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07.21.16

Links 21/7/2016: An Honorary Degree for Alan Cox, Looks Back at DebConf16

Posted in News Roundup at 2:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Has open source become the default business model for enterprise software?

    The announcement this week that Splice Machine is open-sourcing its product has become just the latest reminder that — in emerging technology markets — open source is increasingly the rule, not the exception.

    Open-source software is one of those overnight successes that’s been a decade and more in the making. It’s a far cry from the early aughts when Red Hat and JBoss blazed a trail that still has doubters. Arguably, there’s still the issue of whether Red Hat, a publicly-traded, open source company, is a Unicorn from a different twist. Nonetheless, today, when we get acquainted to a new startup, one of the first questions that we pop is whether they’re open source.

  • Spark-powered Splice Machine goes open source

    Splice Machine, the relational SQL database system that uses Hadoop and Spark to provide high-speed results, is now available in an open source edition.

    Version 2.0 of Splice Machine added Spark to speed up OLAP-style workloads while still processing conventional OLTP workloads with HBase. The open source version, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, supplies both engines and most of Splice Machine’s other features, including Apache Kafka streaming support. However, it omits a few enterprise-level options like encryption, Kerberos support, column-level access control, and backup/restore functionality.

  • 3 lessons from Gratipay’s take-what-you-want compensation experiment

    This is the second in a two-part series on hiring and compensation practices in open organizations. In Want the best employees? Let them hire themselves, I introduced the concept of open hiring with examples from Drupal (the well-known CMS) and Gratipay (a payments start-up and open organization; I’m the founder). We saw how open source thinking about onboarding best practices can lead naturally to including new collaborators in money distribution.

  • Healthcare colored with blockchain’s open-source foundation

    Technological change forces economic growth. Technology extends the science of discovery and produces artifacts used in everyday life. It’s the small technical discoveries that make larger scientific endeavors possible. It’s also these seemingly unrelated breakthroughs that make their way into our daily lives.

  • Apache Foundation Crucial to Hadoop, Big Data’s Success

    Looking back at 10 years of Hadoop, project co-founder and Cloudera Chief Architect Doug Cutting can see two primary factors in the success of open source big data technology: a heap of luck and the Apache Foundation’s unique support.

  • What is DevOps? Gareth Rushgrove Explains

    Gareth Rushgrove is known by many people as the creator and editor of the popular DevOps Weekly email newsletter, and he spent several years working for the U.K. Government Digital Service (GDS) on GOV.UK and other projects. As Senior Software Engineer at Puppet, you can find him building some of the latest infrastructure automation products when he isn’t speaking at events on a wide variety of DevOps and related topics.

  • Coffee Shop DevOps: Clearly defining and communicating team goals

    Last month I interviewed the Cockpit team about team practices. We had an interesting conversation from many different angles, but most notable were the themes we kept returning to: understanding goals, the importance of feedback loops, and committing to open and transparent communication. I found I could easily correlate each of these back to other teams I have worked with in the past. When you inspect the behaviors and inner workings of a team, these themes seem to be remarkably central to team conflict.

  • Google’s Magenta Seeks to Leverage TensorFlow for Art and Music

    As we’ve noted, artificial intelligence and machine learning are going through aamini-renaissance right now. Google recently made a possibly hugely influential contribution to the field of machine learning. It has open sourced a program called TensorFlow that is freely available. It’s based on the same internal toolset that Google has spent years developing to support its AI software and other predictive and analytics programs.

    In a related open project from the Google Brain team, dubbed Magenta, Google is calling for efforts to leverage TensorFlow and machine learning to create compelling art and music. Some of the early examples from this effort are eye-opening.

  • Nintendo NX Spec Rumors Say The Console’s Games May Support Open-Source Virtual Reality

    Nintendo NX spec rumors keep coming, and the latest chatter suggests that the console may support open-source virtual reality for certain games. This would allow the 2017 machine to compete with the likes of Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR.

    The news comes to Design & Trend via Chinatimes as referenced by the sometimes-accurate Digitimes. The report should be taken with a grain of salt, but it’s certainly interesting.

    As indicated by the secondary source, Nintendo allegedly has a production partnership with a certain chipmaker called Pixart. While the outfit is most known for its heart-rate monitoring hardware, mentions are also made to “tape-out chips supporting VR technology by the end of 2016.” These chips “will support next-generation Nintendo NX game machines.”

  • Learn an instrument with this open source music teacher

    Playing musical scores is a heavy kind of art. The Nootka app will help you understand the basics of music notation reading, and help you improve by practicing various kinds of exercises. Nootka gives real-time feedback, has multiple difficulty levels, and is customizable.

  • Open source offers job security as businesses navigate an IT talent war

    If you’re in open source and looking for a job, chances are you won’t have to search long. According to recent research, businesses are going out of their way to find—and hang onto—their best open source talent. Last month, the 2016 Open Source Jobs Report found that 79% of hiring managers have increased incentives to retain their current open source professionals.

  • Google Leverages its AI Tools to Slash Data Center Energy Consumption
  • Tutorials, workflows, and a place to showcase high-quality FOSS photography

    There’s a special place to chat with fellow photographers, learn about high-end FOSS photography software, and share your work with others. It’s called PIXLS.US, and it’s a large and wonderful world beyond Photoshop.

    This is truly a golden age in the hobby of photography. Never before has it been so inexpensive and easy to take and share great photos. The rise of smartphones has fueled an explosion in casual photography, and the ecosystem is further extended through the proliferation of media-sharing apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Lower costs for better cameras has enabled many budding photographers to take up the hobby. Unfortunately, while much of the underlying software that fuels the apps and platforms is built on free/open source software, there is little fanfare for the projects that are available directly to photographers.

  • Events

    • Solskogen 2016 videos

      I just published the videos from Solskogen 2016 on Youtube; you can find them all in this playlist. The are basically exactly what was being sent out on the live stream, frame for frame, except that the audio for the live shader compos has been remastered, and of course a lot of dead time has been cut out (the stream was sending over several days, but most of the time, only the information loop from the bigscreen).

    • REMINDER! systemd.conf 2016 CfP Ends in Two Weeks!

      Please note that the systemd.conf 2016 Call for Participation ends in less than two weeks, on Aug. 1st! Please send in your talk proposal by then! We’ve already got a good number of excellent submissions, but we are interested in yours even more!

      We are looking for talks on all facets of systemd: deployment, maintenance, administration, development. Regardless of whether you use it in the cloud, on embedded, on IoT, on the desktop, on mobile, in a container or on the server: we are interested in your submissions!

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Reducing Adobe Flash Usage in Firefox

        Browser plugins, especially Flash, have enabled some of our favorite experiences on the Web, including videos and interactive content. But plugins often introduce stability, performance, and security issues for browsers. This is not a trade-off users should have to accept.

        Mozilla and the Web as a whole have been taking steps to reduce the need for Flash content in everyday browsing. Starting in August, Firefox will block certain Flash content that is not essential to the user experience, while continuing to support legacy Flash content. These and future changes will bring Firefox users enhanced security, improved battery life, faster page load, and better browser responsiveness.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Empowering Growth Hackers with Big Data

      Growth hacking often leverages customer data in the experimentation process, in the form of A/B testing. The goal is to use big data to gain a better understand of the customer, via a complete view across every touch point of the organization, in order to enable an optimal customer experience. Growth hackers—who can be anyone from marketing professionals to product manager and engineers—are seeking insights to help optimize marketing campaigns across channels, increase customer loyalty and retention, and enhance the customer experience.

    • TP empowers Singapore students with big data analytics skills

      Temasek Polytechnic (TP), Singapore and Cloudera have teamed on cultivating the next generation of data professionals through the Cloudera Academic Partnership (CAP) program.

    • TP, Cloudera to help S’pore students prepare for big data-related roles

      Temasek Polytechnic (TP) and Cloudera are working together to cultivate the next generation of data professionals through the Cloudera Academic Partnership (CAP) program. Through this program, students from Temasek Polytechnic’s School of Informatics & IT (IIT) have access to the latest Apache Hadoop curriculum, software and skills training for the Hadoop platform.

    • Apache Hadoop at 10 – Doug Cutting, Chief Architect, Cloudera
    • Report Shows Hadoop Growing at 53.7% CAGR, But Complexity Remains an Issue

      The latest in a string of market research reports has arrived forecasting huge growth for big data analytics platform Hadoop, but not everyone agrees that Hadoop adoption is going so smoothly. According to researchers at Stratistics MRC, the global hadoop market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 53.7% over the forecast period 2015 to 2022. ” Increasing investments in data management, rising amount of structured and unstructured data, hasty growth in consumer data and rapidly increasing demand for big data analytics are the factors influencing the market growth,” the study’s authors report.

      Here are some of the details, and some of the warning signs coming in pointing to too much complexity required in deploying Hadoop.

    • 5 Stages of Cloud Adoption

  • Databases

    • Splice Machine Launches Open Source RDBMS Sandbox

      Splice Machine, which provides an RDBMS powered by Hadoop and Spark, has announced a cloud-based sandbox for developers to put its just launched open source Community Edition to the test. The company is making available an open source standalone and cluster download, and has announced the general availability of V2.0, and the launch of its developer community site.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LIBOCon: get around Brno

      Yesterday I added Get around Brno page to the LibreOffice Conference website. There you can find comprehensive information about public transport in Brno, how to buy tickets, how to get to the hotel/venue if you arrive by train/bus/car/plane etc. All accompanied with maps and pictures of described places. So hopefully no one will get lost on their way to the hotel or venue, or struggle purchasing tickets.

    • LibreOffice developer interview: Winfried Donkers

      In this week’s developer interview, we talk to Winfried Donkers, a Dutch coder who has been using LibreOffice (and its predecessors) for almost two decades, and today works on Calc.

  • CMS

    • Koha Integrated Library System Brings FOSS to Libraries

      Randal Schwartz, from TWiT.tv’s “FLOSS Weekly,” interviews Nicole Engard and Brendan Gallagher, about the open source Koha Integrated Library System (ILS), which originated in New Zealand in 1999. Along with being a web developer, Nicole is a prolific blogger on Opensource.com and last year was recognized by Red Hat for her significant contributions to open source advocacy.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Results of the EU-FOSSA survey

      Between 17 June and 8 July, you sent the EU-Fossa project 3282 answers, to help us choose which open source software to audit.

      First, thank you very much for the many interesting and encouraging comments!

    • EC to audit Apache HTTP Server and Keepass

      The European Commission is preparing a software source code security audit on two software solutions, Apache HTTP server and Keepass, a password manager. The source code will be analysed and tested for potential security problems, and the results will be shared with the software developers. The audits will start in the coming weeks.

    • NZ govt agencies now have open source software at their side

      Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) is helping government agencies pave the way for open source software use, opening doors for software developers keen to shape new innovative software, says Land Information Minister Louise Upston.

      The NZGOAL Software Extension guidelines were themselves developed using open source tools and facilitated through Loomio, an online group decision-making platform. The final drafts were crafted through GitHub, an open source repository.

    • UK.gov digi peeps hunt open source chief

      The British government’s Digital Service is looking for a chief penguin to head up open source.

      GDS has created a brand-new position for an individual to conduct open source technology projects, adoption and working practices for the government’s IT arm.

      Moreover, the chosen candidate will be charged with forging relationships with individuals and projects outside government in the open-source community.

      Until now, GDS had a number of people working in different roles taking the lead on open source. The new individual will be nestled in GDS’s technical architecture team.

    • ‘GovStrap’ open source kit helps sites replicate GDS website theme

      Open Source Software specialist OpusVL has created a way to take the Gov.UK website theme created by the Government Digital Service (GDS) and reproduce it quickly in designing and building public sector websites.

      The solution uses Bootstrap, an HTML, CSS and JavaScript framework originating from Twitter, which is used for creating front end websites and applications. With an increase in the variety of devices used to view websites, Bootstrap is a standard toolkit for building responsive design and enabling websites to be mobile and tablet friendly.

      With sharing and re-use of software and technology high on the GDS agenda, OpusVL adopted the principle by importing the GDS work and “re-factoring” it in the form of the Bootstrap framework in addition to the methods originally created by GDS.

    • As it Mandates Open Source, is Bulgaria Opening Questionable Doors?

      For decades now, open source tools and applications have been gaining enormous traction in parts of Europe, and cities such as Munich have even been involved in a multi-year effort to transform technology infrastructure by throwing out proprietary applications and using open source tools instead.

      In the latest move on this front, Bulgaria recently passed legislation requiring that government software be open source. The move underscores how pervasive open source applications and platforms have become. Now, though, there is growing debate about whether Bulgaria is making a wise move, or one that could open it up to security threats.

    • Could Bulgaria’s open source law transform government software worldwide?

      Ripples from Bulgaria’s recent decision requiring all software written for the government to be open source could build into something bigger.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • The Importance of Following Community-Oriented Principles in GPL Enforcement Work

      The GNU General Public License (GPL) was designed to grant clear permissions for sharing software and to defend that freedom for users. GPL’d code now appears in so many devices that it is fundamental to modern technology. While we believe that following the GPL’s requirements is neither burdensome nor unreasonable, many fail to do so. GPL enforcement — the process to encourage those who fail to correct problems and join our open software development community — is difficult diplomacy.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Open-Source Farming Machine Plants And Waters Seeds

        While it is nice to have access to produce that is not in season, the unseen use of pesticides and other harmful additives is a difficult problem to avoid.

      • California dreaming: DIY, open-source SoCs with RISC-V

        With its customizable, open-source SoCs built on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture, SiFive, a San Francisco start-up, is poised to reverse the industry’s rising licensing, design and implementation costs.

        With on the one hand Moore’s Law ended or approaching the end and on the other, vast investments required for to develop a modern, high-performance chip, it looks impossible for smaller system designers to join the traditional economic model of chip building. However, the body of software and tools available from the open-source community under the guidance of the RISC-V Foundation, can substantially cut the cost of developing custom silicon. System designers can use the SiFive Freedom platforms to focus on their own differentiated processor without having the overhead of developing a modern SoC, fabric or software infrastructur

      • Lawn Da Vinci Open Source RC Lawnmower (video)

        If you find the prices of the current range of robotic lawnmowers just a little too high for your budget, you might be interested in a new open source remote control lawnmower which has been created called the Lawn Da Vinci.

        Okay so it’s not completely autonomous but you can still add a little extra fun to those lawn mowing days, with the addition of a little remote control to the humble petrol powered lawnmower.

      • A open source toolkit for building your own home

        The evidence is overwhelming that large scale collaboration leads to superior technology. FOSS showed us the way and now free and open source hardware is rapidly gaining traction. There is a growing list of open source hardware projects, which are bringing millions (billion?) of dollars of value to the world. Now a new initiative from the Open Building Institute (OBI) is adding “house” to the list of killer open hardware apps.

      • Open Source Hardware: What It Means and Why It Matters

        You’ve heard of open source software. But what about open source hardware? Here’s an overview of what open source hardware is, what the challenges are and why open hardware is poised to grow in importance as the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to boom.

      • The Ember 3D Printer: High-Resolution, Open-Source 3D Printing on Your Desktop

        Though Autodesk’s interest in 3D printing was not unknown, it may have been a bit of a surprise when the CAD developer entered the industry with its own 3D printer in 2014. Ember, Autodesk’s first hardware product, is a digital light processing (DLP) 3D printer capable of high-resolution prints for prototyping and even end part production. What may be most unique about the Ember is that both the printer and one of its materials are open-source, a bold move for a large corporation like Autodesk.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • AT&T, Orange target NFV, SDN open source, standards

      AT&T and Orange signed a deal to tackle NFV and SDN open source and standards issues that continue to plague the telecom industry

      AT&T signed a deal with European operator Orange to work on open source and standardization initiatives linked to the carrier’s push toward increasing control of its network resources using software-defined networking and network functions virtualization technology.

    • DIGST: ‘Denmark should update eInvoicing systems’

      Denmark’s public administrations should overhaul their eInvoicing solutions, writes the Agency for Digitisation (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen – DIGST). The agency wants public administrations to prepare to introduce a European-wide eInvoicing standard, and to concentrate on the use of Danish 2010 eInvoicing standard, OIOUBL. Its forerunner, OIOXML, is to be phased out.

Leftovers

  • The Dig: Is Your School’s Plan Right for Your Special Needs Child?

    Recently, I got a plea from the mother of a child with special needs. She asked: “Can you do a column on how to investigate your child’s special education file?” Two thoughts flashed to my mind: 1) That’s such a fundamental and important thing to be able to investigate. And 2) I don’t know anything about it.

    Luckily, one of the joys of working at ProPublica is being surrounded by super smart people. And our education reporter, Heather Vogell, is uncommonly sharp, having covered the most important stories in education for years. (Remember the cheating scandal in Atlanta schools? Heather and her colleagues at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution uncovered that.)

  • Science

    • Putting Your Computer Inside Oil Sounds Crazy, But It’s Super Useful. Here’s How To Do It

      Very few of you would be knowing about the existence of mineral oil-cooled PCs. These are custom made computers submerged in non-conductive mineral oil. Compared to regular air cooling , the mineral oil cooling setup works with up to 5-times more efficiency. If you find this interesting, you can read ahead and watch some useful videos that detail the process of making a mineral oil-cooled PC.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • WHO: Countries Need To Step It Up On Noncommunicable Disease Commitments

      Despite “remarkable” progress by some countries on addressing noncommunicable diseases like cancer and diabetes, there is a need to accelerate efforts in order to meet agreed global commitments, the World Health Organization said this week.

    • Jeremy Hunt has broken NHS funding pledges, report finds

      The government has broken its pledges on NHS funding and is misleading the public about how much extra money it is actually putting into the health service, a committee of MPs has said.

      In a highly critical report, the House of Commons health select committee accuses Jeremy Hunt and other ministers of giving the cash-strapped NHS “less than would appear to be the case from official pronouncements”.

      The cross-party group of MPs refutes the health secretary’s persistent claim the government will have given the NHS in England an extra £8.4bn by 2020-21 compared with 2015-16. That was one of the Conservatives’ key pledges in last year’s general election campaign, and was repeated many times after that by David Cameron and George Osborne while they were still the prime minister and the chancellor.

    • Damning Probe Finds EPA ‘Turning Blind Eye’ to Toxic Chemical Cocktails

      While the use of one toxic chemical—on our foods, lawns, and elsewhere—has its inherent risks, scientists warn that the combination of two or more such ingredients in common pesticides could have an even more noxious impact, one which is commonly overlooked.

      In fact, a investigation released Tuesday by the environmental watchdog Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) found that over the past six years the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved nearly 100 pesticide products that contain these so-called “synergistic” compounds, effectively “increasing the dangers to imperiled pollinators and rare plants.”

      As CBD explains, “[s]ynergy occurs when two or more chemicals interact to enhance their toxic effects,” turning “what would normally be considered a safe level of exposure into one that results in considerable harm.”

      “The EPA is supposed to be the cop on the beat, protecting people and the environment from the dangers of pesticides. With these synergistic pesticides, the EPA has decided to look the other way, and guess who’s left paying the price?” asked Nathan Donley, a scientist with the Center and author of the report, Toxic Concoctions: How the EPA Ignores the Dangers of Pesticide Cocktails (pdf).

  • Security

    • Mental Note: Keep Working Email on Forum Account
    • No Passwords Stolen During Ubuntu Forums Data Breach
    • SQL Injection Exposes 2 Million Ubuntu Forum Users
    • Ubuntu forum breach traced to neglected plugin
    • Ubuntu Forums Database Hacked
    • Passwords not compromised by Ubuntu Forums data breach
    • Ubuntu forum breach traced to neglected plugin
    • Canonical warns users after Ubuntu forum data breach
    • Flaw in vBulletin add-on leads to Ubuntu Forums database breach
    • CrypTech — Internet Engineers’ New Open Source Weapon Against ‘Creepy’ Governments

      The CrypTech project is an independent security hardware development effort that consists of an international team. CrypTech Alpha is an open source crypto-vault that stores the private/public keys and separates the digital certificates from the software using them. It has been developed as a hardware secure module (HSM) to make the implementation of strong cryptography easier.

    • Entrepreneur in £10m swoop for hacking team

      One of the northwest’s best-known entrepreneurs has splashed out about £10m on a cyber-security venture that helps businesses repel hackers.

      Lawrence Jones, who runs the Manchester-based internet hosting and cloud computing specialist UKFast, has bought Pentest, an “ethical hacking” firm whose staff help detect flaws in clients’ cyber-defences.

      Jones, 47, will merge Pentest’s 45 staff into his own cyber-security outfit, Secarma. “It’s become obvious that there is a massive need to put emphasis on cyber-security,” said the internet tycoon, whose wealth is calculated by The Sunday Times Rich List as £275m.

    • Guilt by ASN: Compiler’s bad memory bug could sting mobes, cell towers

      A vulnerability in a widely used ASN.1 compiler isn’t a good thing: it means a bunch of downstream systems – including mobile phones and cell towers – will inherit the bug.

      And an ASN.1 bug is what the Sadosky Foundation in Argentina has turned up, in Objective Systems’ software.

      The research group’s Lucas Molas says Objective’s ASN1C compiler for C/C++ version 7.0.0 (other builds are probably affected) generates code that suffers from heap memory corruption. This could be potentially exploited to run malware on machines and devices that run the vulnerable compiler output or interfere with their operation.

    • Security advisories for Tuesday
    • BlackBerry Inks Software Deal With U.S. Senate
    • BlackBerry inks security software deals, shares slip
    • BlackBerry Announces String of Small Security Software Deals
    • BlackBerry inks U.S. government software deals; shares slip
    • Carbanak Gang Tied to Russian Security Firm?

      Among the more plunderous cybercrime gangs is a group known as “Carbanak,” Eastern European hackers blamed for stealing more than a billion dollars from banks. Today we’ll examine some compelling clues that point to a connection between the Carbanak gang’s staging grounds and a Russian security firm that claims to work with some of the world’s largest brands in cybersecurity.

      The Carbanak gang derives its name from the banking malware used in countless high-dollar cyberheists. The gang is perhaps best known for hacking directly into bank networks using poisoned Microsoft Office files, and then using that access to force bank ATMs into dispensing cash. Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab estimates that the Carbanak Gang has likely stolen upwards of USD $1 billion — but mostly from Russian banks.

    • Now you can ask Twitter directly to verify your account

      Do you have an army of imposters online pretending to be you? Probably not, but now you can still request for a verified Twitter account.

      On Tuesday, Twitter launched an official application process so that any account can be verified and receive a blue checkmark badge next to its username. Twitter users interested in applying should have a verified phone number and email address, as well as a profile photo that reflects the person or company branding.

      Verified accounts get to filter their mentions to only see those from other verified accounts. But that seems to be the only real feature or perk that comes from having a blue badge–aside from bragging rights, of course. Additionally, verified accounts can’t be private, and the username must remain the same or you will have to seek verification all over again. If you are rejected, you can reapply after 30 days. Previously, the verification process was never clear-cut, and it seemed to require a direct connection to a Twitter rep.

    • Software flaw puts mobile phones and networks at risk of complete takeover [Ed: proprietary software]

      A newly disclosed vulnerability could allow attackers to seize control of mobile phones and key parts of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure and make it possible to eavesdrop or disrupt entire networks, security experts warned Tuesday.

      The bug resides in a code library used in a wide range of telecommunication products, including radios in cell towers, routers, and switches, as well as the baseband chips in individual phones. Although exploiting the heap overflow vulnerability would require great skill and resources, attackers who managed to succeed would have the ability to execute malicious code on virtually all of those devices. The code library was developed by Pennsylvania-based Objective Systems and is used to implement a telephony standard known as ASN.1, short for Abstract Syntax Notation One.

    • https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/rebooting-digital-security

      Wednesday, July 20 is the final day of EFF’s Summer Security Reboot, a two-week membership drive that focuses on taking stock of our digital security practices and bolstering the larger movement to protect digital civil liberties. Besides a reduced donation amount for the Silicon level membership, the Reboot features sets of random number generators: EFF dice with instructions on how to generate stronger and more memorable random passphrases. EFF even produced three new passphrase wordlists to improve upon Arnold Reinhold’s popular Diceware list, first published in 1995.

      EFF is a longtime advocate for personal security, and over the years we have continued to fight threats to user privacy and freedom. With the Summer Security Reboot, we want the public to engage with the larger questions of how one can and should control personal information in spite of high-profile attempt after attempt to compromise our devices. The world has increasingly recognized privacy and strong crypto as integral parts of protecting international human rights. A recent Amnesty International report states encryption is “an enabler of the rights to freedom of expression, information and opinion, and also has an impact on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly, association and other human rights.” Strong passphrase use is but one basic part of a diverse toolkit that can help you protect personal information, whether from identity thieves or government surveillance (ideally both!).

    • Hacking Facebook By Stealing Facebook Access_tokens In Device Login

      A security researcher has located a flaw in Facebook’s device login feature that allows one to easily authorise apps on IoT devices. Due to the lack of CSRF protection, an attacker can fool Facebook’s systems and grab the access_token of the victim. Facebook has now fixed the bug and awarded $5,000 bounty to the white hat hacker.

    • Neutrino EK adopts new exploit after open source POC release

      The Neutrino exploit kit (EK) added a former Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability affecting to its arsenal.

    • Arbor Networks Report: Largest DDoS Attack Of 579Gbps In The First Half Of 2016

      Arbor Networks has published the statistics of the DDoS attacks in the first half of 2016. The largest one went up to 579Gbps. An interactive map shows the DDoS attacks made on a global level.

    • Security updates for Wednesday
    • How many mobile phone accounts will be hijacked this summer?

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Hell Hath No Fury Like a Teflon Sultan

      When Turkish President/aspiring Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan landed at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport early Saturday morning, he declared the attempted coup against his government a failure, and a “gift from God.”

    • Again? Op-ed by Philippe Aigrain in the aftermath of the Nice attacks

      Yet another? But yet another what? One does not even know. Once more tens of people killed, many more injured. Once more, a human being has carried them over towards death and suffering in his trajectory of violence and self-destruction. And both ISIS and most western commentators rush to describe him as the soldier of a cause when one does not even know if and when he discovered it.

    • The political strategy for peace

      The success of peace requires not only the legal security of the agreements, but also, importantly, a grassroots political process that includes popular support. To date, the government and guerrillas have done little to win public support over the agreement. In fact, many critics have opposed the advances of the Negotiating Table in La Habana, and some, including former president Álvaro Uribe, have called for a “civil resistance” claiming that the agreement promotes impunity. Levels of citizen knowledge about the agreements are low, legitimacy and popular confidence of the peace process have decreased in the latest months, polarization continues to grow with post-paramilitary groups committing human rights abuses, and political strategies to encourage support are non-existent.

    • Mhairi Black on Trident

      Note that the government benches are almost empty. The people who bothered to be present and listen to the debate were overwhelmingly those who voted against Trident. With all Scotland’s MPs but one opposing, this is yet another reason to get a move on with Indyref2. I don’t share the criticism of the Tories for calling this debate and vote – it helpfully clarifies that the representatives of Scotland are treated with contempt, and that the Blairite majority in the Parliamentary Labour Party are in hock to arms industry interests.

    • Ryan Richardson and Siddhattha Gurung: Kurdish Autonomy, Under Siege

      On a hot Friday afternoon in April, hundreds gather at the House of Mourning to pay their respects to the fallen youth of the Kurdish city of Diyarbakır. Among the crowd are families and friends, neighbors and colleagues, municipal officials and local politicians, as well as leaders of the Kurdish movement and many of its most committed supporters. At the invitation of our hosts, we are here to witness the funeral of Yusuf, 19, one of hundreds of young Kurds killed during recent clashes with Turkish forces in the ancient neighborhood of Sur.

    • Fox, Gould, Werritty and Israel – Please write to your MP

      It is to me disgusting that a politician so thoroughly disgraced as Liam Fox should be back in power. Answers were blanked on the actual purpose of the Werritty connection, and I think collectively we should try to do something about that.

    • ‘Fraud’ Alleged in NYT’s MH-17 Report

      An amateur report alleging Russian doctoring of satellite photos on the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 case – a finding embraced by The New York Times – is denounced by a forensic expert as an “outright fraud,” reports Robert Parry.

    • Erdogan Unleashes Unprecedented Crackdown: Fires All University Deans; Suspends 21,000 Private School Teachers

      Over the weekend, after the initial reports of the purge unleashed by Erdogan against Turkey’s public, we previewed the upcoming, far more dangerous counter-coup as follows: “it was the next step that is the critical one: the one where Erdogan – having cracked down on his immediate military and legal opponents – took his crusade against everyone else, including the press and the educational system.”

    • Summer Convention Fun: Keep an Eye (Ear) Out for the LRAD

      The LRAD was first deployed for use in Iraq, and quickly found its way onto Navy and commercial ships sailing amongst Somali pirates. The bad boy is a sound cannon.

      The LRAD company prefers to label its product a tool to broadcast messages and pain-inducing “deterrent” tones over long distances. The device produces a sound that can be directed in a beam up to 30 degrees wide, and the military-grade LRAD 2000X can transmit at up to 162dB up to 5.5 miles away.

      Fun fact: A jet engine at 100 feet is 140dB. Sound at 180db will cause tissue damage.

      But of course the LRAD is non-lethal, so its maker says that anyone within a 100 meters of the device’s sound path will experience extreme pain. The version generally utilized by police departments (the LRAD 500X) is designed for short bursts of directed sound that cause severe headaches in anyone within a 300 meter range. Anyone within 15 meters of the device’s audio path can experience permanent hearing loss.

      Permanent hearing loss begins at 130dB, and if the device is turned up to 140dB, anyone within its path would not only suffer hearing loss, they could potentially lose their balance and be unable to move out of the path of the audio.

    • Civilian Death Toll From Coalition Airstrikes in Syria Could Be Single Largest in U.S.-Led War on ISIS

      Scores of civilians trapped in Islamic State-controlled territory in northern Syria were reportedly killed Tuesday by airstrikes from Western coalition aircraft. The reported death toll, potentially the highest ever to result from a coalition bombing in the international campaign against ISIS, continued to climb as The Intercept reached out to monitoring groups tracking operations in the area.

      The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 56 civilians were killed when their convoy of vehicles attempted to slip out of an area north of the city of Manbij in the predawn darkness, as U.S.-backed forces pushed forward in an increasingly bloody offensive in the area. In a brief phone interview, a representative from the Britain-based organization said that while coalition aircraft were believed to be responsible for the air raid, the group suspected it was a “100 percent mistake.”

      Airwars, a nonprofit that tracks claims of civilian casualties resulting from the international air campaign against ISIS, said incoming reports indicated the death toll may prove to be well over 100 civilians — potentially making it the largest single loss of civilian life resulting from coalition airstrikes since the U.S.-led campaign to destroy ISIS began nearly two years ago. Tuesday’s reports were the latest in a string of recent incidents in which coalition aircraft have been implicated in the deaths of civilians in the Manbij area.

      “Really these civilians are in a desperate situation,” Chris Woods, head of Airwars, told The Intercept. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

    • Chris Christie and Karl Rove’s US Attorney Project

      The Republicans were supposed to talk about how they plan to Make America Work Again last night. And I supposed Paul Ryan — and to a lesser extent Mitch McConnell, when he wasn’t being booed — presented a vision of how they think Republicans run the economy. That vision doesn’t actually resemble the protectionist big government approach Donald Trump has been running on. But given the revelation that Trump offered to let John Kasich run both domestic and foreign policy if he would be his VP candidate (Kasich was still reluctant), perhaps we should focus more on how Mike Pence wants to suffocate the economy.

      Instead, as most people have focused, Republicans continued to attack Hillary (Hillary continues to attack Trump, though I suspect she will focus somewhat more on policy next week than Republicans have thus far). Many people have unpacked Chris Christie’s rabble inciting witch hunt last night, but Dan Drezner backs his review of it with some data on the risks to democracy (click through to read all of, which is worth reading).

    • Senator Ron Johnson Lies About Hillary Clinton to Accuse Her of Dishonesty on Benghazi

      It has become an article of faith among Republicans that the anti-Islam video, which had sparked protests in Cairo in the hours before the attack in Benghazi, and across the Arab world in the days after it, had absolutely nothing to do with the killing of the Americans. Inside that bubble, carefully nurtured by Fox News, any suggestion that the offensive video — a trailer for a film biography of the prophet made to antagonize Muslims — acted as a catalyst for the assault by Islamist militants was part of a cover-up by the Obama administration.

      According to a subsequent investigation by New York Times reporters, however, “extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack” suggested that the violence was indeed “fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”

    • Turkey’s Nukes: A Sum of All Fears

      The post-coup chaos in Turkey is a reminder about the risk of leaving nuclear weapons in unstable regions where they serve no clear strategic purpose but present a clear and present danger, explains Jonathan Marshall.

    • 9/11: 28 Pages Later

      Why the long wait, and what do the 28 pages reveal?

      If we’re to believe the headlines in Saudi media (e.g. Al Arabiya) and mainstream American media (e.g. Time and the Washington Times) the big news is what they don’t reveal: A “smoking gun” connecting the government of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks.

      If we’re to believe the 28 pages themselves, the big news is that they do, in fact, reveal a “smoking gun” connecting the government of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks.

      Here’s the opening sentence from the newly released material: “While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected with the Saudi government.”

    • Military Regimes Shouldn’t be Recognized

      The military upheaval in Turkey, whose final consequences are yet to be seen, highlights a major weakness in worldwide efforts to promote democracy. This event underscores the need to establish binding international legal principles to ban the recognition of military regimes as a result of coups d’état. Establishment of such principles, and the creation of the legal mechanisms for applying them, would foster democracy throughout the world.

      The circumstances in Turkey mimic several similar situations in recent history: the coming to power of governments without support from the military. Once confronted with a threat to their political hegemony, the military either overthrow the civilian government or refuses to surrender power to democratically elected civilians.

      Overt recognition by Western democracies or implied recognition through ambivalent signs of disapproval have encouraged military officers to overthrow many constitutional governments freely chosen by the people. The military relinquish power only when forced by popular will, or when its own incapacity to govern has made its position untenable.

      This happened to the Greek junta after its debacle in Cyprus, to the Chilean regime under Augusto Pinochet and to the Argentine military after the Falklands conflict. New principles could be developed, however, that would automatically bar the recognition of such de facto regimes.

      Given the need to expand the role of the United Nations in keeping peace, the General Assembly and its International Law Commission could be called upon to draw up appropriate legislation. As the late Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold once said, the United Nations is “the most appropriate place for development and change of international law on behalf of the whole society of states.”

      Establishment of non-recognition of post coup d’état a universal principle raises some difficult practical questions. What about already established and recognized military regimes? These cases show the difficulties of applying the principle retroactively.

      But what if a country’s military forces stage a coup against an oppressive or corrupt civilian regime? An ousted civilian government that has been freely elected by the people should not be denied recognition in favor of a post-coup military regime unless the overthrown government was responsible for gross human rights violations. Further, after a coup, recognition should be withheld until another civilian government is chosen in free and democratic elections.

    • Should Police Use Bombs To Kill Criminals?

      In the wake of the two seemingly outrageous slayings of African American men by police in Minnesota and Louisiana and the equally heinous retaliatory killings of five police officers in Dallas by a black former Army Reservist, questions have been raised in all three cases about excessive police behavior.

    • US air strike in Syria kills nearly 60 civilians ‘mistaken for Isil fighters’

      A US air strike killed nearly 60 civilians, including children, in Syria on Tuesday after the coalition mistook them for Islamic State fighters.

      Some eight families were hit as they tried to flee fighting in their area, in one of the single deadliest strikes on civilians by the alliance since the start of its operations in the war-torn country.

      Pictures of the aftermath of the dawn strikes on the Isil-controlled village of Tokhar near Manbij in northern Syria showed the bodies of children as young as three under piles of rubble.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Prolific FOIA Requester Celebrates 50th Anniversary Of FOIA Law By Suing FBI Over Its Document Search Methods

      No better way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act than filing a lawsuit claiming an agency is refusing to comply with it. FOIA enthusiast Ryan Shapiro has done exactly that, suing the DOJ [PDF] for the FBI’s continued refusal to perform anything more than a cursory search, using its most outdated software, for responsive records.

    • Justice department ‘uses aged computer system to frustrate Foia requests’

      Shapiro told the Guardian that the reason the DoJ gave for refusing to use its $425m Sentinel software to process Foia requests after ACS had failed to recover records was that a Sentinel search “would be needlessly duplicative of the FBI’s default ACS UNI index-based searches and wasteful of Bureau resources”.

    • Judge Tells DOJ Lawyers That A Search For FOIA Docs Requires More Than Chatting With A Couple Of Employees

      Jason Leopold is back in court (is he ever NOT there?) battling the NSA and the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) over the release of documents related to the NSA and FBI’s surveillance of federal and state judges. The two parties had already been told to do more looking around for responsive records by Judge Tanya Chutkan, who rejected their original request for summary judgment last July.

      The two agencies went back and performed another search. And still came up empty-handed.

      Let me rephrase that: the two agencies went back and performed another “search.” Here’s what that “search” actually entailed, as described in the opinion [PDF].

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Federal Agents Went Undercover To Spy on Anti-Fracking Movement, Emails Reveal

      When more than 300 protesters assembled in May at the Holiday Inn in Lakewood, Colorado — the venue chosen by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for an auction of oil and gas leases on public lands — several of the demonstrators were in fact undercover agents sent by law enforcement to keep tabs on the demonstration, according to emails obtained by The Intercept.

      The “Keep it in the Ground” movement, a broad effort to block the development of drilling projects, has rapidly gained traction over the last year, raising pressure on the Obama administration to curtail hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, and coal mining on federal public lands. In response, government agencies and industry groups have sharply criticized the activists in public, while quietly moving to track their activities.

      The emails, which were obtained through an open records act request, show that the Lakewood Police Department collected details about the protest from undercover officers as the event was being planned. During the auction, both local law enforcement and federal agents went undercover among the protesters.

      The emails further show that police monitored Keep it in the Ground participating groups such as 350.org, Break Free Movement, Rainforest Action Network, and WildEarth Guardians, while relying upon intelligence gathered by Anadarko, one of the largest oil and gas producers in the region.

    • ‘World’s saddest polar bear’ exhibited in Chinese shopping centre

      More than 285,000 people have signed a petition calling for the closure of an aquarium in southern China that is home to an animal dubbed “the world’s saddest polar bear”.

      The lethargic bear, whose name is Pizza, is on show at an “ocean theme park” located inside the Grandview shopping centre in the city of Guangzhou.

      The aquarium made international headlines after its opening in early January with one Hong Kong-based animal rights charity denouncing it as a “horrifying” animal prison.

    • This Ridiculously Low Oil Spill Fine Is What’s Wrong With Environmental Enforcement

      Six years after spilling more than 27,000 barrels of oil into local rivers, Enbridge Energy Limited Partnership is finally facing the music: a $177 million settlement with the U.S. government.

      The music is a little soft.

      The settlement covers two spills, but one of them was a doozy. On July 25, 2010, an Enbridge pipeline ruptured, ultimately spilling 20,000 barrels of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River and becoming the largest ever on-shore tar sands oil spill. Tar sands oil, extracted primarily in Canada and piped into and across the United States, is heavy, thick, and mud-like. Unlike most other oils, it sinks, making it even more difficult to clean up. After the Kalamazoo spill, Enbridge had to dredge the river and then replant native vegetation. At the five-year mark of the spill, the river’s ecology had not fully returned.

  • Finance

    • What Donald Trump doesn’t get about ‘free trade’

      The future Republican presidential nominee is right to criticize so-called ‘trade’ deals like NAFTA, but he does so for the wrong reasons.

    • The Republican Platform’s Surprise Revival of Glass-Steagall Legislation

      The last-minute decision to include in the Republican platform a call to restore the firewall between commercial and investment banking comes as a surprise, because Donald Trump himself has never publicly addressed or endorsed such a reform in his year-long presidential run.

      Trump did once say at a debate in New Hampshire, “nobody knows banking better than I do,” but a review of the transcripts of all twelve Republican debates shows that he never endorsed restoring Glass-Steagall, legislation first passed in 1933. Websites devoted to detailing Trump’s positions find no record of him having any opinion on the Depression-era law. The issues pages of Trump’s presidential website steer clear of anything related to banks or finance.

    • The Corporate Liberal in America

      Sound familiar? King’s white moderate and Marx’s ostensible friend is our corporate liberal. Same spin, different decade. The corporate liberal is an embodiment of the idea that political parties are the graveyards of movements. Hedges himself wrote a book called, “Death of the Liberal Class” five years ago. It should’ve been the elegy before the interment of the Democratic Party as a serious option in electoral politics. Yet here we are, about to anoint another corporate liberal to the highest seat in the land. In that case, consider this article yet another epitaph awaiting its headstone. Let’s hope it’s not a long wait. Voices like Sawant’s and the momentum of movements like BLM give us reason to think it won’t be.

    • What’s The Rent? NYC Housing Officials Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

      The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is flouting a rent-reporting requirement for apartments built under the city’s single biggest housing tax break. Mayor Bill de Blasio doesn’t seem to mind.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Exclusive: Trump could seek new law to purge government of Obama appointees

      If he wins the presidency, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would seek to purge the federal government of officials appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama and could ask Congress to pass legislation making it easier to fire public workers, Trump ally, Chris Christie, said on Tuesday.

    • Trump Supporters Accused of Bullying Delegates Who Don’t Fall In Line

      Some Republican convention delegates are complaining that pro-Trump thugs harassed and threatened them for not falling into line behind the nominee.

      This is not a new phenomenon; there’s even a Delegate Defense Hotline set up by the Ted Cruz campaign in April that bullied delegates can call.

      Kera Birkeland, a delegate from Utah, said she was confronted by two women in the bathroom at the Quicken Loans Arena Monday night. “They yelled at me, called me names,” she wrote on Facebook. “They said I should die. They said the police should be pulled from the Utah delegation and we should all die. They never touched me. They did not say they would kill me. They just said I should die.”

      Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, joked about the incident on Tuesday. “I think I have a pretty good sense of what’s going on in this convention, but I haven’t gone in to the bathrooms yet,” he told reporters.

      Birkeland was part of a group of delegates who unsuccessfully called for a roll call vote on the convention’s rules on Monday – widely seen as the last gasp of a #Nevertrump movement. Birkeland initially supported Rand Paul for president, then Ted Cruz.

      Tommy Valentine, a 22-year-old Virginia delegate, told ThinkProgress that representatives from the Trump campaign threatened him about the petition for a roll call vote: “I had one Trump staffer who came to me and said, ‘When Trump becomes president, he will remember,’” Valentine said. “They were going around to the delegates who would sign the documents intimidating them and telling them to take their names off it.”

    • Trump Adviser Calls For Hillary Clinton’s Execution

      RNC delegates and convention-goers can buy merchandise calling Hillary Clinton a “bitch” and a “tramp.” On both Monday and Tuesday, the floor has broken out in chants of “lock her up!” Listening to the speaker after speaker spend a significant chunk of their time denouncing Clinton, one might be led to believe hating on Hillary is an official plank in the Republican Party’s platform.

    • G.O.P. Formally Nominates Donald Trump for President
    • RNC Headliners Avoid Talking About Jobs and Donald Trump on Day to Talk About Jobs and Trump

      Tuesday was “Make America Work Again” day at the Republican National Convention, which also happened to coincide with the party formally nominating Donald Trump as its nominee.

      But neither jobs nor Trump got much attention as a grab-bag of Republican headliners Tuesday spent most of their time demonizing Hillary Clinton and talking about themselves without offering an affirmative case for the nominee or a concrete economic policy agenda.

      The keynoter, House Speaker Paul Ryan, spoke nearly 1,500 words, but mentioned Trump’s name just twice. Promising he’ll be standing alongside “Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump” at next year’s State of the Union address, Ryan spent the lion’s share of his time castigating the Democratic Party instead.

    • Will Clinton VP Pick Be ‘Pronounced Middle Finger’ to Millions Who Voted for Bernie?

      Appropriate progressive response to inadequate choice, says one Democratic delegate, ‘would be expressions of outrage and nonviolent protest, from the convention floor in Philadelphia to communities across the country.’

    • GOP Crazy Talk Comes to Cleveland

      The Republican National Convention has been an orgy of crazy talk – mixed in with some plagiarism by Donald Trump’s wife and a vast kangaroo court convicting Hillary Clinton – a truly remarkable spectacle, as Michael Winship describes.

    • Donald Trump’s Most Idiotic Moments
    • The Coronation of a Charlatan

      Years from now, bright-eyed children will look up at Grandma or Grandpa and ask, “Where were you when they nominated Donald Trump?” Far too many prominent Republicans will have to hang their heads in shame.

      As the garish imperial coronation in Cleveland reaches its climax, there will be much commentary—some, no doubt, from me—about fleeting events. Did So-and-so’s speech help Trump or hurt him? Did one line of attack against Hillary Clinton seem more or less promising than another? All of this is news, but we must not lose sight of the big picture: The “Party of Lincoln” is about to nominate for president a man who is dangerously unfit for the office.

      Trump is a brilliant showman, no question about that. His life’s work has been self-aggrandizement, not real estate, and all those years of practice served him well when he turned to politics. He knows how to work a crowd. He understands television and social media. He dominated and vanquished a field of experienced campaigners as if they were mere apprentices.

    • Boris Johnson grilled over past ‘outright lies’ at uneasy press conference

      Boris Johnson was embarrassingly forced on to the back foot during his first London press conference as foreign secretary on Tuesday as he was repeatedly pressed to explain his past “outright lies” and insults about world leaders, including describing the US president as part-Kenyan and hypocritical.

      Standing alongside John Kerry, the US secretary of state, Johnson claimed his remarks had been misconstrued, that his past journalism had been taken out of context, and world leaders he had met since his appointment fully understood his past remarks.

    • A Lens on the RNC: Dispatches From Day 1 of the Convention (Photos)

      What happens outside Quicken Loans Arena during the 2016 Republican National Convention may be more interesting than what happens inside the star-spangled halls.

      Photojournalist Michael Nigro is in Cleveland to provide Truthdig with a view of noteworthy moments from around the convention centers, where protesters and activists have gathered to express their views.

    • Inside The Delegate Revolt At The RNC

      Boos, screams of “no,” and cries of “shame” rang throughout the Republican National Convention’s arena Monday afternoon as party leaders rejected demands from at least ten states to allow a vote on the rules that bind delegates to vote for Donald Trump.

      The delegates leading the eleventh-hour rebellion, including Colorado’s Kendal Unruh, were furious. She told ThinkProgress minutes after the vote that she felt cheated by her own party and its nominee.

    • Anti-Trump Dead-Enders Hit a Dead End

      Party divisions over Donald Trump reached the floor of the Republican Convention on Monday afternoon as anti-Trump delegates attempted a complicated procedural maneuver: petitioning the convention’s chairman to force a roll call vote over the acceptance of the convention’s rules.

      It was an act of desperation.

      “I think Trump is the absolute worst candidate that the Republican Party could put forth,” said Craig Licciardi of Flint, an alternate delegate from Texas who said that he supported the roll call vote. (Nearly half the delegates attending the convention are technically “alternates,” who don’t get an actual vote on the floor.)

      Like many from his state’s delegation, he wore a Lone Star shirt and a cowboy hat. “He’s a Democrat in disguise,” Licciardi said. “I would hope that everything he says has a measure of truth to it, but it was only a few years ago that he was praising Hillary and Bill as his good friends, and good people.”

    • The Long, Sad, Corrupted Devolution of the GOP, From Eisenhower to Donald Trump

      The Intercept and our partners at AJ+ produced the video above documenting the GOP’s 60-year-long de-evolution

      The Republican Party is poised to nominate a presidential candidate who has built his platform on promises to ban a billion people from entering the United States based on their religious faith and build a gigantic wall south of the border.

      But Donald J. Trump is not an accident. The GOP has in the last 40 years relentlessly devolved away from addressing the needs of ordinary people, catering instead to extreme ideologies and the wealthiest donors.

      Rather than addressing pressing problems like income inequality and climate change, the modern GOP focuses instead on cutting taxes for the super-wealthy, expanding earth-killing carbon extraction, and endless war.

      But it wasn’t always this way. Sixty years ago, the Republican Party was advocating for civil rights and gender equality, a stronger welfare state, and to protect the environment. This is the story of the Republican Party that once was.

    • American Pravda: Relying Upon Maoist Professors of Cultural Studies

      Last week America suffered the loss of Sydney Schanberg, widely regarded as one of the greatest journalists of his generation. Yet as I’d previously noted, when I read his long and glowing obituary in the New York Times, I was shocked to see that it included not a single word concerning the greatest story of his career, which had been the primary focus of the last quarter century of his research and writing.

      The cynical abandonment of hundreds of American POWs at the end of the Vietnam War must surely rank as one of the most monumental scandals of modern times, and the determined effort of the mainstream media to maintain this enormous governmental cover-up for over four decades raises serious doubts about whether we can believe what our newspapers report about anything else.

      A couple of mainstream academics, one liberal and one conservative, whose names would be recognized as those of prominent public intellectuals, dropped me notes strongly applauding my effort to reopen the POW controversy and help get the truth out at last.

    • GOP Leans In To Misogyny During Convention

      Each day of the Republican National Convention, as tens of thousands of delegates, reporters, and curious onlookers pushed and shoved their way down a single narrow street leading to the arena’s main stage, a group of vendors hawked t-shirts and buttons attacking Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

    • R.I.P., GOP?

      The Republican Party came to life as the bastion of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men.” It was a reformist party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery and to fighting a “Slave Power” its founders saw as undermining free institutions.

      The new political organization grew out of the old Whigs and reflected the faith that Henry Clay and his admirer Abraham Lincoln had in the federal government’s ability to invest in fostering economic growth and expanding educational opportunity. Its partisans embodied what John C. Calhoun, slavery’s chief ideological defender, described disdainfully as “the national impulse.” It was, in fact, a good impulse.

    • Trump-Loving KKK Leader: Jewish Speechwriter Sabotaged Melania Trump

      In the last 24 hours, the Donald Trump campaign has offered a number of dubious excuses for why Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention’s opening night appeared to lift passages of First Lady Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic Convention speech word-for-word. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who has enthusiastically endorsed Trump, offered a novel explanation: the Jewish agenda.

      Trump initially refused to disavow the notorious white supremacist’s endorsement, eventually distancing himself from Duke after pressure from the party establishment. But Duke has continued to vociferously defend Trump against all accusations of racism, generally by blaming the Jews.

    • Melania Trump Remarks on Values Plagiarized From Michelle Obama

      A central portion of Melania Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Monday night, about the core values her parents instilled in her and her sister as children, seems to have been lifted almost word for word from the speech Michelle Obama gave on the first night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

    • GOP Platform Calls for Elimination of Almost All Campaign Finance Laws

      A key part of Donald Trump’s campaign to become the Republican presidential nominee was based on claiming to self-fund his campaign while calling his opponents “puppets” of big contributors. But the 2016 Republican platform takes some of the most extreme positions on money in politics, measures that would force almost all politicians to seek out their own personal puppet masters.

      First, the GOP platform advocates “raising or repealing contribution limits” on donations directly to politicians.

      Currently individuals can give only $2,700 per election directly to a candidate. Primaries count as separate elections, so you can give Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s campaigns $5,400 – half for the primary and half for the general elections.

      Thanks to Citizens United and related rulings, you can also — if you can afford to — give unlimited amounts to Super PACs that are theoretically uncoordinated with campaigns.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • GCHQ and Leamington charity aim to inspire girls to take up a career in cyber security [Ed: Today's femmewashing]
    • Surveillance, power and communication

      Algorithms make digitally mediated surveillance or watching over technically very easy. Applications can support and mitigate the damage of disasters, they can help protect people in public spaces, they can help signal health risks and in that sense, they combat disease. They help in monitoring climate change. Algorithms are being used to help companies to boost profits and countries are (in some cases) experiencing economic growth as a result – that is the claim and it can be verified. Algorithms also of course support sousveillance or undersight as Steve Mann and others call it; and so algorithmic based watching from below also supports a radical politics of resistance.

    • What Could Go Wrong With Asking Teachers To Monitor Kids for ‘Extremist’ Beliefs?

      The FBI wants to implement a program to counter extremism in U.S. schools that’s similar to a disastrous one in the U.K.

      Are these the tell-tale signs of kids at risk of committing violence: An 8-year-old who wore a t-shirt saying he wanted to be like a seventh-century Muslim leader? A 17-year-old who sought to draw attention to the water shortage in Gaza by handing out leaflets? A 4-year-old who drew a picture of his dad slicing a vegetable?

      Teachers and school officials in the United Kingdom thought so, and they referred these children for investigation as potential terrorists. They were interrogated by U.K. law enforcement. They’re likely subject to ongoing monitoring, with details of their childhoods maintained in secret government files potentially indefinitely.

      A report released last week by Rights Watch (UK) highlights these and other children’s experiences under a U.K. countering violent extremism (CVE) program known as Prevent. Prevent imposes a legal obligation on schools to implement policies assessing whether children have “extremist” views or are at risk of engaging in terrorism, and to “intervene as appropriate.” Intervention may include referring the child to a related program in which panels of police officers, teachers, and other government employees identify children they think are vulnerable to terrorist recruitment.

      Why should any of this concern Americans? Because the FBI wants to do something a little bit too close for comfort in U.S. schools, and American schoolchildren may come under similar suspicion and scrutiny.

    • France orders Microsoft to stop collecting excessive user data

      The French data protection authority on Wednesday ordered Microsoft to stop collecting excessive data on users of its Windows 10 operating system and serving them personalized ads without their consent.

      The French data authority, Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), said the US company had three months to stop tracking browsing by users so that Windows apps and third-party apps can offer them targeted advertising without their consent, failing which it could initiate a sanctions procedure.

      A number of EU data protection authorities created a contact group to investigate Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system following its launch in July 2015, the French privacy watchdog said.

    • Now You Can Hide Your Smart Home on the Darknet

      The privacy software Tor has aided everything from drug dealing marketplaces to whistleblowing websites in evading surveillance on the darknet. Now that same software can be applied to a far more personal form of security: keeping hackers out of your toaster.

      On Wednesday, the privacy-focused non-profit Guardian Project, a partner of the Tor Project that maintains and develops the Tor anonymity network, announced a new technique it’s developed to apply Tor’s layers of encryption and network stealth to protecting so-called “Internet of things” or “smart home” devices. That growing class of gadgets, ranging from refrigerators to lightbulbs to security cameras, are connected to the Internet to make possible new forms of remote management and automation. They also, as the security research community has repeatedly demonstrated, enable a new breed of over-the-Internet attacks, such as the rash of hackers harassing infants via baby monitors or the potential for hackers to steal your Gmail password from your fridge.

    • White privilege protects Taylor Swift’s Instagram while racist slurs force Leslie Jones off Twitter

      Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift had an exhausting day on the internet on Monday. In the immediate aftermath of Kardashian releasing video footage confirming that Swift did, in fact, have a conversation with Kanye West about her name drop in his song “Famous,” public opinion has taken a dramatic turn against Swift.

    • Instagram Protects Taylor Swift While Twitter Lets Racist Trolls Attack Leslie Jones

      Censorship on social media is a tricky issue. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram have to balance community policing with freedom of expression. When does bullying cross the line? Should hate speech be banned? And who gets to decide? It’s often a gray area — except when it’s black and white.
      Since Kim Kardashian uploaded snippets on Sunday night of Kanye’s conversation with Taylor Swift — you know, the phone call about “Famous” that Swift insisted never happened — Kimye supporters have been hard-core trolling Swift’s Instagram response to the debacle. Commenters have been calling her a liar, a fake, and things much nastier than that — or simply resorting to the snake emoji, as inspired by this tweet of Kardashian’s. Not nice — but nothing egregious or unusual, either.

    • Tor Veteran Lucky Green Exits and Withdraws Critical ‘Tonga’ Node and Relays
    • Health Gadgets and Apps Outpace Privacy Protections, Report Finds

      The federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA has not kept pace with wearable fitness trackers, mobile health apps and online patient communities, leaving a gaping hole in regulations that needs to be filled, according to a much-delayed government report released today.

      The report, which was supposed to be complete in 2010, does not include specific recommendations for fixing the problem, even though Congress asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide them.

    • Russia Asks For The Impossible With Its New Surveillance Laws

      It’s been a rough month for Internet freedom in Russia. After it breezed through the Duma, President Putin signed the “Yarovaya package” into law—a set of radical “anti-terrorism” provisions drafted by ultra-conservative United Russia politician Irina Yarovaya, together with a set of instructions on how to implement the new rules. Russia’s new surveillance laws include some of Bad Internet Legislation’s greatest hits, such as mandatory data retention and government backdoors for encrypted communications—policies that EFF has opposed in every country where they’ve been proposed.

      As if that wasn’t scary enough, under the revisions to the criminal code, Russians can now be prosecuted for “failing to report a crime.” Citizens now risk a year in jail for simply not telling the police about suspicions they might have about future terrorist acts.

      But some of the greatest confusion has come from Internet service providers and other telecommunication companies. These organizations now face impossible demands from the Russian state. Now they can be ordered to retain every byte of data that they transmit, including video, telephone calls, text messages, web traffic, and email for six months—a daunting and expensive task that requires the kind of storage capacity that’s usually associated with NSA data centers in Utah. Government access to this data no longer requires a warrant. Carriers must keep all metadata for three years; ISPs one year. Finally, any online service (including social networks, email, or messaging services) that uses encrypted data is now required to permit the Federal Security Service (FSB) to access and read their services’ encrypted communications, including providing any encryption keys.

    • Deep Dive: EFF’s New Wordlists for Random Passphrases

      Randomly-generated passphrases offer a major security upgrade over user-chosen passwords. Estimating the difficulty of guessing or cracking a human-chosen password is very difficult. It was the primary topic of my own PhD thesis and remains an active area of research. (One of many difficulties when people choose passwords themselves is that people aren’t very good at making random, unpredictable choices.)

    • The Things We Need to Know

      The national security state steps out of bounds.

      [...]

      After 9/11, Hayden and a small group of White House officials, intelligence officers, and lawyers secretly put in place a warrantless wiretapping program whose purported legality relied on radical exceptions to both the Fourth Amendment and a federal statute that strictly governs foreign-intelligence surveillance on domestic soil. Even as he defends the program, codenamed “Stellarwind,” as a “logical response” to 9/11 and “not the product of demented cryptologic minds,” Hayden calls it “the agency’s edgiest undertaking in its history.” (He may be right, but he devotes just five lines to describing the program’s most legitimate competitor for that title: the vast domestic spying, detailed in the 1975 and ’76 Church Committee Reports, that he calls a “scandal” in scare quotes. He mentions government surveillance of “the likes of” Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, and Benjamin Spock; he leaves out a host of legislators and civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr.) Situating the controversy Stellarwind ignited, Hayden writes my favorite sentence in the book: “Domestic intelligence has always been countercultural in America.”

    • Pokemon Go Cheat Fools GPS with Software Defined Radio

      Using Xcode to spoof GPS locations in Pokemon Go (like we saw this morning) isn’t that much of a hack, and frankly, it’s not even a legit GPS spoof. After all, it’s not like we’re using an SDR to spoof the physical GPS signal to cheat Pokemon Go.

    • DOJ Pushes Out Legislation Proposal To Undercut Microsoft Case Decision About Overseas Searches

      No sooner had the ink dried on the Second Circuit Appeals Court decision regarding Microsoft and its overseas servers than new legislation designed to undercut the court’s finding has been printed up by the DOJ and presented to the administration.

      Microsoft successfully argued that the US government couldn’t force it to unlock a server in Dublin, Ireland, so it could rummage around for evidence. Nor could the DOJ force the company to act on its behalf, performing a search of its overseas servers for documents the US government couldn’t access otherwise.

      Since that decision obviously just won’t do, the DOJ has presented proposed legislation [PDF] that would alter existing Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) so the agency can do the very thing a court just said it couldn’t do.

      The details are discussed in, um, detail over at the Lawfare blog by none other than a former DOJ lawyer (David Kris). Needless to say, the post skews towards “supportive,” but the analysis is thorough and offers some excellent insight on what the DOJ hopes to open up — and what it’s willing to concede in return for this new power.

    • Former Marine Dad Blames Son’s Beating Death on PTSD
    • Md. dad who killed adopted son sentenced to 12 years in prison
    • Former NSA Employee Sentenced for Adopted Son’s Death
    • Former NSA official gets 12 years in death of adopted son

      A former division chief for the National Security Agency, who admitted that he hurled his 3-year-old adopted son against a wall in his Maryland home, was sentenced to 12 years in prison Tuesday for the boy’s death.

    • War veteran gets 12 years in prison for brutally killing three-year-old adopted son
    • PTSD claim helps deadly dad get low end sentence
    • Former NSA official sentenced to 12 years in death of adopted son

      Much of the six-hour hearing dealt with O’Callaghan’s mental state. He had served tours in Kosovo and Iraq as a Marine, saw the dead bodies of children, and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, testimony showed. His attorney, Steven McCool, described that history as a mitigating factor in the crime.

    • Theresa May wrong to pass spy law, and DRIPA opinion proves it—MP says

      Politicians, lawyers, and civil rights groups have slammed the UK government’s present and future surveillance laws in light of the advocate general’s opinion on the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA)—which said that Theresa May’s emergency spy law is legal if strong safeguards are in place.

      [...]

      Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson—who, alongside Tory MP and the government’s new Brexit chief David Davis—brought the original legal action against the UK’s DRIPA legislation, said: “This legal opinion shows the prime minister was wrong to pass legislation when she was home secretary that allows the state to access huge amounts of personal data without evidence of criminality or wrongdoing.”

      Human rights group Liberty, which represented Watson in the courts, said that if the CJEU judges agree with the advocate general’s opinion, “the decision could stop the government’s fatally flawed Investigatory Powers Bill in its tracks and mark a watershed moment in the fight for a genuinely effective, lawful, and targeted system of surveillance that keeps British people safe and respects their rights.”

    • Germany Wants To Put Black Boxes In Self-driving Cars, Just Like Airplanes

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • There Will Be No Second American Revolution: The Futility of an Armed Revolt

      America is a ticking time bomb.

      All that remains to be seen is who—or what—will set fire to the fuse.

      We are poised at what seems to be the pinnacle of a manufactured breakdown, with police shooting unarmed citizens, snipers shooting police, global and domestic violence rising, and a political showdown between two presidential candidates equally matched in unpopularity.

      The preparations for the Republican and Democratic national conventions taking place in Cleveland and Philadelphia—augmented by a $50 million federal security grant for each city—provide a foretaste of how the government plans to deal with any individual or group that steps out of line: they will be censored, silenced, spied on, caged, intimidated, interrogated, investigated, recorded, tracked, labeled, held at gunpoint, detained, restrained, arrested, tried and found guilty.

      For instance, anticipating civil unrest and mass demonstrations in connection with the Republican Party convention, Cleveland officials set up makeshift prisons, extra courtrooms to handle protesters, and shut down a local university in order to house 1,700 riot police and their weapons. The city’s courts are preparing to process up to 1,000 people a day. Additionally, the FBI has also been conducting “interviews” with activists in advance of the conventions to discourage them from engaging in protests.

    • Court Says There’s No Remedy For Person Whose Vehicle Was Subjected To Civil Forfeiture After An Illegal Search

      A bizarre case comes out of the Texas court system — landing squarely in the middle of a legal Bermuda Triangle where illegal searches meet civil asset forfeiture… and everything is still somehow perfectly legal. (via FourthAmendment.com)

      The facts of the case: police officers arrested Miguel Herrera and seized his 2004 Lincoln Navigator. An inventory search of the vehicle uncovered drugs and the state moved to seize the vehicle itself as “contraband” using civil (rather than criminal — this is important) asset forfeiture. Herrera argued that the stop itself was illegal and anything resulting from it — the drugs and the civil seizure of the vehicle — should be suppressed.

      The Supreme Court of Texas examines the facts of the case, along with the applicable statutes, and — after discarding a US Supreme Court decision that would have found in Herrera’s favor — decides there’s nothing he can do to challenge the seizure. He can’t even move to suppress the evidence uncovered following the illegal stop — the same search that led to the state seizing his vehicle under civil forfeiture statutes.

    • FBI, Police ‘Visited’ Activists’ Homes Ahead of the Republican National Convention

      In another step towards the fascist state Donald Trump has warm dreams envisioning, FBI agents and Cleveland police officers “visited” the homes of local activists in an attempt to gather intelligence on possible planned demonstrations surrounding the Republican National Convention.

    • Republican Congressman Steve King Sets White Supremacist Tone in Cleveland

      Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, insisted on Monday that there was nothing wrong with the lack of diversity at the Republican National Convention since, he said, members of other races had contributed relatively little to human civilization.

      King’s literal assertion of white supremacy, in response to criticism of the party by the Esquire blogger Charlie Pierce, came during a live appearance on MSNBC, and seemed to stun the host, Chris Hayes, as well as Pierce and April Ryan, American Urban Radio Networks’ Washington bureau chief.

    • Amid Unrest, South Sudanese Journalist Arrested

      Alfred Taban, a prominent South Sudanese journalist and editor-in-chief of the Juba Monitor, was arrested by government national security service agents on Saturday, according to the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project (DefendDefenders). His arrest reportedly stemmed from his recent editorial calling for the removal of South Sudan’s president Salva Kiir and his first vice president Riek Machar, following a new round of bloodletting in South Sudan’s long-running civil war.

      “What Alfred wrote was within the constitutional right (freedom of expression), it is not an offense,” Edmund Yakani, the executive director of Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, a civil society organization that tracks the harassment of journalists, told The Intercept by email.

    • The dangerous denial of dangerous instincts

      Power-seeking demagogues appeal, unknowingly, to our dangerous instinct to fear and hate rival groups: unknowingly, partly because the scientific community denies the existence of instinct.

    • Puerto Rican Police Officials Find Out They Can’t Force Officers to Pray or Demote Them When They Refuse

      It’s really simple: Government officials cannot punish subordinates for refusing to pray.

      How does a 13-year veteran of the Puerto Rico Police Department go from being a patrol officer to washing police cars? In the case of Officer Alvin Marrero-Méndez, all it took was refusing to participate in his boss’s official Christian prayers. After Officer Marrero-Méndez, an atheist, objected to the unlawful practice and declined to join his colleagues in prayer, he was demeaned by his supervisors, stripped of his gun, and effectively demoted to a messenger and car-washer.

      In 2013, the ACLU and ACLU of Puerto Rico filed a federal lawsuit against Officer Marrero-Méndez’s supervisors. Today, ruling against the supervisors, a federal appeals court affirmed the obvious: The government cannot punish someone for refusing to pray, and officials who violate this basic constitutional principle can be held liable in court for their conduct.

      The defendants had argued that they should be immune from liability because, according to them, the law at the time was not clearly established. But as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit explained today, “If these actions do not establish religious coercion, we would be hard-pressed to find what would.”

    • Police officer among three stabbed as Hyde Park water fight turns ugly

      One police officer was stabbed and another injured after a water fight in London’s Hyde Park on the hottest day of the year turned violent.

      Two other people suffered stab wounds in addition to the police officer as the park descended into a “war zone”.

    • Hyde Park disorder – two police officers injured and two others stabbed
    • Security, Territory and Population Part 2: Initial Discussion of Security

      The first lecture in the series Foucault calls Security, Territory and Population is primarily a discussion of security. Instead of a definition, Foucault gives two sets of examples. The first group involves penal statutes. In the simplest case, there is a prohibited practice (you shall not steal) and a punishment (amputation). In the second, the disciplinary case, the prohibition and the punishment are present, but in a more complex context, including a system of supervisions, inspections and checks to identify the likelihood that a person will commit a crime; and instead of a spectacular punishment like amputation or banishment, there are incarceration and efforts at transforming the person. In the third case, the first two remain in place, but we add a supervisory regime of statistics and other efforts to understand the problem created by the prohibited practice and to set up mechanisms that are cost-effective in trying to keep the prohibited acts at a tolerable level with cost-benefit analysis and other constructs.

      The second set of examples concerns illness. In the Middle Ages, leprosy was dealt with using a strict protocol of separation. A bit later, the Plague was treated with a robust series of quarantines, inspections and other regulatory steps to prevent spread. In the third case, there is smallpox, treated with inoculations, so that the crucial questions are the effectiveness of the vaccine, the modes of insuring widespread inoculation, and other more formal statistical understandings.

    • The choice before the Labour party

      Underlying this question for the party was a question for the country as a whole, the fundamental and perennial question, ‘who is to be master?’ Is society to be dominated by a few hundred thousand bankers, industrialists and landowners? Or will the whole nation come to comprehend and control its economic policy and ‘distribute the product of its labours in accordance with some generally recognised principles of justice?’

    • Brazil’s Largest Newspaper Commits Major Journalistic Fraud to Boost Interim President Temer

      One of the looming mysteries during the last several months of Brazil’s political crisis (as The Intercept has repeatedly noted) has been the complete absence of polling data from the country’s largest media outlets and polling firms. The lower house voted on April 17 — more than three months ago — to send to the Senate impeachment charges against democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff, which resulted in the temporary installation of her vice president, Michel Temer, as “interim president.”

      Since then, there had been no published polls from Datafolha — the polling firm used by Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de.S Paulo — asking Brazilians if they favor Dilma’s impeachment, if they favor the impeachment of Temer, and/or if they want new elections to choose a new president. The last Datafolha poll prior to the impeachment vote was on April 9, and it found that 60 percent favored Dilma’s impeachment, while 58 percent favored the impeachment of Temer. It also found that 60 percent wanted Temer to resign after Dilma was impeached, and 79 percent favored new elections once they both left.

    • Former STL Cardinals Scouting Director Gets Jail Time For Illegally Accessing Astros Scouting Database

      If you’ll recall, early on this year we wrote about the very strange story in which the at-the-time scouting director for the St. Louis Cardinals, Chris Correa, used the old passwords of a former employee who had since taken a job with the Houston Astros to break into the opposing team’s scouting database. The actions were fairly brazen, leading many to wonder how in the world Correa thought he was going to get away with this. The government charged him under the CFAA, to which Correa pleaded guilty. At the time, I concluded the post guessing that Correa, given his standing and the fact that he isn’t named Aaron Swartz, would get off with minimal if any jail time.

    • Cardinals Employee Sentenced to Almost 4 Years in Prison for Guessing a Password

      Christopher Correa, the former scouting director for Major League Baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, has been sentenced to 46 months in federal prison for guessing the password of a Houston Astros manager.

    • Rudy Giuliani Brags About Treating All Muslims Like Criminal Suspects

      In his grab-the-pitchforks address to the Republican National Convention on Monday night, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani insisted the enemy wasn’t “most of Islam,” just “Islamic extremist terrorism.”

      But in an interview with The Intercept on the convention floor Tuesday night, Giuliani enthusiastically defended policies that treat all Muslims like criminal suspects.

      Asked whether he supports Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s proposals to have police spy on mosques, Giuliani replied “I was the mayor who put police officers in mosques, in New York and New Jersey.”

      Giuliani even claimed credit for a longer history of police surveillance of New York area mosques than is widely known, predating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “We did it for the eight years I was mayor,” he said. Giuliani was mayor from 1994 through December 2001.

      “After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic extremist terrorists from New Jersey, I did it in early January of 1994.”

      After the 9/11 attacks, the New York Police Department launched a now well-documented but then-secret program of spying on every mosque within a 100-mile radius of New York City, including in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England. The department acknowledged in 2012 court testimony that the program had never generated an investigative lead and in 2014, Mayor Bill De Blasio shut down the program’s most controversial unit.

    • Cleveland Police Swarm Protestors Brandishing Tennis Balls

      Dozens of police officers swarmed protestors from the activist group CodePink outside a main entrance to the Republican National Convention Tuesday, because they were holding tennis balls.

      In June, the City of Cleveland added tennis balls to its list of prohibited items inside a 3.3 square mile “event zone,” surrounding the Quicken Loans Arena. Other prohibited items included tape, rope, bike locks, and any stepstool that could be used to address a crowd. But the prohibition did not apply to guns – meaning that convention attendees and onlookers are allowed to openly carry firearms, including assault weapons.

      Cleveland Police requested that Ohio Gov. John Kasich suspend open carry laws inside the “event zone,” but he denied the request.

    • Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Long Nightmare at Guantánamo Is Finally Coming to an End

      After 14 years, the author of ‘Guantánamo Diary’ has been cleared for release from indefinite detention by the government.

      After 14 long years languishing at Guantánamo without charge or trial, Mohamedou Slahi has finally been cleared for release.

      Today the Periodic Review Board — a panel of national security, intelligence, and other officials — made that decision after determining that Slahi poses no significant threat to the United States. The government of his native Mauritania has said that it would welcome him home.

      Slahi is the author of the best-selling memoir “Guantánamo Diary,” and he appeared before the Periodic Review Board on June 2. We provided the PRB with a slew of evidence and support for Mohamedou’s release. We especially appreciate the letter of support from a former U.S. military guard at Guantánamo who was assigned to Slahi for 10 months, and another support letter from former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions, Col. Morris Davis.

      A campaign to free Slahi spearheaded by the ACLU has gathered major support both in the U.S. and abroad. The ACLU and Change.org have collected more than 100,000 signatures calling for his release. High-profile supporters of the petition include Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Roger Waters. In the U.K., several members of Parliament signed a letter urging the British government to call on the U.S. to release Slahi.

    • “Guantánamo Diary” Author Cleared for Release After 14-Year Imprisonment

      An interagency review board has determined that Guantánamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi poses no threat to the United States and has recommended that he be released, setting the bestselling author on the path to be reunited with his family.

      Slahi was arrested in his native Mauritania in 2001, and was held and tortured in secret prisons in Afghanistan and Jordan before being secreted to Guantánamo, an odyssey he recounted in a memoir, Guantánamo Diary, which became a bestseller last year. He has been imprisoned for over 14 years without being charged with a crime.

      In early June, Slahi made his case to the Periodic Review Board as part of a sort of parole process instituted by the Obama administration to evaluate the cases of the remaining men at Guantanamo to determine if they might be safely transferred to another country.

      At that hearing, Slahi’s advocates, including his lawyer and two representatives from the military, described his plans to continue writing and to start a small business, and noted the strong network of family and other supporters who could help him. They spoke to his unusual language skills and warm relationship with his lawyers and even the guards assigned to him. The military representatives described him as “an advocate for peace,” and stated that they were “certain that Mohamedou’s intentions after Guantánamo are genuine, and that he possesses sound judgment, and that he is good for his word.” One former guard submitted a letter attesting that he “would be pleased to welcome [Slahi] into my home.” (In keeping with the general secrecy of proceedings at Guantánamo, Slahi was not allowed speak during the open portion of the review, and he declined to have his own statement from the closed session made public.)

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • La Quadrature du Net answers to BEREC EU consulation on Net Neutrality

      Today ends the BEREC consultation on Net Neutrality. This consultation aimed at consulting the people on the guidelines clarifying the implementation of the telecom regulation1. The version sent by La Quadrature du Net is the one written by the FDN Federation, we believe this answer is appropriate and we support its provisions.

    • Europe Builds a Network for the Internet of Things. Will the Devices Follow?

      With much industry fanfare last month, Dutch telco KPN announced that it had completed nationwide coverage of the Netherlands in a wireless Internet of things network. Like a traditional cellular network, but with far lower costs and energy requirements, KPN’s network can connect sensors monitoring everything from rail switches at Utrecht Central station to depth sounders at the Port of Rotterdam and baggage handling at Schiphol Airport.

    • Handover of internet control to ICANN now officially blocked by Republican policy

      The planned transition of the internet’s critical technical functions from the US government to a technical body may come under further attack after the Republican Party officially agreed to block it on Monday.

      The Republican Platform for 2016 [PDF] was formally approved during a chaotic first day of the party’s national convention in Cleveland, and among its 66 pages of policy positions is its stance on “Protecting Internet Freedom.”

      In contrast to most of the document, the effort to move ultimate control of IANA from the US Department of Commerce (DoC) to non-profit DNS overseer ICANN is covered in largely hyperbolic terms.

    • IoT Gateways

      IoT Gateways connect IoT Devices to IoT back-end systems. Gateways connect to devices using interfaces like Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, 6LoWPAN, RS-485 and CANbus. Gateways connect to back-end systems through the Internet, commonly using Ethernet, WiFi, or cellular connections. Gateways perform multiple tasks, including concatenation of multiple devices, protocol conversion, device management, and security. Gateways may also perform application processing.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • EU Anti-Counterfeiting Rapid Intelligence System: One Database For All Data On IPR Infringement

      The Anti-Counterfeiting Rapid Intelligence System (ACRIS) is new database created by EUIPO’s Observatory in cooperation with DG Trade. The database provides EU companies with an overview of IP risks in third countries and offers a collection of IPR infringement cases. In the database, information is also given on the actions taken by third country local authorities in response to IP infringements. This information is intended to help companies to make informed decisions as to their business strategies in third countries and how to avoid and mitigate risks of IP infringement.

    • UK Government Called To Action To Further Boost IP Enforcement

      The United Kingdom-based Anti-Counterfeiting Group (ACG) industry group launched a “manifesto” earlier this month, calling on the government to establish a more effective and comprehensive response to intellectual property crime.

      A summary press release and the manifesto can be found here.

      The UK government is estimated by industry to lose £1.3 billion in unpaid tax from the sale of counterfeits. Additionally, whilst there has been an increase in the counterfeit products entering the UK markets, there has unfortunately been a decrease in the number of these products being seized at EU borders, the group said.

    • Patenting By Universities Unhelpful, Paper Says; WIPO Programme To Be Reviewed

      A new publication analysing the relationship between intellectual property and access to science explores ways countries have developed to counter the potential barriers created by IP rights, and says patenting by universities is counterproductive.

    • AIDS Conference: Will The UN High-Level Panel Report Deliver R&D And Access To Medicines?

      The lessons derived from the history of AIDS treatment have become a rallying call for civil society organisations globally. Not being able to afford AIDS medicines should not be repeated for people with other diseases, including HIV co-infections, treatment activists told world leaders here.

    • Copyrights

      • German Software Company Sues US Gov’t For Copyright Infringement

        A German software company, Bitmanagement Software, is now suing the US government for copyright infringement and demanding almost $600 million. The lawsuit, which was filed in the US Court of Federal Claims (basically a special court set up just for cases involving suing the US government for money), says that the US Navy copied Bitmanagement’s 3D virtual reality software, BS Contact Geo. Apparently, the Navy had tested the software and had an evaluation license allowing the software to be used on 38 computers. And then the Navy just copied it onto hundreds of thousands of computers.

        The lawsuit notes that the Navy had specifically requested the removal of Bitmanagement’s usage tracking code, and then told the company that it wanted to license the software for upwards of 500,000 computers — but also that it started doing those installs while the company was still negotiating a license. While that negotiation was ongoing, someone (accidentally, apparently) forwarded an email to Bitmanagement indicating that the software had already been installed on 104,922 computers. Apparently, a few months later, the Navy also disabled some other tracking software, called Flexwrap. This part is a bit confusing in the lawsuit, since earlier it notes that the evaluation contract required Bitmanagement to remove tracking software, but then the lawsuit notes that later on it was the Navy that removed Flexwrap, “in violation of the terms” of the license.

      • The conflict between social media and copyright

        Sharing is an inherent feature of social media. But, asks Alice Gatignol, is there any way this can be reconciled with established principles of copyright protection?

      • How Google Fights Piracy? 523,000,000 Pirate Links Removed In 2016

        Copyright holders running after pirates is not a new tune to our ears. Google, the biggest search engine provider on the planet, publishes regular reports of their fight against removing pirated content. They’ve managed to blank out around 523 million links from Google Search this year and will continue to remove more of them in the coming months.

      • Francis Gurry appoints Sylvie Forbin, lobbyist for Vivendi, as new head of copyright at WIPO

        Francis Gurry has appointed the new Deputy Director General for the Copyright and Creative Industry Sector. She is Sylvie Forbin, a national of France, and most recently Senior Vice President for Public and European Affairs, for Vivendi. Here is the WIPO announcement: as PDF.

        If the past is a guide, she is a hardliner for the industry, opposing user rights and favoring very aggressive enforcement measures.

        Among other things, she has described the social movements for access to knowledge as “very organized” and “opaque networks” that serve technology giants.

      • A Fan’s Case For Putting Batman & Superman In The Public Domain

        The crux of the argument is that these iconic characters currently appear to be in a bit of a death spiral. Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman met with a mixed-at-best response from fans and critics, and while both made good money in the big picture, they also showed some worrying signs — like failing to catch up to Marvel’s superhero movies (which was the whole point) and breaking records of audience drop-off between the much-hyped opening night and the following week (when word begins to get around that the movie sucks). Schmidt is not the first to attribute this to the creators’ disdain for the characters: Zack Snyder has openly expressed his lack of real interest in Batman and Superman, and made it clear that he doesn’t really understand their appeal. Writer David Goyer has made similar comments. And the same people are already hard at work on the follow-up Justice League films, which seem unlikely to break the pattern of mediocrity.

      • Farmers Demand Right to Fix Their Own Dang Tractors

        This might be hard to believe for non-farmers, but owners of tractors aren’t actually allowed to fix them, thanks to a set of laws designed to protect software intellectual property.

      • Cable Industry’s False Copyright Claims Are Killing Cable Box Reform Efforts

        In the quest to stop the FCC from bringing competition to the set top box, the cable industry has trotted out all manner of misleading arguments, most of which have been pushed in editorials in newspapers nationwide without highlighting author ties to the sector. Some of them have tried to pretend that cable box competition will create a piracy apocalypse. Others have tried to somehow argue that better, cheaper hardware and choices will somehow harm minority communities. Most of those are just flimsy attempts to try and keep the FCC from cracking open a $21 billion monopoly on cable box rental fees.

        Fearing their own loss of control, the entertainment industry has joined the cable sector in also claiming new cable box rules will somehow violate copyright law. Under the FCC’s original proposal (pdf), the agency simply states that existing cable content must be delivered to third-party hardware using the copy protection of the industry’s choice. Nothing in the rules will change that, or magically give third-party vendors the right to violate copyright. Still, opponents of the rules have consistently tried to claim the rules are some kind of cabal by Google to freeload off of and repackage “their innovation.”

07.20.16

EPO USA: Under Battistelli, the ‘European’ Patent Office Emulates All the Mistakes of the USPTO

Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Patent maximalism (rubberstamping), low examination quality, fiscal preference for large corporations and much more

EPO USA

Summary: Conservative Benoît Battistelli is trying to impose on the European Patent Office various truly misguided policies and he viciously attacks anyone or anything that stands in his way, including his formal overseers

MYSELF and others at Techrights worry deeply. We worry that Battistelli (of UMP, the French conservative party) will turn the Office into another large corporations-leaning USPTO and London (or some other European cities) into the next Eastern District of Texas, complete with venue shifting (dragging defendants to a distant and plaintiff-friendly court), high/unbearable litigation costs that favour settlement in spite of injustice (unless the defendant has deep pockets), massive scope of injunctions (beyond an entire continent), and of course software patents (among other low-quality patents). One reader told us yesterday, “have you heard of the latest load of rubbish from the EPO?” See the above screenshot. No comment is even necessary. How much Europe is there in the ‘European’ Patent Office when foreign companies are enjoying a fast lane?

“How much Europe is there in the ‘European’ Patent Office when foreign companies are enjoying a fast lane?”EPO workers are rightly afraid. Their job security (and their entire employer) has been compromised and is now at mortal risk (stakeholders know what’s happening) because of Battistelli and his friends. Battistelli does not even seem to mind. He attacks sceptics, not just critics. He is like Munich’s Erdoğan. Stability is not the goal; implementing his self-serving vision is the goal. Megalomaniacs can never admit their mistakes and change course.

News sites have learned to distrust Battistelli. Yesterday, for example, Managing IP asked readers about the latest lies from Battistelli's PR department rather than publish an article about it, perhaps seeing it for what it really is (propaganda). Yesterday the EPO PR people were trying to spread the message, but we have not yet seen a single Web site (even IP sites) covering it. Journalists seem to have learned their lesson; Battistelli has zero credibility and zero approval rating among his staff.

“Journalists seem to have learned their lesson; Battistelli has zero credibility and zero approval rating among his staff.”Looking at IP Kat yesterday, we saw nothing but affirmation that people now know better that there is a profound problem at the EPO. “In this context,” one person wrote, “I am also reminded of persistent rumors that the EPO quality is down.” Here is the comment in full:

I reread the discussion again and it seems indeed that the days of the board of appeal are counted. Unfortunately, that also means that the examiners quality will not be controlled any more. When I talk to examiners, their main concern is that the BOA would turn over one of their decisions. THAT is what prevents them from cutting corners.
In this context, I am also reminded of persistent rumors that the EPO quality is down. And I also know that the Office is hiring less competent examiners, quite simply because the pay is not as attractive as it was. Munich is expensive, local firms are not finding the engineers they need and have raised their entry salaries accordingly while the EPO has lowered theirs.

I also read here that some patent attorneys are suggesting that the applicants use the national route, for increased legal certainty. How will that solve their problems when the competitor comes with an infrigement case based on an unclear, vague patent granted by the EPO and validated by the UPC, which will have force of law in all EU states?

Another person wrote that “at least in 2015, the EPO faced significant problems in recruiting.” We keep hearing from numerous sources that the EPO is struggling with brain drain and accordingly it lowered the recruitment bar. New workers don’t receive the same type of salaries and almost none of the benefits (not even job security). They are pressured to grant a lot of patents to justify their place at the EPO, which is exactly what happens at the USPTO (with notorious quality control in recent years). Here is the comment in full:

If you want to know the future of the EPO, take a peek at the official “social report”:

http://documents.epo.org/projects/babylon/eponet.nsf/0/CA803AEC70D6E89FC1257FF40042DAA4/$File/social_report_2015_en.pdf

Despite being nothing more than a dry and dusty collection of statistics, the report contains some interesting figures.

Some of these clearly demonstrate that, at least in 2015, the EPO faced significant problems in recruiting. For example, relative to the figures for 2014:

Numbers of advertised vacancies: up >25%
Number of job applications received: down 12%
Nationalities decreased presence: GB (-32), DE (-29), NL (-28), AT (-10), SE (-7), DK (-6), CH (-5), IE (-3), PT (-1), LU (-1)
Nationalities increased presence: RO (+9), ES (+8), IT (+6), PL (+6), TR (+4), BG (+3), RS (+3), LT (+2), FI (+1), FR (+1), HR (+1), MK (+1)
Permanent staff: down 1.3%
Contract staff: up 13.45%
New hires: down 30%
Termination of employment: up 44%
Increases in termination: retirement (+51%), resignation (+44%), invalidity (+36%)

The figures also show signs of increasingly aggressive management tactics, such as no strikes allowed in 2015 (vs. 22 days in 2014), 99% of all internal appeals rejected (vs. 88% in 2014). The trend at ILOAT, however, is going in the opposite direction (with allowed or partially allowed cases virtually doubling in percentage).

Given the shocking trends that it reveals (which appear to point to an organisation that is in crisis), I am somewhat surprised that this report was produced at all.

What do the AC have to say about this? Figures that speak for themselves surely cannot be brushed under the carpet so easily.

Responding to the above, one person wrote: “Of course they can – at the European Patent Office the money brought in by the increased productivity speaks louder than any figures.”

“It is true that the office is experiencing difficulties at recruiting,” another person noted:

It is true that the office is experiencing difficulties at recruiting. But that did not stop Minnoye to start a project to eliminate all examination stock backlog until end 2020. The project involves recruiting enough examiners to deal with the backlog (=hundreds) thereby creating “overcapacity”. The project started this month, the first applicant were sent letters requiring them to state wether they were still interested in examination.

Minnoye will push this at all cost: stock must be zero within 4 years.

The EPO’s “AC is a permanent fixture, and so will eventually have to deal with the mess that is currently being created,” one person wrote. The comment in full:

Sure, but the increase in money will only be a short-term effect. Unlike BB, the AC is a permanent fixture, and so will eventually have to deal with the mess that is currently being created. From this perspective, I still find it somewhat puzzling that the AC is doing so little to stop BB dynamiting the foundations upon which the EPO (and its reputation) is built.

It won’t be long before the general public, not just insiders at the EPO, recognise this crisis and demand change. It’s not too late to save the EPO, especially if there is public acknowledgement of the errors and then an effort to fix the errors. The main problem, however, remains; attracting again the same experienced examiners (some of whom left or retired early) is impossible and revisiting all the erroneously-granted patents would be laborious and harm ‘customer’ confidence.

Battistelli has secured his place in history books for the same reason Erdoğan has. █

07.19.16

Links 19/7/2016: ARM and Opera Buyout

Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Bryan Lunduke and Matt Hartley – The Boys Are Back

    After some “going back and forth”, Bryan and I have decided it was high time we did a proper show together. Here are the details you need to know. Yes, it’s actually happening!

  • Top 6 Desktop Linux Blunders

    Ever since I first tried Linux on my desktop years ago, I’ve found myself wincing at what I felt were avoidable blunders. This observation doesn’t affect one distro more than another, rather it’s ongoing issues I’ve watch in utter amazement happen time and time again.

    No, I’m not giving a free pass to proprietary operating systems as they also have their share of epic blunder moments. But with Linux on the desktop, I guess you could say it just hits a bit closer to home. Remember, these are not merely bugs – I’m also talking about avoidable issues that affect folks even if they don’t realize it.

  • Desktop

    • Microsoft Releases Patch to Block Linux from Running on the Original Surface RT [Ed: but Microsoft loves Linux]

      The Register claims that MS16-094 fixes a loophole that allowed users to install other operating systems on Windows RT devices, including here Linux. With Windows RT becoming an OS with no future, many have looked into ways to install a different operating system on the Surface RT, but most attempts failed because of the locked bootloader and the other security systems that Microsoft put in place.

  • Kernel Space

    • Intel Developer Proposes “Kernel NET Policy” For Better Linux Network Performance

      Intel developer Kan Liang has published a set of 30 patches amount to more than two thousand lines of new kernel for implementing what he calls the Kernel NET Policy.

    • SGX For Linux — Intel Open Sources A Tool To Protect Your Code And Data

      As promised, Intel has open sourced an early version of its SGX tool for Linux. Intel SGX is a set of instructions that create a private region for sensitive code and data. This enclave is invisible to even the machine’s CPU with root privileges. At the moment, this release only supports Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit version.

    • Hardware Design for Linux Engineers by Grant Likely

      At the Embedded Linux Conference, Grant Likely — who is a Linux kernel engineer, and maintainer of the Linux Device Tree subsystem used by many embedded systems — described his embedded hardware journey in a presentation called “Hardware Design for Linux Engineers” — or as he put it, “explaining stuff I only learned six months ago.”

    • Graphics Stack

      • Intel Has More DRM Graphics Fixes Needed For Kabylake In Linux 4.7

        The Linux 4.7 kernel is expected to be officially released this coming weekend, but a pile of Intel Kabylake fixes are needed if the DRM graphics support is to be in order.

        Intel’s Daniel Vetter sent in a request to DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie to consider pulling these Kabylake (KBL) fixes for Linux 4.7. He explained, “here’s the pile of kbl cherry-picks assembled by Mika&Rodrigo. It’s a bit much, but all well-contained to kbl code and been tested for a while in drm-intel-next. Still separate in case too much, but in that case I think we’d need to disable kbl by default again (which would be annoying too) in 4.7.”

      • Maxwell OpenGL Improvements Coming To Nouveau
      • Intel Finishes Up Another OpenGL ES 3.2 Extension In Mesa
      • libinput 1.4.0

        libinput 1.4.0 is now available. New features since the RC are a reduced
        middlebutton area on Dell clickpads. All Dell touchpads have a visible
        marker between the left and the right button so the middle button can be
        smaller too – users have a visual guide where to click.

      • Libinput 1.4 Officially Released With Graphics Tablet Modes & More

        Libinput 1.4 was officially released over night to add new features to this input handling library used by Wayland, X.Org, and Mir systems.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Qt WebBrowser 1.0

        We have recently open sourced Qt WebBrowser!

      • Qt WebBrowser 1.0 Open-Sourced
      • KDE Neon OS, a review

        After hopping between Red Hat Linux, CentOS, Fedora, and Ubuntu LTS over the past decade, I recently decided to give KDE Neon a shot.

        The potential of a cutting edge desktop environment on a stable 16.04 Ubuntu base really attracted me, the first because I’m a stickler for a good GUI based UX, and the latter because most current software is built against RHEL/Ubuntu.

        However I should preface this by saying that I spend more time on Windows than the GNU/*nix based OS’s combined, and so my perspective in this review may be different than how you feel.

      • System Settings help needed

        First of all I need help, but before you help me I’d like to show you what a user without development skills can do to make plasma better.

        I already post about the system settings redesign and cause developer are busy with other tasks, I reviewed the existing modules and update them to fit (more) our vision. I know it’s not how I would prefere in the end but I did the changes without development skills (no compiling, no new code). I use qt-creator for edit the ui files and play around with qml.

        The Mouse cursor theme was updated, by move the buttons to bottom as in most other kcm’s. The height of the resolution depandant button will be change soon. (left plasma 5.7 right 5.8)

      • Current status for mailrendering in kube & kmail
      • From LaTeX to ConTeXt

        Every year I start to create a new book, every year I delete the book folder because I think it’s going into the wrong direction, and ths year is no different, I’m starting to write a book about Qt5 programming with C++11, I hope this time things can go different. And what I usually do is setup my LaTeX enviroment (kile, texlive, a few libraries and all that) – but I was hitting a UTF8 issue that \includepackage[utf8 or utf8-x][inputenc] didn’t solved… And if you are not well versed in Tex debugging things can go hairwire in just no time.

  • Distributions

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 6 Wallpaper, OpenMandriva 3 RC, Desktop Blunders

        Today in Linux news the Mageia project announced the winner of their artwork contest for upcoming version 6 as well as some of the other being included. OpenMandriva 3.0 Release Candidate 1 is available for download although the project has yet to announce it and Korora 22 is nearing the end of support. Matt Hartley identified the top six Linux desktop blunders and several Linux reviews caught my eye today.

      • And the winner is….

        We have completed the artwork contest and would like to extend our thanks to everyone that took part, there were some excellent pieces submitted and choosing the winners was a tough task.

        We would like to congratulate Jacques Daugeron on winning the background contest, the runners up will be available in the extra theme package as well.

        Here is the signature background for Mageia 6, it will be included in the next updates to the theme packages.

      • Breeze everywhere

        The first half of this year, I had the chance to work on icon and design for two big free-software projects.

        First, I’ve been hired to work on Mageia. I had to refresh the look for Mageia 6, which mostly meant making new icons for the Mageia Control Center and all the internal tools.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Shoots to Solve Container Storage with Gluster and OpenShift

        Red Hat is the newest organization to take a stab at the persistent storage challenge for containers. Last month, the open source giant announced a new Gluster-based storage option for OpenShift, the company’s open source platform for running containerized apps.

        Gluster and OpenShift are two key parts of the Red Hat technology stack. Gluster provides open source distributed storage, while OpenShift offers an integrated, one-stop platform for deploying and managing containers using Docker and Kubernetes.

      • Lenovo G50 & CentOS 7.2 Xfce – As good as it gets

        CentOS 7.2 Xfce is the most satisfactory distribution on the market today, alongside Trusty. Not perfect, not plug-n-play, but it is supported, stable and quite friendly. I did need several hours to sort things out, and that’s the price for converting a server distro into a home operating system.

        In this guise, it works well, with a few small exceptions, one or two outstanding niggles that need fixing, and the knowledge that I needed some third-party gear to achieve the level of productivity that I normally seek. That precludes CentOS 7 from being perfect or a candidate for my production setup, but it might be just the thing for you. If you’re not as bothered as I am around unofficial repos and adding some extra software on your own, then look no further. CentOS 7.2 Xfce is a slick, modern, good-looking choice with all the goodies for a healthy modern life. It is better than KDE and Gnome flavors, and comes with the unbeatable blend of simplicity and functionality.

        If anyone out there is interested in making the perfect home distro, based on Red Hat, please consider my words as a template for what needs doing. Drivers (signed), third-party software, basic customization. And that’s it. So simple. Then again, so difficult. But this is the most sensible formula for desktop use you will have seen in a long, long time. Enjoy.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Korora 22 Is About to Reach EOL

          As Korora uses Fedora as the base for our distribution and thus follow the Fedora Project’s life cycle, Korora 22 Selina will reach it’s End Of Life status on 22nd July.

        • Fedora APAC budget FAD

          Last week I attended the Fedora APAC budget planning FAD for FY’18. Ie. planning for Fedora activities that we expect to conduct between Mar 2017 – Feb 2018 and requisite budget for the same. Last year with Fedora.next reforms, we adopted a new approach to regional budget planning with an aim to increase transparency in the process. In this, each geographical region(ex. APAC) elects three delegates who handle major regional responsibilities. The Treasurer manages regional finance. The Logistician takes care of swag/media/banner production, dispatch and general coordination for Fedora presence at various events. And the Storyteller would collate information about regional events/activities and their impact/benefits to the Fedora project and report the same to the Fedora Community Action and Impact Lead(FCL) and the Fedora Council.

        • Design Prototypes – Week 2
        • FESCo Elections: Interview with Dominik Mierzejewski (rathann)

          I have a degree in software engineering. For over 12 years, I’ve worked as a Unix system administrator, with a short stint as a software engineer. Currently, I work for Citi as a senior IT infrastructure analyst. My primary responsibility at work is expert-level support of a heterogeneous environment consisting of RHEL, Solaris and AIX systems, both physical and virtual machines. Working at Citi while simultaneously being a Fedora developer allowed me to see both ends of the distribution development process and made me appreciate the excellent work of Fedora contributors even more. My past jobs include development of a particle detector model at CERN and system and network administration at the supercomputing centre of the University of Warsaw.

    • Debian Family

      • Enter new tool for newbie: Handy Linux

        Handy Linux has come out with handy Linux its new weapon in its arsenal. It is quite a simplified version to use the Linux operating system on desktop. The Handy Linux surfaced at around three years ago, however in June the latest version was released.

        The developers have made it easy to remove the layers of Handy Linux to reveal the more standard Linux environments which the users can learn. The users who do not need the IT installation tools included in the initial installation can delete them using Handy2Ddebian app from Handy’s main menu.

        Handy Linux is a standard Debian based OS which is light and shows some mix of Xfce desktop ecosystem. The remixed desktop is the signature mark for the Handy Linux.

      • Video: Systemd in Debian, a status update

        On July 5th, 2016 Michael Biebl spoke at DebConf16 on systemd in Debian.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Demo Wireless Convergence on Bq M10 Tablet

            A video demoing wireless convergence on the Bq M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet has been shared by Canonical today.

            Ubuntu phone fans will know that wireless display technology was made available to users of the Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu phone in last month’s OTA-11 update.

            But for its latest over-the-air update Ubuntu is bringing it to the Bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition slate, which went on sale earlier in the year.

            “Our latest OTA-12 has just landed and we’re excited that you can now wirelessly connect your M10 tablet to a monitor,” Canonical say in the description accompanying the video.

            OTA 12 is, at the time of writing, scheduled to begin phased roll out from July 27, so don’t panic if you don’t get the update just yet!

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • 3 open source data visualization tools for Hadoop

    Looking for ways to draw meaningful conclusions from big data?

    In his lightning talk at Great Wide Open 2016, Rommel Garcia gives us quick takeaways for three open source tools that help Hadoop users do just that…

  • Splice Machine 2.0 combines HBase, Spark, NoSQL, relational…and goes open source

    Splice Machine is a well-kept secret though; Zweben told me the company has about 10 customers. Although he hails from the world of commercial software, Zweben believes that open sourcing the Splice Machine product will help spread the word more widely. So version 2 of the product will be available in a free and open source Community Edition with the full database engine. A paid Enterprise Edition, that includes professional support and DevOps features like integration with LDAP and Kerberos as well as backup and restore, will provide the monetization model for the company.

  • Splice Machine Open Sources Dual-Engine Big Data Technology
  • Splice Machine’s New Open-Source RDBMS Sandbox Goes Live on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • As Splice Machine’s Database Goes Open Source, Apache Spark Could Spur it On

    Around the time that Splice Machine announced a milestone version of its RDBMS, which it bills as “the first hybrid in-memory RDBMS powered by Hadoop and Spark,” its fortunes were starting to rise along with Hadoop’s and Spark’s. In the big data space, there is tremendous need to marry powerful data analytics tools with powerful database tools. If you’re focusing on the Big Data and NoSQL arenas, along with relational databases, Splice Machine is worth a look.

    Now, Splice Machine is going open source, and it is also going live in a sandbox version on Amazon Web Services (AWS), so you can easily give it a try.

    Splice Machine aims to be a database solution that incorporates both the scalability of Hadoop, ANSI SQL, ACID transactions, and the in-memory performance of Spark.

  • How Open Source Guides Digital Transformation

    Almost everyone can agree the digital era is being fueled by five primary forces — mobile, social, sensor technologies, big data and the cloud. But doesn’t open source play a role in digital transformation as well?

    That was one of the topics discussed last week during a roundtable discussion sponsored by MIT Technology Review Custom and EnterpriseDB (EDB). The explored how open source software is helping organizations transform their infrastructures to meet today’s data-driven demands.

  • This Open Source Tool Can Map Out Bitcoin Payments

    Bitcoin is not anonymous. Anyone who has followed the dark web or the continuing regulation of the cryptocurrency should be familiar with that idea. If someone manages to link a real identity to a wallet—something that we’ve seen is possible—they can then follow other transactions around the public blockchain to see where else that person’s money has traveled.

  • CIR’s open-source Impact Tracker is live

    Almost two years ago, I began the process of building an Impact Tracker at The Center for Investigative Reporting to help us better understand the results of our work. Flash forward to today, and we have a custom-built platform that is being used by more than 20 organizations around the world.

    Today, we are releasing an open-source version, available to any organization.

  • OpenWest conference emphasizes importance of open-source technology

    Over 2,000 individuals wearing circuit board badges learned and talked about all things open source this past weekend at the South Towne Expo Center. The OpenWest conference is the largest regional tech conference promoting all things open— hardware, software, data, standards and more.

    The conference is put on by Utah Open Source and sponsored by V School, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Podium and Protocol, among others.

    Open source refers to software that anyone can see and edit. Open-source code is typically created in collaboration with both online and real-life communities. Liz Sands-Adams, OpenWest’s Director of the Privacy Education Track, said, “OpenWest survives because of a volunteer community that believes in empowering the open-source communities around them.”

  • Getting Exposure for Your Open Source Project

    With so many great open source projects spreading like wildfire, it is a great time to be a developer! I spend a considerable amount of time looking for great ideas across the open source community. For me, I’m always searching for modules we might include in our distributions, projects that could be enhanced and commercialized, or even crossovers into other areas for innovations. If something really resonates with our business we will apply resources to furthering that project.

    Generally, the first thing I do is hit the project description to see if it makes a connection with me. If it does, I’ll try it out or tag it for further research, perhaps even mention it on Twitter or discuss internally on a relevant Slack channel. Note, I did not look at your code, I looked at the idea. If you want your code to get out into the community, and actually ignite something bigger, you need to make sure your project is discoverable.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Prometheus unbound: Open source cloud monitoring

      Prometheus, an open source system for monitoring and alerting a wide spectrum of enterprise IT events, including containers, released its 1.0 revision this week.

      It’s also the second product in what amounts to a portfolio assembled by the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) for realizing the promise of a container-powered cloud built entirely on open source and open standards.

    • Prometheus reaches 1.0
    • Simplify your OpenStack installation with open source tools

      To avoid any confusion, let’s make this clear: OpenStack is a cloud-operating system. OpenStack is not a VM, but rather sits on top of VMs. Also, OpenStack is written in Python.

      As you install each component, OpenStack installs a command-line tool that works in tandem with it. The problem is that each component — of which there are dozens — has its own command-line tool, each with its own name and parameters. For example, you run Keystone to install users and roles in the Identity Service. Then you run Glance to load VM images. You would then use Nova to deploy those images. After a while, the sheer number of components and their respective command-line tools can get overwhelming.

      So, other than the command line, what options do we have to simplify the OpenStack installation process? Let’s have a look.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • Why we use OpenBSD at VidiGuard

      At VidiGuard, we care a lot about physical security. In fact, it’s our job. But equally important to physical security is the security of our customers’ data. We also need a robust, reliable platform that can run with minimal interaction. To make both of those happen, we employ OpenBSD in our on-premise equipment and our data infrastructure. Why OpenBSD?

    • Building a home firewall: review of pfsense

      For some time now, I’ve been running OpenWRT on an RT-N66U device. I initially set that because I had previously been using my Debian-based file/VM server as a firewall, and this had some downsides: every time I wanted to reboot that, Internet for the whole house was down; shorewall took a fair bit of care and feeding; etc.

      I’ve been having indications that all is not well with OpenWRT or the N66U in the last few days, and some long-term annoyances prompted me to search out a different solution. I figured I could buy an embedded x86 device, slap Debian on it, and be set.

    • LLVM 3.9 Has Been Branched, LLVM 4.0 Will Be Up Next

      Right on schedule the LLVM 3.9 code was branched today in preparation for its formal release next month.

      LLVM 3.9 is another six-month feature update to the LLVM compiler stack. We’ll have more on its features and performance in the weeks ahead, in addition to the LLVM Clang benchmarks we already do daily with it at LinuxBenchmarking.com.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • The Slashdot Interview With Larry Wall

      I run firefox on Linux, and chrome on my ancient Google phone, but I’m not a browser wonk. Maybe I’ll have more opinions on that after our JS backend is done for Perl 6…

    • Pulp 2.8.6 Generally Available

      This release includes a small number of fixes to severe bugs in Pulp Platform, the RPM plugin, and the Docker plugin.

    • 11 Programming Languages For DevOps Success

      DevOps uses languages for software development and languages for deployment automation. If you want to be successful with either side of DevOps, these languages will help.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Physicists Achieve Atomic Data Storage

      Researchers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have created a rewritable data-storage device capable of storing information at the level of single atoms representing single bits of information.

      The technology, which is described in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology, is capable of packing data as dense as 500 terabytes per square inch. Theoretically, the device could store the entire contents of the US Library of Congress within a 0.1-mm-wide cube—though the proof-of-concept demonstrated by the group topped out at 1 kilobyte.

  • Hardware

    • Hardware Acceleration Teams Up with Software

      Like far too many things in this world, enterprise networking seems to bounce between two extremes. One year, hardware acceleration is all the rage. The next, a software-only approach seeks to transform the way networks are built and deployed altogether. In reality, new networking approaches such as software-defined networking (SDN) and networking functions virtualization (NFV) will require a balance between hardware and software.

    • SoftBank to acquire ARM

      The boards of directors of SoftBank and ARM have announced that they have reached an agreement on the terms of a recommended all-cash acquisition of ARM for GBP24.3 billion (US$32.2 billion).

    • ARM chip designer to be bought by Japan’s Softbank

      UK technology firm ARM Holdings is to be bought by Japan’s Softbank for £24bn ($32bn) it confirmed on Monday.

      The board of ARM is expected to recommend shareholders accept the offer – which is around a 43% premium on its closing market value of £16.8bn on Friday.

      The Cambridge-based firm designs microchips used in most smartphones, including Apple’s and Samsung’s.

    • ARM Is Being Bought Out By Japan’s SoftBank

      HARDWARE –
      Many news reports this morning are indicating that Japan’s SoftBank is working out a deal to buy ARM Holdings and that a deal could be officially announced as soon as this morning.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Field Drug Tests: The $2 Tool That Can Destroy Lives

      It only takes $2 and a few minutes to ruin someone’s life. Field tests for drugs are notoriously unreliable and yet they’re still considered to be evidence enough to deprive someone of their freedom and start a chain of events that could easily end in joblessness and/or homelessness.

      Ryan Gabrielson and Topher Sanders — writing for the New York Times magazine — take a detailed look at these field tests, filtered through the experience of Amy Albritton, who spent 21 days in jail thanks to a false positive.

      A traffic stop that resulted in a vehicle search turned up an empty syringe and a “suspicious” crumb of something on the floor. The field test said it was crack cocaine. Albritton was taken to a county jail where she spent the next three weeks after pleading guilty to possession, rather than face a trial and a possible sentence of two years.

      The crumb of whatever had been sent on to a lab for verification, but with Albritton’s guilty plea, there was no hurry to ensure the substance retrieved from Albritton’s car was actually illegal. In fact, with the case adjudicated and closed, the evidence could simply have been destroyed. It wasn’t. Long after Albritton had been released, the substance was tested.

    • The Indian Point Nukes: a Disaster Waiting to Happen

      “Indian Point” is a film about the long problem-plagued Indian Point nuclear power plants that are “so, so risky—so close to New York City,” notes its director and producer Ivy Meeropol. “Times Square is 35 miles away.”

      The plants constitute a disaster waiting to happen threatening especially the lives of the 22 million people who live within 50 miles from them. “There is no way to evacuate—what I’ve learned about an evacuation plan is that there is none,” says Meeropol. The plants are “on two earthquake fault lines,” she notes. “And there is a natural gas pipeline right there that an earthquake could rupture.”

      Meanwhile, both plants, located in Buchanan, New York along the Hudson River, are now essentially running without licenses. The federal government’s 40-year operating license for Indian Point 2 expired in 2013 and Indian Point 3’s license expired last year. Their owner, Entergy, is seeking to have them run for another 20 years—although nuclear plants were never seen as running for more than 40 years because of radioactivity embrittling metal parts and otherwise causing safety problems. (Indian Point 1 was opened in 1962 and closed in 1974, its emergency core cooling system deemed impossible to fix.)

    • Defeat Of Philip Morris In Its Corporate Sovereignty Case Against Uruguay Likely To Open Floodgates For Tobacco Packaging Legislation

      Last December, Techdirt wrote about Australia fending off an attempt by Philip Morris to use corporate sovereignty to overturn the country’s plain-packaging regulations. As we pointed out, this wasn’t proof that investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) was no threat to national sovereignty, despite what some were claiming. Australia won on purely procedural grounds, not because the ISDS tribunal agreed that Australia had a fundamental right to regulate.

  • Security

    • Flaw in vBulletin add-on leads to Ubuntu Forums database breach

      Ubuntu support forums users should be on the lookout for dodgy emails after the website’s database of 2 million email addresses was stolen.

      Canonical announced the security breach on Friday after being notified that someone was claiming to have a copy of the UbuntuForums.org database. An investigation revealed that an attacker did get access to the website’s user records through a vulnerability.

    • Flaw in vBulletin add-on leads to Ubuntu Forums database breach
    • Canonical hack exposes private data of 2 million forum members
    • Canonical sets off alarm after Ubuntu forum data breach
    • Ubuntu Linux forums hacked
    • Canonical warns of Ubuntu Forums breach
    • The Hacking of Ubuntu Linux Forums: Lessons Learned
    • Ubuntu Forums Breach Affects Two Million Users
    • Two Million Passwords Breached in Ubuntu Hack
    • VBulletin flaw exploited in breach of Ubuntu Forums

      A known SQL injection vulnerability affecting vBulletin software was exploited by an attacker to breach the Ubuntu Forums database.

    • Ubuntu Forums data breach exposes 2 million users

      Ubuntu aficionados beware, as a data breach of the Ubuntu Forum has resulted in the leak of information for two million users. It should be noted that the breach has not hit Canonical Ltd., which runs the Ubuntu operating system, but rather the forum, so other services are still safe.

      The notice from Canonical explains that the breach was made possible through an SQL injection vulnerability in the forum’s Forumrunner add-on, which had not been patched. By injecting certain formatted SQL into the forum database, the hacker could then reach any table, particularly the “user” table.

    • Ubuntu Forums Suffer Data breach; Credit Goes to SQL Flaw
    • Ubuntu Forums Hacked, Attackers Get Away With Names, Emails And Salted Passwords
    • Ubuntu Linux forum hacked, data of 2 million users leaked
    • Notice of Ubuntu Forums breach; user passwords not compromised
    • Ubuntu Forums hacked (again)

      Ubuntu Forums was previously hacked in 2013.

    • Ubuntu Forum Hack Exposes 2 Million Users

      Ubuntu Linux developer Canonical has confirmed that a data breach exposed personal information of two million users of its forum.

    • How to scam $750,000 out of Microsoft Office: Two-factor auth calls to premium-rate numbers

      Gaming two-factor authentication systems with premium rate phone numbers can be very profitable – or it was until the flaws got reported.

      Belgian security researcher Arne Swinnen noticed that the authentication systems used by Facebook-owned Instagram, Google and Microsoft allow access tokens to be received by a voice call as well as a text message. By linking accounts to a premium-rate phone number he controlled and could pocket money from, he was able to scam the three companies out of cash – in some cases potentially thousands of dollars a day.

    • How Do Hackers Easily Crack Your Strongest Passwords — Explained
    • Security Skills Give Open Source Professionals a Career Advantage

      In today’s market, open source professionals with security expertise are crucial players on an employer roster. The growing use of cloud and big data, as well as the overhaul and expansion of many companies’ tech infrastructures, are driving the demand and need for professionals with this skillset.

      According to the 2016 Open Source Jobs Report, 14 percent of hiring managers and recruiters surveyed believe security to be the most important open source skill to date, ranking third just behind cloud technologies (51 percent) and networking (21 percent). Employers aren’t the only ones that see the value in security; 16 percent of open source professionals surveyed cited security as the most important open source skill and the biggest driver for open source growth in 2016.

    • AT&T Unveils Powerful New Security Platform

      AT&T this week unveiled a new powerful security platform, using big data analysis based on a Hadoop architecture which allows the company to ingest and analyze 5 billion security events in less than ten minutes.

    • Software security: Does quality provide a blueprint for change?

      Software security has been in the news a lot lately, between various high profile social media hacks to massive data breaches it feels like people in the industry are always talking about security, or more appropriately, the lack thereof. While having a conversation with somebody from my company’s internal security team a few weeks ago I had a bit of an epiphany: security in 2016 is much like quality was in 1999.

      Let’s think back 17 years and remember what the quality process was like in 1999. Code was written in rather monolithic chunks with very little thought (if any) given to how that code was to be tested. Testers were on completely separate teams, often times denied access to early versions of the software and code. Testers would write massive sets of test cases from technical specifications and would accept large drops of code from developers only after a feature was considered completed. Automation was either a pipe dream or only existed for very stable features that had been around for a while. A manual testing blitz would then kick off, bugs would be filed, work thrown back over the wall, rinse and repeat. After several of these cycles it was the testers job to give a go/no-go on whether the product was good enough to ship, essentially acting as gatekeepers.

    • As a blockchain-based project teeters, questions about the technology’s security

      There’s no shortage of futurists, industry analysts, entrepreneurs and IT columnists who in the past year have churned out reports, articles and books touting blockchain-based ledgers as the next technology that will run the world.

      In the middle of all this hype is a small fire that threatens to put some of those words to ash: The hijacking last month of around US$40 million of dollars worth of a cryptocurrency called ether – named after its blockchain platform, Ethereum — from The DAO, a crowd-sourced investment vehicle that has so far raised over US$100 million in the digital currency. Instead, the DAO has become paralyzed and on the verge of collapse.

    • Sandia Labs Researchers Build DNA-Based Encrypted Storage

      Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico are experimenting with encrypted DNA storage for archival applications.

      Husband and wife team George and Marlene Bachand are biological engineers with a remarkable vision of the future.

      The researchers at the Sandia National Laboratories Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies foresee a time when a speck of DNA on a piece of paper the size of a millimeter could securely store the entire anthology of Shakespeare’s works.

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Using a HooToo Nano as a magic VPN box
    • opensshd – user enumeration
    • Criminals plant banking malware where victims least expect it

      A criminal gang recently found an effective way to spread malware that drains online bank accounts. According to a blog post published Monday, they bundled the malicious executable inside a file that installed a legitimate administrative tool available for download.

      The legitimate tool is known as Ammyy Admin and is used to provide remote access to a computer so someone can work on it even when they don’t have physical access to it. According to Monday’s blog post, members of a criminal enterprise known as Lurk somehow managed to tamper with the Ammyy installer so that it surreptitiously installed a malicious spyware program in addition to the legitimate admin tool people expected. To increase their chances of success, the criminals modified the PHP script running on the Ammyy Web server, suggesting they had control over the website.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Germany axe attack: Assault on train in Wuerzburg

      Initial reports said up to 20 people had been injured but it was later revealed that at least 14 had been treated for shock.

      The motive for the attack is not yet clear.

      Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said the attacker was a 17-year-old Afghan refugee who had been living in the nearby town of Ochsenfurt.

    • Hyping Terrorism, Stoking Fear Following Nice, France Incident

      Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called for banning Sharia. Will greater war on Islam follow than already?

      Wall Street Journal editors hyped Islamophobia, saying “Jihad has become the default assumption of our age.”

      They urged strengthening NATO, shamelessly claiming it’s to protect freedoms from “21st-century barbarism,” ignoring the real thing.

      State-sponsored war on humanity is terrorism’s most extremist form. Expect lots more coming – an endless body count of imperial victims.

    • Donald Trump Doesn’t Care If He’s a Hypocrite About Mike Pence’s Iraq Vote

      Donald Trump has condemned the Iraq War as a “disaster,” but he showed little concern during a 60 Minutes interview, broadcast Sunday, that his vice presidential candidate, Indiana’s Republican Gov. Mike Pence, was an outspoken advocate of that invasion.

      After Trump proclaimed that the United States should not have invaded Iraq because it had no involvement in 9/11, interviewer Lesley Stahl reminded him that his running mate, then-Indiana Republican Rep. Mike Pence, voted to authorize the war.

    • Would Turkey Be Justified in Kidnapping or Drone-Killing the Turkish Cleric in Pennsylvania?

      Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan places the blame for this weekend’s failed coup attempt on an Islamic preacher and one-time ally, Fethullah Gulen (above), who now resides in Pennsylvania with a green card. Erdogan is demanding the U.S. extradite Gulen, citing prior extraditions by the Turkish government of terror suspects demanded by the U.S.: “Now we’re saying deliver this guy who’s on our terrorist list to us.” Erdogan has been requesting Gulen’s extradition from the U.S. for at least two years, on the ground that he has been subverting the Turkish government while harbored by the U.S. Thus far, the U.S. is refusing, with Secretary of State John Kerry demanding of Turkey: “Give us the evidence, show us the evidence. We need a solid legal foundation that meets the standard of extradition.”

      In light of the presence on U.S. soil of someone the Turkish government regards as a “terrorist” and a direct threat to its national security, would Turkey be justified in dispatching a weaponized drone over Pennsylvania to find and kill Gulen if the U.S. continues to refuse to turn him over, or sending covert operatives to kidnap him? That was the question posed yesterday by Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor of Guantánamo’s military commissions who resigned in protest over the use of torture-obtained evidence:

      That question, of course, is raised by the fact that the U.S. has spent many years now doing exactly this: employing various means — including but not limited to drones — to abduct and kill people in multiple countries whom it has unilaterally decided (with no legal process) are “terrorists” or who otherwise are alleged to pose a threat to its national security. Since it cannot possibly be the case that the U.S. possesses legal rights that no other country can claim — right? — the question naturally arises whether Turkey would be entitled to abduct or kill someone it regards as a terrorist when the U.S. is harboring him and refuses to turn him over.

    • Of density, banality and terror

      Once again there will be an influx of notes of sorrow, by now customary calls for unity in face of the terror gripping our cities, our streets: the spaces of our public, convivial existence.

      But there is already something not-quite-right about the prime sentiment that grips some of us this morning as we skim through the endless videos of Nice’s howling urban beach-front stampede. The feeling that the city’s screaming agony is on the verge of becoming as commonplace as the street lights and the wide avenues on which it unfolds: an inseparable, however unwelcome, by-product of urban life.

    • Military Coups, Turkey and Flimsy Democracy

      Any aspect of instability in the state of Turkey is going to be greeted with trepidation by those partners who bank on its security role between East and West. The European Union, that rattled club of members who fear the next onslaught against its institutional credibility, have been bolstering Ankara in the hope to keep refugees at bay. There are security exchanges, and promises (always promises) of sweeter deals regarding the movement of Turkish citizens.

    • Turkey’s Faltering Democracy

      Turkish President Erdogan crushed a military coup this weekend but this victory for civilian rule will do little to revive Turkish democracy which Erdogan has been strangling with his autocratic grip on power, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • China’s Bad Day in Court
    • Theresa May Says “Yes,” She’s Prepared to Kill Hundreds of Thousands in Nuke Attack

      Newly installed U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May is prepared to authorize a nuclear strike that could kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

      So she said before Parliament on Monday, as the body debated whether to renew Trident, Britain’s aging nuclear weapons system.

      According to the Independent, May was challenged on her support for the program by the SNP’s George Kerevan, who asked: “Are you prepared to authorize a nuclear strike that could kill hundreds of thousands of men, women and children?”

    • Iraq must not be forgotten: The humanitarian crisis worsens

      As ISIS continues to have devastating effects on Iraq, the country is facing some of the most profound challenges it has seen in the last decade. Rachel Sider, Humanitarian Policy Advisor, comments on the need for governments to prioritize the area as they meet this week in the United States at a donor pledging conference.

    • Israel’s Wolf-Crying about Iran’s Bomb

      Despite Israeli and neocon-led doomsday talk, the year-old Iranian nuclear agreement has achieved its principal goal of stopping Iran from getting the Bomb and has even quieted alarums from Israel, writes Trita Parsi.

    • CODEPINK Marches to Oppose Unlimited Funding for War Abroad While Millions Live in Poverty at Home

      CODEPINK will be part of the Coalition to Stop Trump and March on the RNC and the End Poverty Now! March on Monday, July 18th to protest the GOP’s corporate backers profiteering off of endless war abroad while the shameful epidemic of poverty continues unabated in the richest country on the planet.

    • Long Knives in Ankara: Victorious Erdogan begins Purge of Judiciary, Army

      President Tayyip Erdogan is taking advantage of the failed coup against him to purge the judiciary and security forces of anyone who is lukewarm toward or actively critical of him.

      These steps are, of course, the opposite of the ones Erdogan should be taking– he should be attempting to bring the country together in unity and to re-include in the polity those he has isolated and excluded in recent years. Instead, he is scapegoating and purging.

      Erdogan characterizes this purge as against the secretive and cult-like Gulen movement, one element in Turkey’s landscape of the religious Right. He blames the Gulen movement for the attempted coup, though its leader (in exile in Pennsylvania), Fethullah Gulen, denies the allegation.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Offshore wind powers ahead in Europe

      A building boom is underway offshore in Europe. Up to 400 giant wind turbines are due to be built off the northeast coast of the UK in what will be the world’s largest offshore wind development.

      Output from the Dogger Bank project will be 1.2 Gigawatts – enough to power more than a million homes.

      Next year, a 150-turbine wind farm off the coast of the Netherlands is due to start operating, and other schemes along the Dutch coast are in the works.

    • The British Climate Department Is Gone — But It Could Have More Power Than Ever

      The fallout from Brexit continues. The pound has hit record lows against the dollar.

      [...]

      “This is shocking news. Less than a day into the job and it appears that the new Prime Minister has already downgraded action to tackle climate change, one of the biggest threats we face,” Friends of the Earth U.K. CEO Craig Bennett said in a statement emailed to ThinkProgress.

      But while changing the actual name of the office that works on climate change might seem extreme, the change in branding might not be indicative of where the government plans to go.

      Simon Bullock, a spokesperson for Friends of the Earth, noted that Greg Clarke, the new head of the newly formed department, is “decent” on climate. “It’s reassuring that although [climate change] is not in the new department’s title, Clark at least sees climate as a part of his role,” Bullock said in an email.

  • Finance

    • Ukip’s trade policy would leave Britain isolated and vulnerable

      Say what you like about the UK Independence party, but do not call them economic isolationists. Ukip is mustard-keen on free trade as long as the EU is not negotiating on Britain’s behalf. Buoyed by its European election victory and clutching sweat-stained copies of David Ricardo’s pro-trade economic treatise, Ukip is promising a new trade deal as soon as Britain’s exit liberates the UK from the dead hand of European protectionism.

    • Revoking an Article 50

      The vote on 23 June for the UK to leave the EU is beginning to expose uncertainties in the withdrawal procedure laid down by Article 50 of the EU Treaty. Among the issues currently being debated is whether it would be possible to revoke a formal Article 50 notice to withdraw from the EU before the withdrawal process has been completed. In other words, would the die have been cast irretrievably for the UK to exit the European Union once Article 50 is triggered, or could the process be reversed before its conclusion if the UK wished to do so?

    • Lao Holdings continues legal battle on Savan Vegas sale

      Sanum Investments Ltd and its parent company, Lao Holdings NV, say they filed on Friday the latest move in a legal battle concerning the Savan Vegas Hotel and Entertainment Complex – a casino hotel in Savannakhet, Laos.

      The legal move opposes what is known as a ‘motion to dismiss’ filed earlier by San Marco Capital Partners LLC, a U.S.-based private investment firm that had been asked by the Laos government to handle the sale of Savan Vegas.

      The opposition to the motion to dismiss was filed with the United States District Court in Delaware.

    • SNP MPs at Westminster are giving their £7,000 pay rise to charity

      Westminster MPs of all parties are getting a 10 per cent, £7,000, boost to their pay packets after the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority said they were not paid enough.

    • Greenpeace replaces Brexit battle bus ‘lies’ with ‘messages of hope’ in Westminster stunt

      Greenpeace has acquired the Vote Leave battle bus and parked it in Westminster where it has been covered with thousands of messages for the new Government.

      They overhauled the bus to replace the “lies” about EU funding with demands for the “truth” in a stunt outside Parliament on Monday morning.

      The environmental activists are calling on members of the public to send in messages for the “rebranding” of the bus.

    • My 350 on BREXIT: Last call for new leaders?

      If the political discourse in the coming months and years changes to successfully countering populists with “popularizers” as leaders, preserving the European (western) order, and further reforming it, we could yet be thanking the UK for saving us by the alarm bell.

    • Bill Gates’ Silver-Bullet Misfiring at the Mandela Memorial Lecture

      But compare what can be termed Gates’ ‘philanthro-capitalism’ with Ford Foundation President Darren Walker’s proposal for a more appropriate approach to giving in the 21st century: “We foundations need to reject inherited, assumed, paternalist instincts… We need to interrogate the fundamental root causes of inequality, even, and especially, when it means that we ourselves will be implicated.”

      In contrast, Gates specialises in top-down technicist quick-fixes – ‘silver bullets’ – which often backfire on the economic shooting range of extreme corporate influence and neoliberal policies. As Global Justice Now’s Polly Jones complained in a report last month, Gates’ “influence is so pervasive that many actors in international development, which would otherwise critique the policy and practice of the foundation, are unable to speak out independently as a result of its funding and patronage.”

      Amongst the few exceptions are Katharyne Mitchell and Matthew Sparke, whose research critiques Gates’ “highly targeted investments, market-mediated partnerships, rapid technological fixes, constant assessment, quick exits, and the use of competition, benchmarking and rankings to set funding priorities.”

      [...]

      But the most damage done within South Africa was Gates’ promotion of intellectual property (IP) rights. Long-term monopoly patents were granted not only to Gates for his Microsoft software, but for life-saving medicines.

      IP became a fatal barrier to millions of HIV+ people who, thanks to Big Pharma’s profiteering, were denied AIDS medicines which cost R150 000/year fifteen years ago. The Gates Foundation was part of the problem by insisting on Merck-branded drugs in its Botswana AIDS clinics, complained Zackie Achmat of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in 2001.

      [...]

      Self-interest was perhaps a factor, because Gates got rich from IP illegitimately acquired thanks to blatantly anti-competitive practices, such as bundling Windows with the slow, security flaw-ridden Internet Explorer web-browser, according to US prosecutors. The emails that Gates and his colleagues sent each other unveiled their cutthroat, illegal approach to IT (and Gates’ own slipperiness), notwithstanding the internet’s massive government subsidies.

      And as Edward Snowden showed, Microsoft is in league with the United States National Security Agency’s Prism snoop service to hack your computer, Outlook, Hotmail and Skype accounts.

      Speaking of secrecy, Microsoft’s offshore tax-avoidance policies today earn the company more money than Gates gives annually in donations (less than $4 billion/year).

      [...]

      These forces show, objectively, that the world urgently needs far less corporate power – including in the hands of Bill Gates and Microsoft – and many more bottom-up activist initiatives to achieve thorough-going wealth redistribution.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Hillary Clinton’s Citizens United Pledge Doesn’t Matter; Her Small-Donor Matching Pledge Definitely Does

      Presidents play essentially no role in amending the Constitution. Any amendment Clinton proposed would have to be passed by a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate, and then would have to be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states.

      That’s never going to happen. The U.S. has amended the Constitution just once in the past 45 years, with the non-earthshaking 27th Amendment prohibiting Congress from voting itself a pay raise that takes effect before the next election. (Moreover, the 27th Amendment was submitted to the states in 1789; it then took 203 years for three-fourths of the states to ratify it in 1992.)

      So Clinton’s constitutional amendment pledge is empty grandstanding. Citizens United will either be overturned by the Supreme Court, or it will remain law.

      On the other hand, Clinton’s pledge to “fight” for small-donor matching funds is genuinely important. Over the past several years, almost all Democrats in the House and many in the Senate have signed on in support of the idea, and it would change the dynamics of money in politics in a way that even overturning Citizens United would not.

    • Donald Trump’s Shotgun Wedding in Cleveland

      The rift between establishment conservatives and Tea Party insurgents was on full display. The billionaire dilettante and presumptive nominee was attempting to pivot from rabble-rouser to peacemaker. It wasn’t going to be easy.

    • Donald Trump and the Revolt of the Proles

      Liberals and progressives love to point across the aisle and accuse their opponents of racism, misogyny and xenophobia, but that’s not what the Trump campaign is all about. And that’s not what Brexit was about. While it’s true that anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise in Europe and the US, the hostility has less to do with race than it does jobs and wages. In other words, Brexit is a revolt against a free trade regime in which all the benefits have accrued to the uber-rich while everyone else has seen their incomes slide, their future’s dim and their standard of living plunge.

    • Two Delegates Propose Banning Corporate Lobbyists From the RNC, Get Crushed

      Donald Trump has denounced his opponents as being controlled by “special interests, the lobbyists, and the donors,” but a number of pro-Trump delegates helped crush an effort by two members of the Republican Party’s rules committee last week to ban for-profit lobbyists from the Republican National Committee.

      Republican state Reps. Mary Anne Kinney of Maine and Cindy Pugh of Minnesota introduced an amendment at a rules committee session that would ban registered lobbyists for for-profit entities from serving as members of the RNC.

      “This amendment is meant to keep those with a financial stake in being on the RNC [out]. … Nonprofit lobbyists are exempt,” Ted Cruz delegate Kinney explained, saying that lobbyists for pro-life groups, for instance, would not be barred.

    • Trump Resistance Swells at RNC Kickoff

      Protests, discord, and heightened security announced the start of the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Monday as thousands marched on downtown Cleveland calling on the GOP to reverse its racist policies and “Dump Trump.”

      The peaceful March on the RNC ended with a rally outside the heavily-fortified perimeter that encircled the Quicken Loans Arena during which participants denounced the “racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim” policies of the GOP and its presumptive nominee Donald Trump.

    • Trump 2016: The Three Shadows Haunting Cleveland

      When Donald Trump’s Republican Party convenes in Cleveland, three shadows will haunt the arena. They won’t talk about these shadows on television, but if you look closely you’re sure to see them.

      The first shadow is that of the extremist Republican right. Since the infamous Lewis Powell memo of 1970 it has invested billions in think tanks, academia, and politics to promote its agenda of individual greed over the common good.

    • Stephen Colbert Tells Us What He Really Thinks About Clinton in This Hilarious Rap (Video)

      The seemingly fed up—but inevitably comical—“Late Show” host “took [his] gloves off” in his take on the Democratic presidential candidate’s email scandal, rapping, “You’re so bad at running for president, the only person you could beat is Donald Trump.”

    • Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All

      Last June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartz’s sprawling house, on a leafy back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up with the day’s big news: Donald J. Trump had declared his candidacy for President. As Schwartz watched a video of the speech, he began to feel personally implicated.

      Trump, facing a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, laid out his qualifications, saying, “We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ” If that was so, Schwartz thought, then he, not Trump, should be running. Schwartz dashed off a tweet: “Many thanks Donald Trump for suggesting I run for President, based on the fact that I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ”

      Schwartz had ghostwritten Trump’s 1987 breakthrough memoir, earning a joint byline on the cover, half of the book’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance, and half of the royalties. The book was a phenomenal success, spending forty-eight weeks on the Times best-seller list, thirteen of them at No. 1. More than a million copies have been bought, generating several million dollars in royalties. The book expanded Trump’s renown far beyond New York City, making him an emblem of the successful tycoon. Edward Kosner, the former editor and publisher of New York, where Schwartz worked as a writer at the time, says, “Tony created Trump. He’s Dr. Frankenstein.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • South African bishops urge lawmakers to address media censorship

      South Africa’s bishops have lent their support to demonstrators who have protested censorship at the state-run South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), including the suspension of employees who sought to cover riots.

      “An impression has been created that the SABC is failing to report fully and objectively on events that have the capacity to diminish the holding of free and fair elections,” said Bishop Abel Gabuza, chairman of the justice and peace commission of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference. “Certainly, this is a serious matter that requires urgent intervention by the National Assembly.”

    • Israeli College Department Head Resigns Over Censorship of Political Artwork

      A department head at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art has resigned to protest the college’s censorship of a drawing…

    • At Cleveland Repub Convention, ‘First Amendment Zones’ Will Detain Protesters Far Away From Trump

      Once upon a time, all of America was a First Amendment Zone. That’s now as dead as Alexander Hamilton.

      The city of Cleveland revealed part of its security plan for the Nuremberg rally Republican National Convention. Securing the convention will require a heavily policed, fenced off 3.3 square-mile First Amendment Zone. A fun fact is that the First Amendment Zone is about the same size as Baghdad’s Green Zone.

    • 100 Naked Women Hold Mirrors Up to RNC to Protest Anti-Women Rhetoric

      On Sunday, the day before the Republican National Convention (RNC) began, 100 naked women held up mirrors to the RNC-hosting Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland as a political statement against the anti-women rhetoric of the Republican party.

      The staged protest artwork by the artist Spencer Tunick, titled “Everything She Says Means Everything,” was meant to “express the belief that we will rely upon the strength, intuition and wisdom of progressive and enlightened women to find our place in nature and to regain the balance within it,” Tunick wrote. “The mirrors communicate that we are a reflection of ourselves, each other, and of, the world that surrounds us. The woman becomes the future and the future becomes the woman.”

    • Call Him Out. Call Him Out.

      The two recent police shooters were ex-military. Two minds cocked and loaded by the country they turned on. The police who recently killed black citizens, also cocked, loaded and afraid. Human beings on hair triggers and for a year we have had a steady bark from a sociopath shrieking simplistic violent solutions to all issues. The two police shooters had the military training but the uniforms they targeted changed. Not sure what kind of training the policemen in Baton Rouge and St. Paul had. But an atmosphere gave the release. If you can say, which is said ad nauseum, our hearts and prayers are with the families – there was also a heartlessness and a counter prayer that preceded the killing.

    • University’s China campus has less censorship than its U.S. campus, American student says

      New York University student Ella Reider had to go to China to find the freedom to debate things she’d never be allowed to say or hear in Manhattan.

      That’s her surprising takeaway from the past year studying at NYU Shanghai, whose openness to controversial ideas stands in stark contrast to the American campus, which is increasingly “hostile to political views that differ from the predominant views on campus.”

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Admiral Rogers Talks Openly About The NSA But Not Quite [Ed: AOL puff piece]
    • Foreign govts could serve warrants on US firms

      The United States is working with foreign governments to draft agreements that would allow the latter to serve warrants for email searches and wiretaps on US technology companies doing business in these countries.

      According to the Wall Street Journal (paywall), the plans were discussed at a public forum in Washington DC by Brad Wiegmann, a senior Justice Department official, who said the first agreement was being worked out with the UK.

      The news comes a few days after Microsoft won a landmark case to prevent the US government from using a domestic warrant to gain access to the email data of one of its clients which was stored in Ireland. The US had claimed the data was relevant to a drug-trafficking operation.

    • Germany to require ‘black box’ in autonomous cars

      Germany plans new legislation to require manufacturers of cars equipped with an autopilot function to install a black box to help determine responsibility in the event of an accident, transport ministry sources told Reuters on Monday.

      The fatal crash of a Tesla Motors Inc Model S car in its Autopilot mode has increased the pressure on industry executives and regulators to ensure that automated driving technology can be deployed safely.

      Under the proposal from Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt, drivers will not have to pay attention to traffic or concentrate on steering, but must remain seated at the wheel so they can intervene in the event of an emergency.

    • Facebook and Google show how the world really will be blanketed in 5G

      Facebook has outdone even Google recently, in its efforts to shake up the mobile industry and accelerate the delivery of broadband services (and its revenue generators) to the entire planet. This is no longer just about using balloons and new spectrum to push affordable wireless access to underserved communities. It is about blowing apart the traditional mobile network supply chain, and the way those networks are deployed.

      First came TIP (Telecoms Infrastructure Project), a telecoms network version of its Open Compute Project to drive commoditized, massively scalable platforms. Then came its own R&D projects geared to affordable, easily deployable, but powerful open RANs, Terragraph and Aries.

      And now it has announced OpenCellular, which brings the two ideas together in many ways, providing an open source platform for low cost, dense networks.

    • UK prime minister Theresa May’s Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) isn’t

      UK prime minister Theresa May’s Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) isn’t necessarily incompatible with European fundamental rights, a senior advisor at Europe’s top court said on Tuesday.

      European Court of Justice (ECJ) advocate general Saugmandsgaard Øe has published his non-binding legal opinion on DRIPA arguing that “a general obligation to retain data imposed by a member state on providers of electronic communication services may be compatible with EU law.”

      The case was brought by a cross-party alliance of British MPs—the now Brexit secretary of state David Davis and deputy Labour leader Tom Watson.

    • Core TOR Browser Developer Leaves Project, Shuts Down Critical Node Relays

      A core contributor to the Tor network has announced that he would be shutting down all the relays and Tor-related services under his control and leaving the project. Known as Lucky Green, he has indicated some recent development as the cause and finds them behind the bounds of ethics for initiating such action.

    • What’s The Reason China Fears Pokemon GO?

      The overnight success of Pokemon GO has been on the center stage for another interesting reason — this time for acting as a potential medium for disclosure of military zones in China. The flow of posts regarding the same has begun to appear on the microblogging site Weibo

    • Sen. McCain Unhappy Apple Turned Down His Invitation To Be Encryption Hearing Punching Bag

      Thanks, but no thanks. McCain and others attending the hearing pretend the encryption problem can be solved by “working together.” But Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance used part of his testimony to basically accuse Apple of offering encryption-by-default just to spite the government. The others testifying didn’t go quite as far as Vance did in portraying the company as the enemy of justice, but there was really nothing in it for Apple. There’s no “working together” going on here, not if the committee offers three invitations to people opposed to encryption (or at least far more sympathetic to law enforcement’s requests) but the only outsider asked to attend is one that spent the running time of the last hearing listening to ignorant statements and wild allegations.

    • Cy Vance Still Arguing For Mandated Encryption Backdoors; Believes Third Party Doctrine Supports His Theory

      The United States Senate Committee on Armed Services held a hearing about the coming darkness cellphone encryption Friday morning. There was almost no attempt made to address both sides of the issue, most likely because Senator John McCain — who headed up the “discussion” — has already made up his mind on how this problem should be handled.

      Testimony — all from government officials — was presented, with Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance leading off. Vance’s tune hasn’t changed. Encryption is still (apparently) an insurmountable problem and the only “answer” runs directly through Congress. Vance spent most of his speaking time [PDF] criticizing Apple and suggesting its decision to provide encryption by default on its phones was done purely to spite him and the government.

    • Defense Department Issues Opsec Guidelines For Safe And Secure Pokemon Hunting

      Given the cultural phenomenon that is Pokemon Go, it was only a matter of time before security-conscious government agencies would be forced to confront the inevitable: that their employees would be joining in the quasi-AR madness.

      Kristan J. Wheaton of the Sources and Methods blog was handed an apparently official document from the Defense Department that lays down several common sense rules for employees throwing imaginary balls at imaginary creatures. (A screenshot of the original document can be seen in Thomas Rid’s tweet, embedded at the bottom of this post.

    • Pre-Snowden Whistleblower Explains How NSA Got ‘Unleashed’ To Spy On Everyone

      Thomas Drake was a 48-year-old decorated Air Force and Navy veteran, and a senior executive at the National Security Agency, the NSA, when he decided he had to speak up against what he considered the spy agency’s abuses.

      That’s when he anonymously contacted a reporter at The Baltimore Sun, helping her expose wrongdoing at the agency in a series of articles. Two years later, the FBI raided his home, and the US government launched an investigation into Drake for leaking classified information and espionage.

      All of a sudden, Drake faced the possibility of spending most, if not all, of the rest of his life in jail. Looking back now, after he escaped jail and only pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, Drake says it was all worth it.

    • Security chief claims there are more Russian spies in the UK now than at the height of the Cold War [Ed: THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING !!! Like headlines from the 70s today. John Bayliss, a former GCHQ official, warning about the Russians is like GSK warning about Swine Flu.]
    • More Russian spies are trying to gather intelligence in Britain now than at the height of the Cold War, warns former GCHQ official
    • More Russian spies in Britain than during the COLD WAR, top intelligence official warns

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Half Of TSA’s 30,000 Employees Accused Of Misconduct; Nearly A Third Multiple Times

      The TSA is a multibillion dollar agency with nearly zero redeemable qualities. It can only act in hindsight, does almost nothing to make traveling safer, and seemingly devotes most of its screening efforts to toddlers, cancer patients, and ensuring carry-on liquids do not exceed three ounces.

      What it lacks in competency, it makes up in misconduct. Lines at security checkpoints have slowed to a crawl. Making it through the tedious, invasive process sometimes means inadvertently “donating” expensive electronics to sticky-fingered agents. The TSA’s morale is generally on par with Congress’ approval rates. And, when it’s all said and done, the people hired to protect travelers just plain suck at their job.

      [...]

      As Katherine LaGrave of the Conde Nast Traveler points out, the problem is only getting worse. Complaints are up 28% over the last three years, with larger airports averaging a complaint a week. Long lines may be causing a spike in the complaints, but the misconduct detailed in the report has very little to do directly with this issue.

      Attendance issues are part of the problem, but the offenses listed in the report range from missing work to smuggling drugs/humans to “engaging in child pornography activities.” Although processes are in place to handle disciplinary issues, they are both bureaucratic and inconsistently applied. Worse, the investigation found that the agency has no specific process in place to fire problem employees.

    • Almost Half of All TSA Employees Have Been Cited for Misconduct

      Despite the Transportation Security Administration’s ten-point action plan to reduce long lines at airports across the country, lengthy queues remain. Now, the TSA’s summer may be getting even worse: According to a recent report from the House Homeland Security Commission entitled “Misconduct at TSA Threatens the Security of the Flying Public”, nearly half of the TSA’s 60,000 employees have been cited for misconduct in recent years.

      The bad news doesn’t stop there. Citations have increased 28.5 percent from 2013 to 2015, and in 2015, the average U.S. airport received 58 complaints each year—more than one a week. (Unsurprisingly, some of the nation’s largest and busiest airports—Los Angeles International Airport, Newark International Airport, and Boston Logan International Airport—saw the highest rates of misconduct.) The complaints can come from frustrated passengers, sure, but also from fellow TSA employees and other government workers.

    • The Sun wants to know why a TV presenter in a hijab was allowed to talk about the Nice attack

      Ex-editor and columnist for the Sun Kelvin MacKenzie caused furore on Monday with a piece asking “Why did Channel 4 have a presenter in a hijab fronting coverage of Muslim terror in Nice?”

    • Muslims Were The Real Victims Of The Nice Terror Attack, The BBC Explains
    • Nice and the Mathematics of Killing

      As I watch the news on television and see another atrocity unfold in front of my eyes, innocent people crushed to death as they were celebrating Bastille Day, by the weapon of mass destruction that is a white van, the absurdity of the situation becomes hard to miss. 84 – 84 dead, many amongst them children. 84 innocent people crushed to death by a mad man behind wheels, hurling his vehicle at them with the intent to do maximum harm. And so he did, until his turn came to die an early death under the blaze of gun bullets aimed to kill. Every last second of an insignificant life laid to bare on the world stage, analyzed, repeated, studied and vilified. 84 dead. In the coming days, the lives, loves and stories of these people cut down in their prime will fill magazines. Images, anecdotes and testimonies will make them come alive again for a few moments only to heighten that feeling of loss when it is brought home again that because of a mad man behind a wheel, Stephanie will not get her dream wedding and Jeff will not play for the home team, and our eyes will well up in tears.

      Meanwhile the world we knew and functioned in comfortably will have changed again to an even more aggressive and unwelcoming place to all who do not come from the West. You are blamed and asked to carry the shame of the act of a lone madman, but was he alone? Or was he following the orders of a higher entity that is fighting to destroy the freedoms the West benefits from. ISIS or IS or Al-Qaeda, these boogie men in the dark who hate western values, western freedoms and consider the rest infidels, sending their radicalized disillusioned soldiers to do Allah’s work in our midst.

    • Rough Passage: Reporters Find Abuse, Neglect and Death Aboard Private Prison Vans

      Raines was one of some 50 current and former guards who spoke to Hager and Santo for “Inside the Deadly World of Private Prisoner Transport,” a devastating examination of the for-profit van companies used by prisons to transport inmates. The reporters found that a dozen prisoners died in such vans in the last 16 years; a dozen more suffered serious injuries; at least 60 managed to escape, and many alleged sexual and physical abuse at the hands of drivers and guards. This week the reporters join the ProPublica podcast to tell us how their effort grew from a tip on one prisoner who was beaten to death to a full and rare examination of a dangerous, virtually unregulated industry.

    • The Police Are Victimized By Their Training

      It is too early to know if the shooting of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge are the beginnings of acts of retribution against police for their wanton murders of citizens. The saying is that “what goes around, comes around.” If police murders of citizens have provoked retribution, police and those who train them need to be honest and recognize that they have brought it upon themselves.

      Killings by police have gone on too long. The killings are too gratuitous, and the police have largely escaped accountability for actions that, if committed by private citizens, would result in life imprisonment or the death penalty.

      There has been no accountability, because the police unions and the white community rush to the defense of the police. In rare instances when prosecutors bring charges, as in the case of Freddie Gray, the police are not convicted.

      Presstitutes treat killings by police as acts of racism, and that is the way the public sees them. This infuriates black communities even more as the indifference of whites to the murders is regarded as racist acceptance of the murder of black people.

    • Mike Pence Argued For Criminalization Of Adultery Before Joining Trump Ticket

      Before his career as an elected official, Gov. Mike Pence (R-IN) hosted both a radio and television show in the 1990s, with the name, “The Mike Pence Show.” While his commentaries from that time in defense of cigarettes and in opposition to the feminist message in Disney’s Mulan have made news, one less noticed piece suggested that adultery should be a crime in the United States. It appeared on the website for his television show on WNDY, retrieved through the Internet Archive WayBack Machine.

      In May of 1997, Pence railed against the news that U.S. Air Force Lt. Kelly Flynn had received a general dischrage despite having been accused of two adulterous affairs. While Pence said he was glad she had received compassion, he took aim at society for making extramarital affairs acceptable. “Did anyone else notice the incredulous looks on the faces of Lt. Flynn’s most ardent defenders anytime the term ‘adultery’ was mentioned? Many of her defenders were less concerned, it seemed, about the facts of the case than about the fact that somewhere in this society adultery is still a crime.”

    • Three Years After Global Garment Industry’s Worst Disaster, 38 Indicted for Murder

      Over 1,100 people died when Rana Plaza garment factory building collapsed near Dhaka

    • The Post-Dallas Kumbaya Window Begins to Close

      There was a true kumbaya moment after the Dallas cop massacre similar to the moment after 9/11 when sympathy was expressed for America from many unexpected quarters around the world. That window began to close when US leaders took a hard line and vengefully attacked an un-implicated nation to counter the very sense of vulnerability that moved people of the world to sympathize with us. Similarly, the sympathy for attacked cops in Dallas may be evaporating thanks to a familiar sociological dynamic involving in-group, out-group identification.

    • America’s Failure to Protect Voting

      America may call itself democracy’s gold standard, but it fails to guarantee the right to vote and permits the dominance of political money, a shameful anomaly that requires a constitutional amendment, writes William John Cox.

    • Profile of Baton Rouge Police Shooter Begins to Emerge

      The shooter, who was killed at the scene, has been identified as 29-year-old Gavin Eugene Long of Kansas City, Missouri. He was honorably discharged from the Marines in 2010 holding the rank of sergeant. During his five-year stint in the service, which included a June 2008 to January 2009 deployment in Iraq, he received several medals, according to media reports citing military records.

    • Beyond Panic and Punishment: Brock Turner and the Left Response to Sexual Violence

      The Brock Turner case has reminded us of the bitter truth of the adage that in America it is better to be guilty and rich than to be innocent and poor. In early June, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner, a Stanford student who was convicted on three counts of sexual assault, to six-months in jail and three years of probation. The sentence, shorter than the six years requested by prosecutors, spurred an eruption of public outrage. Anger has poured out at Turner’s mother and father for excusing his actions and in particular at Judge Persky. The Turner case exemplifies a problematic pattern in American policymaking. The case, similar to other sensationalized instances of leniency for sexual assault, has animated calls for harsher punishments, mandatory minimums and removing judicial discretion. All of these law-and-order responses, coming particularly from the left, continue a tradition in the United States of channeling efforts to address sexual violence into demands for punishment. Far from being progressive, however, this strategy contributes to the expansion of the carceral state, which is ineffective at reducing crime, incapable of healing victims, and devastating for those caught in its web. A more substantively progressive and feminist strategy for addressing these issues is needed in order to draw the connection between sexual violence and material inequality.

    • Newt Should Check out Mike Pence’s Christian Sharia

      Newt Gingrich suggested late last week on cable tv that Muslim Americans should be asked if they believe in “sharia” and if they answer yes, they should be deported. You can’t deport US citizens, so the whole remark was ridiculous.

      Sharia for Muslims is the equivalent of Canon Law for Catholics, Halakhah for Jews, and I guess the entire Bible for some fundamentalists (though there are laws in Deuteronomy that it is hard to imagine anyone actually practicing). All religions have laws. Sharia is the Muslim one. But it is fluid and an arena of contention within Islam. It forbids murder, theft, adultery, and drinking. You’d think people would be happy about all that. In any case, observant Muslims would all say they believe in sharia, just as observant Jews would say that the believe in Halakhah or observant Catholics would say they believe in canon law.

    • A Border Wall Isn’t Very Popular Among The People Who Actually Live There

      Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump built his political career on a campaign promise to build a border wall along the U.S. border with Mexico if elected president. But a new poll has found that a large majority of residents living in major cities along the southern U.S. border with Mexico aren’t excited about that prospect.

      About 72 percent of people living on the U.S. side of the border and 86 percent of people living on the Mexican side are opposed to building a wall, a poll funded by Cronkite News, Univision News, and Dallas Morning News found. Building out a border wall also isn’t on the top of their priority list — 77 percent of Mexicans and 70 percent of Americans found that the economy, crime, and education were more important than border issues. Another 69 percent of Mexicans and 79 percent of Americans said that they depend on the other country for economic survival.

    • Judge Hands Down Another Acquittal for Officer in Freddie Gray Case

      Baltimore Police Lt. Brian Rice, the highest ranking officer charged in the death of Freddie Gray, was on Monday acquitted on all counts.

      It marks the fourth time prosecutors have failed to secure a conviction in the case, the Baltimore Sun notes, and in turn “is likely to renew calls for Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby to drop the remaining charges[...] including from the union that represents the city’s rank-and-file officers.”

      Rice was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office by Circuit Judge Barry Williams in a bench trial. Williams previously handed down acquittals for officers Caesar Goodson and Edward Nero. The trial for Officer William G. Porter ended with a hung jury in December. A retrial is set for September 6.

    • FCC will let jails charge inmates more for phone calls

      The Federal Communications Commission is trying once again to limit the prices prisoners and their families pay for phone calls, proposing a new, higher set of caps in response to the commission’s latest court loss.

      A March 2016 federal appeals court ruling stayed new rate caps of 11¢ to 22¢ per minute on both interstate and intrastate calls from prisons. The stay remains in place while appeals from prison phone companies are considered, but FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and Commissioner Mignon Clyburn last week proposed new caps of 13¢ to 31¢ per minute in an apparent attempt to satisfy prison phone companies and the courts.

    • Police lock down Cleveland in what looks like martial law as poorly organized convention begins

      So far, the RNC has been low on organization and high on police presence.

      In fact, organizers did not even release a detailed schedule of speakers until Monday afternoon, when the convention began.

      The official guide for the RNC — which does not include a schedule — did, however, open with a photo of a smiling Donald Trump embraced by his wife, Melania.

      [...]

      Police are preparing for massive protests. Sunday did not have a lot of protest activity. The official convention began on Monday. Large demonstrations are planned to be held throughout the week.

      Cleveland spent $50 million in federal grant money on police for the RNC. The city spent $20 million on riot gear and equipment — including at least 2,000 full-body riot suits, 24 sets of ballistics body armor and 300 patrol bikes. It also spent another $30 million on “personnel-related expenditures.”

      The American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, sued Cleveland in June for “placing unacceptable restrictions on free speech and other rights of people living and visiting downtown Cleveland for the RNC.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • BT must put house in order or face split

      In its report the Culture, Media and Sport Committee says BT is “significantly under investing” in Openreach, its infrastructure subsidiary. Based on a report commissioned from a panel of independent experts, the Committee concluded the shortfall in investment could potentially be hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • UNCTAD Conference Opens With High-Level Calls For Action On Trade And Development

      The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 14th Session opened here yesterday, with leaders calling for deeper and broader cooperation between trade and development.

    • Trademarks

      • Australian Company Files Bogus Defamation/Trademark Infringement Lawsuit Over A Nine-Year-Old Blog Post

        How Assef came across this single post, floating in the internet backwater, is a mystery. But there it is. Before suing the Doe behind the single-post “blog,” Lincoln Crowne tried suing Google for defamation in Australia, presumably to use local laws to route around Section 230 protections. It didn’t work. Google briefly took down the blog post before restoring it.

        Having failed in this attempt, Lincoln Crowne is now trying to sue the anonymous blogger, using a poorly-constructed lawsuit with more than a few deficiencies. It not only claims the content is defamatory, but that the defendant’s URL is a violation of its trademark. It’s a mess, which is somewhat surprising because the firm is being represented by lawyers who seem otherwise competent.

      • Australian Financier’s Abuse of Trademark Law to Suppress a Critical Blog: A Perpetual Problem in the N.D. Cal.

        There is somebody on the other side of the Pacific Ocean who has a strongly negative perspective on Nicholas Assef, the head honcho at an Australian financial services firm called Lincoln Crowne – or at least, somebody held such views nine years ago. We know at least that much because, in 2007, an anonymous individual created a small Google blog, using the URL lincolncrowne.blogspot.com, and posted a “warning” urging people who were considering doing business with Assef and his company to do their due diligence first. And even though the blog is buried deep in the Google search results for someone entering a search using lincoln crowne as the search string (currently, it is on the tenth page of results), Assef is plainly rankled by this criticism. We know that first of all because seven years later, after Google refused to take down the blog, Lincoln Crowne sued Google for defamation in Australia (which lacks the US protection for online hosts that section 230 affords). Google initially responded to the lawsuit by taking down the blog, but later restored the blog to its DOT.COM domain. It is not clear to me whether Lincoln Crowne ever pursued the suit against Google to judgment. The company’s papers do not make reference to any judgment, so I assume there was none.

    • Copyrights

      • Just As Open Competitor To Elsevier’s SSRN Launches, SSRN Accused Of Copyright Crackdown

        A couple of months ago, we wrote about how publishing giant Elsevier had purchased the open access pre-publisher SSRN. SSRN is basically the place where lots of research that we regularly report on is published. Legal and economics academics quite frequently post their journal articles there. Of course, Elsevier has a well-known reputation for being extreme copyright maximalists in dangerous ways. Having Elsevier take over SSRN concerned a lot of academics, and even led to calls for alternatives, including many asking the famed arXiv to open a social science research operation as well.

        Indeed, it appears that arXiv was paying attention, because just about a week ago, SocArXiv was announced, and it already has a temporary home hosted by Open Science Framework.

      • How copyright trolls plunder both US citizens and… rights holders

        German extortion outfit Guardaley, together with its US collaborators — Voltage Pictures and a network of ethically handicapped attorneys — has been filing frivolous, evidence-free lawsuits across the US for years, extracting millions from alleged pirates and innocents alike. To maintain the fog of legitimacy and to shield Voltage from bad publicity, dozens of shell corporations were created — one per film — to serve as (sometimes bogus) plaintiffs in thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits filed either against individual defendants or about a dozen of John Does lumped together.

      • Ted Cruz Campaign Infringed On Copyright, But Will Probably Be Treated With Kid Gloves Just Because

        It’s typical for these types of complaints to be layered in nuance and interpretation, with a dash of one side or the other misunderstanding how licensing, copyright, and the rights that surround public performances work. This does not appear to be one of those cases, as the agreement Madison McQueen agreed to is fairly straightforward and specifically forbids the exact use for which the music was incorporated. As Goldman notes, whereas most campaigns would simply apologize and pay to have all of this go away, the Cruz campaign instead offered up a motion to dismiss. That motion didn’t rebut any of the allegations. Instead, Cruz’s lawyers argued that the musicians had only applied for copyright registrations and had yet to have that process completed, that it’s unclear how many times it should be said that the campaign infringed on the copyrights for the songs, that Audiosocket can’t stack its copyright complaint alongside its breach of contract complaint, and that all of this is a moot point because — not making this up — Cruz lost and gave up on his candidacy.

      • Rome Court of First instances confirms once again that takedown requests do not need to include URLs

        The Tribunale di Roma (Rome Court of First Instance) is back with yet another decision on the liability of online intermediaries (ISPs) for third-party copyright infringements.

      • Copyright in the Animal Kingdom

        Reading coverage of the new Great Animal Orchestra exhibition got this Kat thinking about the relationship between animals, artwork, performance and IP. The “biophony” exhibition is made up of natural soundscapes – estimated to come from over 5,000 hours of sound recordings made by Bernie Krause, and edited together with visual rendering by United Visual Artists. The product is an immersive collage of squeaks, calls, howls, waves and so on, which have also somehow previously been adapted to a symphony (by composer Richard Blackford), and a ballet. The exhibition is named after Krause’s book of the same title.

        The various intellectual property involved in the Great Animal Orchestra and its adaptations has not been the subject of any great, wild, public dispute – falling quite understandably behind other priorities such as drawing attention to the fact that over the 50 years of Krause’s recording, around half of the habitats have been silenced by humans. But, recently, of course, the issue of animal copyrights has been in the legal spotlight…

07.18.16

Large Corporations’ Software Patenting Pursuits Carry on in Spite of Patent Trolls That Threaten Small Companies the Most

Posted in IBM, OIN, Patents at 9:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Hostile environment in which trolls thrive owing to software patents and cashless startups that must settle

Robert BahrSummary: With unconvincing excuses such as OIN, large corporations including IBM continue to promote software patents in the United States, even when public officials and USPTO officials (like Bahr on the left) work towards ending those

SOFTWARE patents remain a very major barrier not just to FOSS developers but to all software development. Such patents, unsurprisingly, are being promoted by monopolists and their facilitators, to whom they’re a major source of revenue. Those monopolists continually rig the whole system in their favour as they can definitely afford it; in fact, it might be considered part of the obligation to shareholders (protectionism through legislation).

The mainstream media or corporate media no longer talks about software patents. Instead it speaks about “patent trolls” and by patent trolls it means the small ones, not the media owners. Apple, for instance, is directly connected to some major media conglomerates, so bias in patent coverage is to be expected in some cases (we wrote about this in past years). Let’s be easily deluded and just ignore Apple demanding billions (not millions) from Android OEMs (patent aggression and sometimes trolling includes big vendors) and also forget Apple’s unique role in Intellectual Ventures (explained here several years ago), the world’s largest patent troll which goes after Android vendors. The article “Apple will pay $25M to patent troll to avoid East Texas trial” is eye-catching and so is “Newegg’s Three-Step Solution to Fighting Patent Trolls” by Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of Consumer Technology Association (CTA). This group likes to focus on patent trolls rather than patent scope. Here is some of the latest from Gary Shapiro:

Lee Cheng is a troll trapper. As chief legal officer for Newegg.com, the second-largest online only retailer in the United States, Cheng has successfully battled the almost three dozen trolls that have attacked his company in the last ten years. And not just fight them, but win.

Patent trolls — sometimes called “non-practicing entities,” or NPEs — don’t actually create any products or services. Instead, they scoop up patents for the express purpose of using them to extort money from real companies large and small that can’t or don’t want to pay high legal defense costs. NPEs focus on settlements and generally have no desire to test their generally poor-quality patents in trial and through appeal. Even bad patents can generate millions in settlement dollars.

A newly-updated Harvard Business School study finds patent trolls sue cash-rich firms “seemingly irrespective of actual patent-infringement” — because that’s where the money is. The Harvard researchers noted trolls are taking a toll on innovation at the firms they target: “After settling with NPEs (or losing to them in court), companies on average reduce their research-and-development (R&D) investment by more than 25 percent.” So instead of funding development of the Next Big Thing in consumer technology, these American small businesses are handing over legalized extortion payments to trolls.

Research estimates that patent trolls drain a prodigious $1.5 billion a week from the economy. I sat down with Lee Cheng to get a from-the-trenches account of the patent troll problem, and to let him share his lessons for taking down the trolls.

“They also rely a great deal on software patenting, as a look at their patent portfolio easily and instantly reveals.”What Gary Shapiro misses here is that patent trolls are often part of a broader shell game played by large corporations such as Microsoft. They also rely a great deal on software patenting, as a look at their patent portfolio easily and instantly reveals. All the focus is now being shifted towards trolls, both in the media and US Congress. Just see this new tweet (“VIDEO: Sen. Jeff Flake Targets Patent Trolls”).

Proskauer Rose LLP, which likes to cherry-pick cases in promotion of software patents, recently released this so-called ‘analysis’. They try to maintain a grip on software patents no matter what. Some large corporations are doing the same thing and it’s not limited to Microsoft. Consider IBM.

IBM’s commitment to Free software, especially now that it pays lobbyists like David Kappos for software patentability, should be seriously doubted. It just likes “Linux”. Manny Schecter, a patent chief at IBM, is an ardent proponent of software patents and he has just linked to “Latest very brief USPTO update to patent examiners on subject matter eligibility in view of recent cases…”

This is a PDF of a new Robert Bahr (Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy) letter regarding the Rapid Litigation case and Sequenom case (both covered here earlier this month). Herein he is alluding to Mayo and Alice as he might try to gently challenge these or begrudgingly adopt what the ‘pesky’ Supreme Court said. Here is a quote from the PDF: “In summary, the USPTO’s current subject matter eligibility guidance and training examples are consistent with the Federal Circuit’s panel decisions in Rapid Litigation Management and Sequenom. Life sciences method claims should continue to be treated in accordance with the USPTO’s subject matter eligibility guidance (most recently updated in May of 2016). Questions should be referred to Technology Center subject matter experts or your SPE.”

Where does IBM stand on the subject? It’s hardly even a mystery. IBM does not like Alice because IBM loves software patents and actively works to expand these to more countries/continents. At the same time IBM brags about OIN as though it magically makes IBM’s patent policies absolutely fine and compatible with FOSS. “I don’t think there is an alternative choice when you are small entity,” told me someone today. “When has OIN actually helped a small company? Even as a deterrent,” I replied. “When your entity is relatively small,” he said, “OIN represents a potential shield to provide you even a minimum of security.”

“Life sciences method claims should continue to be treated in accordance with the USPTO’s subject matter eligibility guidance (most recently updated in May of 2016).”
      –Robert BahrBut how in practice can OIN protect one against a troll for example? It cannot. OIN is totally useless against patent trolls. Don’t ever forget that. I saw that firsthand when I was part of E-mail thread I had initiated. Small companies sometimes try taking rivals to court with their patents. If the rival is big enough, then countersuit is massive (IBM has a massive portfolio which virtually every software patents infringes on), defeating the very point of bothering with a lawsuit in the first place. Large companies may use trolls as satellites/proxies, so the lawsuits/countersuits can come from all sorts of mysterious directions.

“Intel and McAfee Sued for Patent Infringement,” writes Patent Buddy this week. Security Profiling LLC (LLCs are usually patent trolls) is suing in the Eastern District of Texas. What can Intel do about it? Nothing. Intel is now trying to sell/offload McAfee, based on last week’s news reports (see our daily links for half a dozen such reports). Has it become too much of a burden perhaps? The point about patent trolls and OIN sticks, no matter what. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has just fallen for the OIN public relations machine, joining the chorus which began with an 'exclusive' puff piece. OIN is not a “Linux” thing as some want it to be widely viewed; it’s mostly an IBM, Sony etc. thing. It helps legitimise software patents rather than acknowledge that they are not compatible with FOSS or Linux and thus need to be ended. █

Battistelli Has Implemented De Facto EPO Coup to Remove Oversight, Give Himself Total Power, and Allegedly Give UPC Gifts (Loot) to French Officials

Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Using (or milking) the Office for his personal purposes?

Police probe
Things are not always as simple as they may seem

Summary: Benoît Battistelli’s agenda at the EPO is anything but beneficial to the EPO and suspicions that Battistelli’s overall agenda is transitioning to the UPC to further his goals grow feet

EIGHT years ago we wrote about vendor capture in relation to ISO. Individuals or companies sometimes take advantage of police departments (see famous example above), public institutions or even other companies and the EPO appears to become a good example of this.

Some anonymous voices openly allege that Battistelli is not only surrounding himself with French people (former colleagues, family members etc.) at the top-level management (astronomical salaries and job security) but is also serving French buddies of his in France (he is politically-affiliated, in defiance of ILO or EPO rules), looking to empower himself in Paris (several sources sent us rumours over the years about his pursued role inside UPC). The following new comment repeats what we too have been saying regarding the UPC and Battistelli’s controversial actions, only to be proven correct by EPO management. They even explicitly admitted to it when asked by Dr. Glyn Moody several months ago. Here is what the comment says about the board of appeals (which relate to DG3):

I have been suggesting for ages that BB [Benoît Battistelli] is busy “clearing the path” for the UPC and its seat in Paris. For as long as DG3 exists, some litigants might prefer to dispute validity in Munich rather than in Paris. How badly will that hinder the growth of a healthy caseload docket in Paris?

But now it seems that the UPC is dead. No docket then for Paris, in the foreseeable future.

Time for the AC to press BB to stop clearing the path, to change direction and reinvigorate DG3, so it can dispatch cases in reasonable time? Wake up industry. Put pressure on your governments to instruct their AC representative accordingly.

Here is another comment on the subject:

Let me just say this: it is going to be the UPC, it is going to be in Paris and the board of appeal members will have nothing to say about it. They will never get employed by the UPC. The council and the president agree, nothing can stop them.

This was, as it turns out, noted also in the German media, not just Ars Technica (the aforementioned article from Glyn Moody). To quote:

That is certainly the plan of BB & Co. as was revealed in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in October 2015.

One alleged aim of the failed coup attempt against BB was “… to prevent the Office from facing the biggest change in its history: the transition to the single European patent and a new jurisdiction with the Court in Paris, including branch offices, also in Munich. The Enlarged Board would be replaced as soon as all States have ratified the agreement.

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/europaeisches-patentamt-der-erfundene-skandal-1.2695424

Unfortunately in the meantime the Süddeutsche seems to have stopped reporting about EPO affairs:

http://techrights.org/2016/07/17/suddeutsche-and-epo-pr/

Battistelli’s attempt to ‘revolutionise’ the EPO for his own benefit goes quite a while back, also to his very appointment. “If you look at ILOAT 3699, it is about Bernard Paye,” one source told us, “the ex-head of Internal Audit, who was pushed aside because of the abolition of the Audit Committee, which he objected to.”

Something such as the Audit Committee existed for the function of oversight — something which Battistelli absolutely could not (and still cannot) stand — and he took little time — once he had seized power — to totally destroy it, as we first noted here in 2014 (the Audit Committee and independence of Internal Audit was abolished).

Internal Audit, as we noted before (years ago), is directly under Battistelli’s control now. We also mentioned this more recently, even a in relation to the EPO’s Investigative Unit. The story of how this came about must be recalled. Bernard Paye has now won his case against the Office, but not many people will have noticed (let alone remember him). “The ILOAT is pretty damning of the Office,” a source told us, and “the language is quite strong, “inconsistent arguments”, etc.”

“Battistelli’s attempt to ‘revolutionise’ the EPO for his own benefit goes quite a while back, also to his very appointment.”We spent some time converting this decision into HTML and adding highlights in yellow. This once again reminds us of the important of whistleblower protections at the Office. As the decision below helps reaffirm, Bernard Paye was assigned to (or offered) a fictitious post — a similar thing to what happened in Croatia when Battistelli’s ‘bulldog’ tries to get rid of people (we covered this before). He was effectively fired for not agreeing with Battistelli and his “yes men”. The UPC is mentioned there too, namely “the strategic responsibilities inherent in the new post of Senior Advisor for planning and preparation of the unitary patent” (it all boils down to the UPC quite so often).

The decision below was reached (not yet published) earlier this month, so it took several years to reach a conclusion, at which point the chance of redemption, justice etc. was rather hard to reason about. In fact, this long delay would likely serve as a deterrent against future such cases (complaints) and the compensation offered is only a sixth of what was requested, which makes this entire ordeal (long process) less than worthwhile, except maybe as a matter of principle and setting the record straight.

Here is the full decision’s text (in English this time, not French):

Organisation internationale du Travail Tribunal administratif
International Labour Organization Administrative Tribunal

Registry’s translation,
the French text alone
being authoritative.

P. (No. 2)
v.
EPO

122nd Session
Judgment No. 3699

THE ADMINISTRATIVE TRIBUNAL,

Considering the second complaint filed by Mr B. Y. P. against the European Patent Organisation (EPO) on 20 June 2013 and corrected on 12 July, the EPO’s reply of 11 November 2013, the complainant’s rejoinder of 31 January 2014 and the EPO’s surrejoinder of 10 June 2014;
Considering Article II, paragraph 5, of the Statute of the Tribunal;
Having examined the written submissions and decided not to hold oral proceedings, for which neither party has applied;
Considering that the facts of the case may be summed up as follows:
The complainant challenges the decision to transfer him to a Senior Advisor post.
At the material time, the complainant held the grade A6 post of Head of the Internal Audit department, that is, Principal Directorate 0.6 of the European Patent Office, the EPO’s secretariat. When the President of the Office proposed that the Administrative Council abolish the Audit Committee – one of its subsidiary bodies – the complainant expressed his disagreement. On 30 June 2011 the Administrative Council adopted decision CA/D 4/11 abolishing the Audit Committee with immediate effect.
By a letter of 21 July 2011, the President of the Office informed the complainant that his public “opposition” to the decision to abolish Judgment No. 3699 the Audit Committee made it impossible for him to continue as Head of Internal Audit, and that he considered that this was no longer in the interests of the service. Under Article 12, paragraph 2, of the Service Regulations for permanent employees of the EPO, the President therefore proposed to transfer the complainant to a post of “special advisor” and asked him to submit his “reactions” by 1 August.
A vacancy notice for the grade A6 post of Senior Advisor planning and preparation of the unitary patent – which was to be filled by way of a transfer – was published on 6 September. On 16 September the complainant wrote to the President stating that he did not intend to apply for that post as he did not believe he had the necessary qualifications and experience. By a letter of 29 September the complainant was notified that in the Office’s interests the President had decided to transfer him to the post with effect from 1 October. On 14 December 2011 the complainant filed an internal appeal against this decision, submitting that it constituted an abuse of authority, a hidden disciplinary sanction and an affront to his dignity. He requested the cancellation of the decision, his reinstatement in a post that corresponded to his qualifications, experience and level, and redress for the injury that he claimed to have suffered.
The Internal Appeals Committee, to which the matter was referred, delivered its opinion on 14 December 2012 after hearing both parties. Considering in particular that the complainant’s transfer to a post that did not really correspond to grade A6 had injured his dignity, the Committee unanimously recommended that the President cancel the decision to transfer the complainant, award the complainant 25,000 euros in moral damages and take prompt action to reassign him to a genuine grade A6 post with a view to allowing the complainant to end his career on a positive note. Failing this, the complainant should be awarded additional damages of 5,000 euros. By a letter of 25 March 2013, which constitutes the impugned decision, the complainant, who had retired on 31 December 2012, was notified of the President’s decision to dismiss his internal appeal.

The complainant asks the Tribunal to rule that the impugned decision to transfer him to the post of Senior Advisor was unlawful and to award him 60,000 euros in compensation for the moral injury he considers he has suffered as well as 2,000 euros in costs.

The EPO asks the Tribunal to dismiss the complaint in its entirety.

CONSIDERATIONS

1. In his complaint, the complainant asks the Tribunal to rule that the decision of the President of the Office to transfer him to a post of senior advisor unlawful and to award him 60,000 euros in compensation for moral injury as well as costs in the amount of 2,000 euros. In support of his complaint, he submits that his “transfer constituted an abuse of authority and a hidden disciplinary sanction and that the post to which [he] was transferred was fictitious and was created to suit the circumstances
in violation of the applicable procedures”. He further submits that the post in question was not commensurate with his grade.

2. The EPO denies that the decision to transfer the complainant was unlawful. It further submits that, contrary to the complainant’s assertion, he was transferred to a post with grade A6 duties in keeping with his qualifications and experience.

3. This case presents two material questions. The first is that of whether or not the complainant’s transfer was wrongful. The second relates to the grade of the duties which the complainant was assigned; in other words, did the post of Senior Advisor to which the complainant was appointed correspond to a grade A6 position?

4. According to the complainant, his transfer was wrongful and was in fact a hidden sanction. He adds that the post to which he was assigned was “fictitious”. The defendant submits that the complainant was transferred in the EPO’s interests in light of his continuing opposition to the abolition of the Audit Committee.

5. Although the complainant believes that his transfer was a hidden sanction, he does not bring any evidence in support of this allegation. His submissions merely contain an unsubstantiated assertion that his transfer to the contested post of Senior Advisor was a hidden sanction for his refusal to apply for that post. Furthermore, in his rejoinder he writes that he has “never disputed the right of the President of the Office to order a transfer in the Organisation’s interests, of which he is the judge”. There is no doubt here as to the Organisation’s interests: as the defendant argues persuasively, “it was no longer in the Office’s interest for the complainant to remain as Head of Internal Audit given that his continuing opposition to the abolition of the Audit Committee demonstrated a marked divergence of opinion regarding the conditions in which Internal Audit was to operate and its position”. Moreover, the evidence shows that, contrary to what the complainant asserts, the post to which he was assigned involved duties that were real – irrespective of their level, which will be addressed below – and the post cannot therefore be regarded as “fictitious”.

6. The complainant submits that the post of Senior Advisor to which he was transferred was not commensurate with his A6 grade. In this regard, he stated in his internal appeal that Senior Advisor posts were “posts held by staff members who held grade A4 at most and who [did] not exercise any authority”. He added that the grade A6 responsibilities outlined in the “Job Descriptions” appended to the Service Regulations, according to which “[t]he Officer runs a prominent organisational unit covering several specialised fields or is chairman of a Board of Appeal [and] duties primarily consist in developing [...] authoritative guidelines [...] and taking decisions in particularly difficult and important cases”, were not involved in the task assigned to him, which merely consisted in “conduct[ing] an in-depth analysis of the situation and draft[ing] proposals”. The EPO maintains that the complainant’s duties in his new role of Senior Advisor corresponded to grade A6.

7. It is to no avail that the EPO attempts to show that the complainant’s duties were of grade A6 level. First, it invites the Tribunal to interpret the job description appended to the Service Regulations liberally as, in the defendant’s view, it would not be possible for the Office to perform its functions properly “if it were obliged to apply the generic post descriptions strictly to the letter, without regard to the particular circumstances of the case in question”. Next, it poses the question, tailored to this particular case, of “whether, in the circumstances of the present case, the complainant’s new role was reasonably commensurate with his grade”, and not that of whether it corresponded exactly to grade A6 duties. Lastly, it asserts that “the strategic responsibilities inherent in the new post of Senior Advisor for planning and preparation of the unitary patent, though involving no management responsibilities, were nevertheless at the same level as those of a grade A6 post”. These inconsistent arguments, submitted by the defendant to convince the Tribunal that the complainant’s new duties were at grade A6 level, poorly disguise the fact that this was not at all the case. The defendant itself acknowledges in its submissions that “the complainant’s new role did not entail all of the characteristics of a grade A6 post according to the generic description provided in the Service Regulations”. The Tribunal concludes that the complainant’s new duties were not commensurate with grade A6. The complainant did not run a prominent organisational unit covering several specialised fields; he was neither a Principal Director nor a Chairman of a Board of Appeal; he could not take decisions in particularly difficult or important cases. Hence, the contested transfer decision must, as the complainant requests, be ruled unlawful.

8. The EPO will be ordered to pay the complainant the sum of 10,000 euros as redress for the moral injury incurred as a result of that decision.

9. As the complainant succeeds in part, he is entitled to an award of costs, set at 2,000 euros. For the above reasons,

1. The impugned decision is quashed and the contested transfer decision is declared unlawful.

2. The EPO shall pay the complainant 10,000 euros in moral damages.

3. It shall also pay him 2,000 euros in costs.

In witness of this judgment, adopted on 28 April 2016, Mr Claude Rouiller, President of the Tribunal, Mr Patrick Frydman, Judge, and Ms Fatoumata Diakité, Judge, sign below, as do I, Dražen Petrović, Registrar.

Delivered in public in Geneva on 6 July 2016.
(Signed)

CLAUDE ROUILLER
PATRICK FRYDMAN
FATOUMATA DIAKITÉ
DRAŽEN PETROVIĆ

Battistelli’s abuses may as well end up bankrupting/fossilising the Office (compensations, millions spent on buying the media for UPC promotion and setting up lobbying events). He has already, based on reports made to us, reduced demand for EPO services as stakeholders recognise the sharp decline in quality of service and thus go elsewhere or recommend/advise clients to turn to national offices etc.

There are more cases like the above and we intend to mention or properly cover them in the future as they serve to highlight/establish Team Battistelli’s guilt. █

EPO Social [sic] Report is a Big Pile of Lies That Responsible Journalists Must Ignore

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 11:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Here’s why…

caricature

Summary: A reminder of where the EPO stands on social issues and why the latest so-called ‘social’ report is nothing but paid-for propaganda for Battistelli’s political ambitions

THE EPO is in a state of crisis (as even the entire Organisation admits). The President has 0% approval rating and there is growing unrest. Later this year EPO management will probably be chastised by the Dutch Supreme Court (and Dutch politicians, never mind Dutch media) and another trial at The Hague began on Friday. There are clearly several cases against EPO management at The Hague right now. The latter is about the attack on staff representatives (more of them silently got sacked recently) and the former about a variety of issues less severe (but nonetheless ones for which the EPO was found guilty).

Erdoğan and EPOEPO workers, we recently learned, are already doing fund-raisers for a post-Battistelli party. This party would probably take a while to actually take place and additionally, his departure isn’t the end of it all. He has polluted the entire management rank. It’s full of his cronies now. If Battistelli’s craziness and his paranoia continue to escalate, soon enough he’ll hire people with jobs skills like “eating” to test (or taste) his food for him. He has become just about as insane as Erdoğan or other tyrants which history turned into iconic symbols (not just Napoleon). “Still no comment from the EPO President about the coup attempt in Turkey,” one person wrote earlier today. “Doesn’t he care about what is going on there? Let us not forget that Turkey is an EPO member state!!!”

The EPO has said nothing about Turkey but instead it has just released a pile of lies (they call it “social report” rather than “social study”, maybe to help dodge — SEO-wise — the negative association with the long-malign ‘study’). We wrote about this study many times before, e.g. in [1, 2, 3]. Insiders have warned about how it was done and why it would tell lies once released. Right now the EPO's PR team and its outside help (FTI Consulting, with over a million Euros of EPO budget) must be pressuring journalists to repeat their ‘social’ lies. How many will they manage to bamboozle and/or co-opt? That remains to be seen.

It typically takes a day or two for the EPO to mention its blog posts or “news” [sic] in its Twitter account. Over at Twitter today the EPO is promoting this event in Madrid, Spain. In spite of or because Spain is a thorn in the EPO’s side? Remember that Spain is one of the biggest barriers to the UPC and mind the fact that “EPO management is still busy with the UPC,” according to this new comment. Here is the comment in full: “People discuss the future of the board of appeal as it it had a future. The president said it many times: in his mind, there is no need for the board of appeal with the UPC. The board of appeal members missing have not been replaced in the past years (just check how many posts are still vacant) and will not be replaced. The move to another place is classical in French politics, just check how it was done at French Telecom (it’s in the press): they moved people around to harass them and force them to resign. The EPO management is still busy with the UPC, BTW. They believe brexit is not a problem.”

“This so-called ‘social’ report (propaganda to mislead about the management’s antisocial behaviour) is just the latest distraction.”The EPO can ignore Brexit all it wants, but it pretty much rendered the UPC dead (or dying, or in a limbo for several years to come). Looking beyond the failed UPC, Sweden opens a new specialised court of its own. “A new era for the Swedish intellectual property market will be ushered in on September 1 2016 with the opening of the Patent and Market court in Stockholm,” wrote a sister site of WIPR. “On the whole, Swedish participants in this year’s WTR 1000 research process are expecting the introduction of a specialised, IP-exclusive court to be an overwhelmingly positive development for their jurisdiction.”

Things are not working out so well for the EPO these days. This so-called ‘social’ report (propaganda to mislead about the management’s antisocial behaviour) is just the latest distraction. █

Links 18/7/2016: Vista 10 a Failure, FreeType 2.7

Posted in News Roundup at 5:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Microsoft’s Windows RT security patch also stops you from loading Linux

    It was big news when Microsoft announced it was working on a version of Windows that would run on tablets with ARM-based processors… but by the time Windows RT actually launched it was a lot less exciting. Devices like the Microsoft Surface and Surface 2 couldn’t run desktop Windows apps and weren’t significantly cheaper than Intel Atom-powered tablets running the full version of Windows, and they didn’t even get better battery life.

  • Desktop

    • Microsoft blocks Linux installations

      Microsoft has closed a backdoor left open in Windows RT even though the OS is pretty much dead in the water as Vole can’t be bothered with it any more.

      This vulnerability in ARM-powered locked down Windows devices was left by Redmond programmers during the development process. Exploiting this flaw, a hacker could boot operating systems of his/her choice, including Android or GNU/Linux.

    • “Windows 10 Is A Failure” — According To Microsoft’s Own Metric [Ed: in spite of very dirty if not illegal tricks]

      Microsoft has accepted that Windows 10 has failed to perform as expected. The software giant hoped that by mid-2018, Windows 10 will be running on 1 billion devices. Now, this number seems far-fetched due the constantly shrinking PC market and poor performance of Windows 10 Mobile.

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • Wayland’s Weston Now Working On Libweston-Desktop

        Wayland developers continue working on Libweston, which is aiming to make more of the Weston reference compositor reusable by other Wayland compositors. This library offers much of the boilerplate code around the Wayland protocols to allow more sharing by compositors and making it more straight-forward to get things up and running. The latest component is Libweston-desktop.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Herding Cats, or Managing Complexity

        Determined to find a rational web based development environment, something stable, that works, has support and is flexible enough to deal with future demands, as well has minimal html involved, I ended up using Angular 2 on a Meteor base.

      • Gsoc 2016 Neverland #7

        When I was working with Mediawiki, I realized its source code isnt good.

      • #29: GSoC with KDE Now – 7
      • The KApiDox poll results (at last!)
      • About my GSoC project

        My mentor gave me a task (it was one of the first ones) to refactor QMap structure, which was holding archive entries metadata, into an Archive::Entry class, which would use QProperty system. Such refactoring would bring more extensibility and allow to pass and manipulate data in more convenient ways. And of course QProperty is a big step forward for possible future using QtQuick and other nice modern Qt stuff. Today I’m finished with it. That was a huge amount of work in order to complete that task. It was not hard itself, but rather routine, because this structure was used by large part of code. Though after that I faced a tough challenge to fix all the bugs I’ve done with that refactoring. Now I’m happy I can proceed to other important things.

      • Accelerating Vector Tile Creation

        Late summer brings a couple of interesting dates for the Marble community: On the Desktop we’ll release Marble 2.0 and around the same time our Android app Marble Maps will have its first stable release. Later on in September it’s time to celebrate the 10th birthday of the Marble project!

        The common theme to the upcoming release is the introduction of the Vector OSM map: A beautifully styled map based on data from the OpenStreetMap project that spans the entire world from globe to street zoom level. In order to make this possible we’re working very hard behind the scenes to optimize both the tile data and the rendering in Marble to give you a smooth experience.

      • 17th FISL, KDE Brazil and cake!

        In this last week happened in a cold city called Porto Alegre, in Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, the 17 edition of FISL, the Free Software International Forum.

        Well… KDE has always participated in this forum, and the organization gave to us all day in a room, so the KDE Community could make a lot of talks.

      • KDEPIM ready to be more broadly tested

        As was posted a couple of weeks ago, the latest version of KDE has been uploaded to unstable.

        All packages are now uploaded and built and we believe this version is ready to be more broadly tested.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GSoC 2016: The adventure begins

        Hello! I am Razvan, a technology & open-source enthusiast and I am working on what is probably the most interesting project for me so far, Nautilus. So far, this has been the highlight of my experience – lots of interesting things learned while coding and a great interaction with the community. This is mainly thanks to Carlos, captain of Nautilus, who always finds the time to help me and other contributors whenever we get stuck. On top of this, the funny chats with him and people from the GNOME community make contributing so much more enjoyable! Up until now I’ve been titled King of the Trash™, I’ve learned about some file system magic from Christian Hergert, and I’ve also been threatened by a katana-wielding GNOME samurai. Awesome, right?

      • Extraction support in Nautilus

        As a result, the output will always have the name of the source archive, making it easy to find after an extraction. Also, the maximum number of conflicts an extraction can have is just one, the output itself. Hurray, no more need to go through a thousand dialogs!

      • Improved File Extraction Coming To GNOME’s Nautilus

        As part of Google Summer of Code, improved extraction support for compressed files is being worked on for the Nautilus file manager.

      • Builder Happenings

        Over the last couple of weeks I’ve started implementing Run support for Builder. This is somewhat tricky business since we care about complicated manners. Everything from autotools support to profiler/debugger integration to flatpak and jhbuild runtime support. Each of these complicates and contorts the problem in various directions.

        Discovering the “target binary” in your project via autotools is no easy task. We have a few clever tricks but more are needed. One thing we don’t support yet is discovering bin_SCRIPTS. So launching targets like python or gjs applications is not ready yet. Once we discover .desktop files that should start working. Pretty much any other build system would be easier to implement this.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Linux Lite 3.0

        Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Linux Lite 3.0 is a lightweight distribution with the Xfce 4.12 desktop. In addition to being lightweight, it is also aimed at providing a familiar user experience for users transitioning from Microsoft Windows. In the wide array of Ubuntu derived distributions, Linux Lite has a lot of competition, so what sets Linux Lite apart from the other options? I downloaded the 955MB 64-bit install media to find out and below I share my experience with this very nice, polished distribution.

        Booting and installing the distribution is a very familiar experience for anyone who has used Ubuntu or any distribution based on Ubuntu. The standard Ubiquity installer walks the user through the install experience providing guidance and making the experience pretty straight forward. In this regard, Linux Lite 3.0 is almost identical to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

        Because Linux Lite 3.0 is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, it features version 4.4 of the Linux kernel and supports a wide variety of hardware out of the box using open source drivers. If the user needs proprietary drivers, all the drivers that are available for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS can be installed. Unfortunately users who need to use the proprietary ATI Catalyst drivers will run into problems because Linux Lite 3.0, just like Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, does not support the Catalyst drivers. One other hardware related issue to note is that the Linux Lite documentation recommends switching the computer’s BIOS to Legacy mode instead of using UEFI mode and Secure Boot. The documentation states that “Linux Lite does not support or advocate the use of Secure Boot” and it notes that the distribution can be made to work with UEFI booting, but “The solution requires intermediate knowledge of Linux” and provides a link to a YouTube video which provides instructions.

    • New Releases

      • Solus 1.2.1 Releases Tomorrow

        We’re really excited to be releasing our last “traditional” release, Solus 1.2.1, tomorrow. We opted to delay by a day just to ensure we don’t push ourselves too hard after the recent Hackfest, as well as being able to take the time to do additional QA.

    • Red Hat Family

      • CentOS 7 – Daily papercut fixes

        That’s all for today. A bunch of small, innocent and possibly personal fixes that you might not like and appreciate, but they should come useful if you decide to embark on a serious day-to-day mission of using and taming CentOS. And not because it’s bad and needs extra effort compared to the Ubuntus and Mints and Fedoras of this world. Because it stays put once tweaked, in a loving, predictable fashion. Something that compels me to keep on trying despite an occasional hiccup here and there. What’s the word I’m looking for? Right. No regressions! That’s that one! Fix once and forget about it – not dread what will happen in six months. Jolly good. These fine little tips and tricks just make the whole thing even more pleasurable.

        I will expand this list as I continue exploring the CentOS 7 desktops more and more. We also have the Xfce adventure ahead of us. Truth to be told, I have never been so excited about CentOS before. Something had always been amiss. When I had modern hardware, CentOS 6 was approaching its zenith. Then CentOS 7 came about, but my laptops became outdated, and the newest box refused to boot this distro. Until now.

        With the right combo of modern – on both the hardware and software side, I can finally give CentOS its full attention. And this means more games, more tweaking, and far more detail than almost any other distro attempt. It has taken the bulk of my Linux time, and I am really enjoying the experience. So you should expect more articles, more guides. One day, we might actually nail the perfect distro formula for all eternity. Stay sweet.

      • Red Hat adds SDN support to latest cloud management platform

        Red Hat, Inc. has announced the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.1, the latest version of its open hybrid cloud management solution. With support for Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 now supports greater choice and flexibility for customers who want to run hybrid cloud workloads on Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • New guidelines for Fedora Ambassadors and Design

          This week, some Ambassadors, CommOps, and Design Team members collaborated on improving and redefining the guidelines for how to request artwork and other art assets. As the advocates and representatives of Fedora across the globe, the Ambassadors often need many tools and resources for demonstrating Fedora. Examples of this might be fliers, banners, tablecloths, stickers, badges, and more. Until recently, the process for requesting artwork assets was not well-defined and somewhat unclear. This can cause problems when Ambassadors need something designed for an event. Sometimes it can draw out the request or end up in an accident, such as purple DVD media covers!

        • GSoC 2016 Weekly Rundown: Documentation and upgrades

          This week and the last were busy, but I’ve made some more progress towards creating the last, idempotent product for managing WordPress installations in Fedora’s Infrastructure for GSoC 2016. The past two weeks had me mostly working on writing the standard operating procedure / documentation for my final product as well as diving more into handling upgrades with WordPress. My primary playbook for installing WordPress is mostly complete, pending one last annoyance.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • ARM grabbed for £24.3bn by Japan’s SoftBank

      British microprocessor designer ARM, an icon of the UK’s technology sector, has agreed a £24.3bn cash sale to Japan’s acquisitive SoftBank Group in a surprise deal announced this morning in a statement to the London Stock Exchange.

      The purchase by SoftBank will be one of the biggest-ever M&A deals in tech – and certainly the biggest in the UK. The agreed takeover may spark a bidding war for ARM, whose technology has become the de facto standard for mobile microprocessors, while the company represents the main competition for chip giant Intel.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Washington Is Politicizing The Olympics Again

      Washington and its Canadian vassal are trying to use a Western media-created Russian athletic doping scandal to ban Russian participation in the Olympic games in Brazil. Washington and Canada are pressuring other countries to get on board with Washington’s vendetta against Russia. The vendetta is conducted under the cover of “protecting clean athletics.”

      You can bet your life that Washington is not motivated by a respect for fairness in sports. Washington is busy at home destroying fairness to the poor, and Washington, which disregards the sovereignty of countries and international law against naked aggression, is busy abroad destroying millions of lives for hegemonic purposes.

    • Your Hands in the Soil: Tending the Garden of a Nation

      Serious gardening is meditation. It is a long pause in the cupped hand of life itself. There is a good deal of work involved in creating something from nothing, in taking a blank space and painting it green and red. I put my hands in the dirt and smell the soil between my knuckles, I feel the sun on my neck, I shoo away the early summer flies and plant at pace, seed here and seedling there. I watch the weather like a meteorologist to know when to water and when to let it ride because a soft rain beats the sprinkler any day. I watch the leaves for signs of yellow. I watch for buds and flowers. All the while, I am outside in an ocean of green and blue with hummingbirds and hawks and dragonflies, and I am also inside myself, diving deep as I perform the rote duty of tying a stalk to a stake.

    • Industry Report Tracks Innovation’s Value To AIDS Treatment In Developing Countries

      A new report launched in time for this week’s AIDS conference in South Africa analyzes factors relating to access to HIV/AIDS treatments over the past 15 years. The analysis includes a look at government policies used during that time, the contribution of generic and research-based industries, and the importance of voluntary licensing.

    • Public Health Takes a Hit Even as Uruguay Prevails in Infamous Philip Morris Investor-State Attack

      Thankfully, a years-long campaign to shame Philip Morris and the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system for the tobacco giant’s infamous ISDS attack on Uruguay ultimately prevailed, but not without leaving deep and damaging scars to global tobacco-control efforts. An ISDS tribunal ruled that Uruguay did not have to compensate Philip Morris after the firm attacked Uruguay’s public health law requiring that 80 percent of tobacco product packages feature graphic medical warning labels.

      But what happens when a government “wins” an ISDS attack should be a cautionary tale for the threats posed by the Trans-Pacific Partnerships (TPP). If enacted, the TPP would double U.S. ISDS liability overnight.

  • Security

    • The sad state of Linux download security

      Installation images for many of the most popular Linux distributions are difficult or impossible to obtain securely via download.

    • Why we use the Linux kernel’s TCP stack

      Let’s start with a broader question – what is the point of running an operating system at all? If you planned on running a single application, having to use a kernel consisting of multiple million lines of code may sound like a burden.

      But in fact most of us decide to run some kind of OS and we do that for two reasons. Firstly, the OS layer adds hardware independence and easy to use APIs. With these we can focus on writing the code for any machine – not only the specialized hardware we have at the moment. Secondly, the OS adds a time sharing layer. This allows us to run more than one application at a time. Whether it’s a second HTTP server or just a bash session, this ability to share resources between multiple processes is critical. All of the resources exposed by the kernel can be shared between multiple processes!

      [...]

      Having said that, at CloudFlare we do use kernel bypass. We are in the second group – we care about performance. More specifically we suffer from IRQ storms. The Linux networking stack has a limit on how many packets per second it can handle. When the limit is reached all CPUs become busy just receiving packets. In that case either the packets are dropped or the applications are starved of CPU. While we don’t have to deal with IRQ storms during our normal operation, this does happen when we are the target of an L3 (layer 3 OSI) DDoS attack. This is a type of attack where the target is flooded with arbitrary packets not belonging to valid connections – typically spoofed packets.

    • Ubuntu user forums hack leaks millions of user details [Ed: Canonical continued using proprietary software that had already been breached, now gives GNU/Linux a bad name again. Many journalists out there cannot tell the difference between operating system and forums software, never mind proprietary and Free software. How many so-called "technology" journalists still say "commercial" software instead of proprietary software, as if FOSS is non-commercial?]

      Attacker took advantage of unpatched software.

      Canonical, the parent company of popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, has disclosed that its user web forums have suffered a major data breach.

      Over the weekend, Canonical said that it had come across claims that a third party had a copy of the Ubuntu Forums database.

      The company was able to verify that a breach had taken place, with a database containing details of two million Ubuntu Forums users being leaked.

    • As Open Source Code Spreads, So Do Components with Security Flaws[Ef: Catalin Cimpanu's headline would have us believe that proprietary software has no "Security Flaws", only FOSS]

      The company that provides hosting services for the Maven Central Repository says that one in sixteen downloads is for a Java component that contains a known security flaw.

    • OpenSSH has user enumeration bug

      A bug in OpenSSH allows an attacker to check whether user names are valid on a ‘net-facing server – because the Blowfish algorithm runs faster than SHA256/SHA512.

      The bug hasn’t been fixed yet, but in his post to Full Disclosure, Verint developer Eddie Harari says OpenSSH developer Darren Tucker knows about the issue and is working to address it.

      If you send a user ID to an OpenSSH server with a long (but wrong) password – 10 kilobytes is what Harari mentions in his post – then the server will respond quickly for fake users, but slower for real users.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • You, Too, Armenia?

      Come on, give us a break, will you? Most of us are still digging out of news on France’s latest terror attack, the 28-pages released on Friday, and Turkey’s so-called coup. Couldn’t you wait until later this coming week?

      Apparently not.

      Reliable reports are even more scarce than for Turkey as Armenia is even more aggressive in its monitoring and policing of social media. What reports have emerged indicate an organized, armed hostage-taking event demanding the release of a political prisoner rather than a coup.

    • Military Regimes Shouldn’t Be Recognized

      The military upheaval in Turkey, whose final consequences are yet to be seen, highlights a major weakness in worldwide efforts to promote democracy. This event underscores the need to establish binding international legal principles to ban the recognition of military regimes as a result of coups d’état. Establishment of such principles, and the creation of the legal mechanisms for applying them, would foster democracy throughout the world.

      The circumstances in Turkey mimic several similar situations in recent history: the coming to power of governments without support from the military. Once confronted with a threat to their political hegemony, the military either overthrow the civilian government or refuses to surrender power to democratically elected civilians.

      Overt recognition by Western democracies or implied recognition through ambivalent signs of disapproval have encouraged military officers to overthrow many constitutional governments freely chosen by the people. The military relinquish power only when forced by popular will, or when its own incapacity to govern has made its position untenable.

    • Turkey coup arrests hit 6,000 as Erdogan roots out ‘virus’

      Turkey has arrested 6,000 people after a failed coup, with President Erdogan vowing to purge state bodies of the “virus” that caused the revolt.

      Mr Erdogan’s top military aide Col Ali Yazici is among those now in custody.

      The overall death toll for the weekend violence has risen to 290, the foreign ministry said. More than 100 of those were participating in the coup.

    • Fears for Turkey’s Democracy Build as Post-Coup Crackdown Continues

      The fallout from the failed military coup in Turkey extended through the weekend, as the number of people arrested rose to about 6,000 and world leaders continued urging restraint from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has said the plotters would pay a “heavy price.”

      Erdoğan on Sunday vowed to “clean all state institutions of the virus” of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom the Turkish president blamed for the uprising. He said members of the “Gülen group” have “ruined” the country’s military and are being taken into custody throughout all ranks.

      “This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army,” Erdoğan said.

      Gülen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, has denied involvement in the revolt, which began late Friday night and was quashed by citizens responding to Erdoğan’s call to action.

    • Turkey’s Attempted Coup

      Turkey’s democracy is dead. It was dying anyway, as President Recep Tayyib Erdogan took over media outlets, arrested political opponents and journalists, and even re-started a war with the Kurds last autumn in order to win an election. But once part of the army launched a coup attempt on Friday night, it was dead no matter which way the crisis ended.

    • 6 Police Officers Shot, At Least 3 Dead in Baton Rouge Ambush

      Six police officers were shot and three are dead after a shoot-out took place in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Sunday morning.

      The attack was said to be an ambush, after police reportedly received a call of a “suspicious person walking down Airline Highway with an assault rifle,” according to a CNN source. When police arrived, the man, reportedly clad in black and wearing a face mask, opened fire on them.
      Six law enforcement officers were shot—three are dead and three others are injured, Baton Rouge Police Department spokesman Sgt. Don Coppola told CNN.
      The suspect, who was killed at the scene, has been identified by police as Gavin Eugene Long.

    • Police Officers Reportedly Shot in Baton Rouge

      Three police officers have been confirmed killed and at least three others were injured in a shooting Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, according to the sheriff’s office.

    • Two Baton Rouge police officers killed in shooting Sunday, mayor’s office confirms

      At least one police officer has been shot in Baton Rouge on Sunday morning, and there’s an active shooter situation in the area of Airline and Old Hammond highways, Baton Rouge police confirm.

    • Three Police Officers Dead in Baton Rouge Shooting

      Six police officers have been shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and three are dead, according to local news reports citing police sources.

      At a Sunday afternoon press conference following the shooting, Louisiana State Police Superintendent Mike Edmonson said that “there is no active shooter scenario going on in Baton Rouge. We believe that the person that shot and killed our officers was shot and killed at the scene.”

    • Nuclear weapons have almost been launched accidentally 13 times – it’s time to stop believing in the fantasy that Trident keeps us safe

      It is my firm view, based on the best available evidence, that renewing Trident will not only fail to improve Britain’s security, but in fact poses significant dangers to us. These weapons of mass destruction have the potential to cause death on an unimaginable scale, and they do nothing to hinder the real threat of lone gunmen or extremists. Their very presence here – and the transport of nuclear warheads on our roads – is not only a target for terrorism but a continued risk of accidents linked to human error or technical failure. A recent report from Chatham House confirms this threat, listing 13 occasions from across the world when nuclear weapons were nearly launched accidentally. These weapons present a huge risk – and there’s no evidence to suggest they keep us any safer.

      If we’re serious about ridding the world of nuclear weapons and fulfilling our obligations under the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, then genuine disarmament is non-negotiable. Keeping these weapons sends a dangerous signal to the rest of the world that security is dependent on being able to use weapons of mass destruction, and thus drives proliferation.

      The UN is currently working on a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. Britain can play a part in ridding the world of these weapons, but not if we refuse to lay down our own nuclear arms.

    • Cleveland Police Ask For Emergency Suspension Of Open Carry Laws During Republican Convention

      The request will put Governor Kasich in an awkward position. In general Republicans argue that open-carry laws are an important party of the right to bear arms and improve public safety. The research does not support this argument.

    • Turkey’s Erdogan Expands Post-Coup Crackdown To Target Judges, Key Military Leader

      Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is further enforcing his reputation as a shrewd political operator in the aftermath of Friday’s attempted coup, arresting some 6,000 people, including a prominent military official, connected to Friday’s events.

      General Bekir Ercan Van — the commander of the Incirlik Air Base — was just one of thousands of soldiers and members of the judiciary to be arrested. Erdogan said the coup was “a gift from God…because this will help us claim our military from these members of this gang.”

      Analysts say Erdogan is using the coup to dispose of his known opponents in government. Erdogan and his moderate Islamist party AKP was once widely hailed as a reformist leader who helped ease tensions with Kurdish separatist groups and played a positive role in regional events. But after around a decade in power, Erdogan began attempts to consolidate his power and advance his own political values and influence in Turkey. Friday’s attempted coup will likely further embolden Erdogan to crack down on his opponents in government and beyond.

    • MH-17: Two Years of Anti-Russian Propaganda

      Two years ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot out of the sky over eastern Ukraine killing 298 people and opening an inviting path for a propaganda campaign toward a new Cold War with Russia, writes Robert Parry.

    • MH-17: Russia Convicted By Propaganda, Not Evidence
    • Here’s Why Activists Don’t Buy Hillary Clinton’s Justification for the Honduras Coup

      In April 2016, Hillary Clinton was asked about her role in Honduras’ 2009 coup by Democracy Now’s Juan González. The coup, which took place while Clinton was Secretary of State, ousted the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya and plunged the country into chaos. Today, Honduras is one of the most violent countries on earth, particularly for activists. On March 3, 2016, Berta Cáceres, a Honduran indigenous Lenca and a leading human rights activist and environmentalist, was assassinated in Honduras. Shortly before her death she singled out Clinton for criticism, holding her accountable for legitimizing the country’s current political situation.

    • Trump Campaign Weighs In On Open Carry At The Republican Convention

      Hours after the head of Cleveland’s police union pleaded with the governor to suspend Ohio’s open-carry laws during the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump’s spokesperson told ThinkProgress she is “not nervous at all” that people are walking around the city with assault weapons.

      “I am recommending that people follow the law,” Katrina Pierson said Sunday when asked whether she believes people should arm themselves in the convention zone. Under Ohio law, residents over 21 years old who have permits can openly carry guns in public.

    • 29 Pages Revealed: Corruption, Crime and Cover-up Of 9/11

      First and foremost, here is what you need to know when you listen to any member of our government state that the newly released 29 pages are no smoking gun – THEY ARE LYING.

      Our government’s relationship to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is no different than an addict’s relationship to heroin. Much like a heroin addict who will lie, cheat, and steal to feed their vice, certain members of our government will lie, cheat, and steal to continue their dysfunctional and deadly relationship with the KSA – a relationship that is rotting this nation and its leaders from the inside out.

      When CIA Director John Brennan states that he believes the 29 pages prove that the government of Saudi Arabia had no involvement in the 9/11 attacks, recognize that John Brennan is not a man living in reality – he is delusional by design, feeding and protecting his Saudi vice.

      When Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Anne W. Patterson, testifies – under oath – that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an ally that does everything they can to help us fight against Islamic terrorism, recognize that her deep, steep Saudi pandering serves and protects only her Saudi vice.

    • The Saudis Did 9/11

      News reports about the recently released 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks are typically dismissive: this is nothing new, it’s just circumstantial evidence, and there’s no “smoking gun.” Yet given what the report actually says – and these news accounts are remarkably sparse when it comes to verbatim quotes – it’s hard to fathom what would constitute a smoking gun.

      To begin with, let’s start with what’s not in these pages: there are numerous redactions. And they are rather odd. When one expects to read the words “CIA” or “FBI,” instead we get a blacked-out word. Entire paragraphs are redacted – often at crucial points. So it’s reasonable to assume that, if there is a smoking gun, it’s contained in the portions we’re not allowed to see. Presumably the members of Congress with access to the document prior to its release who have been telling us that it changes their entire conception of the 9/11 attacks – and our relationship with the Saudis – read the unredacted version. Which points to the conclusion that the omissions left out crucial information – perhaps including the vaunted smoking gun.

    • The Trojan Drone

      Think of it as the Trojan Drone, the ultimate techno-weapon of American warfare in these years, a single remotely operated plane sent to take out a single key figure. It’s a shiny video game for grown ups — a Mortal Kombat or Call of Duty where the animated enemies bleed real blood. Just like the giant wooden horse the Greeks convinced the Trojans to bring inside their gates, however, the drone carries something deadly in its belly: a new and illegal military strategy disguised as an impressive piece of technology.

      The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved — whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone — the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion we’ve had has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). It’s a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.

    • Scores of educators held for inciting terrorism in Bangladesh

      Bangladeshi police have discovered that dozens of university professors and high school teachers have been inciting their students to engage in Islamic terrorism.

      One English teacher is quoted by a school caretaker as saying that ““Muslims are being persecuted around the world, so let us attack non-Muslims”.

    • Erdogan Had It Coming: But the Turkish Coup Failed

      Recep Tayyip Erdogan had it coming. The Turkish army was never going to remain compliant while the man who would recreate the Ottoman Empire turned his neighbours into enemies and his country into a mockery of itself. But it would be a grave mistake to assume two things: that the putting down of a military coup is a momentary matter after which the Turkish army will remain obedient to its sultan; and to regard at least 161 deaths and more than 2,839 detained in isolation from the collapse of the nation-states of the Middle East.

      For the weekend’s events in Istanbul and Ankara are intimately related to the breakdown of frontiers and state-belief – the assumption that Middle East nations have permanent institutions and borders – that has inflicted such wounds across Iraq, Syria, Egypt and other countries in the Arab world. Instability is now as contagious as corruption in the region, especially among its potentates and dictators, a class of autocrat of which Erdogan has been a member ever since he changed the constitution for his own benefit and restarted his wicked conflict with the Kurds.

    • Hello and Goodbye Turkey

      And then we got word of the military coup d’état that was launched while she was airborne that rocked Turkey and the world. Had our kid had a slightly later connection, she would have been out of luck because Ataturk Airport was shut down for about the next 24 hours. She would have to sleep there and then be jostled by thousands of anxious passengers all trying to get the hell out at the same time. Thankfully, that was not to be, and with our personal concerns out of the way, my Turkish wife and I stayed glued to all channels trying to understand what in Allah’s name was going on in the fatherland.

    • Russia, America, it’s time to talk face-to-face

      During the late 1980s, superpower leaders demagnitised international confrontation by speaking directly to the other side. Why shouldn’t we do this again?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Op-ed: TransCanada lawsuit highlights need to scuttle TPP

      The Obama administration is still trying, against the odds, to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade and investment agreement (TPP) through the lame-duck session of Congress after the November presidential vote. The administration knows that TPP can’t pass before the election because both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump oppose it; therefore, they are hoping for a stealth Senate vote between the election and inauguration of the new president in 2017. We can therefore “thank” TransCanada for reminding us why the TPP needs to be scuttled.

    • Yes on 1 for the Sun: The Florida Anti-Solar Ballot Initiative from Utilities

      Last week, the Florida utility-backed anti-solar initiative officially launched their campaign to block solar leasing in the sunshine state with the confusing name, “Yes on 1 for the sun.” The utility-backed group running the initiative campaign, called the “Consumers for Smart Solar” has been funded by nearly $7 million in contributions from the investor-owned utilities and fossil fuel front groups to date.

      Energy & Policy Institute previously revealed that Consumers for Smart Solar is funded by utilities and front groups seeking to prevent changes to state law that would open the solar market in Florida and specifically allow third party solar leases. Third party solar accounted for 72 precent of residential solar installed across the country in 2014.

  • Finance

    • Popular Uprising Backs Striking Teachers in Southern Mexico

      In Chiapas, Mexico, what started as a fight for teachers union power has exploded into a popular movement against the privatization of public education and the entire public sector.

      Fifty thousand teachers, students, parents, and small-business owners marched at sunset July 11 through the streets of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital city of Chiapas—in just one of at least 10 protests across five states.

      Meanwhile an hour east, in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, parents, students, social justice organizations, and members of civil society were gathering for the 15th night of their highway blockade.

    • This year’s GOP platform pushes federal land transfers

      The Republican Party is drafting its 2016 platform, which represents a hard swerve to the right on social issues. But other parts of its stance have long been consistent – most notably, its push for transferring federal lands to state control.

      [...]

      “Congress should reconsider whether parts of the federal government’s enormous landholdings and control of water in the West could be better used for ranching, mining, or forestry through private ownership… The enduring truth is that people best protect what they own.”

    • India ‘gold man’ battered to death

      An Indian man who bought one of the world’s most expensive shirts made entirely of gold has been allegedly battered to death, police said.

      Datta Phuge shot into the global limelight in 2013 when he bought a shirt made with more than 3kg of gold and worth $250,000 (£186,943).

      A money lender based in western Pune, Mr Phuge was called “the gold man”.

      Four persons have been detained for questioning. Police suspect a dispute over money led to the murder.

    • With Wall Street Fees in Danger, Bloomberg Tries to Make Mom and Pop Afraid

      Bloomberg News is really pushing the frontiers in journalism. In order to give readers a balanced account (7/14/16) of a proposal by Rep. Peter DeFazio to impose a 0.03 percent tax on financial transactions (that’s 3 cents on every hundred dollars), it went to the spokesperson for the Investment Company Institute, the chief investment officer from Vanguard and an academic with extensive ties to the financial industry. It also presented an assertion about the savings from electronic trading from Markit Ltd. Based on this diverse range of sources, Bloomberg ran the headline:

      Democrats Assail Wall Street With Plan That May Hit Mom and Pop

      If Bloomberg were interested in views other than those of the financial industry, it might have found some people who supported the tax to provide comments for the article. Or it might have tried some basic arithmetic itself.

      Most research finds that trading is price elastic, meaning that the percentage change in trading in response to a tax is larger than the percentage increase in trading costs that result from the tax. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center assumed an elasticity of -1.25 in its analysis of financial transactions taxes.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Trustworthy Hillary

      Hillary Clinton’s 6-point lead over Donald Trump in last month’s CBS News poll has now evaporated.

    • A Prime Day to Celebrate the Boss’s Business

      That was the lead on a news story in the Washington Post (7/13/16)—owned, of course, by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

      And the story discloses that parenthetically: “(Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, owns the Washington Post.)” But there seems to be some confusion: While welcome, disclosure is not an inoculation. We still look askance at a news story with lines like, “That the sale drew such strong spending from shoppers for a second year suggests that Amazon is making inroads establishing this as an appointment summer shopping event.”

    • ‘We Can Stand Together’: Protesters Prep for Cleveland as RNC Nears

      Cleveland, Ohio is preparing for what many expect to be a volatile Republican National Convention (RNC) on Monday, as protesters and supporters converge on the city and controversy around presumptive nominee Donald Trump and his divisive running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, continues to build.

      About 50,000 people are expected to take part in protests and rallies for the four days of the convention, from July 18-21. The Guardian reports that thousands of police officers, secret service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents “swarmed the downtown area throughout the weekend.”

      As Common Dreams reported last week, officials are readying extra jail space and keeping courts open late “in case protesters are arrested en masse.”

      Activists are rallying against Trump’s caustic rhetoric, now signature to his speeches, as well as the issues of police brutality and racism—particularly significant in Cleveland, where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by officers in November 2014.

    • Does the Trumpence Nightmare Coalition Have a Chance? Yeah, Because It’s 2016 and Chaos Reigns

      So here we are, at a major pivot point in the unfolding narrative of America’s Stupidest Election Ever. (Admittedly I haven’t gone back and taken a hard look at “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.”) Our two major political parties head into their conventions with two deeply flawed and widely disliked candidates, who despite their divergent styles and opposed positions come from the same elite caste in American life, and have known each other for years. There has been yet another presumed or probable terrorist attack in France, a gruesome event whose timing in terms of the American presidential election was coincidental, but whose symbolism was not. If the deranged Islamic radicals of Europe don’t actually support Donald Trump, they are nonetheless doing their damndest to get him elected.

    • Is there any hope for New Age politics?

      Picture a human anus superimposed on President Obama’s mouth, or a smiling Hilary Clinton attached to the giant belly of a hog, or a presidential primary debate “featuring Donald Trump comparing his genitals with those of a group of fellow frat boys.” Disgusting right? Welcome to election season in America.

    • NBC Gives Glenn Beck A Platform To Re-Mainstream Himself

      NBC’s Chuck Todd gave noted-conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck a national platform to re-mainstream himself on the July 17 edition of Meet The Press. Todd introduced Beck as “founder of the conservative website and TV network The Blaze” and a “vocal critic of Donald Trump right from the start.”

      During his appearance, Beck criticized presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his vice presidential running mate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence — who Beck alleged has previously criticized Trump behind closed doors — and lamented that “the problem is in our society that there’s no authenticity. You can’t trust anybody.” Beck also criticized Republican officials, including RNC chairman Reince Priebus.

    • That Far Left Entryist Takeover of the Labour Party

      At its height in the 1980’s, Militant claimed 8,000 members. In 2013 its descendant, the Socialist Party, claimed 2,500 members and crowed that it was now bigger than the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP replied, not by claiming to have more than 2,500 members, but by saying that the Socialist Party’s claim of 2,500 was inflated. The various manifestations of the Communist Party are smaller. An umbrella group, the People’s Assembly against Austerity, incorporates more or less all of these disparate elements plus much of the organised left of the Labour Party and trades union supporters. Its mailing list, which includes many Greens and other radicals like me, is 40,000 people. That is probably an exaggeration of the membership of the formal left in the UK and it should be noted that a significant proportion of that 40,000 are long term Labour members. Momentum, the Blairites’ bete noir, has only about 10,000 members.

      I have therefore watched with bemusement the claims that the 120,000 new Labour members now banned from voting, and perhaps half of the remaining 400,000 Labour electorate, are entryists from organisations of the “hard left”. Anybody who believes there are over 300,000 members of “hard left” groups in the UK is frankly bonkers.

    • The Dream is Over: Bye, Bye Bernie

      Bernie Sanders has gone over to the enemy side; it is now written in stone. Everyone who felt the Bern will have to deal with that as best they can. The dream is over.

    • ‘The Sham Is Over’: Elizabeth Warren Has the Last Word on ‘Thin-Skinned Fraud’ Donald Trump

      Outside of a humiliating defeat in November, Donald Trump’s biggest nightmare has to be the continuing attacks by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren who continually leaves him in a stuttering rage, only able to use smears about her heritage that likely cost her former opponent, Scott Brown, his seat in the Senate.

      Warren stomped all over Trump’s big day on Saturday when the presumptive GOP presidential announcing his Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his choice of a running mate.

    • Donald Trump’s Big Show: Get Ready for Wild Conspiracy Theorists and Pistol-Packin’ Bikers

      No sooner had word broken in news reports that three police officers were shot to death Sunday morning in Baton Rouge, La., than Republican presidential nominee apparent Donald J. Trump did what a brave man does: He took to social media to declare himself the “law and order candidate.” The reason for the shootings, Trump proclaimed, was a “lack of leadership” —a taunt aimed at President Barack Obama.

      Trump’s good buddy, Alex Jones, the far-right conspiracy theorist whose InfoWars radio show Trump has frequented, attributed the shootings to “Obama-sponsored terrorists.”

      Before you yell at me for alleging guilt by association, consider that on Monday in Cleveland, as the Republican National Convention gets underway here, Jones, together with Republican political operative Roger Stone, will host an “America First Unity Rally” — and that Trump has lauded Jones for his “amazing” reputation. (Well, that wasn’t exactly a lie; it is a pretty amazing thing. Consider his Space Lizard riff on Obamacare.)

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Its World Emoji Day, let’s talk about Microsoft’s censorship of LGBT and “profane” emoji

      Since we’ve already patted Microsoft on the back for keeping up with the trends with regards to the sheer number and variety of emoji, its time to tut at them for what appears to be a cynical move with regards to expressive emoji.

      I’ve noted this down a while back when Microsoft launched new emoji for Windows 10 but refrained from commenting on this, but this seems a good time as ever to say this; Microsoft censors emoji on their platforms.

    • How Bollywood is fighting ‘irrational’ censorship in India

      Udta Punjab is currently the eighth highest-grossing Bollywood film of the year. But a month ago, the makers of the film worried if it would ever release, due to censorship issues. BBC Asian Network’s Haroon Rashid speaks to Bollywood actors and writers about creative freedom and censorship in India.

      The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) had asked the Udta Punjab filmmakers to make 94 cuts, including removal of expletives, references to cities in Punjab and any shots of drugs being consumed, ironically in a film about drug abuse.

    • POLITICAL WEEK AHEAD: News censorship at SABC heads for court

      THE issue of the SABC’s self-censorship will come to the boil this week, when the high court hears an application from the Helen Suzman Foundation for an urgent interdict against a ban on screening footage of violent protests.

      Also, with a little over two weeks before the local government elections, the general political temperature in the country is likely to increase, as campaigning from all political parties intensifies.

      SABC chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng and board chairman Professor Mbulaheni Maguvhe have yet to file responding papers to the court.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Abuse victim ‘appalled at intimidation’ by church

      A British man who travelled to Verona in an attempt to forgive the Catholic missionary who sexually abused him at Mirfield seminary in Yorkshire almost 50 years ago is being prosecuted in the Italian courts on three counts of “trespassing, stalking and interference in private life”.

    • A hard truth for Leave voters: Brexit means big government

      Without the European Union’s shackles, Britain will be free to develop new products and innovate for greater success. Like a gleaming stallion racing away from the herd, the UK will leave Europe’s deadbeat economy in the dust. It’s a Brexiters’ image that also pictures Europe falling back, unable to maintain its poise while protecting the interests of unionised workers and ageing elites.

      The most recent economic figures appear to bear this out, with lower growth posing a fresh problem for Brussels and European Central Bank boss Mario Draghi, who had presumed that increases in GDP, while still only moderate, were steady and assured.

      And it’s true that policymakers in Denmark, Sweden and even some quarters of liberal Germany fear that, without the UK, Europe will turn inwards and ossify, forcing them to question their own membership.

    • Mississippi’s prison town are in danger of collapse, thanks to tiny reforms in the War on Drugs

      Towns in Mississippi and other Tea Party-ruled states with large (often private) prison industries are totally reliant on state/fed funding transfers to local prisons for cash and jobs, forced prison labor to provide local services for free, and War on Drugs arrests and minimum sentencing to fill those jails. The first tiny steps toward criminal justice reform have eroded the underpinnings of the whole system, leaving the towns facing collapse.

      Increasing vacancy rates in these prisons mean less revenue (and less free, forced labor), but the counties and towns still have to keep up payments on the bonds they floated to raise the money to build their prisons.

      Meanwhile, “fiscally responsible” states run by slash-and-burn Tea Party governors have cut services and transfer payments (except the per-prisoner/per-diem payments), eroding the towns’ infrastructure (see also), leaving the towns in a state of absolute precarity.

    • After the Horror, We Must Build One America

      “It is more dangerous to be black in America. You’re substantially more likely to be in a situation where police don’t respect you.”

      [...]

      The challenge now — for every concerned American — is how we react to the injustice and the violence. We know that our justice system suffers from massive and systematic racism. It is more dangerous to drive while black. African Americans are more likely to be stopped, more likely to be searched, more likely to be arrested if stopped, more likely to be charged if arrested, and more likely to be jailed if convicted. The budget of many small towns is based upon the fines, penalties and fees largely paid for by African-American offenders. Police, state’s attorneys and judges tend to have a shared perspective, an organizational kinship.

    • In Ukraine, not only heroes deserve justice

      A Ukrainian blogger sentenced for his scandalous views on the conflict in the Donbas has just been released.

    • Police Already Have Broad Powers to Detain Us; and the Supreme Court Gave Them Even More

      I don’t want to end up like Alton Sterling.

      Or Philando Castile. Or Eric Garner. Or Freddie Gray. Or Amadou Diallo. I don’t want to end up dead after a police stop, probably based on wrongful suspicion, which leads cowardly police officers to resort to unjustifiable force.

      I don’t want to die like this. Nobody does.

      But the statistical fact is that black men are likelier to be victims of the criminal justice system. Black men are victimized by lengthier sentences. They’re victimized daily by harassment and stop-and-frisk. And in the worst cases, they are victims of police who kill them, an act that is rarely prosecuted.

    • Continues to Rise: Muhammad Ali (1942-2016)

      Muhammad Ali’s life could be summed up in a single statement: freedom is always worth fighting for.

    • Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Communism and Revolutions

      As global capitalism, with neoliberalism being a necessary accompaniment, has covered now the entire globe, it is extremely useful to revisit some of the great radical traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries — namely, anarchism and communism. What do they stand for? What are their main differences? Did Soviet Communism represent an authentic form of socialism or was it a “reformed workers’ stage” — or, even worse, a tyrannical form of stage capitalism? In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Noam Chomsky shares his views on anarchism, communism, and revolutions in hopes that the new generation of radical activists does not ignore history and continue to grapple with questions about strategies for social change.

    • Writing as Resistance

      Ringelblum formed his small army of writers clandestinely. Nazi discovery of any writer’s involvement meant his or her immediate execution or deportation to a death camp.

    • Cleveland Protesters Counter Noise of Hate With Silence and Love

      On a day that started with news of the murder of police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, thousands of people gathered here on the eve of the Republican National Convention in a “a nonpartisan, no-labels, no-issue event” designed to “Circle the City with Love.”

      On Sunday afternoon, thousands of people, many in white T-shirts declaring Standing in Love, walked in two lines onto the art deco Hope Memorial Bridge over the Cuyahoga River. Once the marchers were in place and formed a circle, the Dixieland band stopped playing and conversation ended as the group observed a half-hour of silence. Many held hands, some prayed, and when an air horn signaled the end of the silent period, the crowd broke into good-natured cheers, exchanged hugs, and began leaving the bridge.

    • Erdogan is using this failed coup to get rid of the last vestiges of secular Turkey

      The sweeping purge of soldiers and officials in the wake of the failed coup in Turkey is likely to be conducted with extra vigour because a number of close associates of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are among the 265 dead. The number of people detained so far is at 6,000 including soldiers, and around 3,000 judges and legal officials who are unlikely to have been connected to the attempted military takeover.

      On Sunday, Erdogan attended the funeral of the elder brother of his chief adviser, Mustafa Varank. Varank’s older brother, Dr Ilhan Varank, studied at Ohio State University, and was the chairman of Computer and Technology Education Department at Istanbul’s Yildiz Technical University, according to Anadolu Agency (AA). It says that the 45-year-old was shot at and killed as he demonstrated in front of the Istanbul Municipality building on the night of the coup, 15 July.

    • OiThe Cyberpower Crushes Coup

      I am not a military strategist, but I have lived through a couple coups in Thailand, so I have some first hand experience of what they look like. The guide book to running a coup is still Luttwak’s Coup d’État, but it needs to be revised to reflect the use of cyberpower. In the same vein, people who talk about cyberpower need to understand what it actually is (hint: it isn’t a stockpile of exploits, it’s the ability to create and maintain advantage.)

    • The International Labour Organization: workers rights champion or 90-pound weakling?

      In 1969, at the height of its global influence, the International Labour Organization (ILO), a specialized agency of the UN, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work in protecting labour rights, a vital subset of social rights. However, by the early twenty-first century, with the liberal-social democratic consensus left in tatters by the onslaught of globalization, the authors of a volume on international labour standards described the ILO as “the 90-pound weakling of UN agencies.”

      Few would deny that the ILO is having a difficult time promoting labour rights in the age of economic globalization when political actors seem to have ambivalent views about the very idea of labour rights.

      Making things more difficult for the ILO is the principle of national sovereignty that, though more porous now, remains a central feature of international relations. States are free to ignore the urgings and determinations of international organizations, including those of the ILO.

      That said, the ILO has brought a lot of its impotence upon itself. Member states are deeply reluctant to make use of the stronger measures at its disposal. For the most part, the ILO relies on its reporting mechanisms to encourage compliance with its standards and little else.

    • Why Black Lives Matter Won’t Go Away: a Primer on Systemic Racism in America

      Intellectually lazy. Willfully ignorant. Blinded by privilege. Drunk with prejudice. These are some of the words that come to mind when I think of the 30 percent of Americans in 2016 who agree “our country has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights to whites.” There’s no excuse for such irresponsible comments considering the mountain of statistical data showing American institutions treat citizens very differently based on race.

      The shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling have re-energized a Black Lives Matter movement that’s remained remarkably vigilant over the years. I have no interest in judging the specifics of the Castile and Sterling shootings in this piece, or in judging the police officers involved in the court of public opinion prior to official legal action being taken. Individual stories and anecdotes can be spun any which way supporters and opponents of Black Lives Matter wish. But at the end of the day, these stories are just that – stories. They are symbolically powerful, but they won’t convince many who didn’t already agree that America is racist. What I’m interested in are the comprehensive studies of racial prejudice in American political and social institutions.

    • Living in the shadows of slavery

      Everybody agrees on the importance of bringing together the study of ‘old’ slave systems with research on the contemporary marginalities and exploitation that fall under the category of ‘modern’ or ‘new’ slavery. But how to do so is a different question entirely, since each step paves the way for disagreement. ‘Old’ and ‘modern’, for example, are in quotes because they are relative terms: north Atlantic slavery is ‘modern’ compared to that of Antiquity and the Mediterranean world; and the ‘modern’ and ‘new’ slaveries that anti-slavery organisations target are new in relation to the slave systems of the 18th and 19th centuries that abolition wiped out. Yet not all agree on this naming.

    • Jail for Sharing Your Netflix Password? Understanding the Law That Could Make it a Federal Crime

      It’s become so common that it’s almost a joke. One person has a Netflix account and three other people are using it. A recent court ruling found that because of a law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), using someone else’s password could be considered a federal crime with an extremely harsh punishment. Someone who violates the CFAA can face decades in prison and large fines.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Time Is Running Out to Save Net Neutrality in Europe

      One month after a US federal court upheld strong rules protecting net neutrality—the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible—the battle over how to protect the internet’s open, freewheeling nature has shifted to Europe.

      A coalition of prominent open internet advocates, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is mounting a last-ditch campaign urging European officials to stand up to the telecom industry and strengthen the EU’s net neutrality policy before the bloc’s regulatory public consultation period ends on Monday.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Taylor Swift is taking on YouTube, and it won’t be an easy fight

        When Apple announced its plans to offer customers a three-month trial of its Apple Music streaming service, Taylor Swift kicked off. The free trial meant no royalties for artists, and Tay-Tay wrote an open letter describing the terms as “shocking” and “disappointing” – and revealed she’d be withholding her music from the platform. Her tens of millions of fans magnified her protest and the tech giant made a rapid and uncharacteristic U-turn.

        Now Swift and other music artists are publicly taking on YouTube, calling for better protections against copyright infringement and better pay for artists. But this time she’s unlikely to win.

      • Google Wipes Record Breaking Half Billion Pirate Links in 2016

        Copyright holders asked Google to remove more than 500,000,000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine in 2016 thus far. This nearly equals the number of takedown notices it received for the whole of 2015. Rightsholders see the surge as evidence of a failing system, but Google clearly disagrees.

07.17.16

Exploiting Perceived Emergencies/Disasters, Suspending the Rule of Law, and Suspending Judges: How Erdoğan is Like Battistelli, Except the Coup

Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

All Battistelli Needs Right Now is a Reichstag Fire or Parliamentarian Attack (Not Bicycles)

Erdoğan and EPO
Original photo: Erdoğan, 2012

Summary: Pretexts for crackdown on law-abiding people or figureheads who are remote and independent the hallmark not only of Erdoğan but also the EPO’s President, Benoit Battistelli

THIS afternoon we took note of an analogy involving Erdoğan. It has gone viral today (if not yesterday). Battistelli, like Erdoğan, is taking advantage of emergency — real or perceived — to seize total control/endless power and crack down on potential competition/opponents while surrounding oneself by people who even mess around with a bailiff. OpenDemocracy called the coup d’état attempt against Erdoğan “Turkey’s Reichstag fire” and many people haven’t been missing the stunning similarities/parallels when it comes to the EPO. Earlier today someone wrote: “Just wait, the EPO President will probably condemn the Cout détat in Turkey, just wait…”

“…many people haven’t been missing the stunning similarities/parallels when it comes to the EPO.”Given how Battistelli, inherently a politician, takes advantage of political events to further his agenda (he last did this a few days ago [1, 2]), they rightly suspect he might spin this one too. As a side note, Fethullah Gülen, whom Erdoğan blames for the coup (in spite of him being half the globe away), alleges that this whole coup may have been staged (coordination at the top, but no knowledge of the plot among the troops down under).

“What an embarrassment to Turkish democracy and to the rule of law (or lack thereof) at the EPO.”Another person wrote: “The Frenchman Battistelli expresses heartfelt sympathy to the people of France. But only in English. Presumably for reasons of administrative efficiency. Who actually writes this sanctimonious bull***t, anyway? And who cares what the European Patent Office “firmly believes”? It’s just a patent office, FFS. Now eagerly anticipating Battistell’s statement expressing solidarity with President Erdogan.”

A nice analogy in this case can be highlighted here (“”Turkey’s Erdogan Expands Post-Coup Crackdown To Target Judges”) and many other articles about the coup. Battistelli and Erdoğan are both going after judges as if they are the root of all evil. What an embarrassment to Turkish democracy and to the rule of law (or lack thereof) at the EPO. █

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