A militant EPO
The Office — much like Paris — is better known as a militaristic operation now, not an examination institution

Summary: Another depressing look at how Battistelli manages the EPO, once a meritorious patent office which has become a laughing stock not only among EPO employees but also among the stakeholders who are the source of the EPO’s income

Benoît Battistelli is embarrassment to the EPO. He does to the image of the EPO and the European Union what Blatter did to the reputation of FIFA and UEFA.

Benoît Battistelli is once again (as in many times in the past year) exploiting terror attacks (warning: epo.org link) to pretend that he’s anything other than a thug, or a bully who terrorises staff, terrorises lawyers, terrorises delegates, and even terrorises bloggers. What a total hypocrite. This is a typical routine of his, after every major terror attack (we covered other such examples in the past). This helps boost/feed the fictitious narrative of urgent need for 6 bodyguards [1, 2, 3] and makes it seem like he’s the “defensive” party. What next? Will he be strutting around with a plaster across his face like Blatter did? Cosby too used such strategies to garner sympathy. Are these blog posts written with advice from FTI Consulting? Maybe ghostwritten by the PR team? These have been written since the initial FTI Consulting deal. Is Battistelli sitting up there in his office near the Isar waiting for the next terror attack so that he can write blog posts and ‘private’ letters (opportunistically published to the whole world), painting him as sympathetic and caring? The latest is being sent to the head of the USPTO, a terrible patent system with no real quality control and a lot of patent trolls (i.e. what Battistelli strives for with the UPC). There is hardly any connection between her and the victims. She probably lived in the West Coast and is of East Asian decent, whereas the attack happened in the (South) East Coat and mostly killed Latinos. But never mind all that; terror attacks are always convenient excuses for policy-pushing (gun control, foreign policy etc.), especially for politicians like Battistelli. He’s not a scientist, he's a politician, which in itself is a problem. This could disqualify him if not rationalise impeachment.

“But never mind all that; terror attacks are always convenient excuses for policy-pushing (gun control, foreign policy etc.), especially for politicians like Battistelli. He’s not a scientist, he’s a politician, which in itself is a problem.”Speaking of the low patent quality at the USPTO, it seems evident that Battistelli — whether inadvertently or not — emulates the same thing (including the patent trolls). Meldrew wrote today that: “There is a bouncing ball that might be spun in different ways.” Meldrew alluded to number of patent grants, which help demonstrate that Battistelli killed patent quality at the EPO; how long will it take for applicants to realise this and for value of existing (and future) patents to be accordingly/appropriately depreciated? In his/her blog, Meldrew wrote: “Applying some rough and ready guesswork, one can guess a total number of patents granted in 2016 as in the region 88,000 to 102,000 representing an increase of 29-49% in the number of grants over 2015.”

Yes, how ‘natural’. Unless the industry as a whole suddenly experienced a 29-49% growth in ‘innovation’…

That’s ENA’s neo-liberalism ‘at work’, racing to the bottom to help portray the businessman (Battistelli) as a king of all trades, master of jacks, and holder of no scientific qualifications. Meldrew asked: “What is happening in the background that explains this sudden increase?”

Well, recall the push to grant quickly, even at the expense of examination quality. Also recall the apparent fudging of numbers [1, 2, 3]. Another person explained this as follows:

Meldrew,
A partial explanation… Grants actually reflect work done 7-8 months previously as the decision to grant is based on the intention to grant delayed by time for translation and any amendments. Thus the current ‘surge’ is actually a surge taking place in early 2015.
That relates to a time when Early Certainty From Search started and examiners dossier management system prioritised search over examination. With one exception! Grants could be made immediately even if they were low ranked and the system identified files which were possibly ready for grant based on the info supplied for ESOP or WOISA. In order to reach targets examiners thus took this option and, in effect, non-grantable files became secondary at best. Priority was search and grant. Examination had to wait for search deadlines (priority 1) to be met. This may change soon so the apparent surge may not continue. Indeed, at some point examiners will have to do the examinations as priorities will change. But in the meantime the examination work is skewed to grant rather than further communications, even if the applicant has amended and feels it is ready for grant the examiner must deal with highly ranked files – legal search deadlines etc. – first and is not allowed to choose lower files.

Meanwhile, the EPO’s Twitter account (i.e. PR people) is still milking the staged events and linking to puff pieces like this one. Applicants’ money is apparently being wasted by the millions on a silly festival rather than a thorough/comprehensive/exhaustive patent search (for prior art). Cutting corners to improve the bottom line in the short term seems like ENA ideology. If Battistelli manages to survive until the end of his term, why worry about the mess he leaves behind him? It’s like a 4- or 8-year presidential cycle, where one typically leaves the bubble for successors to grapple with as it implodes.

“Grossenbacher has earned quite a negative reputation, for reasons we named here before. Some suspect he is also the reason Brimelow stepped down and made room for Battistelli.”EPO and Battistelli are busy wasting a lot of money on a lobbying event, dressed up as an award ceremony or science. Here is Battistelli writing about his lobbying event (warning: epo.org link) which took place one week ago. This event, which he spent millions of Euros (EPO budget) on, will “continue to assert itself as the ‘Nobel prize’ of innovation,” according to Battistelli’s blog post. So he thinks he’s Nobel again, having said something to that effect at the event as well (we covered this at the time). Megalomania at work?

Speaking of megalomania, Battistelli must be so intolerant toward quality control at the EPO that he is still working towards demolition of appeal boards (like court of appeals). Based on today’s legal news [1, 2], a fortnight from now the boards may be further marginalised. “Early Certainty,” the EPO labeled it today (euphemisms galore), “new opposition procedure from 1 July.”

We have already mentioned it here the other day, as it’s clearly an attack on appeal rights and hence on the boards. Patent quality would be severely damaged. That was a cornerstone of the EPO and it was how the high costs (fees) were justified for decades. These fees are presently being wasted by Battistelli, who is buying the media to control the message (improve an image) rather than improve the Office. To the tune of millions of Euros, Battistelli flushes money down the toilet because the image of the EPO remains tarnished.

Many comments appeared today at IP Kat and we wish to quote some relevant ones. At the EPO, according to one person, Roland Grossenbacher (who is Swiss like Blatter and the person who started the Investigative Unit) “must be viewing the present mayhem with a certain satisfaction.”

Grossenbacher has earned quite a negative reputation, for reasons we named here before. Some suspect he is also the reason Brimelow stepped down and made room for Battistelli. To quote the comment in full:

Personally, I have always seen the dead hand of Eminence Grise Roland Grossenbacher (or ‘Roland’ as BB warmly refers to him in meetings of the AC) in all this. He has led the hawkish element in the AC ever since he became head of the Swiss delegation and if there is any concertation involved in the various measures introduced by the BB regime, he is at least the arranger, if not the bandmaster. This is not to say BB is his creature: I think Benoît is now beyond anyone’s control. But Roland must be viewing the present mayhem with a certain satisfaction.

As for the third leg of the milking stool, I suspect that Jesper thought he was playing as an equal with the big lads, but probably now realises that the game has got too rough for him. Certainly, he does not seem to be exercising any leadership in the AC, for someone who is supposed to be its chairman.

“If an ordinary CEO had done [what Battistelli did] in the UK,” one person commenter, “he would have committed a criminal offence” (laws don’t apply at Eponia, Battistelli makes them up and changes them whenever he pleases).

Here again is the comment in full:

Truly astonishing. If it can be proven that there was a “threatening” letter, then it is hard to see how that could amount to anything other than an attempt to pervert the course of justice. If an ordinary CEO had done this in the UK, he would have committed a criminal offence that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

So does that mean we are now in the situation where it is unarguable that the EPO is being run by a person who, under national law, could fairly be described as a criminal?

Regardless of the semantics, the AC needs to act now, even if they have arguably been complicit in bringing this situation about. On this occasion, the president has unarguably overstepped the mark (and in a serious way). Given that the president has also taken other actions that are directly contrary to instructions given to him by the AC, then what choice does the Council have but to give him his marching orders? There would appear to be no options for “finessing” this situation so that business can carry on as normal.

I shall finish with a thought experiment. Imagine you are BB. Also imagine that there is some reason why it is essential to your survival that you keep from the public certain details pertaining to the investigations into the Board of Appeal member that you are trying to get rid of. Then what, in this imaginary situation, would you do if the Enlarged Board decided to make the dismissal hearing open to the public? Apart from making it as difficult as possible for the public to attend, you would perhaps try to engineer a situation where the Enlarged Board would be forced to close the hearing without having discussed the substance of the case (and hence without revealing to the public the material that could really damage you).

This kind of tactic would be akin to ensuring that your claims go down for added matter upon appeal, just in order that you do not receive a public (and final) pronouncement of unpatentability on a substantive ground such as novelty or inventive step.

The observable facts appear to fit the theory pretty well. However, could BB and his team be that devious? If so, just how explosive / damaging is the information that such tactics are aimed at suppressing?

The EPO still threatens people using their pensions, which is why some people suspect Ciaran McGinley decided to retire now (exceptionally early). Here is one new comment about it:

Here is an example of a restrictive covenant which was upheld by the Danish Courts:

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2016/541.html

(see §43 onwards)

Here, compensation of 50% of final salary was paid for a 12 month covenant, with the prohibited acts restricted fairly narrowly. While there may be good reasons for the EPO to restrict certain acts after employment at the EPO ends, it is reasonable for the restrictions to be narrowly defined such they demonstrably protect the interests of the office rather than being open ended subject to the whims of the management of the day.

“They’re not acquired rights,” another person added, “they are contractual terms. And that was the intention when new examiners signed the contract. But bona fide is not in the legal lexicon of the EPO, it seems.”

Finally, here is the latest comment on this thread:

Staff Regulations of the European Union Article 16: An official shall, after leaving the service, continue to be bound by the duty to behave with integrity and discretion as regards the acceptance of certain appointments or benefits. Officials intending to engage in an occupational activity, whether gainful or not, within two years of leaving the service shall inform their institution thereof. If that activity is related to the work carried out by the official during the last three years of service and could lead to a conflict with the legitimate interests of the institution, the Appointing Authority may, having regard to the interests of the service, either forbid him from undertaking it or give its approval subject to any conditions it thinks fit. The institution shall, after consulting the Joint Committee, notify its decision within 30 working days of being so informed. If no such notification has been made by the end of that period, this shall be deemed to constitute implicit acceptance.

Looks very much like the new service regulations article 19. Nevertheless there are some differences which can be problematic.

Based on the type of comments we have been seeing today, Battistelli’s EPO has an appalling reputation, not just among EPO staff but also externally. Patent stakeholders (such as attorneys) increasingly view the EPO in a negative light. Does Battistelli care? And if so, what would he do? Dump several more millions of Euros (of applicants’ money) on media and PR companies? The EPO seems to have gotten itself a Sarkozy in charge, with or without a Bygmalion affair. █

EPO Crisis: What If There Was an Administrative Council Meeting and Nobody Came?

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Delegates’ no-show protest?

Empty Administrative Council meeting

Summary: A reader lays out one possible approach for national protests that can help put an end to the Battistelli era at the European Patent Office (EPO)

GIVEN THE abundant evidence of gross abuses by EPO management, any national delegate would have to be blind, dishonest, or even corruptible to pretend that everything is fine, even when Board 28 admits it's a disaster.

One of our readers tried to come up with a plan. How can one bypass Battistelli's timely gifts and protest without facing the severe consequences from the Napoleonic Nobel wannabe.

“Judging by what I read from the recent Techrights posts,” said this reader, “chances are high that Bastardelli [sic] will have his ass saved by a bunch of votes bought from minor countries. Like this, I guess also those countries who oppose him will save their faces by stating they voted against but kept actually enjoying the present regime with him still on the saddle.”

“…I guess also those countries who oppose him will save their faces by stating they voted against but kept actually enjoying the present regime with him still on the saddle.”
      –AnonymousWe have actually heard things along those lines (or to that effect) for quite some time. Battistelli is playing games with other people’s money. He continues to use money as a carrot-and-stick utility.

“They will simply say that there is nothing else they could do,” our reader added, alluding to what s/he called “minor countries.”

The reader continued: “Well, actually there is something, and it is quite something, major Countries could do: to withdraw their delegates in protest from the Council and from the Convention altogether.

“I know this is a strong step, but just the threat of it would be effective: it would devoid of legitimation the very existence of the AC and of the European Patent Convention. In fact, it seems to me that in case Battistelli stays on, this would be the only way to press on the whole AC and on Kongstad to take responsibility, for an intolerable situation that should no longer exist. It would also turn to be of major impact for the public, FIFA style.

“Unless, of course, major court cases explode nationally, but that would take more time and may still not happen at all: national Courts would still need major reasons for wanting to pick up their responsibilities in EPO related issues, pretending to respect an immunity that should not actually exist for criminal charges.

“It would also turn to be of major impact for the public, FIFA style.”
      –Anonymous“To withdraw a delegation from the AC would be equivalent to the closure of diplomatic relations between countries, the step previous military hostilities… I guess this would be the only way left that “virtuous” Countries could play to limit and eventually reverse the power bought by Battistelli in the AC and possibly to start a tide against Battistelli.”

Such a strategy would only be truly effective if several major delegations participated in it at the same time, so coordination may be needed.

“Maybe we should make a lobby in sync to every delegation for that,” our reader suggested, “I considered that for my own delegation, but as a single individual issue, that would never be taken seriously. Now issues are far from being individual ones. And if more countries dare this threat…”

“This theatre should have been stopped already a long time ago,” one new comment in IP Kat said earlier today. Here is the full comment:

After a few years following the development within the EPO under Battistell(BB) as President and Jesper Kongstad (JK) as chairman of the Administrative Council (AC) I come to the conclusion that only the representatives of the big countries in the AC (NL,DE,GB,FR,CH,IT,SP) can stop this disasterous development by demanding very strongly a diplomatic conference as forseen in the EPC. BB and JK are big friends. It is the tactics of this ¨team¨ BB and the AC with chief JK and with many BB-friends in the group of representatives of the small countries, to demand from BB as AC things to do and not do and when BB is doing nothing the AC is also doing nothing. This theatre should have been stopped already a long time ago.

This seems to be a strategy supported by quite a few people. Here are the contact details of all the delegates. Maybe our readers can explain to them this strategy and put an end to Battistelli’s coup (or reign of terror, even over delegates whom he reportedly threatens/bullies). █

EPO Brain Drain Goes All the Way to the Top as Head of Patent Administration Abruptly Resigns

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

A pattern of resignations continues [1, 2, 3, 4] as Ciaran McGinley too will fall this fall (having just announced intent of resignation or retirement intent far too early in his career)

A photo from EPO Vienna

Summary: People who are allegedly responsible for the unprecedented lawlessness at the EPO are leaving again, perhaps realising what’s next to come and shrewdly trying to dodge it based on insider information which they possess

IN OUR previous post we showed how SUEPO leaders and staff representatives are being abused inside the IU (EPO Investigative Unit). They’re gagged, so not much is known about what goes on inside. No wonder there are strikes this year. The EPO has become an embarrassing institution to work for, based on what EPO workers sometimes tell us. It wasn’t always like that. The EPO used to have relatively good reputation (we had an amicable attitude towards the EPO back in the Brimelow days), not just based on EPO mouthpieces.

“The EPO has become an embarrassing institution to work for, based on what EPO workers sometimes tell us.”Based on the latest news, Board 28 was right to say there's a "crisis" at the EPO. Now, only a few months later, the top managers have begun quitting their jobs. Vacuum remains behind them, compromising the quality of operations (not just as measured by number of approved applications but actual patent quality). We are growing rather concerned that it puts in jeopardy the entire organisation (hence everybody’s jobs, including delegates’).

When one sees his or her employees committing suicide under the Battistelli regime it’s not too shocking to see high-level resignations. If Battistelli does not step down pretty soon, signaling change and hope (to use the Obama buzzwords), a lot of other managers (even those in Battistelli’s circle but especially good, moral, respected ones) will vanish. This will compromise the entire Office, so the Organisation must act fast and decisively. This might also save lives (recall this letter from Ciaran McGinley about the fourth suicide).

Several different sources told us about the latest resignation. Basically, the head of Patent Administration (where many of the suicides happened at the EPO) has just unexpectedly resigned. This was known about yesterday, but now the word is circulating more widely. “I got the news yesterday lunchtime,” told us one person, “however I wasn’t allowed to share” the information, “but since it’s live now, here we go:

It could either mean personal damage control or jumping from the sinking ship (SOS Titanic) or both! The time will tell us.

BREAKING NEWS !

PD 21 CIARAN MCGINLEY JUST INFORMED STAFF THAT HE LEAVES IN EARLY RETIREMENT

with among other one striking sentence “However, looking to the future leads me to the conclusion that early retirement from the EPO is the right step both personally and professionally.”

In our experience (writing about software), people often retire early right before (or shortly after) major scandals that jeopardise one’s ‘peak’ or memorable legacy.

Our theory about this is that he cannot take it anymore, no matter the compensation (salary) working for incompetent top-level managers whom the staff hates so much that some commit suicide. There have been stories like this in other companies. That’s a sort of “acceptance” stage and appropriate action. We begrudgingly commend Ciaran McGinley for this decision, which surely he knew would damage Battistelli’s legitimacy before his potential sacking later this month (well overdue).

“Regarding the resignation of McGinley,” told us another source, “my first thought was exactly like what was portrayed below the first lines: Ciaran McGinley must know something that everyone else don’t.”

Is there more on the way? For completeness of our records, here is Ciaran McGinley’s farewell message in full:

From: Silke Johmann On Behalf Of Ciaran McGinley
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2016 1:35 PM
To: PA_all Staff
Subject: To all staff in Patent Administration

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to inform you of my intention to take early retirement later this year, namely from 1st November onwards. I have informed Alberto yesterday evening and the President this morning.

Since taking up my duties at the European Patent Office on 1 January 1982, it has been a continuous privilege to have worked in, and to have contributed to, this organisation. It has furthermore been an honour to have served under, and worked directly with, all six Presidencies. The last years have been especially enjoyable as Principal Director of Patent Administration and I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the wonderful contribution made by each and every one of you. Serving you since 1 January 2010 has been a highlight of my professional career at the EPO.

However, looking to the future leads me to the conclusion that early retirement from the EPO is the right step both personally and professionally. After all these years, I believe that the circumstances are now such that it is time for me to move on.

No doubt we will have the opportunity to share, reminisce and thank each other more personally in the coming months. I very much look forward to that.

Yours faithfully,

Ciaran McGinley
Principal Director, Patent Administration

So Ciaran McGinley, who has worked for the EPO since I was just two weeks old, is now leaving prematurely. Here are some thoughts we found about this, which look upon McGinley rather negatively, framing him as a big part of the problem:

An iconic EPO top manager is prematurely leaving the EPO…

- PD 21, Mr. Ciaran McGinley has announced to his staff his “intention to take early retirement later this year, namely from 1st November onwards”. This announce has come as a great surprise: Mr McG has been a notorious EPO manager for his long and (hyper-?) active time in the EPO but is still far from the EPO statutory pension age of 65.

- He has served in various positions, in particular as advisor to two EPO Presidents (worked under six of them), and is/was renowned for the legions of bold and staff-unfriendly reform ideas, which he repeatedly defended (against all parties preferably, in particular staff) with little diplomacy but with a remarkable skillful and eloquent stamina year after year… Just to cite one: the abolition of Automatic steps, which is unfortunately now a reality under Mr. Battistelli last career reform… So why should such a reform champion leave?

- Surely, personal reasons must prevail (enough pension rights, financial sustainability, personal and professional plans, etc..). Or has this manager informations about an imminent pension reform, that staff does not know about (at least not the Staff representation), rendering a quick departure a tactically clever thing to do? However, most “great leaders” who identify with their organisation, tend to feel essential for the future of the office and often believe in being unreplaceable: so why stopping now so “early”, so suddenly Surely not for simple mundane criteria such as stability and safety.

- Clearly when a herald of “tough” reforms thinks that “circumstances are now such that it is me for [him] to move on”, it does raise a few eye-brows… One cannot but have the impression that, perhaps, even for him, the radical provocateur he always likes(d) to posture himself, the present climate and today’s leadership may have gone a few unbearable steps too far.

- The question is not if other staff or managers think along these lines (a look in the staff survey should be enough to know the answer): the question is when will the Administrative Council understand and act to stop this?

That’s actually a good question. McGinley may be one among several ‘bigwigs’ to fall. Several people believe so. Stay tuned… there’s a lot more coming. █

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