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02.22.16

Germany, Which Allows People in Europe and Abroad to Patent Software (EPC Shunned), Simply Cannot be Trusted With the EPO and UPC

Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

A Germany-centric court and filings system would further empower the software patenting agenda

Keep clean

Summary: Germany’s attitude towards software patents makes it even more abundantly clear that it’s not suitable to take the lead in a Europe-wide patent system

THE situation in Europe is dire because of ill-situated bureaucracy. Just look at what Team Battistelli has done. It’s Europe’s embarrassment and shame. Europe needs to put the EPO under control of citizens and/or their representatives. Right now it’s above the law (detached from the European Union), thus dangerous. It’s largely controlled by German authorities that shelter it (see how German media treats this subject [1, 2]) because it’s beneficial to the German economy in various ways.

Now that patent trolls penetrate Europe along with software patents (close correlation exists between these two) we are reminded that: “The costs of a lawsuit from a patent troll are astronomical, and can reach tens of millions of dollars.”

“Just look at what Team Battistelli has done. It’s Europe’s embarrassment and shame.”This mostly hurts small businesses, which Europe is composed of in many pertinent countries (more so than in the US). “How NOT to make EU innovative” is what Professor James Bessen wrote about the article “Get Ready for Patent Wars as IP Europe Consortium Is Unveiled” (we mentioned this article before).

Bastian Best, a German national who is a patent lawyer, wrote again about last month’s post (the blog is in favour of software patents, as is the case with every lawyer’s blog) about German’s acceptance of software patents under certain scenarios, provided lawyers cleverly use words to mislead examiners and judges. Of interest to this bizarre situation (Germany being open to software patents) are the following older articles of ours (among others):

Recall Microsoft’s FAT patents in Germany — patents which were used against a lot of companies that use Linux, even a Dutch company (TomTom) which Microsoft took to court over it. These are software patents which are still being used against Linux (we last covered an example earlier this month). We recently wrote about Germany’s special role in the UPC [1, 2] and we continue to worry that Germany’s notable tolerance of software patents (never mind tolerance of Battistelli’s abuses) will spread to other countries, including the UK where the UK-IPO has also been relatively friendly towards software patents. █

Call for Information: Separating EPO Rumours From Confirmed Facts

Posted in Europe, Patents, Rumour at 8:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

EPO staff is afraid to speak out (fear of revenge), but Techrights has no such issues

A whisper

Summary: In an effort to put together reliable information about what’s going on inside the secretive European Patent Office (EPO) we kindly request more input from readers

TECHRIGHTS has been receiving a lot of information regarding what evidently becomes some kind of managerial exodus at the EPO. We are still, however, trying to ascertain the accuracy of information we receive. A couple of nights ago one person wrote that “Mrs Elodie Bergot ha[d apparently] resigned.” Based on further investigation, it does not appear to be the case (at least not yet). We think we know the source/reason for confusion here. It’s not too easy to keep track of resignations because there are quite a lot of them right now. There are also early ‘retirements’. We are going to write more about that later today and in the mean time we appeal for additional verifications (these can be posted below, in the comments, or sent through other methods/channels).

Hurrah! Is she BB’s scapegoat or is this the beginning of the end for BB’s inner circle?

Let’s hope that the following persons will follow:
Régis Hannart, the distributor of cooperation money which convinced most delegations to blindly follow BB’s crazy management line;
Mr Lutz, one of the most incompetent judges Germany ever produced, who provided the legal basis for BB’s actions;
Mr Willy Minnoye, a bullying, arrogant, ignorant manager (see contributions in Techrights.epo)
Mr Gilles Requena, grey eminence in BB’s office and Mrs Bergot’ husband.

[...]

Unfortunately, the above rumour is not confirmed. But the wish list of resignations remains.
Let’s wait and see the developments in the next days.

Until we post an updated list of the status/resignations (with high level of certainty and corroboration) please consider getting in touch with us. We need to at least try to organise this kind of informative list which EPO management is trying to suppress, as usual. █

It’s Official: Death of Software Patents Reaffirmed in India

Posted in Asia, Law, Patents at 7:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

No sane population (i.e. people insufficiently indoctrinated by maximalists) should tolerate software patents

Indian monuments

Summary: India has once again managed to steer public policy in the right direction, but only after immense pressure from the public

SEVERAL months ago there were new and well-founded fears that the software patents lobby (IBM, Microsoft and so on) was again making headway in India. They nearly got their way again, but the public woke up, NGOs spoke out, and the government came under pressure which soon thereafter temporarily blocked this silly initiative (similar to recent efforts of Facebook in India). If this isn’t People Power at work, then it sure is something that the Western populations can learn from and emulate, e.g. when mobilising against TPP, TTIP, UPC, etc. For those who haven’t been following these developments, this Wiki page can help (chronological list of articles on the topic).

“Software patents in India have always been like a zombie that keeps trying to come back to life because megacorporations (usually foreign) lobby for that.”This morning we found the English article “India’s patent office says no to software patents, again”. It claims that “India’s apex patent office has said no to software patents in the guidelines for examining computer-related inventions, which were published on 19 February.”

Another article, this one coming from a legal site, says: “The Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks has issued an order dated February 19, 2016 publishing the revised Guidelines for Computer Related Inventions. The current guidelines are in tune with the provisions in the Patents Act, 1970 (as amended).”

This is great news. Software patents in India have always been like a zombie that keeps trying to come back to life because megacorporations (usually foreign) lobby for that. They still can’t quite colonise the country by legislation. Anivar, a longtime supporter of ours (nearly a decade) from India, writes: “New Software patent guidelines follow the spirit of Indian patent law 3(k) clause.” (he moreover links to the original PDF, which is in English). In the US, in the mean time, software patents are getting a lot weaker. Europe and New Zealand are under enough pressure from the public to prevent them — at least for now — from formally tolerating software patents (more on that later today).

This week has begun with a lot of good news on the patent front. Stay tuned. █

Los Abogados de Patentes y los Oficiales de la OEP están Desfilando Como si Fuese Carnaval a Favor de La Corte Unitaria de Patentes, A Pesar de la Falta de Proceso Democrático

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

English/Original

Publicado en Europe, Patents at 8:03 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

La UPC es un Caballo de Troya de los que se enriquecen con las patentes.

Trojan horse

Sumario: La Corte Unitaria de Patentes, el último nombre del esfuerzo de una década para incrementar litigación, daños, mandatos, trolling, etc. dentro de Europa, esta siendo embaucada en le sistema como un caballo de Troya, confiando en la apatía del público (ya que este no sabe nada acerca de su existencia y la dura realidad)

LA UPC, de la que escribimos hace cuatro dias, es de gran importancia para la gerencia de la OEP. Incluso propició un evento propagandístico a su favor en los Estados Unidos, que tendrá lugar dentro de unos dias con la ayuda de los abogados de patentes y sus medios. Esto no es democracia, es un golpe de estado que únicamente sirve para desacreditar la democracia Europea.

Amerikat (Ward) de IP Kat continúa impulsando la UPC como si ya fuera una realidad (no lo es) y algún ¨Abogado de IP y Tecnología¨ promueve este golpe de estado de la UPC en el cual los ciudadanos europeos nunca votaron por el. No son sólo mujeres promoviéndolo pero casi todos los abogados de patentes, lo que es revelador, no es cierto? ADR es también parte del nuevo #marco de patentes. Diseño #reglas de mediación de la UPC ya fuerón publicadas¨ el último escribió.

Benjamin Henrion (FFII) respondió diciendo: ¨Las Reglas NO pueden ser escritas por un comite administrativo¨

“…en el peor caso, ellos copiarán y pegarán las reglas y pedirán a los parlamentarios que la sellen.”
      –Benjamin Henrion (FFII)¨Las Reglas NO pueden ser escritas por un comite administrativo,¨ añadió más tarde, ¨sólo por parlamentarios elegidos¨ (¨no se preocupen,¨ dije, ¨ellos siempre pueden sobornar algunos políticos para firmar las reglas que son pasadas a ellos¨).

Una cuenta pro-patentes saltó para decir: ¨Supuestamente tiene que ser vigilada por el Consejo de la UE, cuyos miembros supuestamente tienen que ser vigilados por los parlamentarios elegidos, los que a su vez son vigilados por el pueblo.¨ Pero si el pueblo se duerme (lo que sucede por apatía) entonces estamos jodidos.

¨¿Cuándo estuvo la UPC monitoreada por personas que no sean abogados de patentes y otros que se ENRIQUECEN POR ELLAS?¨ Respondí comparándolos con zorros en el gallinero. Entonces Henrion dijo ¨eso es robar la democracia. Hay reglas claras de la ECHR para esto.¨

“Bueno no es que a los abogados de patentes honestamente les importe la justicia,” “ellos tuercen las leyes!” De eso viven, por ello la gente les paga un montón de dinero.

Como Henrion lo puso: “en el peor caso, ellos copiarán y pegarán las reglas y pedirán a los parlamentarios que la sellen.”

Entonces, ¨patentlyGerman¨ (su ocupación no es difícil de adivinar) dijo: ¨La división local de Munich de la #UPC será ubicada en un aburrido pero céntrico edificio¨ (abogados de patentes y sus propagandistas lo dicen en tiempo ¨futuro¨ no como ¨posibilidad¨, como sí la UPC ya es inevitable e imparable).

“La UPC ES UN CABALLO DE TROYA QUE LOS CIUDADANOS EUROPEOS NI QUIEREN NI NECESITAN (por lo menos aquellos quienes estan al tanto de ella y de sus objetivos).”Agredezcamos que alguna gente comenzo a despertar. España esta en lo correcto al rechazar la UPC, a pesar del chantaje político.

Muéstrenos algún otro que no sea abogado de patentes (o la OEP) que este promoviendo la UPC y le daremos un premio. Lo que tenemos aquí es un golpe de estado. La UPC es un caballo de troya que los ciudadanos europeos ni quieren ni necesitan (por lo menos aquellos quienes estan al tanto de ella y de sus objetivos).

La UPC es un escupitájo en la cara de la democracia Europea. Es tiempor para que más sitios (no sitios pertenecientes a abogados de patentes) hablen abiertamente acerca de ella e informen correctamente al público. Al no hacerlo como ha ocurrido hasta ahora para ventaja de los abogados de patentes quienes se ENRIQUECEN Y BENEFICIAN de ellas el público es mal informado y manipulado a creer que las patentes de software son buenas para ellos. ¿Donde estan las PYMEs Europeans? Es tiempo de agruparse hablar y sentar sus puntos de vista, si no lo hacen ustedes (PYMEs) están condenadas al fracaso y poniendo a Europa bajo el control de GRANDES CORPORACIONES EXTRANJERAS. █

La Oficina Europea de Patentes (OEP) Abiertamente Aboga por las Patentes de Software a Pesar de las Reglas

Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

English/Original

Publicado en Europe, Patents at 1:33 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

El máximalismo de patentes bajo el régimen de Battistelli se ha convertido en un cancer (y afecta negativamente a sus pacientes)

OEP por patentes de software
OEP por patentes de software

Sumario: La OEP ha alcanzado un nivel de sinverguencería tan alto que abiertamente promueve monopolios en algoritmos (patentes de software) es ahora generalmente visto como permisible y también aceptable

LA OEP es un mounstro hambriento fuera de control. Sirve a largas corporaciones y arrolla todo lo que encuentre en su camino. La OEP es probablemente la más grande fuente de verguenza de la Unión Europea, pero la OEP no es Europea ni tampoco parte de la UE. Frecuentemente parece más como una conspiración de largas corporaciones y gente riquísima, engañándo bajo el nombre ¨Europea¨ y un dominio .org. Los intereses de los ciudadanos europeos no importan simplemente y las PYMEs europeas tampoco cuentan.

“La absoluta arrogancia de los gerentes de EPO aparentemente les permite ser descarados tratando de ignorar las reglas y expandir el alcance de patentes para casi cualquier cosa, en la búsqueda sin sentido de más patentes (donde la cantidad es más importante que la calidad o su valor económico colectivo).”La OEP esta promoviendo patentes de software de nuevo (el tweet de arriba es de apenas unas horas). No sorprende a nadie de aquellos que campañan contra las patentes de sofware porque a la OEP no le importa la ley (abiertamente lo admite) y no sigue las reglas de la EPC tampoco.

“No se pierdan nuestro workshop en patentabilidad de software el Miercoles 16 de Marzo en CeBIT,” escribió la persona de arriba en un documente oficial (una publicación oficial), aludiendo algo que cubrimos aqui a principios de este mes.

Vaya caraduras que son…

En los Estados Unidos al contrario que Europa las patentes de software están muriendo. Ahora mismo abogados de patentes tratan de ¨Salvar las patentes de software,¨ usan sus propias palabres (vean el artículo de hoy titulado “How Structural Claim Limitations Can Save Software Patents” — aunque sea detrás de una caja registradora).

No es un secreto que Techrights estaba completamente en lo correcto contra las patentes de software, pero nunca estuvo en un principio contra la OEP hasta que se enteró de los abusos a los derechos humanos. La absoluta arrogancia de los gerentes de la OEP los hacen ver como SINVERGUENZAS ignorando las reglas y expandiendo la esfera de patentes a casi todo, en un descerebrada persecución de más patentes (donde la cantidad importa más que la calida o su colectivo valor económico). █

Links 22/2/2016: IceWeasel/Firefox Debian Debate, Linux-powered Microwave

Posted in News Roundup at 6:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • ETSI Launches Open Source Mano Group

    A total of 23 Service Providers and Solution Vendors have announced their intent to join the Open Source MANO (OSM) Community in the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona focused on delivering an open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack aligned with ETSI NFV Information Models. OSM has been created under the umbrella of ETSI and it is an operator-led community to meet the requirements of production NFV networks such as a common Information Model (IM) that has been defined, implemented and released in open source software.

  • OSM Demos First Steps to Open Source MANO

    A new ETSI-based open source community, launched this week, is demonstrating its model-based approach to management and orchestration for NFV here at Mobile World Congress, hoping to build consensus and speed practical deployment of virtualization by solving its most persistent problem.

  • How to choose a brand name for your open source project

    When it comes to developing a new open source software project, most developers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about brand strategy. After all, a great idea, solid code, and a passionate community are what really matter when you’re getting a project underway.

  • Web Log: Quitter appeals to Twitter deserters

    All the hoo-hah around Twitter tweaking its timeline, shortly after ditching ‘favourites’ for ‘likes’, along with its decision to censor certain content and accounts, has left some folks weary and wary of the microblogging platform.

    If you’re planning on quitting Twitter perhaps you plan on tweeting via Quitter?

    That’s a bit of a mouthful but Quitter is an ad-free, not-for-profit alternative that runs on a volunteer basis.

  • Mejiro Update: Responsive and Improved

    As always, a Mejiro demo is available for your viewing pleasure. And you can download the latest version of the app from the project’s GitHub repository.

  • Events

    • Connfa: An open source mobile app for conferences and events

      Connfa is an open source app for conferences and events aimed to make paper brochures a thing of the past. Yes, those large, clumsy brochures.

      Imagine you’re at a conference. A nice person at the reception desk checks your ticket and hands you one of these bright and shiny paper program guides. You walk off and start circling the events you want to attend. Everything goes fine until you miss the session you wanted to go to because you confused the date, or maybe you spent ages looking for the venue. To top it all off, you forget the brochure the next day and you’re pretty lost. Sound familiar?

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox: on the right fix, and why the Bugzilla breach made me proud

        At Mozilla, we keep security-sensitive bug reports confidential until the information in them is no longer dangerous. This week we’re opening to the public a group of security bugs that document a major engineering effort to remove the rocket science of writing secure browser code and make Firefox’s front-end, DOM APIs, and add-on ecosystem secure by default. It removed a whole class of security bugs in Firefox – and helped mitigate the impact of a bug-tracker breach last summer.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • ls output changes considered unacceptable

      There are some software changes that are simple accidents resulting in bugs; folks find them, fix them, and all is well. Then there are intentional changes, which don’t affect functionality, but instead change _essential aesthetics_. These are much more alarming issues, the kind of issues that get under your skin, that disrupt your relationship with the terminal, as though you suddenly woke up and all your countrymen but not you spoke with a hardly comprehensible accent. It’s a shock, a disruption, a psychological chasm. And, when such a change is made in software considered “core”, by a single individual unilaterally without extremely wide consultation of the larger community, it is clear that a grave an unacceptable thing has happened. The recent change to ls (commit 109b922) must be reverted immediately, a new package version released, and only after large multi-distro discussion might a similar change be made.

  • Programming

    • Don’t use the greater than sign in programming

      Has 15 other possible ways to be expressed if you include the greater than sign and don’t make your expressions conform to the number line.

    • Upgraded to Jekyll 3.0

      Github Pages now supports Jekyll 3.0 which has some backward incompatible features, so I have decided to upgrade. I was quite surprised when I realized I am still using Jekyll 1.0 and everything was working great so far!

    • GCC vs. Clang On POWER8 Is A Competitive Compiler Match

      Most often when running GCC vs. LLVM Clang compiler benchmark comparisons it’s done on Intel/AMD x86 hardware or occasionally on ARM when benchmarking an interesting ARMv7/ARMv8 system. However, in having remote access last weekend to the prototype of the Talos Secure Workstation powered by a POWER8 design, I was very anxious to run some compiler benchmarks to see how these open-source compilers compete on the alternative architecture.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Mercury Splatters the Central U.S.

      Several years after scientists thought they had put the problem to rest, they have once again discovered increasing concentrations of mercury, this time in rainwater. “It’s a surprising result,” says David Gay from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who is a co-author on the new study. “Everybody expected [mercury levels] to continue going down. But our analysis shows that may not necessarily be the case.”

    • Flint’s Poisoned Children Deserve the Truth

      The Michigan Legislature must amend the state’s Freedom of Information law to include itself and the governor’s office.

      By now, you’ve surely heard about the Flint water crisis. And you probably know why it happened: After the state of Michigan suspended democracy in the impoverished, predominantly African-American city, emergency managers appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder were given absolute power to make unilateral decisions that resulted in the lead poisoning of the municipality’s water supply.

      Congress, the Department of Justice, and the FBI are all conducting investigations. And the ACLU of Michigan, along with the National Resource Defense Council, local pastors and residents, is litigating to force the state to replace lead service lines immediately.

    • US School Agrees to Pay $8,500 to Get Rid of Ransomware

      As criminal probes and lawsuits examine the Flint water crisis, some of the key decision makers have been reluctant to discuss their roles.

      But their e-mails, released under the Freedom of Information Act, offer contemporaneous accounts of the crisis as it was happening. Here are some of the e-mails exchanges that have been recently released and what they show about a crisis that has drawn international attention.

    • Russian doping official planned book before sudden death

      The former executive director of the Russian anti-doping agency planned to write a book on drug use in sports shortly before his sudden death, a former colleague and Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper reported Sunday.

      Sunday Times sports writer David Walsh, renowned for his coverage of cycling champion Lance Armstrong’s doping, reported that Nikita Kamaev wrote to him in November offering to reveal information on doping covering the last three decades since Kamaev began work for a “secret lab” in the Soviet Union.

  • Security

    • SMEs vulnerable through insufficient IT, data security

      Small businesses are particularly vulnerable to breaches of IT security, according to a newly published survey which finds that security of data and IT systems is a growing concern for business leaders across Australia.

      Despite facing the same online risks as larger corporates, research by recruitment agency Robert Half the shows that small and medium businesses typically use fewer data protection tools than large companies.

    • US School Agrees to Pay $8,500 to Get Rid of Ransomware [Ed: Microsoft Windows]

      Administrators of the Horry County school district (South Carolina, US) have agreed to make a $8,500 / €7,600 payment to get rid of a ransomware infection that has affected the school’s servers.

    • Linux Computers Targeted with Fresh Fysbis Spying Malware

      One fresh malicious program called Fysbis, whose other name is Linux.BackDoor.Fysbis has been created for targeting Linux computers through installation of a backdoor which reportedly opens the machine’s access to the malware owner, thus facilitating him with spying on the user as well as carrying out more attacks.

    • CVE-2016-2384: arbitrary code execution due to a double-free in the usb-midi linux kernel driver

      This post describes an exploitable vulnerability (CVE-2016-2384) in the usb-midi Linux kernel driver. The vulnerability is present only if the usb-midi module is enabled, but as far as I can see many modern distributions do this. The bug has been fixed upstream.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Gallup Poll Shows Americans Prefer Terrorist Nations Over Iran. Why?

      A February 17th Gallup Poll showed that Americans prefer the chief nation that sponsors international terrorism, when given a choice between that terrorist-sponsoring nation and Iran. The disapproval shown of Iran is 79%; the approval is 14%. Back in 2014, the disapproval / approval were 84%/12%. At that time, Saudi Arabia had figures of 57%/35%. Iran was seen by Americans as being even more hostile toward Americans than Saudi Arabia.

    • The Saudi Slaughter in Yemen

      Although the Saudis have promised a high-level committee to investigate civilian deaths from their airstrikes in Yemen, they continue to strike civilian targets with countless deaths and destructions.

    • Darkness at High Noon in Korea

      As the world focuses on the war in Syria, the refugee crisis in Europe, and the primary slugfest in the United States, the two Koreas are heading toward a catastrophe in the Far East.

      Although relations on the Korean peninsula have been deteriorating for the better part of eight years, the last six months have been particularly tense. North Korea recently conducted its fourth nuclear test and followed up with a satellite launch using a long-range rocket. The international community reacted in its customary fashion, with condemnations and the imposition of more sanctions. South Korea joined in the chorus of disapproval.

    • Jeb Bush Is Dropping Out of the GOP Race. Here’s Why I’ll Miss His Campaign.

      There were more than a few reasons for a libertarian (or, okay, anyone) to dislike Jeb Bush: his consistent support for his brother George W. Bush’s administration, his aggressive backing of awful government surveillance programs, his general air of hawkishness, and the easy, entitled comfort with which he slipped into his place as the early favorite of the Republican party establishment. Jeb Bush and his supporters stood for continuity with the GOP under his brother, and all that was wrong with it.

    • It Took Jeb $150 Million, 250 Days And 3 States To Figure Out Republicans Don’t Want More Bush

      The massive expenditure of funds earned him 2.8 percent of the vote in Iowa, 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire and, at the time he announced his withdrawal from the race, about 8 percent of the vote in South Carolina.

    • Uber Driver Allegedly Responsible For Kalamazoo Shooting Spree That Killed 6

      Police have arrested a suspect for a six-hour shooting spree that started in an apartment complex parking lot and ended in a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

      Jason Brian Dalton, a 45-year-old Uber driver, is suspected of killing six people and injuring two at random with a semiautomatic handgun during multiple shootings Saturday night. The shootings started around 6 p.m. when a woman was shot four times while with her three children. CNN reported the woman is in serious condition but is expected to survive the attack.

    • Kosovo Chaos Undercuts Clinton ‘Success’

      President Bill Clinton’s Kosovo war of 1999 was loved by neocons and liberal hawks—the forerunner for Iraq, Libya, Syria and other conflicts this century—but Kosovo’s political violence and lawlessness today underscore the grim consequences of those strategies even when they “succeed,” writes Jonathan Marshall.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • South Florida’s Tourist Season From Hell

      February and March are the prime times for tourists to come to Florida for a respite from cold winter weather. So imagine the panic that people who run fishing charters, paddle board concessions, beachfront hotels and restaurants are feeling as dark agricultural swill gushes from the state’s center to the east and west coasts, killing marine life.

      “It’s brown, it stinks, it’s cold,” a tourist from New Mexico told a TV reporter in Fort Myers.”It doesn’t look very appealing to get into to go swimming in.”

    • Why I Support Dr. Jill Stein for President

      The political crisis in America is severe. The old ideas that buttressed the ruling class and promised democracy, growth and prosperity—neoliberalism, austerity, globalization, endless war, a dependence on fossil fuel and unregulated capitalism—have been exposed as fictions used by the corporate elite to impoverish and enslave the country and enrich and empower themselves. Sixty-two billionaires have as much wealth as half the world’s population, 3.5 billion people. This fact alone is revolutionary tinder.

      We are entering a dangerous moment when few people, no matter what their political orientation, trust the power elite or the ruling neoliberal ideology. The rise of right-wing populism, with dark undertones of fascism, looks set in the next presidential election—as it does in parts of Europe—to pit itself against the dying gasps of the corporate establishment.

    • NOAA Forecast for Red Tide in Florida

      A red tide, or harmful algal bloom, is the rapid growth of microscopic algae. Some produce toxins that have harmful effects on people, fish, marine mammals, and birds. In Florida and Texas, this is primarily caused by the harmful algae species, Karenia brevis. It can result in varying levels of eye and respiratory irritation for people, which may be more severe for those with pre-existing respiratory conditions (such as asthma). The blooms can also cause large fish kills and discolored water along the coast.

    • Preparing for the Collapse of the Saudi Kingdom

      For half a century, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been the linchpin of U.S. Mideast policy. A guaranteed supply of oil has bought a guaranteed supply of security. Ignoring autocratic practices and the export of Wahhabi extremism, Washington stubbornly dubs its ally “moderate.” So tight is the trust that U.S. special operators dip into Saudi petrodollars as a counterterrorism slush fund without a second thought. In a sea of chaos, goes the refrain, the kingdom is one state that’s stable.

  • Finance

    • An Open Letter To My CEO

      I haven’t bought groceries since I started this job. Not because I’m lazy, but because I got this ten pound bag of rice before I moved here and my meals at home (including the one I’m having as I write this) consist, by and large, of that. Because I can’t afford to buy groceries. Bread is a luxury to me, even though you’ve got a whole fridge full of it on the 8th floor. But we’re not allowed to take any of that home because it’s for at-work eating. Of which I do a lot. Because 80 percent of my income goes to paying my rent. Isn’t that ironic? Your employee for your food delivery app that you spent $300 million to buy can’t afford to buy food. That’s gotta be a little ironic, right?

    • Bank of Finland predicts country will be cash-free by 2029
    • More Than 100 State and Local Governments Considering Anti-TPP Resolutions

      More than 100 state and local governments have introduced or passed resolutions opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In addition, more than 100 resolutions opposing the TPP were passed at recent precinct caucuses in Iowa.

    • TTIP reading room to open in the UK, but campaigners warn of lack of transparency

      The UK government has announced its plans to open a special ‘TTIP reading room’ where MPs are able to read the negotiating texts of the controversial trade deal being negotiated between the EU and the USA – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The announcement was made in response to a written parliamentary question by Caroline Lucas MP, in advance of the 12th round of the TTIP negotiations which start in Brussels on 22 February.

    • Secret TTIP talks resume Monday as EU-US rifts deepen

      EU and US resume their negotiations next week over the TTIP trade and investment deal. But deep rifts have emerged over the corporate courts in which investors can sue governments for any actions that reduce their profits. Meanwhile MPs are seething over their restricted access to draft texts and negotiating documents.

    • A New Infographic on TPP and Your Digital Rights

      Anyone familiar with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may find that it can be challenging to explain to others, in simple terms, how it threatens our rights online and over our digital devices. We often begin by describing the secretive, corporate-captured process of the negotiations that ultimately led to the final deal, then go into some of the specific policies—including its ban on circumventing digital locks (aka Digital Rights Management or DRM), its copyright term extensions that will lengthen restrictions on creative works by 20 years, and its inclusion of “investor-state” rules that could empower multinational corporations to undermine new user protections in the TPP countries.

    • Canada’s first Chinese FIPA case in the making?

      You never know where the next huge story is going to come from. I remember the first time I saw Enbridge’s proposal for a West Coast oil tanker port mentioned in a tiny newspaper article 15 years ago, and we know what happened with that.

    • Globe & Mail columnist calls for scrapping ISDS to save CETA

      The Globe and Mail’s national business correspondent Barrie McKenna has a solution to getting the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) through the European Parliament – drop the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provision.

    • In Murky 2016 Contest, Clear Opposition to Trade Agreements

      One of the few things clarified by a presidential contest where much remains unclear is the diminished support for–and, in some quarters, outright hostility toward–more trade deals. This goes beyond candidates pledging support for “fair trade” rather than “free trade,” which is par for the course during campaign season. What’s happening this cycle has implications for not only the next administration but also the global economy.

    • Obama Punts On Trade Agreement With EU

      The Obama administration has all but given up on a trade agreement with the European Union.

      Negotiations on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership continue, but the administration is so invested in saving its other free trade agreement – the Trans-Pacific Partnership – that it has punted the T-TIP to the next administration.

    • Majority of U.S. Public School Students Live in Poverty

      For the first time since the Great Depression, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

    • You Can’t Earn a Living on the Minimum Wage

      When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what are they really talking about? Whether they know it or not, it’s something like this.

    • Looking for ‘Revitalization’ in All the Wrong Places

      On the one hand, using the Kings arena as a hook to examine chronic homelessness (though the examination here doesn’t go much beyond “it exists”) isn’t the worst thing in the world, especially for local newscasts that almost never focus on the lives of the poor. But on the other, this report reveals how deeply messed up local development reporting can be.

      [...]

      The FOX40 reporters who put together this piece probably didn’t think that this was the message they were conveying, but that shouldn’t let them off the hook. If you’re going to be a journalist, it’s vitally important that you think about not only what you’re covering, but how you’re covering it, and what assumptions go into the way you frame your story.

    • Billionaire-Owned Observer Whines About Democratization of Media in 2016’s Worst Op-ed

      Second only to glib equivalencies between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, 2016’s most popular lazy media trope is the idea that rabid Sanders fans have unleashed dark populist forces that threaten our republic. Both are fairly common, and more or less write themselves if the author tosses coherence and intellectual honesty out the window. But it’s rare that both are on such stark display as with New York Observer‘s editor-at-large Ryan Holiday’s recent op-ed (2/17/16).

      The diatribe, “The Cause of This Nightmare Election? Media Greed and Shameless Traffic Worship,” poses as media criticism but is little more than petulant establishment gatekeeping. Let’s begin with the thesis, or what passes for one, which is that the democratization of media has created a “sub-prime market” for the media.

    • Presstitutes At Work

      Like the Supreme Court the presstitutes have aligned themselves with the rich and powerful. Fox “News” reported that Marco Rubio, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, declared that to make the poor rich requires making the rich poor and we shouldn’t make the rich poor. Apparently, Fox “News” believes that aligning Rubio with the One Percent is helpful to his political career. Fox showed Rubio’s audience cheering and applauding his defense of the One Percent.

      This is “democratic America” where the people have no representation.

    • ‘Nobody Asked a Worker!’
    • NYT Rounds Up ‘Left-Leaning Economists’ for a Unicorn Hunt

      With Hillary Clinton ramping up her attacks on Bernie Sanders as a budget-buster—in the February 11 debate, she claimed his proposals would increase the size of government by 40 percent—the New York Times (2/15/16) offered a well-timed intervention in support of her efforts: “Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’ Plans.”

      While the “left-leaning” is no doubt meant to suggest critiques from those who would be inclined to sympathize with Sanders, all the quoted economists have ties to the Democratic establishment. So slight is their leftward lean that it would require very sensitive equipment to measure.

      Opinion pieces critical of Sanders often begin with a pledge of allegiance to his “impracticality.”

    • Wall Street Analyst Says Hillary Clinton Would Be the Best President for Healthcare Investors

      Amidst a tense battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over competing visions for health care, a leading Wall Street analyst has put out a report saying that Clinton would be the best candidate for healthcare investors.

    • Hillary Clinton Again Declines to Disclose What She Told Big Banks in Her Paid Speeches

      The guy in the audience said it was a matter of trust. “Please just release those transcripts so we know exactly where you stand,” he said.

      But Hillary Clinton wasn’t going there. At the MSNBC town hall with the Democratic presidential candidates on Thursday evening in Las Vegas, Clinton once again refused to release transcripts or recordings of the secret speeches she was paid millions of dollars to make to Wall Street banks.

    • Voodoo Journalism: Dr. Krugman Strikes Again—Risking His Credibility

      Paul Krugman is at it again. This time, he’s using his position as the leading progressive columnist in the “nation’s newspaper of record,” to ballyhoo a letter from four former heads of the Council of Economic Advisors.

      Their letter criticizes an economic analysis of Bernie Sanders’ policies performed by University of Massachusetts economist, Gerald Friedman, which found that Sander’s platform would increase growth by 5.3%.

      Krugman’s column this past Friday suggests that the former CEA chiefs’ letter puts Bernie in the same camp as the Republicans, who’ve been spouting voodoo economics such as trickle-down and the elixir of tax cuts for decades now, complete with magic asterisks designed to make nearly $6 trillion in deficits disappear.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Hillary is the foolish idealist: Clinton derides Sanders as naive, but has no plan for battling GOP obstruction

      Throughout this Democratic primary season, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly cast herself as “a progressive who likes to get things done,” and her opponent, Bernie Sanders, as a foolish idealist whose ideas “sound good on paper but will never make it in the real world.”

      “I want you to understand, I will not promise you something I cannot deliver,” she told a South Carolina crowd last Friday. “I will not make promises I know I cannot keep.”

      But, contrary to these assurances of realism and pragmatism, Clinton has actually set forth a bold, sweeping agenda to transform America.

    • This is the key to Bernie Sanders’ political revolution: Here’s how we beat GOP obstruction

      It is my belief that Sen. Bernie Sanders will be the next president of the United States — a belief I’ve held since he first announced. Bernie is one of the most gifted politicians I have ever observed. He’s a person of great integrity and very clever. Many thought that calling himself a democratic socialist doomed his presidential candidacy, initially causing “the powers that be” to dismiss him. It turned out to have been an asset because this lack of national attention from opinion-makers permitted Bernie to grow his movement below the radar.

    • Why Bernie Can Win

      The pundits are wrong. Bernie Sanders is the most electable candidate this November.

    • Team Clinton: Fools, Damn Fools and Democrats

      However, we Americans are bombarded relentlessly with mind numbing pro-regime, pro-status quo propaganda. This is why it is always worthwhile repeating information that is out there already.

    • WATCH: Amy Goodman Critiques Media Coverage of Election 2016 on CNN’s “Reliable Sources”

      “…it is astounding that Bernie Sanders is where he is today. Look at that Tyndall Center report that found in 2015, in the months leading up to December, you had 234 total network minutes, like almost four hours, CBS, NBC, ABC, covering Trump. That’s four hours and how much got coverage? Sanders got 10 minutes. On ABC World News Tonight in that year, Sanders got 20 seconds. Trump got like 81 minutes,” said Goodman.

    • Backed by Airline Dollars, Congress Rejects Effort to Address Shrinking Legroom

      An amendment to address shrinking legroom for airline passengers was defeated recently by members of Congress fueled by campaign dollars from the airline industry.

      An amendment proposed by Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., would have required the federal government to study the issue of shrinking legroom and allowed it to set a minimum dimension for commercial airline seats.

    • Hillary Wins a Squeaker in Nevada, But It’s a Rout in the Headlines

      In case you’ve ever wondered about the value of a narrow 5-point win in a state you were expected to take easily, just take a look at today’s headlines. The margin of victory doesn’t matter. The headlines in all four of our biggest daily newspapers were clear as a bell: Hillary won and her momentum is back. That’s the story everyone is seeing over their bacon and eggs this morning.

    • Sanders: ‘We Have Enormous Momentum’ Going Into South Carolina

      Despite a narrow loss in the Nevada presidential caucus on Saturday, Bernie Sanders is not slowing down, and neither are his supporters.

      A report filed over the weekend with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) shows the senator from Vermont has received more than four million contributions, raising a total of $94.8 million through January 31st after his campaign launched last April.

    • How Hillary Clinton Won Nevada

      It might have been closer than most people would have guessed a month ago, but Hillary Clinton’s long-term investment in Nevada paid off. The former secretary of state edged out Sen. Bernie Sanders by about five percentage points in the Nevada caucuses. It wasn’t quite the 20-point edge that Clinton had in polls from late last year, but it was a decisive win that backs up the Clinton campaign’s contention that Sanders won’t be able to maintain the same level of support he enjoyed in Iowa and New Hampshire as the contest moves to more diverse states.

    • [Old but republished] Clinton’s Experience: Fact and Fantasy

      From the Archive: Hillary Clinton’s win in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses and her big lead in South Carolina restore her status as Democratic frontrunner but lingering doubts about her honesty and her coziness to Big Money continue to dog her path to the White House, a problem that Barbara Koeppel identified during Clinton’s first run in 2008.

  • Censorship

    • February 22, 1976, Forty Years Ago: Court On Censorship

      “The press is not only an instrument for disseminating information but a powerful medium for moulding public opinion by propaganda. True democracy can only thrive in a free clearing house of competing ideologies and philosophies — political, economic and social — and in this, the press has an important role to play. The day this clearing-house closes down would toll the deathknell of democracy,” says a judgment by Justices D.P. Madon and M.H. Kania of the Bombay High Court. It adds: “It is not the function of the censor acting under the censorship order to make all newspapers and periodicals trim their sails to one wind or to tow along in a single file or to speak in chorus with one voice. It is not for him to exercise his statutory power to force public opinion in a single mould or to turn the press into an instrument for brainwashing the public. Under the censorship order, the censor is appointed the nursemaid of democracy and not its grave-digger. Dissent from opinions and views held by the majority and criticism and disapproval of measures initiated by a party in power make for a healthy political climate, and it is not for the censor to inject into this the lifelessness of forced conformity.

    • A culture of silencing

      A fortnight ago I was due to chair a session at the British Houses of Parliament organised by the Labour Friends of Palestine, in which MPs would “hear directly from four young Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and a Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, live via Skype”. As a Palestinian, born in a Gaza refugee camp, this opportunity to present lawmakers with the reality on the ground was dear to my heart.

      The session was cancelled at the last minute under extreme pressure from the Labour Friends of Israel parliamentary group and a campaign waged against me in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle. This is not the first, and I am certain it will not be the last, time I have been prevented from offering the Palestinian point of view by the powerful machinations of the Zionist lobby and the propaganda department of the state of Israel known as Hasbara (‘explaining’).

    • Call For Stories: User Uploads and Takedown Abuse

      EFF is filing public comments on a series of studies initiated by the U.S. Copyright Office, and we need your help. One of the studies focuses on the notice-and takedown procedures outlined in section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). We’d like to hear from you about your experience with those procedures, and the policies and practices that platforms have implemented to comply with them.

    • Don’t censor A-rated movies: Petition filed on change.org after the beeped-up screenings of ‘Deadpool’

      With a message echoing that Indian cinemagoers can handle mature content and a plea to release A-rated movies without any cuts, a petition has been started by Change.org, a technology platform, to submit before the Shyam Benegal Committee on censorship.

    • Cairo gallery bemoans unprecedented censorship as it prepares to reopen

      The director of one of Egypt’s most respected art galleries has warned it faces unprecedented censorship as it seeks to reopen to the public next month after being shut down by the authorities in December.

      William Wells, the director of Townhouse gallery, said staff were allowed to return last week, having been given two weeks to comply with new legal restrictions, some of which amounted to state control of its work.

    • Censorship & Localisation – Reasons To Be Cheerful

      Xenoblade Chronicles X is one of my favourite games of last year. It’s a bloody great game and you should all play it. But a few outspoken gamers caused a ripple on the social media ocean when it was discovered that the Western versions of the game would be subject to some censorship.

    • Twitter Meets Orwell — an FAQ by Daddy Warpig

      Twitter has introduced a brave new way of screwing with users, which some have taken to calling shadowbanning.

      Basically, this acts like a gag: you can send normal tweets normally, but people Following you won’t see them on their timeline. (However, people reading your profile will see them.)

      The following restrictions also apply:

      Your tweets won’t show up in certain hashtags (which and why is unknown).

      Your tweets won’t show up in Search, either by keyword or by account name.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Paul Rosenberg on Antonin Scalia, Darnell Moore on Black Futures Month

      This week on CounterSpin: The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia sent shockwaves through the political and media world; but for many the real shock was hearing a man eulogized as gracious and thoughtful who called the Voting Rights Act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” complained of the law profession’s “anti-anti-homosexual culture” and argued that mere “actual” innocence is no reason for the state not to kill someone.

    • Antonin Scalia’s death during secret junket points to new ethical violations

      Antonin Scalia died as he lived, indulging behind closed doors in the largess of the very wealthy, who could depend on the right-wing associate justice to defend their interests in the United States Supreme Court.

      The nauseating praise for Scalia as a towering judicial figure is exposed as all the more dishonest and absurd by the still emerging circumstances of his passing.

      On Friday, February 12, the start of the Supreme Court’s annual week-long President’s Day recess, Scalia took a chartered jet from Washington, D.C., accompanied by an unidentified lawyer friend, to the exclusive Cibolo Creek Ranch in the Chinati Mountains of West Texas, near the Mexican border. US marshals assigned as Scalia’s bodyguards were told not to make the trip.

    • Albert Woodfox, Last of the Angola Three, Is Free After 43 Years in Solitary Confinement

      Just moments ago, Albert Woodfox, the last remaining member of the Angola 3 still behind bars, was released from prison 43 years and 10 months after he was first put in a 6×9 foot solitary cell for a crime he did not commit. After decades of costly litigation, Louisiana State officials have at last acted in the interest of justice and reached an agreement that brings a long overdue end to this nightmare. Albert has maintained his innocence at every step, and today, on his 69th birthday, he will finally begin a new phase of his life as a free man.

    • ‘Where Are Your Guts?’: Johnny Cash’s Little-Known Fight for Native Americans

      In 1964, Johnny Cash faced a backlash for speaking out on behalf of native people — and he fought back.

      In 1964, Johnny Cash released a Native American-themed concept album, “Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian.” In an incredible but little-known story, Cash faced censorship and backlash for speaking out on behalf of native people — and he fought back.

      A new documentary airing this month on PBS, “Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears,” tells the story of the controversy. For the album’s 50th anniversary, it was re-recorded with contributions from musicians including Kris Kristofferson and Emmylou Harris, and the documentary also chronicles the making of the new album.

      ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Stephen Pevar, author of “The Rights of Indians and Tribes,” had a chance to ask writer/director Antonino D’Ambrosio about the film.

    • Siding With Foreclosure Victim, California Court Exposes Law Enforcement Failure

      The California Supreme Court on Thursday ruled unanimously in favor of a fraudulently foreclosed-upon homeowner in a case that should serve as a wake-up call to state and federal prosecutors that mortgage companies continue to use false documents to evict homeowners on a daily basis.

    • 5 Questions for CIA Director John Brennan

      NPR national security reporter Mary Louise Kelley tweeted on Friday that she would be interviewing CIA Director John Brennan on Saturday. Brennan was just on 60 Minutes last weekend, where Scott Pelley tossed him softballs.

    • Labor Board Sides With Trump Hotel Workers In Union Battle

      Just days before Nevada’s Republican presidential caucus, a federal labor official weighed in on the ongoing dispute between Donald Trump’s signature luxury Las Vegas hotel and the hundreds of workers who voted in December to unionize. Trump Hotel management had asked the National Labor Relations Board to throw out the results of that election, claiming that organizers from the Culinary Workers Union intimidated and coerced employees into voting yes, which “interfered with their ability to exercise a free and reasoned choice.” But after weeks of reviewing the evidence, the labor board did not agree.

    • Albert Woodfox released from jail after 43 years in solitary confinement

      US’s longest-standing solitary confinement prisoner set free in Louisiana after more than four decades in form of captivity widely denounced as torture

    • A Hindu priest in Muslim-majority Bangladesh has been hacked to death and two devotees injured in an attack on a temple in the country’s north

      A Hindu priest in Muslim-majority Bangladesh was hacked to death and two devotees injured in an attack Sunday on a temple in the country’s north.

      Police said Jogeshwar Roy, 50, was attacked as he came out after people threw stones at the temple in the Deviganj area of Panchgarh district, on the border with India.

      Quoting local people and witnesses, police officer Kafil Uddin said the assailants on a motorbike attacked the priest with a sharp weapon, fired guns and exploded crude bombs, injuring two devotees who tried to help him. The attackers fled.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • A Tale of Two Treaties: Marrakesh and Beijing Both Make Their Way to the Senate

        The White House has submitted two copyright treaties to the Senate for ratification: the Marrakesh Treaty, which would improve access to copyrighted works for people with visual and print disabilities; and the Beijing Treaty, which could create a new layer of monopoly rights for the creators of audiovisual works. International copyright treaties move slowly, so neither of these is a surprise. For years now, we’ve encouraged the adoption of Marrakesh and the rejection of Beijing.

02.21.16

Links 21/2/2016: Linux Mint Web Site Breaches, MWC 2016

Posted in News Roundup at 8:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Tencent and Why Open Source is About to Explode in China

    One of the pioneers of the internet in China gave a highly provocative talk – asking the audience why China had yet to birth a major open source project. The consensus in the audience (polled via WeChat platform) was that China’s culture inhibited open source. I heard this in my travels throughout China.

    Frankly I can see this both ways. While I see the cultural challenges everyone was telling me about, their awareness of the challenge is so tangible that it is driving leaders in the community like Tencent’s Marty Ma and TethrNet’s Kevin Yin to try just a little harder. Even if the majority of Chinese tech workers don’t quite fully get open source now, we’re seeing leaders emerge in the country willing to invest of their time and energy to change things. I wouldn’t bet against them.

  • IoT industry leaders announce open source standard group

    On Friday, a group of industry leaders making headway in the Internet of Things (IoT) market announced a cross-industry collaboration effort aimed at unlocking the massive opportunities for consumers and business with IoT devices, and ultimately a way to quickly get everyone to adopting a single open standard.

  • Coreboot Now Supports U-Boot As A Payload
  • Coreboot Receives Initial POWER8 Support
  • New Businessweek Comic Uses Open-Source Al Jazeera Code

    Businessweek just published a comic strip online by Peter Coy and Dorothy Gambrell, which also appeared in print today. It argues against Fed Chair Janet Yellen introducing negative interest rates. For online readers that find their view of the strip too constricted, the site offers a way to focus on one digestible bit at a time. Open-source software released by Al Jazeera America (AJAM) last year under the MIT license, called Pulp, allowed Bloomberg to better the reading experience without writing new code.

  • AquaJS framework for Node.js is open source and in beta

    AquaJS is a framework for Node.js that was created at Equinix, which provides carrier-neutral datacenters and Internet exchanges for interconnection. AquaJS was developed to provide a way to start microservice-based application development. It is built with open-source modules, along with a few in-house modules, such as including architecture and design, programming best practices, technology, and deployment and runtime.

  • Learn Why Node.js is an Open Source Juggernaut

    The Node.js Foundation was created last year to support the open source community involved with Node.js, which offers an asynchronous event driven framework designed to build scalable network applications.

  • Events

    • What Should We Stop Doing? (FLOSS Community Metrics Meeting keynote)

      One trend I see underlying a big chunk of FLOSS metrics work is the desire to automate the emotional labor involved in maintainership, like figuring out how our fellow contributors are doing, making choices about where to spend mentorship time, and tracking a community’s emotional tenor. But is that appropriate? What if we switched our assumptions around and used our metrics to figure out what we’re spending time on more generally, and tried to find low-value programming work we could stop doing? What tools would support this, and what scenarios could play out?

    • Comparing Codes of Conduct to Copyleft Licenses (My FOSDEM Speech)

      I will briefly mention my credentials in speaking about this topic, especially since this is my first FOSDEM and many of you don’t know me. I have been a participant in free and open source software communities since the late 1990s. I’m the past community manager for MediaWiki, and while at the Wikimedia Foundation, I proposed and implemented our code of conduct, which we call a Friendly Space Policy, for in-person Wikimedia technical spaces such as hackathons and conferences.

    • What to expect from QCon London 2016

      Actually, it’s mostly more of the same (in a good way)… but perhaps at a slightly amplified level — the only change we have reflected here is to profile QCon London in the open source blog category.

      Okay yes there will be your proprietary players there too, but open source will be especially strong this year… as it is everywhere.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Open Source Interview: Former Mozilla President Li Gong on the HTML5 OS

        In this article, I introduce our new series—the Open Source interview—inviting you to suggest questions to ask our interviewees in a follow-up email interview. The first candidate is Li Gong, former president of Mozilla, who is now heading Acadine Technologies. They are busy launching H5OS, an open source platform for mobile and IoT.

      • Servo Lands Its New GPU-Accelerated Rendering Backend

        Mozilla’s experimental Servo web layout engine written in Rust has landed its new “WebRender” back-end that leverages GPU rendering.

        WebRender is an experimental GPU rendering back-end for Servo. WebRender tries to offload as much of the rendering work to the GPU rather than having to draw the web content via the CPU.

      • Mozilla: Real Data Encryption Requires Political Action, Not Just Code

        Mozilla took a strong stance on online privacy this week by reiterating the need for more encryption — but also noting that, in our age of government backdoors, encryption software alone may not be enough to keep data secure.

        In a blog post, Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox and other popular open source software, declares that “encryption isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity.” And it plays up the importance of projects like Let’s Encrypt, a partnership Mozilla helped launch in 2014 to create an open certificate authority for encrypting websites.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Analysts Find Hadoop Now Entrenched in Banking, Government

      The open source Hadoop Big Data platform is not only on the rise, but it is becoming more entrenched in important sectors, including business and government. That is just one of the findings in a Research and Markets report titled “World Hadoop Market – Opportunities and Forecasts, 2014 – 2021″.

      The report also finds that the global Hadoop market is expected to garner revenue of $84.6 billion by 2021, registering a CAGR of 63.4% during the period 2016 to 2021. That is nothing to shake a stick at.

      North America accounted for around 52% share of the overall market revenue in 2015, according to the report, owing to higher rate of adoption in industries such as IT, banking, and government. Europe is anticipated to witness the fastest CAGR of 65.7% during the forecast period.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Joining The Document Foundation Board

      At the end of 2015 I was honoured to be elected to serve as a director of The Document Foundation — the charity that develops LibreOffice — for two years. The new Board commenced yesterday, February 18 and immediately started conducting business by selecting a Chair – Marina Latini from the LibreItalia community – and a vice-chair, the redoubtable Michael Meeks of Collabora.

      While some doubted when it was formed, with a few even mounting campaigns to undermine it for reasons I still don’t understand, The Document Foundation has quickly developed into a model for new open source community charities.

    • Pondering the future of the Document Foundation

      This past week we had had the pleasure to welcome both our new marketing assistant and the new board of directors of the Document Foundation. I would like to say a few words on where the Document Foundation stands now – and I must stress that I’m confident the new board has the right people to handle the future of the foundation.

      The Document Foundation is still a small entity compared to the Mozilla or OpenStack Foundation. However, with several hundreds of thousands of euros/dollars of resources, it just happens to stand just behind these behemoths. It is not an easy task. Commonly held opinions often do not apply with us: “pay X to code feature Y”. That is somewhat possible, but we tend not to do it, unless there is a strategic reason (and enough money) to do it. We do fund, however, our entire infrastructure, the release management process, infrastructure and tools that help the community develop, improve and release LibreOffice. As the Document Foundation is now four years old, we are adjusting our internal processes and decision making structure in order to scale up and be more effective. There is no easy answer, because most of the ones that could be made were already found during the past four years.

  • CMS

    • Remember WordPress’ Pingbacks? The W3C wants us to use them across the whole web

      Something called Webmentions – which looks remarkably like the old WordPress pingbacks, once popular in the late 2000s – is grinding through the machinery of the mighty, and slow-moving, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

      But don’t be deceived. Lurking behind that unassuming name lies something that might eventually offer users a way of ditching not just Facebook and Twitter but also those other massive corporations straddling the web.

  • Google Openwashing

  • IBM

  • BSD

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Kuhn’s Paradox

      I believe this paradox is primarily driven by the cooption of software freedom by companies that ostensibly support Open Source, but have the (now extremely popular) open source almost everything philosophy.

      For certain areas of software endeavor, companies dedicate enormous resources toward the authorship of new Free Software for particular narrow tasks. Often, these core systems provide underpinnings and fuel the growth of proprietary systems built on top of them. An obvious example here is OpenStack: a fully Free Software platform, but most deployments of OpenStack add proprietary features not available from a pure upstream OpenStack installation.

      Meanwhile, in other areas, projects struggle for meager resources to compete with the largest proprietary behemoths. Large user-facing, server-based applications of the Service as a Software Substitute variety, along with massive social media sites like Twitter and Facebook that actively work against federated social network systems, are the two classes of most difficult culprits on this point. Even worse, most traditional web sites have now become a mix of mundane content (i.e., HTML) and proprietary Javascript programs, which are installed on-demand into the users’ browser all day long, even while most of those servers run a primarily Free Software operating system.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • GitHub is proprietary, therefore it is evil

      There has been a lot of noise recently on how GitHub is bad, and how developers should stop using it.

    • Hello, Kotlin: Another programming language for JVM and JavaScript

      Why Kotlin? JetBrains is a developer tools company whose IntelliJ IDEA IDE has been adapted by Google for Android Studio, and the short answer seems to be that the company wanted something better than Java with which to build its own products.

    • A Programmer’s Dream: This Is What Your Code Actually Looks Like On GitHub

      Codeology is an online visualization program that allows you to see your GitHub project in front of your eyes.

    • The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2016

      It’s been a very busy start to the year at RedMonk, so we’re a few weeks behind in the release of our bi-annual programming language rankings. The data was dutifully collected at the start of the year, but we’re only now getting around to the the analysis portion. We have changed the actual process very little since Drew Conway and John Myles White’s original work late in 2010. The basic concept is simple: we periodically compare the performance of programming languages relative to one another on GitHub and Stack Overflow. The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion (Stack Overflow) and usage (GitHub) in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.

Leftovers

02.20.16

Business Model of Patent Trolls Terribly Shaken as Their Weapon of Choice (Software Patents) Tackled, New Developments Emerge

Posted in America, Patents at 3:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A positive take on recent developments, impacting statistics in the United States, which serve to highlight the importance of abolishing software patents

IN THE previous post, the decline or demise of software patents was noted, backed by new examples. CAFC‘s introduction of software patents nearly 4 decades ago in the United States has reached a crossroad or a turning point. No longer are the weapons of patent trolls effective, unless the trolls manage to settle out of court (as is usually the case when they silently extort small companies). It’s nothing other than “protection money”, shrewdly disguised as “business as usual” or a legitimate “business model”. According to the EPO-funded IAM ‘magazine’, there is a “Big fall in US patent suit filings following pleading standards change” (they cite a respected data source which keeps track of the numbers). Remember that IAM ‘magazine’ is again, by its own admission (as was the case last year), being paid by patent trolls (sorry, we mean, “NPEs”). The alleged decline in lawsuits must be a cause of concern for these patent maximalists. It means less money for patent lawyers.

Alluding to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), Dennis Crouch writes that it “has released an interesting new (though non-precedential) decision on patent exhaustion – in particular the court affirmed a lower court finding of exhaustion based upon a retroactive sublicense filed after the lawsuit was filed and the patents had expired. The case offers some further guidance as to how patent licenses are treated in complex mergers.”

“No longer are the weapons of patent trolls effective, unless the trolls manage to settle out of court (as is usually the case when they silently extort small companies).”This is noteworthy as it further serves to limit passage of patents for aggression before expiry (this is where a lot of patent trolling comes from).

Another noteworthy report says that Google, which is less than 20 years old (the lifetime of a patent), is hiding software patents. Jesse Drucker wrote: “More than a decade ago, Google moved a chunk of its software patents offshore as part of a Double Irish.” Slashdot is meanwhile indicating that “Google Submits Patent Application For Online Voting”. That’s very clearly and unambiguously a software patent. To quote Slashdot: “Google has outlined a concept for real-time online voting in the Google home page in a patent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Entitled ‘Social Voting-Based Campaigns in Search’, the application proposes a voting user interface (VUI) that will enable a user to submit one or more votes in a voting-based campaign, giving the hypothetical example of a campaign to vote for the ‘Top American Singer’, with users authenticated via Google log-ins. If implemented, the system would represent a new foray for Google into generating rather than recording analytics and metrics of popularity.”

“The alleged decline in lawsuits must be a cause of concern for these patent maximalists. It means less money for patent lawyers.”It will be interesting to see if some time in the future Google might choose to disseminate patents to trolls (for attacks, or weaponisation through proxies) in the same way that Microsoft gives patents to trolls which soon thereafter attack Linux (we gave several examples of this in the past), often addressing/sending the lawsuits and letters to Red Hat and Google. Some of the above news, regarding lawsuit numbers, potency of software patents and a new decision from CAFC serve to reassure us that things may be getting better faster than they get worse. But we must all be vigilant. █

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