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07.23.15

Links 23/7/2015: New RHEL Release, Capital One Releases Code

Posted in News Roundup at 8:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Enjoy Your Romaine—While It Lasts

      The mighty Central Valley hogs the headlines, but California’s Salinas Valley is an agricultural behemoth, too. A rifle-shaped slice of land jutting between two mountain ranges just south of Monterey Bay off the state’s central coast, it’s home to farms that churn out nearly two-thirds of the salad greens and half of the broccoli grown in the United States. Its leafy-green dominance has earned it the nickname “the salad bowl of the world.” And while the Central Valley’s farm economy reels under the strain of drought—it’s expected to sustain close to $2.7 billion worth of drought-related losses—Salinas farms are operating on all cylinders, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

  • Finance

    • At Wall Street Journal, Government-Enforced Monopolies = ‘Free Market’

      Those folks at the Wall Street Journal are really turning reality on its head. Today it ran a column by Robert Ingram, a former CEO of Glaxo Wellcome, complaining about efforts to pass “transparency” legislation in Massachusetts, New York and a number of other states.

      This legislation would require drug companies to report their profits on certain expensive drugs, as well as government funding that contributed to their development.

      [...]

      This would eliminate all the distortions associated with patent monopolies, such as patent-protected prices that can be more than 100 times as much as the free-market price. This would eliminate all the ethical dilemmas about whether the government or private insurers should pay for expensive drugs like Sovaldi, since the drugs would be cheap. It would also eliminate the incentive to mislead doctors and the public about the safety and effectiveness of drugs in order to benefit from monopoly profits.

    • What do Angela Merkel and Mitt Romney have in common?

      In May 2012, when Mitt Romney was campaigning for president, he made a statement that summed up his economic views — and came to define his run for office:

      “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he said. These people “are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them … I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

      Germany’s current leaders — and most of Europe’s, as well — seem to fully agree with this philosophy. They treat Greece exactly as though the country fit Romney’s description of that lazy, greedy 47 percent of Americans. And Greece’s experience prefigures what looms elsewhere: like Romney, many European leaders appeal to their publics to embrace that perspective, often effectively. This involves leading the hard-working 53 percent to rise up and refuse to pay taxes that sustain the lazy and irresponsible, recipients of public support and overindulged public employees who deliver it. Romney’s portrayal of the 47 percent matches, in words and tone, many European leaders’ portrayal of Greeks (and also Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Irish and the peoples of whatever other country happens to be in an economic rut.)

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • 20-year-old SNP MP Mhairi Black isn’t happy about Tony Blair calling her party ‘cave men’

      Tony Blair’s criticism of the SNP for having a “cave man” ideology is ridiculous considering his “primitive” policy on Iraq, one of the Scottish nationalists’ rising stars has said.

      The former prime minister said on Wednesday morning that Scottish nationalism was “reactionary” and consisted of “blaming someone else” for Scotland’s problems.

    • ALEC Admits School Vouchers Are for Kids in Suburbia

      School vouchers were never about helping poor, at-risk or minority students. But selling them as social mobility tickets was a useful fiction that for some twenty-five years helped rightwing ideologues and corporate backers gain bipartisan support for an ideological scheme designed to privatize public schools.

    • Donald Trump And Fox & Friends’ Symbiotic Relationship

      Fox & Friends has emerged as Donald Trump’s biggest cheerleader and defender in the media, a role the presidential candidate is rewarding with lavish public praise.

    • ‘Media Have Been Applying a False Narrative to the Entire Issue’ – CounterSpin interview with Gareth Porter on the Iran deal

      NBC’s David Gregory said the international community, divided on many things, are united on this: “They think Iran is up to no good and wants to build a nuclear weapon.”

      US corporate media have a habit when discussing Iran, though not only then, of presenting what are overwhelmingly US points of view as those of the whole world–a less-than-helpful quality as we try to understand the deal with Iran currently making headlines.

      Here to help us sort through it is investigative journalist Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare and a regular contributor to Middle East Eye.

  • Censorship

    • New Facebook video controls let you be sexist, ageist or secretive

      Videos on Facebook are big business. As well as drugged up post-dentist footage, there is also huge advertising potential. Now Facebook has announced a new set of options for video publishers — including the ability to limit who is able to see videos based on their age and gender.

    • New Censorship Bill Passed in Australia

      Having lived in Australia this Kat tries to turn his attention to the Land Down Under as often as he can. Although the Australian intellectual property law regime takes a lot from its UK and common law counterparts, they have often been a step ahead (or to the side, depending on your perspective) in one way or another. Recently the Australian Parliament passed the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015, which aims to give the Australian courts more tools to combat online copyright infringement, or the facilitation thereof. While the provision is not necessarily hugely pertinent to those of us working here in the UK, it is still an interesting one.

  • Privacy

    • Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Accuses David Cameron Of ‘Technological Incompetence’ over Encryption Bill

      The founder of Wikipedia accused David Cameron of “technological incompetence” on Tuesday, telling the British Prime Minister the idea of banning encryption was “just nonsense.”

      Speaking on HuffPost Live in New York, Jimmy Wales responded to a question about the British government’s push to gain access to encrypted sites for reasons of security.

      He called increased online security of “critical importance” in the face of “real threats from cyber crime.”

      “That means end-to-end encryption everywhere. That’s what he [Cameron] should be campaigning for,” Wales said.

      “The idea that you could ban encryption… it is just nonsense, it’s impossible, it’s math, you can’t ban math,” he added.

    • [on Washington Post]

      The Washington Post again demanded that tech companies create special ‘golden keys’ for authorities to keep and use for access to private communication. Protected by a warrant, of course. For the benefit of this discussion (which is really getting old), I just put together the reasons why it is a dumb idea.

    • Is the NSA lying about its failure to prevent 9/11?

      On March 20, 2000, as part of a trip to South Asia, U.S. President Bill Clinton was scheduled to land his helicopter in the desperately poor village of Joypura, Bangladesh, and speak to locals under a 150-year-old banyan tree. At the last minute, though, the visit was canceled; U.S. intelligence agencies had discovered an assassination plot. In a lengthy email, London-based members of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, a terrorist group established by Osama bin Laden, urged al Qaeda supporters to “Send Clinton Back in a Coffin” by firing a shoulder-launched missile at the president’s chopper.

    • UK Court rules DRIPA unlawful

      The successful judicial review was brought by Liberty, represented by David Davis MP and Tom Watson MP, with ORG and PI acting as intervenors.

    • How to Create a Burner Account on Ashley Madison (And Other Sketchy Sites)

      In brief, these masked cards are burner card numbers that are linked to your real credit card—but the third-party site will have no access to your personal information (though Abine will have all your data stored—so, just hope they don’t ever get hacked). A masked card lets you use any name you want (e.g. Joe Smith, Kevin Bacon, Barack Bush—go nuts), and for the billing address, you just use Abine’s address in Boston. The cost on your real credit card will just show up as “Abine” on your card statement.

    • Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg moves step closer to becoming world’s richest person

  • Civil Rights

    • Woman recruited by Google four times and rejected, joins suit
    • “Between the World and Me”: Ta-Nehisi Coates Extended Interview on Being Black in America

      We spend the hour with Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of “Between the World and Me,” an explosive new book about white supremacy and being black in America. The book begins, “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” It is written as a letter to his 15-year-old son, Samori, and is a combination of memoir, history and analysis. Its publication comes amidst the shooting of nine African-American churchgoers by an avowed white supremacist in Charleston; the horrifying death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman in Texas who was pulled over for not signaling a lane change; and the first anniversary of the police killings of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson. Coates talks about how he was influenced by freed political prisoner Marshall “Eddie” Conway and writer James Baldwin, and responds to critics of his book, including Cornel West and New York Times columnist David Brooks. Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues.

    • ‘I will light you up!’: Texas officer threatened Sandra Bland with Taser during traffic stop

      According to newly released police video, a Texas trooper threatened Sandra Bland with a Taser when he ordered her out of her vehicle during a traffic stop on July 10, three days before she was found dead in a county jail.

      Bland — a 28-year old African American woman — was stopped for failing to signal while changing lanes, but the routine traffic stop turned confrontational after the officer, Brian Encinia, ordered Bland to put out her cigarette.

    • In ‘White People,’ an Attempt to Break the Cycle of Ignorance

      It turns out, according to Vargas, that white students are eligible for 96 percent of scholarships and are more than 40 percent more likely to receive private scholarships. As Katy comes to terms with reality, she begins to see her frustrations for what they truly are: resentment about limited resources in the academic arena. The fact that these statistics were so readily available to Vargas also potentially points to Katy’s poor research abilities, which may be a factor in her inability to find scholarships. What is truly frightening—but not at all shocking—is the tendency for the white millennials in the film to place blame on minorities before engaging in critical research to substantiate their beliefs.

    • ‘Selma’ director Ava DuVernay says dashcam video of Sandra Bland arrest was doctored

      Ava DuVernay, who directed the Oscar-nominated civil rights movement film Selma, suggested on Tuesday that the dashboard camera footage of Sandra Bland’s arrest earlier this month was altered.

    • Bernie Sanders becomes the first candidate to speak out on Sandra Bland: “We need real police reform”
    • 1. Whisper to NYT 2. Demand Anonymity 3. Truth!

      Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept, 7/21/15) traces the transmission of a demonstrably false claim–that ISIS’s “top leaders now use couriers or encrypted channels that Western analysts cannot crack to communicate” as a result of “revelations from Edward J. Snowden”–from nameless “intelligence and military officials” to a front-page piece by the New York Times‘ Eric Schmitt and Ben Hubbard (7/20/15) to other journalists gleefully retweeting and reprinting the false claim as fact.

    • The Spirit of Judy Miller is Alive and Well at the NYT, and It Does Great Damage

      One of the very few Iraq War advocates to pay any price at all was former New York Times reporter Judy Miller, the classic scapegoat. But what was her defining sin? She granted anonymity to government officials and then uncritically laundered their dubious claims in the New York Times. As the paper’s own editors put it in their 2004 mea culpa about the role they played in selling the war: “We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.” As a result, its own handbook adopted in the wake of that historic journalistic debacle states that “anonymity is a last resort.”

    • “Your Border War Stuff Is Ridiculous”: Fox’s Stossel Demolishes O’Reilly’s Anti-Immigrant Stats from CIS

      Stossel: “You’re Citing Statistics From The Center For Immigration Studies … They Spin Them”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

07.22.15

Terminology of Patent Lawyers and Pro-Patents Media Serves to Mislead the Public

Posted in Deception, Patents at 11:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: An outline of stories where the language used to describe patents is grossly distorted so as to bias the reality and mislead the audience/readers

TECHRIGHTS often links to articles about patents, including some awkward ones from patent lawyers, but rarely does it nitpick or criticise the warped terminology, which with the art of semantics helps rig the discussion. Just like in politics, language defines the debate, and choice of words can either glorify or demonise an idea. Today we will give some examples that we set aside over the past fortnight.

“Trade Secrets” and Patents (Opposites)

A lot of articles such as this one began to appear some days ago, mixing or mistaking patents for “trade secrets”, which are inherently very different (patents were originally introduced in order to discourage trade secrets and encourage publication). It was very hard to get the story straight based on the large majority of articles (we checked about a dozen). Ford is being sued over some rare combination of reverse engineering/’trade secrets’ but also claims pertaining to patents, according to few of the reports, including this reposted article from Bloomberg, which said: “Ford allegedly began developing its own version of Versata’s software by reverse engineering, according to court papers. The Dearborn, Michigan-based carmaker is also accused of disseminating Versata’s proprietary information to unauthorized users to create “a copycat configuration technology.””

So this is basically a combination of reverse engineering and patents. It’s an attack on Ford over patents and claims of reverse engineering. A lot of the media does an extremely poor job explaining this. the word “theft” or “steal” is used sparingly, subjecting readers to a trial by media (theft is a crime, but patent violation is not the same as theft and reverse engineering should arguably be legal everywhere).

“Stealing”, “Intellectual Property”, and “Innovation”

One of the grossest blogs out there (IP Watchdog, which we sometimes call “Watchtroll”) really beat its record. It not only used a propagandistic photo of a violent/militant bandit but also used three propaganda terms in one single headline: “Does Stealing Intellectual Property Boost Innovation?”

What a loaded, ugly headline (and a question). Patent lawyers who promote software patents really don’t try to come across as professional, do they? See the photo too. It’s worse than the Daily Fail, a notorious UK-based tabloid.

Patent Stacking/Royalty Stacking

There is a practice by which one company or several companies are stacking up patents and working to increase legal costs so as to discourage challenging of the patents, or simply drive a product out of the market. Watch the lawyers’ media framing this ugly strategy as “consolidation”. To quote:

No consolidation was granted where the petitions involved some non-overlapping grounds and arguments. However, the Board used its discretion to coordinate the date of the oral arguments to lessen the burden on the patent owner.

Software Patents by Another Name

Software patents are quite controversial, especially after Alice, which makes them weak. We have seen software patents alluded to in all sorts of ways that dodge the bad connotation, but how about “Behavioral Analytics”?

Patents as Objects

Patents are now sold like fruit and vegetables. Watch this piece titled “Improved Auction and Online Marketplace Patents Available from ICAP Patent Brokerage” or another one titled “Sleep, Temperature Analysis Wearables Patents Available”. They treat these like food. To quote one of these ridiculous pieces: “ICAP Patent Brokerage announces for sale patents disclosing methods for monitoring wakefulness and body temperature, available from inventor Gaby Badre (Bader). This portfolio is offered as part of the Internet of Things IP Auction, with a bidding deadline of July 30, 2015.”

They are truly selling them like some kind of objects, even though the patentor is supposed to be the holder. What has the patent system turned into? They are clearly perverting the logic behind patents when they were first introduced. Are these justified anymore? The meaning of patents has changed profoundly.

Buying Patents Like Products

“We’ve filed over 2,000 patents,” says this piece, “which is actually a lot, and we’re acquiring patents.” The saddest thing? It’s about Hugo Barra, known for his work on Android.

Protectionism

Patents can be a waste of time, money, and effort. “Westerners zealously guard their IPRs with patents and copyrights and so on,” said this piece the other day. What is “IPRs” anyway? Intellectual Property Rights? It’s a meaningless collective term that alludes to many separable things. It’s a bit like “cloud”.

Any protectionism by law (for the rich) can rely on metaphors like “intellect”, “right” and “property”, but just as in the case of that “cloud” buzzword, the reality is very different. It can simply means lock-in, surveillance, entrapment, and financial extortion. Nebulous terms make people oblivious and hence more gullible.

On “Discovering Patents”

IDG thinks that patents are being “discovered” because it says “newly discovered patents”. As if there’s some finite number of patents just waiting to be discovered, like gold buried beneath the ground. How foolish can the author be? Chemical elements can be discovered. Islands can be discovered (or colonised, or attacked). Patents are just an abstract concept, they’re man-made and they’re more like a musical composition. We never say that musicians “discover” a song when they come up with a new song.

Monopoly as “Market Exclusivity”

Monopoly is an ugly thing and a lot of literature exists to explain why monopolies are collectively harmful. So, ProactiveInvestors.com uses the propaganda terms of monopolisers and calls these “market exclusivity”. To quote: “Market exclusivity is a critical component of valuation. Patenting strategies, regulatory data exclusivity and product life-cycle management will give about 10 to 15 years of market exclusivity to most novel drugs.”

In reality this often means that poor people are left to die from curable diseases, just so that few companies that are often subsidised by governments (i.e. taxpayers) get to increase their private profits (going into few private pockets). Watch this new lobbying from the New Jersey press, titled “N.J. biotech companies need patent protection from Congress”. What they probably mean is that they want monopoly and protectionism. Competition is something they cannot tolerate.

Patent ‘Owners’

The patent maximalists, as usual, refer to patent applicants as owners, in the same way that once upon a time men from Africa were considered “property” to be “owned” by white men in the northern hemisphere. This whole notion of “ownership” of ideas is perverse, but given enough repetition in the corporate media people might come to take that all for granted and accept it, just like many people used to happily accept slavery and deem it “just” or “necessary”.

“Intellectual Ventures Combats Malaria” Nonsense

Reddit, which is a horrible Web site (reportedly in steep decline this month), is now grooming the world’s biggest patent troll (and strongly Microsoft-connected, too). Watch this kind of advertisement disguised as discussion. A reader of ours told us that he got banned by the moderator/s for merely questioning such dodgy ‘advertisements’ for an evil, reprehensible firm. It attacks practicing companies while hoarding patent monopolies by acquisition. This non-practicing (and thus by definition not good-doers or even doer) is owned by Nathan Myhrvold from Microsoft. █

“The last thing this company needs is another fucking [computer] language.”

–Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft (now Intellectual Ventures)

Amid Billions in Losses, Microsoft Tries to Conquer the Competition (Which Already Wins)

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 10:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Grabbing GNU/Linux revenue and share

Bank robbery

Summary: The ‘Embrace, Extend, Extinguish’ strategy goes a few steps further as Microsoft looks to dominate developers, devices and servers that are running Free/libre software

AS we have just shown, Microsoft suffers billions in losses because GNU/Linux and Android crush it. Microsoft’s reaction seems irrational as it’s not sure whether to just keep attacking GNU/Linux and Android (as it still does) or pretend to embrace it. Xamarin, the steward of Mono (along with Microsoft), integrates more closely with Microsoft and hopes to make developers (not just Windows developers) dependent on Microsoft. Microsoft wants “developers developers developers developers” (Ballmer’s words) and that’s where Xamarin comes in.

“Perhaps we are seeing the very end of Microsoft these days.”Yesterday we remarked on the latest advertising (in news form) for Microsoft as a GNU/Linux host. Microsoft’s Channel 9 (the last remaining channel) has been openwashing Microsoft quite a lot recently and now it joins the advertising effort:

Corey Sanders, Director of Program Management on the Windows Azure Compute team sits to chat about recent Linux announcements on supportability as well as MOAR stuff on ARM Templates (this time from a partner).

Like we explained yesterday, it would be very dumb to let Microsoft control GNU/Linux instances, but Microsoft’s acceptance of this route is a sign of defeat.

An argument that can never be won when dealing with anti-GNU/Linux trolls is about “year of Linux”. It often goes like this never-ending moving-goalposts list of demands:

2002: “Nobody uses Linux.”

But look, everyone uses Google and many other servers, which mostly run GNU/Linux.

2007: “Nobody uses Linux on the client side.”

Actually, many people’s devices and phones run some form of Linux.

2012: “Nobody uses Linux on the proper screen.”

Android (Linux) is used extensively not only on phones but also tablets.

2014: “Nobody uses Linux on desktops or laptops.”

Actually, Chromebooks are gaining popularity and they have GNU/Linux in them.

2014: “But Chrome OS is not really Linux.”

It’s also simple to install ‘proper’ GNU/Linux on them (my wife did that twice).

2015: “Microsoft does better than GNU/Linux. Windows is so much better!”

Even Microsoft is trying to make money by offering GNU/Linux support and hosting.

And on it goes…

Perhaps Microsoft’s current efforts to become a GNU/Linux host are due to GNU/Linux being a majority market share platform (especially in the back rooms). The same is true for Android on mobile. Perhaps we are seeing the very end of Microsoft these days. █

Microsoft Losing Billions of Dollars is Not News

Posted in Finance, Microsoft at 9:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Calculator

Summary: Few remarks on Microsoft’s latest admission that it is losing a lot of money

The latest Microsoft layoffs, which are misleadingly being framed by the corporate media as a “Nokia” thing [1, 2, 3], have financial impact as well. Microsoft has just publicly admitted that it is losing billions of dollars.

“Recall how Microsoft bribed its own staff (a whistleblower) after getting caught in financial fraud…”British media claims this to be “biggest loss in [Microsoft] history”, but the biggest losses are perhaps in the past, as there’s fraud that is many years old. We have written a lot about Microsoft’s financial misconduct for many years. It is not speculative. Recall how Microsoft bribed its own staff (a whistleblower) after getting caught in financial fraud [1, 2] — an often-overlooked issue these days (Microsoft is claimed to have lost $18,000,000,000 in 1998). This may seem like very old news, but it is definitely relevant to today’s massive Microsoft losses. Microsoft has paid millions of dollars to gag several CFOs since then. They must keep up the dodgy accounting.

Nokia is destroyed because of Microsoft, but Microsoft’s losses aren’t to be blamed on Nokia. What kind of a Nokia “CEO” is being appointed with the formalised promise of a $20 million bonus to sell the company? Only Microsoft’s Elop, probably the world’s most famous mole, managed to do this together with Ballmer. Microsoft now pays the price for misguided entryism that has achieved nothing but destruction of Nokia’s Linux efforts. █

Links 22/7/2015: Kodi 15.0, MKVToolnix 8.2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 8:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • 6 Things You Learn Preserving America’s Past

    The sheer volume of paper out there means that there’s simply no way that archivists have been able to go through everything. Some boxes haven’t been opened since the 1800s, and we may never have any idea what these things are. See, archivists need permission to go through material like that. To do so, you need to tell the higher-ups specifically where you want to look and what you’re looking for. You can’t simply start randomly spelunking in piles of government papers — the files will get messed up even worse than they are now. Somewhere in our records are papers that could change what we know about the history of our country. Every archivist knows this. But we need to get through everything first, and with mundane governmental papers taking priority (looking at you, Veterans Affairs), archivists rarely get the chance to discover new things.

  • Science

    • Studies find genetic signature of native Australians in the Americas

      The exact process by which humanity introduced itself to the Americas has always been controversial. While there’s general agreement on the most important migration—across the Bering land bridge at the end of the last ice age—there’s a lot of arguing over the details. Now, two new papers clarify some of the bigger picture but also introduce a new wrinkle: there’s DNA from the distant Pacific floating around in the genomes of Native Americans. And the two groups disagree about how it got there.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Monday
    • Why DANE isn’t going to win

      1024 bit RSA keys are quite common throughout the DNSSEC system. Getting rid of 1024 bit keys in the PKI has been a long-running effort; doing the same for DNSSEC is likely to take quite a while. Yes, rapid rotation is possible, by splitting key-signing and zone-signing (a good design choice), but since it can’t be enforced, it’s entirely likely that long-lived 1024 bit keys for signing DNSSEC zones is the rule, rather than exception.

    • RealVNC: more open remote access protocols will increase security

      Yes but RFB 5 is new… and it’s a closed, secret, previously unpublished protocol (unlike earlier RFB 3.x versions).

      Hmm, still doesn’t sound very secure.

      Security in remote access solutions will always be a concern for some it’s true.

    • I worked at #HackingTeam, my emails were leaked to WikiLeaks and I’m ok with that

      Is radical transparency the best solution to expose injustice in this technocratic world, a world that is changing faster than law can keep up with?

      That question became even more relevant to me, a privacy activist, when I found myself in the Wikileaks archive, because I worked at Hacking Team 9 years ago.

      [...]

      This is a leak in the public interest, and I really feel that the personal and corporate damage is smaller than the improvement our society can gain from it. But to reach such an improvement, we have to focus on the bigger picture rather than getting distracted by the juicy details.

    • Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway—With Me in It

      Immediately my accelerator stopped working. As I frantically pressed the pedal and watched the RPMs climb, the Jeep lost half its speed, then slowed to a crawl. This occurred just as I reached a long overpass, with no shoulder to offer an escape. The experiment had ceased to be fun.

      At that point, the interstate began to slope upward, so the Jeep lost more momentum and barely crept forward. Cars lined up behind my bumper before passing me, honking. I could see an 18-wheeler approaching in my rearview mirror. I hoped its driver saw me, too, and could tell I was paralyzed on the highway.

    • 470,000 Vehicles At Risk After Hackers “Take Control & Crash” Jeep Cherokee From A Sofa 10 Miles Away

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Mental Illness Doesn’t Explain Mass Violence–but Neither Does ‘Islamic Extremism’

      With the latest mass shooting in Chattanooga, corporate media followed the usual pattern of being ready and willing to label violence as “terrorism” so long as the suspect is Muslim—e.g., Time‘s report on the shooting, “How to Stop the Next Domestic Terrorist” (7/20/15)—despite questions occasionally raised about whether “terrorism” is the appropriate frame to describe attacks on military installations (e.g., Slate, 7/17/15).

  • Transparency Reporting

    • 800 years post Magna Carta: Why no equal justice for all whistleblowers?

      IN LIGHT OF the Magna Carta’s 800th birthday and what modern democracy is based on today, is there really equal justice for all?

      Whistleblowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are wanted. Chelsea Manning and Jeffrey Sterling are in gaol. John Kiriakou recently released from gaol. Thomas Drake and David Petraeus free. Free? If they all leaked classified information why are two free?

      Let’s look at each case pertaining to these whistleblowers apart from the Assange and Snowden cases.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Toshiba CEO quits over accounting scandal

      Toshiba Corp’s (6502.T) chief executive Hisao Tanaka and a string of other senior officials resigned on Tuesday for their roles in the country’s biggest accounting scandal in years.

      Tanaka will be temporarily replaced by Chairman Masashi Muromachi after an independent inquiry found the CEO had been aware the company had inflated its profits by $1.2 billion over a period of several years.

    • Greek Prime Minister Asked Putin For $10 Billion To “Print Drachmas”, Greek Media Reports

      Back in January, when we reported what the very first official act of open European defiance by the then-brand new Greek prime minister Tsipras was (as a reminder it was his visit of a local rifle range where Nazis executed 200 Greeks on May 1, 1944) we noted that this was the start of a clear Greek pivot away from Europe and toward Russia.

    • Prof. Wolff joins The Big Picture RT’s Thom Hartmann: “Is China’s Bubble About To Burst? Look Out US!”

      Prof. Wolff joins The Big Picture RT’s Thom Hartmann to discuss the latest on China. China – the world’s second biggest economy – recently saw its stock market plummet 30 percent in a month. Does this mean that next big economic crisis is right around the corner?

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Five Times Local Media Exposed ALEC’s Secretive Agenda

      On July 22, the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) annual meeting will once again see corporations and state lawmakers gather to discuss and vote on model legislation meant for introduction in state legislatures across the country. On the eve of the three-day conference in San Diego, Media Matters looks back at five examples of great reporting by local news teams who pulled back the curtain and held ALEC accountable for hosting lobbyists and legislators in secret meetings — where they wrote corporate-supported bills blocking minimum wage hikes, attacking unions, and eliminating environmental regulations — and previews this year’s agenda.

  • Privacy

    • High Court Rules UK’s Surveillance Powers Violate Human Rights

      UK’s High Court found the rushed Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) to be illegal under the European Convention on Human Rights and EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, both of which require respect for private and family life, as well as protection of personal data in the case of the latter.

    • Snowden to the IETF: Please make an internet for users, not the spies

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has urged the world’s leading group of internet engineers to design a future ‘net that puts the user in the center, and so protects people’s privacy.

      Speaking via webcast to a meeting in Prague of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the former spy talked about a range of possible changes to the basic engineering of the global communications network that would make it harder for governments to carry out mass surveillance.

      The session was not recorded, but a number of attendees live-tweeted the confab. It was not an official IETF session, but one organized by attendees at the Prague event and using the IETF’s facilities. It followed a screening of the film Citizenfour, which documents the story of Snowden leaking NSA files to journalists while in a hotel room in Hong Kong.

    • The Biggest Mistake AshleyMadison Customers Made: Using Their Credit Cards

      Digital extortionists are holding the sexual profiles of potentially 37 million adulterers hostage after a breach of infidelity website AshleyMadison.com. In a ransom message published on the site’s homepage today, the hackers threaten to publish reams of private information unless AshleyMadison.com and its peer site, EstablishedMen.com, are taken offline. Among that information, the message states, are “all customer records” including “real names and addresses.”

    • Organizational Doxing of Ashley Madison

      The — depending on who is doing the reporting — cheating, affair, adultery, or infidelity site Ashley Madison has been hacked. The hackers are threatening to expose all of the company’s documents, including internal e-mails and details of its 37 million customers. Brian Krebs writes about the hackers’ demands.

    • Andrés Iniesta loses Instagram account to Andrés Iniesta, Instagram apologises to Andrés Iniesta

      Instagram has apologised after it handed control of a Spanish user’s account over to a Barcelona football player with the same name.

      Andrés Iniesta, from Madrid, is the holder of the @ainiesta Instagram account. Andrés Iniesta, from Fuentealbilla, is the captain of Barcelona football club. The former Iniesta woke up on Wednesday to find that access to his Instagram account was blocked.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • If The UK Wants People To ‘Respect’ Copyright, Outlawing Ripping CDs Is Probably Not Helping

        We had two separate stories late last week about copyright issues in the UK, and it occurred to me that a followup relating one to the other might be in order. The first one, from Thursday, was about the UK’s plan to try, once again, to push a new “education campaign” to teach people that “copyright is good.” We’ve seen these campaigns pop up over and over again for decades now, and they tend to lead to complete ridicule and outright mockery. And yet, if you talk to film studio and record label execs, they continually claim that one of the most important things they need to do is to teach people to “respect” copyright through education campaigns.

07.21.15

The Technology Sector in the US Has Gotten Fed Up With Apple’s Patent Aggression Against Android/Linux

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents at 4:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Seeing the dark side of Apple…

Glass apple

Summary: Apple is desperately trying to stop Android from increasing its levels of dominance (in phones, tablets, watches, and so on), so Silicon Valley is lining up against Apple, antagonising its misuse/abuse of patents for anticompetitive purposes

APPLE became somewhat of a patent troll around 2010 when it filed its first anti-Android patent lawsuit, having threatened to do the same to Palm years beforehand (Tim Cook played a big role in these threats at the time). Microsoft and Apple are both bullies and they are not hiding it. They really hate Linux; they try to destroy it rather than adopt it like the rest of the industry, especially in Silicon Valley. With the exception of Microsoft, which habitually supports Apple’s court cases against Android, almost every significant company is now supporting Samsung‘s defence against Apple [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]. Engadget wrote: “Samsung has also found a powerful group of backers in its fight against Apple in court. According to a document unearthed by Inside Sources, Google, Facebook, eBay, Dell, HP and other big tech corporations have submitted a “friend of the court” brief on July 1st, supporting Samsung’s stance. The two companies have been embroiled in legal fisticuffs for years, ever since Apple first filed a lawsuit against Samsung for violating various intellectual properties, such as tap-to-zoom, sinle-finger scrolling and two-finger zooming, as well as edge-to-edge glass design, among other things.”

“Supporting Apple these days is supporting an arrogant bully, hell-bent on destroying Linux.”There is no “patent fight with Samsung” as some media puts it. It is Apple attacking Android by targeting a top Android entity other than Google (it is clear that Google has far greater an incentive to fight back). It is, by extension, an attack on Linux. Apple fans’ site keep bragging about new Apple patents, perhaps not caring to realise that they now support the equivalent of a giant patent troll, the world’s richest troll.

Google, by contrast, is trying to fix the patent system and to reduce litigation. As Mike Masnick put it a few days ago, “Google Revamps Patent Search To Actually Do What Patent Office Should Do” (that’s Masnick’s headline).

Masnick correctly recalls that this is not the first such effort from Google. To quote some background: “A few years ago, Google seemed to downgrade its patent search features, pulling away a separate “Google Patents” section and mixing it back into the main Google search. This seemed like a major step backwards, especially given how terrible the US Patent Office’s own patent search engine was. Google has tried to do a few things like launching a “prior art finder” and teaming up with StackExchange to help crowdsource prior art.”

Supporting Apple these days is supporting an arrogant bully, hell-bent on destroying Linux. Please don’t buy anything from Apple as it only makes this aggressor stronger. █

Patents Regime in Europe: Mixture of Greed, Competition Abuses, and Propaganda

Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

From authority need not always come justice

Congress building

Summary: A roundup of the latest patent news from Europe, focusing on Italy, the UK, Germany, and Hungary

UPC and EPO

DAYS ago we recalled Italy's defeat on UPC. Italian politicians basically surrendered to patent maximalists and patent lawyers in Europe are expectedly jubilant. One wrote: “The renewal fees will be less than 5.000 EUR during the first 10 years of the patent. The cumulative total to be paid over the full 20-year term will be just over 35.555 EUR. Currently, the total amount of renewal fees for a European patent validated in 25 member states is 29.500 EUR during the first ten years and 158 621 EUR in total. In other words, the True Top 4 decision corresponds to a reduction of 78% compared to the current situation.”

It’s all about money, isn’t it? Even as the EPO continues to attack its own staff all that the management can wave as an excuse for this is money. Rather than a public service the EPO is now a greedy corporation. Who’s funding the EPO anyway? European taxpayers. It’s a form of subsidy or ‘welfare’ for a system that is headed by corrupt officials with astronomical salaries and relatives/friends/former colleagues in positions of power. We can become a laughing stock even in the eyes of Zimbabwe now.

Qualcomm’s Patent Abuse Under EU Fire

“Even as the EPO continues to attack its own staff all that the management can wave as an excuse for this is money.”In other news from Europe, Qualcomm faces new EU antitrust probes over patents [1, 2, 3]. Why did it take so long? We have written about Qualcomm’s abuses for quite a few years. As one publication put it, “European Union antitrust regulators are investigating whether one of the world’s biggest chipmakers, Qualcomm, uses illegal tactics to shut out rivals, six years after slapping a record 1 billion euro ($1.09 billion) fine on Intel for a similar offence.

“Qualcomm has been feeling the heat from regulators in Europe, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea in recent years in relation to its licensing model and the power of its patents in mobile networks and communications devices.”

Qualcomm is perhaps the only hardware giant that can rival Intel when it comes to scale of crimes (although Intel does criminal things in many more areas and aspects).

The whole Qualcomm situation ought to teach Europe — and this includes the antitrust officials — that patents maximisation is not what Europe needs.

Shaming the United Kingdom for Not Being Crazy Enough About Patents

Here in the UK we regret to see this patent propaganda titled “UK patent applications dropping as Sweden files 3.5 times more patents than the UK”. On the face of it, this sounds like exciting news, but the article is actually berating Brits for not amassing patents as though only when you acquire (buy) or get granted a patent your work becomes “innovative”. Here is the opening sentence of the article: “Bad news: the UK’s attitude to intellectual property remains dismissive, as new figures show that the number of patents filed were not just below the EU average, but actually falling.”

How is that “bad news”? That’s like saying that the UK having less nuclear weapons than Russia is “bad news”. England reportedly puts all of its nuclear arsenal (not to be confused with Trident) in Scotland and the Scots surely hate it, judging by the growing popularity of SNP. Perhaps they realise that nuclear waste and nuclear warheads on their soil not only fail to improve their security (Russia would view Scotland as a high-value target) but actually cause potential health hazards (see Japan and Ukraine). A lot of that is true for patents too, as they are basically weapons that either discourage innovation (deterrence) or assault Brits who come up with good ideas and implement them.

The article continues with this statement: “In absolute numbers, by far most patent applications come from Germany. With 22,800 filed, the country had over 40 per cent of all European applications.”

Well, the EPO is now based in Germany, too. Does it mean much? No, it doesn’t mean that Germany is most innovative, it just shows that many Germans (or German companies) like to pass money for Munich and other German cities to devour.

There is this constant obsession of patent lawyers. They want to delude technical people into believing that correlation between patents and innovation (or market leadership) is so strong that without them hiring lawyers their businesses will fail. Hiring patent lawyers is a waste of time and legal costs are often the cause for companies going bankrupt. In many cases, patent lawyers are just a burden that tries hard to market itself.

Patent Lawyers Promote Patents in Hungary

Today in the lawyers’ news/media we find “Shelston IP” trying to set the record on patents in Australia and in New Zealand, where technical people have been fighting for many years against patent lawyers and corporate lobbyists.

On the same day “Danubia Patent & Law Office LLC” tried to set the record on patents in Hungary (part of the EU), where resources for patent applications are far more limited than in Germany.

Does anyone in Europe (especially the less fortunate member states) think that this UPC hype will do them any better than German bankers did for Greece? █

Patent ‘Reform’ in US Congress Still Under Attack by Patent Lawyers and Corporate Lobbyists

Posted in America, Law, Patents at 3:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

US Capitol

Summary: The latest instances of assault on changes to the US patent system, demonstrated through an elaborative survey of the media (two days’ worth)

THE futility of a so-called ‘reform’ in the US patent system and our dismissive attitude towards it is due to corporations-led watering down of bills. What’s typically left in bills is nothing of substance, or too little of substance, just enough for the corporate media to state that the system has been changed and is thus ‘fixed’.

“Corporations and the millionaires (or billionaires) who own them are totally dominating political platforms.”Blake A. Ilstrup, who describes himself as “general counsel and senior vice president of business development at Kineta,” does not want the current patent regime to change. “Congress must keep trolls away from medical patents,” heralds another headline from someone working in Kineta’s field (or very similar). It sure looks like there’s a battle between lawyers and everyone else. Remember that many lobbyists are themselves lawyers. AmeriKat, a strong proponent of more patents in the US (and a proud proponent of software patents, so we assume that it’s a patent lawyer from the US), happily speaks of “US patent litigation boom” (more business for lawyers), not to our surprise at all. Sen. Gerald Ortiz Y Pino’s piece about “frivolous patent suits” continues to circulate while former Rep. Ron Klink (D-Pa.) pretends that this out-of-control patent system is good for workers (he published this in a site where lobbyists are abundant). This former Representative sure seems to be fronting for corporations here, not workers. There is also a lot of pro-patents propaganda (more lawsuits wanted) from patent lawyers who celebrate this horrible patents-maximising system, hoping that it stays in tact [1, 2, 3, 4]. With an arrogant grin in the latter two examples, patent lawyers actively work to derail patent reform. They are succeeding so far because, as the first of these highlights right in the headline, “House vote on Innovation Act could be delayed until after August recess” (delay works well for them).

Where is opposition to software patents in the media? We’re massively outnumbered now by patent lawyers. The corporate media is currently reposting a biased article from Bloomberg (booster of patents and so-called ‘IP’ for a number of years), showing us all that no chance of a ‘reform’ — however small — is being tolerated by corporations. Corporations and the millionaires (or billionaires) who own them are totally dominating political platforms. █

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