Summary: A high-quality version of the Kontrovers BR TV program about the EPO with subtitles for the deaf
LAST night we published the transcript of the following video. Today we make available the high-quality version of the recent video.
It looks as though the scandalous EPO management is desperate to bury this video, which means it needs to be secured. █
Summary: A high-quality version of the Kontrovers BR TV program about the EPO with English subtitles
LAST night we published the transcript of the following video. Today we make available the high-quality version of the recent video.
It looks as though the scandalous EPO management is desperate to bury this video, which means it needs to be secured. █
Summary: EPO Kontrovers BR TV video in a better (high-quality) format and with one little correction in the French transcript
LAST night we published the transcript of the following video. Today we make available the high-quality version of the recent video.
It looks as though the scandalous EPO management is desperate to bury this video, which means it needs to be secured. █
Not that he’s likely to accept these offers (of concessions)…
The CSC extends an olive branch to Monsieur Battistelli
Summary: Amid strike preparations and a very difficult Administrative Council meeting (starting tomorrow) the EPO’s President is given a chance to acknowledge his errors and act to correct them
SEVERAL days ago the Chairman of the Administrative Council was contacted in an effort to de-escalate things by undoing Monsieur Battistelli's union-busting actions. Here’s the latest Communiqué from the Central Staff Committee (CSC) of the EPO. It suggests that they really are after a peaceful resolution, wherein staff representatives (SRs) get their jobs back and get re-integrated into the workforce.
Zentraler Personalausschuss
Central Staff Committee
Le Comité central du Personnel15.03.2016
sc16043cp – 0.2.1/0.3.2Dear colleagues,
The Central Staff Committee has accepted the invitation to see the President in the afternoon of 15 March 2016 in Munich to discuss the last call for strike (link). This is the afternoon before the meeting of the Council. A previous meeting on 24 February 2016 with Ms Bergot on the same matter did not lead to any progress (link).
As your interlocutor in the recent call for strike (91% of staff voted in favour), we will ask the President concrete questions, including the ones below and will come back to you with his replies as quickly as possible.
- Will you lift the disciplinary sanctions against Elizabeth Hardon, Ion Brumme and Malika Weaver?
- Will you lift the disciplinary sanctions against the former members of the Internal Appeals Committee?
- Will you stop the disciplinary threats, investigations and retaliations against further Staff Representatives?
- Will you be ready to revise the Investigation Guidelines together with the Staff Representation based on a mandate that is agreed upon by both parties?
- Will you be ready to re-establish an appropriate IAC system?
- Will you be ready to adapt the strike regulations according to the judgment of the Dutch Court?
- Will you be ready to revise the health, sick-leave and invalidity regulations together with the Staff Representation based on a mandate that is agreed upon by both parties?
- Which further concessions are you willing to make?
Your Central Staff Committee
All the above bullet-points seem perfectly reasonable considering the bizarre nature of the allegations and Battistelli’s failure to carry out the judgments as they were handed over from the Disciplinary Committees — something which Board 28 became distraught over (it called for a suspension of these dismissals and an external re-evaluation of them). █
Publicado en America, Microsoft, Patentes at 7:37 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“La Comisión no puede unilateralmente quitar un derecho fundamental de defensa.”
–Horacio Gutierrez, hypocrita de Microsoft quien colecta ‘dinero de protección’ de compañías que usan/distribuyen Linux
Sumario: Agresores de patentes como Microsoft y entidades no-prácticantes que llevan las patentes de software al Distrito Este de Texas para extraer dinero de compañíás productivas que han atraído hacia ellas atención (celos) de gente que puede ponerles freno
Los reciéntes artículos acerca de la agresión de patentes (4 artículos acerca de ello [1, 2, 3, 4] han atraído bastante tráfico (el cache de nuestro server obtuvo 22,986,674 hits en las últimas cuatro semanas) y ha traído un montón de artículos en toda suerte de medios, incluyendo medios en otros lenguajes. Este hilo titulado ¨Microsoft trolleando a Linux con patentes pueda que se este exténdiendo a la cadena Azure de microsoft¨, por instancia, links a este artículo que a su turno nos cita y dice:
Microsoft ha lanzado otra campaña anti-open source en las últimas semanas, apuntando prominentes compañíás de Linux y Software Libre. Ellos están atentando limitar el desarrollo de open-source con compras, trolling de patentes, así como cobrar ¨regalíás¨ por productos que usan Linux. Sus esfuerzos reciéntes los tienen AGARRANDO PATENTES DE TECNOLOGÍA DE OPEN SOURCE iNCLUYENDO SOFTWARE DESARROLLADO POR CANONICAL, desarrolladores de la más popular Linux distr, Ubuntu.
[...]
Esta no es la primera vez que Microsoft ha usado esta metodología para tratar de obstaculizar innovación en la comunidad de open source. Usaron tecnologías similares el 2006 al entrar en un ´arreglo´ de patentes con Novell acerca de su venta de Linux productos de empresa. Han hecho lo mismo al aplicar por patentes en ´su´ tecnología llamada Continuum, (a similar software, llamado Convergence, ha estado siendo desarrollado en Canonical en los años anterióres) y firmar otro ´arreglo´ de patentes con Rakuten Inc. que cubre aparatos Android y Linux. Microsoft usa estos ´acuerdos´ para perseguir al software de código libre que daña considerablemente sus margines, tulliendo innovación al ir alrededor de las protecciones proveidas por el licensing de open source. Usan estos casos como precedente para ESTABLECER QUE LINUX Y OTROS SOFTWARE DE CÓDIGO ABIERTO ES SU PROPIEDAD INTELECTUAL. Estos casos típicamente son cubiertos por los medios corporativos con gran parcialismo, pintando al pobrecito Microsoft protegiendo ´su´ propiedad intelectual, cuando en realidad lo opuesto es la verdad.
[...]
En los ambientes actuales legales de desarrollo de software, el open source no es más suficiente para protejer contra compañíáß cuyo interés es poner zancadillas, como hemos discutido en un previos artículo. Microsoft ha hecho lo mismo en el pasado, así que no hay nada que los detenga de hacerlo de nuevo con el blockchain y cryptocurrencies? Nada al presente. Todo lo que toma es un ´arreglo´ de patentes con una compañíá pequeña que no puede financiar una batalla legal para empezar el proceso en cadena en el ecosistema para llevar la bola de Microsoft a rodar de nuevo.
Microsoft no es un clásico troll de patentes porque todavía tiene sus propios productos en el dominio mobil. ¿Pero por cuánto tiempo?
“Microsoft no es un clásico troll de patentes porque todavía tiene sus propios productos en el dominio mobil. ¿Pero por cuánto tiempo?”De acuerdo con este artículo de MIP ¨TC Heartland será escuchado hoy 11 de Marzo [eso fué hace días]. El caso busca voltear el caso de 1990 en el Circuito Federal VE Holdin versus Johnson Gas Appliance, que dió a los dueños de patentes más opciones de enjuiciar¨ (usualmente en el Distrito Este de Texas [1, 2, 3]).
“Hace unos pocos meses,” escribió otro autor,¨Yo estaba en el Distrito Este de Texas Banco y conferencias Bar, y empecé a hablar con un juez federal de distrito acerca de sus puntos de vista de la desaparición entonces inminente del Formulario 18, la forma que esencialmente hizo suficiente para una denuncia por infracción directa para incluir sólo acusaciones escuétas de los hechos. Su respuesta fue, “que va a ser la infernal Regla 12.¨
El mismo autor fue interrogado posteriormente (en el titular): ¨¿Qué Pasaría a Casos de Patentes si Ellos no Pueden Ser llenados en Texas?¨
“Wadhwa no es un troll de patentes pero más un académico y empresario. Contraste sus puntos de vista con aquellos de Neil Wilkof (IP Kat), quien tremprano hoy dijo que estaba suavizando la imagen de los trolles de patentes y minimzando los asuntos asociados con ellos.”“Así,” dijo, “¿A dónde nos lleva esto? Muchas veces tenemos que moverlos, no sólo casos llevados por NPEs [trolles]. Incluso así, un decente número de casos permanecen en la misma localidad. Que Delaware y Nor California serían las más populares no es sorprendente, dado que muchos acusados tienen sede en Delaware o Silicon Valley. Talvez más sorprendente es que el Distrito Este de Texas permanezca tercero en la lista, aunque con un menor número de casos. Esos caso probablemente sean llenados contra negocios vendiendo bienes patentados de tiendas localizadas en ese distrito, aunque haya algunos acusados en nuestra muestra que tenían sede allí.¨
Un nuevo artículo por Vivek Wadhwa, a quien habitualmente citamos aquí, desea poner un punto final a esta costosa y espurea/frívola litigacion. En AOL escribió el otro día: ¨Lo que es bueno para la innovación es un próspero ecosistema en el cual compañías construyan en ideas mutuas y constantemente se reinventen a sí mismas en vez de tratar de poner zancadillas una a otra en las cortes.
“Es suficiente malo cuando grandes compañíás con bolsillos profundos batallan una a otras, pero para compañías nuevas, juicios pueden ser faltales.¨
“Innovadores en ciernes tienen que vivir en constante temor de que un troll de patentes saque una pistola grande y los ponga en quiebra. Para compañíás nuevas, esto es de mayor preocupación que alguie robe sus ideas.”
Wadhwa no es un troll de patentes pero más un académico y empresario. Contraste sus puntos de vista con aquellos de Neil Wilkof (IP Kat), quien tremprano hoy dijo que estaba suavizando la imagen de los trolles de patentes y minimzando los asuntos asociados con ellos. El escribió: ¨En Noviembre 2013, como Kat reportó previamente, más de 60 profesores de propiedad intelectual enviaron una carta al Congreso de los Estados Unidos, estableciéndo su critica del sistema de patentes y sugerencias para una reforma. Entre otras cosas, la carta discute el efecto global negativo de los trolls de patentes sobre la innovación …”
Lo que todo el mundo parace estarse dando cuenta. Es difícil de negar.
“Curiosamente, ya que Kat lo ha sugerido en otro lugar, el emblema de riesgos (u oportunidades) en el potencial para ampliación del trolling de patentes, específicamente Intellectual Ventures, parece que su presencia pública ha bajado significativamente.”
–Neil Wilkof¨En una palabra,¨ Wilkof añadió, ¨parece simplemente haber un murmullo acerca de la materia. Curiosamente, ya que Kat lo ha sugerido en otro lugar, el emblema de riesgos (u oportunidades) en el potencial para ampliación del trolling de patentes, específicamente Intellectual Ventures, parece que su presencia pública ha bajado significativamente. Sea causa o efecto de la más general decadencia del troll de patentes es una pregunta intersante. Más aún, Kat se pregunta si la dificultad en definer lo que se entiende por un troll de patentes también ha contribuido a este descenso “.
Intellectual Ventures es un masivo troll de patentes conectado a Microsoft (uno de varios) y de verdad ha sufrido despidos. Sin embargo, hay miles de satélites alrededor de Intellectual Ventures, así que es difícil decir si esta disminuyendo, creciendo or simplemente metamorfoseando.
Entre la gente que defiende a los trolles de patentes (y consiguen ser financiados por ellos, e.g IAM ´magazine´) es común ver que ¨troll¨ es una palabra indefinida y raramente la mencionan (como vampiros que les ponen ajos en frente). Miren este comentario en este artículo de Wilkof, que dice: ¨el mar de cambio en las cortes, efectivamente revirtiéndo State Street y encontrándo (vez tras vez) la materia de reclamo ineligible que se haga valer la NPE. Despues de todo, muchos de los reclamos sostenidos por las NPEs son métodos de negocios con una contribución a artes útiles que podemos resumirlo como ¨hazlo en la red¨. Accionistas han retumbado que tales reclamos simplemente no cortan más la mostaza.¨
Lo que el/ella/ellos quisieron decir es, esto esta ¨en la red¨ patentes de software; esa es una de las más populares herramientas de los trolles de patentes.
“Se escribió mucho acerca de la LEY DE PATENTES así como la Ley de Innovación habiéndose explicado en varias ocasiones que estos están diseñados para ayudar a las grandes empresas y trolles de patents a expensas de la sociedad, en lugar de ayudar a la sociedad en su conjunto, a expensas de los trolls de patentes.”Ahora que los trolles de patentes están de regreso en la agenda en los Estados Unidos (primera vez desde el receso de Verano en el Congreso), algunos escritores pretenten que necesitamos trolles de patentes para la ¨innovación¨. Este ejemplo dice: ¨Nuestra futura economía está basada en la innovación, como las muchas compañías de ciencias de la vida y de la biotecnología que se están desarrollando en Kentucky. No sólo es nuestra industria ayudando a afrontar algunos de las amenazas para la salud más grandes del mundo, pero lo que están haciendo al crear la próxima generación de puestos de trabajo”.
¿Este tipo piensa que innovación no puede suceder sin patentes en cada dominio? O ¿qué combatir a los trolles de patentes es algo malo para los negocios pequeños? Pretender que impedir la ola de trolles de patentes actualmente puede dañar a los pequeños negocios (a los que usualmente los trolles de patentes EXTORSIÓNAN hasta que quiebren) es engañoso a lo mejor. Aquí esta otro nuevo ejemplo de las noticias “S 1137 (the PATENT Act) and HR 9 (the Innovation Act),” dice esta persona, ¨cambiaría la manera que los juicios de patentes son manejados. El nuevo proceso crearía un complejo y oneroso labor de retazos legal para pequeños y medianos negocios así como inventores defiendan sus patentes. Mientras que largas corporaciones y sus equipos de abogados de alto precio serían insignificantemente impactados por los cambios en esos proyectos de leyes, aquellos sin los recursos para defender sus patentes estarán [jodidos] devastados.¨
We wrote a great deal about both the PATENT Act and Innovation Act and explained repeatedly that these are designed to help big corporations at the expense of patent trolls, rather than help society as a whole at the expense of patent trolls. It does not, however, mean that these so-called ‘reforms’ are undesirable or detrimental to small businesses which actually produce things (i.e. not patent trolls).
Se escribió mucho acerca de la LEY DE PATENTES así como la Ley de Innovación habiéndose explicado en varias ocasiones que estos están diseñados para ayudar a las grandes empresas y trolles de patents a expensas de la sociedad, en lugar de ayudar a la sociedad en su conjunto, a expensas de los trolls de patentes. No significa, sin embargo que aquellas llamadas ¨reformas¨ son indeseables o detrimentales para los pequeños negocios que actualmente producen cosas (i.e no trolles de patentes). █
Publicado en Microsoft, Patentes at 5:20 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Sumario: Artículos que publicamos la semana pasada acerca de los chantajes de Microsoft (contra Linux usando patentes de software) estan recibiendo niveles de tráfico sin precedente
TECHRIGHTS esta satisfecho de ver poco después de escribir 3 artículos acerca de los últimos arreglos de patentes contra Linux [1, 2, 3] hay un amplio debate en la red acerca de ello, y se ha extendido mucho más allá del mundo de GNU/Linux. Las mucha entradas acerca de ello se aproximan a 1,000 comentarios en toda clase de sitios (difícil de leerlos todos) y la gente expresa su justificada ira contra Microsoft.
“Los diversas entradas al respecto se acercan a 1.000 comentarios en todo tipo de sitios (es difícil mantenerse al día con todo) y las personas expresan su ira justificada en Microsoft.”Ayer notamos que este es un ángulo que tiene cubrimiento en la prensa Alemana. Para citar: “Microsoft hat zwei Patentabkommen geschlossen, die sich auf Technologien beziehen, die in Linux und Android verwendet werden. Darauf weist Roy Schestowitz vom Techrights-Blog in einem Beitrag hin. Zwar versuche Microsoft derzeit, sich als besonders Linux-freundlich zu inszenieren, so Schestowitz, an der Praxis der Geltendmachung von Patentrechten gegenüber Linux und Android habe sich aber nichts geändert.”
Un sitio de noticias en Inglés escribió ayer que ¨no todas las ramas de la comunidad de open source estan dando la bienvenida al supuesto aproximamiento de Microsoft al open source. Christine Hall en FOSS Force lleno un analisis esta semana en el que escribió que los movimientos de Microsoft ¨están basados únicamente en codicia¨ y representan una ¨calle de un sólo sentido¨ para empujar más negocios para Microsoft.
“Básicamente hacen un montón de dinero sin mover un dedo, con sólo el envío de un flujo de solicitudes de patentes, a costa de millones de personas, con el fin de ganar miles de millones de empresas que realmente hacen cosas.”“Similarmente, Roy Schestowitz, uno de los más firmes de la nueva generación de propenentes de open source, escribe que Microsoft ha “chantajeado a Linux.”
“A primera vist, criticismos como estes parecen meramente reflejar profundas dudas contra Microsoft por parte de proponetes del open source que representan la más ideológica parte de la comunidad de open source. Sería fácil condonarlos como puntos de vista radicales con poca presencia en la comunidad misma.”
Para aquellos que no saben lo suficiente acerca de la controversia, el meollo de lo que Microsoft desea:
“Es un escorpión o una serpiente en el sentido de la parábola.”Ayer mencionamos al artículo de Simon Phipps en IDG acerca de esto. Poco despues acompañando al mismo (talvez indicando lo que no es adecuado publicar allí) publicó esta pieza en su blog personal y dijo: ¨Fui a la pagina de las Publicaciones de Prensa de Microsoft buscando noticias de apoyo a Linux de SQL server y su unión a Eclipse. Para mi gran sorpresa, no hubo nada allí. Pero hubo algo más; una publicación de prensa celebrándo l firma de otro usuario de Linux de las Patentes de Microsoft Licensing así como otra ganancia de patentes contra Android. Nada acerca de SQL server, Eclipse o cualquier positivo compromiso con open source.
¨Pondré aparte los asuntos de validez de las patentes de software, or la aplicabilidad del portafolio de Microsoft a Linux, aunque ambas tienen asuntos reales y significativos. La sorpresa surge por mis propias experiencias en Sun.¨
Esto vino después que intercambié algunas palabras con Phipps, quién concluyo con: ¨Por eso he escrito en InfoWorld un llamado a Microsoft a unirse al Open Invention Network (OIN). Por favor unanse a mi respondiendo cada anuncio de Microsoft relacionado con Open Source con ¨¿Pero ya se han unido al OIN?¨ hasta que ellos lo hagan.¨
Ellos probablement nunca lo harán. No es su naturaleza. Es un escorpión o serpiente en el sentido de la parábola.
Temprano hoy, uniéndose a un sitio proponente de Microsoft, notamos este post de Reddit titulado ¨Lloviendo en el Desfile: Microsoft extorsióna a compañíá por su infringimiento de patentes de Linux¨ (muchísimos medios no prestaron atención a ello por que hubo suficiente distracción). Ahora hay casi una docena de posts de Reddit uniéndose a Techrights en relación a esta materia (este es sólo uno de ellos). Incluso Soylent News cubrió esto hoy al tomar parte del artículo de Phipps y el nuestro:
Los comentarios de Simon Phipps las últimas payasadas de Microsoft contra open source. Específicamente, mientras el público es distraído por el show, Microsoft esta extorsiónando a las comunidades de Android/Linux y GNU/Linux por licensias de patentes.
Roy Schestowitz tiene palabras duras en la misma materia, notando que los medios estan ignorando las acciones maliciosas de Microsfot a favor de prestar atención a su campaña de relaciones públicas.
Mientras que la OIN no pueda protejer contra NPEś (Entidades No Prácticantes) alias trolles de patentes, fue creada justamente por esta clase de situaciones y eligir no unirse a ella – envia un claro mensaje de sus intenciones en contra de la comunidad.
“Esperamos que nuestros pocos artículos sobre el tema de Microsoft y GNU/Linux seán suficiente para dejar a un montón de gente con el equilibrio aleccionador y una perspectiva más amplia de las cosas.”Hay muchos comentarios allí, incluyendo: ¨Simon ha escrito mucho en su blog personal. Solicita a la gente a unirsele en responder a cada anuncio de M$ relacionado con open source con: ¨¿Pero ya se unieron al OIN? [webmink.com]” hasta que lo hagan. M$ no puede esperar seguir extorsionando y al mismo tiempo ser respetado como un par en open source.
“Tal vez unirse a OIN funcionaría, pero yo preferiría ver al camp financiero de M$ y sus activos restantes apropiados. Nada de lo que tienen es necesario o incluso ventajoso con el código abierto o software libre. El mundo sería muchísimo mejor sin ellos. Ciertamente, la tecnología sería mucho más avanzada. Las décadas de daño que han hecho a la industria del software en general, no se pueden deshacer rápidamente o fácilmente, incluso si fueran a hacerlo en serio, no tienen esa intención. Pero dejando quejas a un lado, estoy de acuerdo con Simon. La única forma en que puede demostrar que ellos están allí para trabajar con el código abierto en lugar de atacarlo sería unirse a la OIN.¨
“Esto lleva a la gente cerca de la verdad.”Al presente hay cerca de 800 comentarios en Reddit acerca del último artículo de Techrights (no recuerdo si alguna vez alcanzamos tantos comentarios por un simple artículo). FOSS Force acaba de decir: ¨Aunque Microsoft principalmente exitósamente escondió sus atentados de joder a FOSS al esparcir noticias de amor a open source – en vez de esparcir FUD, creo que hubieron muchas noticas de FOSS sucendiéndo lejos del campo de Redmon. Incluso Microsoft con todos sus billones, parece que no es lo suficientemente largo para monopolizar (aunque lo quieran y traten) todas las noticias en el grade y maravillos mundo de FOSS.¨
Esperamos que nuestros pocos artículos sobre el tema de Microsoft y GNU/Linux seán suficiente para dejar a un montón de gente con el equilibrio aleccionador y una perspectiva más amplia de las cosas. Microsoft no es un amigo y estimamos que cerca de un millón de personas se han encontrado con nuestros posts acerca del último MATONEO de Microsoft. Esto lleva a la gente cerac de la verdad. █
If Microsoft really cares about Linux and open source, if they really want to be part of the community. they must win the trust of the community. As I’ve said before and will say again, if Microsoft really loves Linux, they must make a public pledge to not go after Linux. They should join the Open Innovation Network (OIN) to send a message to the Linux and open source world that they are in it with us, that they are not going to attack us, to destroy us if we use Linux.
Rackspace’s expanded OnMetal bare-metal server service for OpenStack cloud debuts.
Rackspace is expanding its OnMetal bare-metal service for OpenStack, providing users with more powerful options to deploy applications in the cloud.Typically with a cloud deployment, server assets are virtual and customers don’t get to choose the physical underlying hardware, the actual bare-metal that an application will run on. The Rackspace OnMetal service first launched in June 2014, enabling users to directly deploy an OpenStack cloud onto physical hardware.
Swiss software start-up LzLabs has unveiled the world’s “first” software defined mainframe, designed to move legacy mainframe applications and data to open Linux server and cloud platforms.
Announced at CeBIT 2016, LzLabs says it is still undergoing clinical trials with ten companies, but it will be offered to customers both for use within their own datacentres running on Red Hat Linux-based computers and for deployment via the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
The software defined mainframe has been five years in the making and if the testing goes well, LzLabs plans to launch it later this year.
So what’s left for Microsoft to do?
Well, if they announce AD Services running on Linux, you’ll know that their heart is no longer in the Windows data centre.
Of course the update that is most interesting to us, is the addition of experimental support for Powerplay in the amdgpu driver. Powerplay is the brand name for the power management technologies found in AMD CPUs and APUs, which requires the dreaded and deprecated Catalyst driver to work properly.
The Linux 4.5 kernel was officially released by Linus Torvalds late on Sunday March 13, providing the second major kernel milestone update so far in 2016, following Linux 4.4 which debutedon January 10.
Among the big additions in Linux 4.5 is support for the copy_file_range() system call for offloading copies between regular files. The Linux kernel code commit for the new system was authored by Red Hat’s Zach Brown and according to the git entrythe new system call, “..gives an interface to underlying layers of the storage stack which can copy without reading and writing all the data.”
This release nearly didn’t make it: Linux lord Linus Torvalds writes that he came close to ordering an eighth release candidate, as “We did have one nasty regression that got fixed yesterday [Sunday - Ed], and the networking pull early in the week was larger than I would have wished for.”
Thanks to wccftech (and our IRC for the link) I have learnt today that AMD’s new processor design named Zen is shaping up very nicely. Apparently they are due out in October of this year (not confirmed), so hopefully not too long to find out for ourselves. I’ve no doubt Phoronix will have tests up shortly after they are released so we can see their Linux performance.
Tox is a free, open source, end-to-end encrypted messenger that allows you to communicate securely with your family, and friends. It is completely decentralized, peer-to-peer messenger without relying on any central server. The communication between you and your friend should always remain private and secure. Nobody knows what you’re communicating, except the recipient of course. The idea behind the development of Tox was born when the NSA whistle bowler Edward Snowden’s leaks of NSA spying activity. The Tox project has been started by single anonymous developer back in 2013, and now hundreds of active developers are contributing to this project.
Another game which is really amazing is Team Fortress 2, it can be played online and it’s fun you can choose a personallity and play with that, the guns of each personallity is different with others for example spy’s guns are different with doctor’s tools, this game is about 8GB too!
Spike Chunsoft is releasing a sequel to its visual novel murder mystery thriller with a cult-like following, Danganronpa. The sequel, titled Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, will be headed to Steam on April 18, allowing PC gamers to join in on the fun.
I keep reading comments that Linux gaming is pretty much stagnating and not worth investing in because it is still at around 1% in the Steam Hardware Survey. So I decided to try and find some numbers. Unfortunately, there isn’t all that much data publicly available, if you have additional or better data, I’ll be happy to add them. Also, if you find any mistakes please let me know.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a game built with CryEngine looked like it was going to be a fantastic game to have on Linux, but the developers have told me it “is not possible technically”.
The Godot Engine has grown by leaps and bounds alongside Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy’s development. Its recent 2.0 release and Steam launch have been received with enthusiasm by both the existing Godot community and newcomers alike. The engine is now under the protective wing of the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is as I understand it, making sure that two of its primary developers can continue working on it.
Good news Danganronpa fans as Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair looks like it will support Linux on the April 18th release.
If you are stuck in the world of bin and bash, trying to figure out a way to escape your machine’s Terminal, here’s how to take a quick break. If you know some basic UNIX commands and PHP, this quick and dirty method will help you play Pokémon and Mario inside your Terminal.
I found this Terminal Game Boy project on GitHub. To use this, your machine needs to be running at least PHP 5.6, 7, or HHVM. This Terminal emulator only works on Linux and Mac OS X. Based on Game Boy JS Emulator and making use of PHP7’s performance improvements, this project has become a fun way to kill some time.
The developers of the open-source and cross-platform Unvanquished FPS (first-person shooter) game have announced today, March 14, 2016, the release of the 49th Alpha build.
The latest monthly alpha release for the Unvanquished open-source first person shooter game is now available. This release also marks four years since these releases began by this project derived from Tremulous.
Unvanquished Alpha 49 is also special in that it brings a new, tile-based forward+ renderer, which should help significantly with lighting performance. There are also patches to improve performance for those using graphical effects and more. The Unvanquished engine’s renderer was originally derived from XreaL while now it’s evolved into a radically different beast. Both the new and old renderer will be around for a few more releases as the new tile-based renderer doesn’t yet support shadows and some other features, plus there is always the chance of regressions.
GNOME Games app developer Adrien Plazas announced this past weekend the availability for testing of the RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming 3.20 release, which should land as part of the GNOME 3.20.
KDSoap is a tool for creating client applications for web services without the need for any further component such as a dedicated web server.
KDSoap lets you interact with applications which have APIs that can be exported as SOAP objects. The web service then provides a machine-accessible interface to its functionality via HTTP.
It looks like Qt 5.6 is finally ready to be released.
The Qt Company’s Jani Heikkinen announced the availability this morning of the final Qt 5.6.0 packages. The availability of these packages today is for any last minute testing to see if the Qt 5.6.0 release can be officially announced on Wednesday if there are no last minute issues.
The crew behind the incredible Krita KDE drawing program has today announced they’ve gone into a feature freeze for Krita 3.0 and have decided to release 3.0 Pre-Alpha 3.
The program is now under a feature freeze until the official Krita 3.0 release, which is scheduled to take place on 27 April. For the next month they are focused on just fixing bugs in this huge release that marks the porting to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. Krita 3.0 also brings Kickstarter-sponsored features of an instant preview, animation support, rulers and guides, grid docker, layer multi-selection handling improvements, support for GImp brushes as images, a revamped layer management panel, and more.
Scott Petrovic from the Krita Foundation has sent an email announcement to Softpedia informing us about the immediate availability for testing of the third Pre-Alpha build of the upcoming Krita 3.0 software.
Plank is one of the simplest to use and easiest to install dock-like applications for GNU/Linux operating systems, and it reached the 0.11.0 milestone this past weekend.
The GNOME Project is getting ready for the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, due for release next week, on March 23, 2016, and most of the core components and apps are currently in the process of being updated to the RC (Release Candidate) version.
During weekend I was in Puck, Poland at small conference called “Zimowisko linuksowe” (Linux winter camp) where I had a talk called “Dlaczego moje urządzenie nie jest obsługiwane przez dystrybucje” (Why my device is not supported by distributions).
In talk I presented how distributions (Debian, Fedora) handle ARM devices (one kernel for all, one image for all) and why it does not fit Raspberry/Pi or Chromebook. Also mentioned Roseapple/Pi as an example of how not to make support for device.
RapidDisk is an open source and enhanced Linux RAM drive solution. Dynamically create, resize, and remove RAM drives. Or map those same RAM drives as a cache to slower data volumes. RapidDisk consists of a collection of kernel modules, an administration utility, High Availability scripts, and a RESTful API for third party integration.
The developer of the Studio 13.37 OS, a GNU/Linux distribution based on the well-known Puppy Linux operating system, has announced earlier the release of the 2.4 build.
Today’s data centers and clouds run on virtualization. The leading business Linux provider Red Hat knows that so it’s released an update to its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualizaiton (RHEV) project: RHEV 3.6.
Qualcomm wants to port Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux Server for ARM which will allow developers to write applications for Qualcomm’s server chips.
Qualcomm has not hinted at a server chip shipment date, but said it will enter the ARM server market when it’s viable. There’s a handful of ARM systems available, but there is a lack of software which makes users a little more wary.
That said, today I want to tell you and ask for feedback for Fedora 24 Alpha Release Wallpaper. Let me guide you for the process of wallpaper creation first. As you might know, before the final release, we have Alpha and Beta releases, for which we already have to package wallpapers. Between Alpha and Beta we collect feedback and make changes accordingly. You can take a look at previous versions wallpapers on their wiki pages: f23_artwork, f22_artwork, etc, etc. There you can also take a look at banners (based on wallpapers) and supplemental wallpapers chosen by vote. By the way, everybody is welcome to submit supplemental wallpapers! If you have pics to share, read this article and contribute. The deadline is in April, so there’s still time.
For the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development (HFOSS) course at the Rochester Institute of Technology, we were tasked with the Community Architecture (CommArch) project. For this project, we were tasked with analyzing an open source project’s community and the general details surrounding the project. This blog post serves as the analysis our team prepared for the project.
I plan to enforce SHA2 for GPG signatures some time after the release of xenial, and definitely for Ubuntu 16.10, so around June-August (possibly during DebConf). For xenial, I plan to have a SRU (stable release update) in January to do the same (it’s just adding one member to an array). This should give 3rd party providers a reasonable time frame to migrate to a new digest algorithm for their GPG config and possibly a new repository key.
A few minutes ago, Canonical published a new Ubuntu Security Notice to inform users of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system about the availability of a kernel update.
We reported earlier that Canonical released a minor kernel update for its Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system, and now the company announces a new kernel update for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).
Publicly, Canonical Software’s announcement that Ubuntu 16.04 will include the ZFS filesystem sounds like a potential violation of the second version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).
The fact that ZFS’s license, the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), is a free license but incompatible with the GPL makes the case unusual, but the problem routine.
However, the implications could prove extraordinary — in fact, they could indicate that, contrary to years of assumptions, the GPLv2 does not protect the Linux kernel at all. Many other projects could also be affected.
Canonical has just teased the Linux and Ubuntu community with the fact that the upcoming BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet will be available for purchase soon.
Michael Hall of Canonical has come up with a lengthy blog post to explain why the forthcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system needs your help to make GNOME Software look beautiful.
We reported on March 14 that Canonical published two new Ubuntu Security Notices with detailed information on multiple Linux kernel vulnerabilities patched for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) and Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating systems.
Intel OTC’s PowerTOP utility has been around for nearly a decade for making it easy to carry out power optimization tweaks on Intel Linux systems. However, is this program still useful or are modern Linux distributions and upstream code now better optimized by default for delivering an ideal power-savings experience? As it’s been a while since the last time I tried PowerTOP, I fired it up today on an Intel Haswell ultrabook running a development snapshot of Ubuntu 16.04.
The leader of the Ubuntu MATE project, Martin Wimpress, announced a few moments ago that the forthcoming Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system would feature full support for Client Side Decoration (CSD) and Header Bar applications.
Although I’m very pleased with the Pi 3, it is clearly still very early days for the new hardware. The one thing that every point listed above has in common is that they are all in need of an updated software release for one reason or another. So here’s to the future!
Firefly’s sandwich-style “Reload” version of its quad-core Firefly-RK3288 hacker SBC adds SATA, more HDMI, camera, and USB ports, and more expansion I/O.
The Cortex-A17 has seen fairly high adoption in Android media player such as the Tronsmart Orion R28 via Rockchip’s quad-core, 1.8GHz Rockchip RK3288 SoC. T-Chip Technology’s Firefly single board computer spinoff has once again tapped the RK3288 for its open-spec Firefly-RK3288 Reload board, running Linux or Android on the same RK3288 with Mali T764 GPU as its earlier Firefly-RK3288 SBC. This time, however, it’s a sandwich-style carrier/COM product that adds SATA storage, more expansion pins, and more USB, HDMI, and camera ports.
Open Pandora’s successor, the Pyra, now has a working prototype. The makers of this Linux-powered handheld computer are looking to make it better on the precision front and working to launch it in the market later this year. Know about the device here and watch the demonstration video.
Today only you can get a quad-core ARMv7 development board for less than $15 USD.
The king of tiny and cheap computers finally has a successor. The first Raspberry Pi computer made a big impact on the technology world, offering a full computer on a $35 chip roughly the size of a credit card. It has since proved to be a popular tool for students and hackers alike, providing easy and accessible software and hardware. Now, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is back with the Raspberry Pi 2, which crams in even more computing power while keeping the same price and roughly the same form factor.
Internet of Things (IoT) company myDevices has announced a competition that it hopes will help build new partnerships centered on Rasbperry Pi, the inexpensive, open source-friendly hardware platform.
Although the Raspberry Pi 3 was recently announced, the Raspberry Pi 2 still has plenty of life and is more than suitable for many interesting and useful tasks.
I have a few Raspberry Pis sitting around that I’ve been exploring for other interesting projects, one of which is the possibility of replacing a very old single-core 64-bit Intel rackmount server that I use for the primary firewall and router on the edge of my network. But before I disrupt the main firewall and gateway for my network, I wanted to test the Pi a bit and see just what it would take to make this happen.
Nearly every pundit on the planet has chimed the death knell for the desktop PC. After all, isn’t everyone pretty much glued to their smartphones at this point?
It’s Linux.
With an effort led by John Stultz at Linaro, developers have managed to get a Google Nexus 7 tablet running on a mainline Linux kernel.
Open-source developers were able to get the Nexus 7 running on a mainline kernel plus about fifty extra patches, which are all open-source and available via a Linaro Git tree. They even managed to get accelerated open-source graphics for the Qualcomm SoC by using the Freedreno MSM DRM driver and Mesa Git.
According to a research paper authored by some Google minds, a futuristic variant of the Google Now voice assistant is being developed by the search giant. The new personalised Google Now won’t require internet access – up to some extent – to process your voice commands as it will be intelligent (artificially) enough to understand you. The commands will be saved for later use and sent to the servers if the voice assistant feels them hard to understand.
The next round of Oracle’s copyright lawsuit against Google over Android will begin on May 9, and we can expect to be treated to a lot of “bombshells” about Google’s Android business, sources close to the situation have told Business Insider.
Last week Google released the developer preview for Android N. Some of you guys might have been pretty excited about it and might have gone and downloaded the system image to flash the OS onto your phone manually. Now if you’re regretting that decision because you think that you won’t get OTA updates, you can rest easy.
Last month we told you about a new Android phone called the Freedom 251 that costs as much as a cup of coffee. This particular device is ridiculously shady, as it looks like the company behind it stole a bunch of Adcom Ikon 4 phones and rebranded them under its own name. In fact, as Android Authority points out, the company even used whiteout to conceal the Adcom brand name on the device.
Google last week announced a developer preview of Android N, the forthcoming release of its mobile operating system. The release comes early; it was widely expected to be announced in May at Google I/O 2016, the Google developers conference. Releasing a work-in-progress build earlier in the development cycle will give Google more time to incorporate feedback from developers and will let it hand off the final release to device makers in the summer, the company said.
A walkthrough of the Node.js Foundation’s base contribution policy.
A lot has changed since io.js and Node.js merged under the Node.js Foundation. The most impressive change, and probably the change that is most relevant to the rest of the community and to open source in general, is the growth in contributors and committers to the project.
Now, what does this have to do with open source?
Well, open source projects function on both social and market norms. On one hand, we see corporate sponsors or contributors who are being paid to write code; on the other, we see several highly skilled, intelligent people contributing not for monetary gain, but because they value the community and the goodwill purpose of the project. These people identify with the altruistic ideal of giving back to others and the recognition that comes with it.
One of the most important resources that an open source project can provide to potential contributors is contributor guidelines. When eager new contributors rush over to your project to make their first open source contribution, they rely on your contributor guidelines to be their guiding hand. That means that contributor guidelines should be easy to read, thorough, and friendly.
ONS has become a recognized forum for major industry announcements and the introduction of open source networking projects. AT&T, Google and The Linux Foundation, among others have announced major networking projects and initiatives at ONS over just the last few years.
Managing the changes made to any given dataset becomes a challenge as the scope of the organization grows, especially at the level of enterprise.
WhereHows was recently released as open source by its developer, LinkedIn, which manages vast amounts of data (about 50,ooo datasets, 14,000 comments, and 35 million job execution records). The name is a compound of two important attributes of data: “WHERE is the data, and HOW is it produced/consumed.”
Among the purists is Chef, a firm which in fact describes itself as a player in automation for DevOps.
Moxie Marlinspike, a co-developer of the Signal encrypted mobile messages app, is seeing his security technology used by Facebook’s messaging service, WhatsApp.
Encryption is a key technology for social media websites such as Facebook, and the technology developed by Moxie Marlinspike (the name is a pseudonym) and now marketed by his company Open Whisper Systems in the Signal app, is playing a big part in online community moves to improve security of user data.
Paul Rouget of Mozilla has shared plans for making an initial alpha release of their next-generation Servo Engine and Servo-based Browser.html web browser release for this summer.
The first version of Servo and Browser.html is planned for release in June. Browser.html is Mozilla’s experimental web browser built atop Servo where the UI itself is built in HTML. While a Servo Alpha release was originally expected in 2015, it’s great to see a release now planned in a few months.
Amnesty International today announced a new #360Syria “virtual tour” website showing the devastation brought by Syrian government barrel bombing of the besieged city of Aleppo. The website demonstration, called “Fear of the Sky” (www.360Syria.com), is built using Mozilla A-Frame technology.
Websites like #360Syria, that allow viewers to take a virtual tour of the devastated city of Aleppo, are a significant new use case for WebVR. Technology gives people a voice where otherwise there is none. It brings a new level of visibility and greater levels of empathy to real-life situations.
First of all, there is no question that open source is becoming more pervasive in the enterprise stacks. And open source is part of the DNA of Hadoop. It is an essential part of the business model of Hadoop.
“SONiC is a collection of networking software components required to have a fully functional L3 device that can be agnostic of any particular Linux distribution,” the SONiC Github project page states. “Today SONiC runs on Debian.”
Open source ECM and BPM company Alfresco is expanding its channel presence through a new partner program tailored for businesses seeking standards-based content management solutions.
If you are a college student, you probably look forward to the summer as a relaxing time away from learning. Yeah, I get it — school can be very stressful, but sleeping late and vegetating won’t result in meaningful growth.
Instead of wasting your summer, why not learn about open source? If that sounds boring, then maybe it isn’t for you. However, if you are excited by the possibility of working on an open source project like Fedora, KDE, LibreOffice or VLC, then you should sign up for Google’s Summer of Code 2016.
While PAM has a potentially wider audience than FM:AZ, that interest isn’t as deep. I’m expecting nowhere near as many PAM sponsors. If you want to really stand out in a list of sponsors, this is your chance.
OpenBSD 5.9 is gearing up for release at the start of May as the next feature release of this BSD operating system.
Mike Belopuhov of OpenBSD presented at this weekend’s AsiaBSDCon in Tokyo about the state of OpenBSD 5.9. There are PDF slides available to those interested.
The GNU free software project has launched version 0.0.1 of its Gneural Network package in response to the “outstanding and truly inspiring” results achieved of late in proprietary artificial intelligence.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) describes Gneural Network as a GNU package for a programmable neural network, which as of 0.0.1 is “a very simple feed-forward network which can learn very simple tasks such as curve fitting” – although more advanced features will hopefully be delivered soon.
GNU Health is growing quite fast, and we take very seriously the security of the implementations around the world that trust us.
Using open source has set the city of Limerick (Ireland) free to modernise its organisation. The city merged several isolated department front-desks into one modern customer centre, with the customer relations management system and other open source solutions greatly improving service levels.
The Swiss Open Systems User group /ch/open wants the country’s cantons to use Geneva’s eVoting solution. The canton of Geneva is working to make the source code of its Internet voting solution available under an open source software licence, sometime next year.
The US is buying into open-source software development methodology. “This policy will require new software developed specifically for or by the Federal Government to be made available for sharing and re-use across Federal agencies. It also includes a pilot program that will result in a portion of that new federally-funded custom code being released to the public.”
If we take into consideration all the votings, we will notice that the greatest differences exist between the government and the opposition. It turns out that there are two Members of Parliament on the side of the government (Jarosław Gowin and Jacek Żalek) who usually voted as MPs from PO (the colour on the diagram corresponds to the club that a given Member of Parliament belonged to during most votings), yet their profiles differ considerably from the profiles of the remaining MPs. Besides, that pair migrated from one party to another, what may explain their incompatibility with the stance of PO. As far as PiS is concerned, the least compliant voters were Górski Artur and Tomaszewski Jan (who finally transferred to PO at the end of the year).
DRAWING comparisons to Edward Snowden, a graduate student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan is believed to be hiding out in Russia after illegally leaking millions of documents. While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published, on topics ranging from acoustics to zymology.
Her protest against scholarly journals’ paywalls has earned her rock-star status among advocates for open access, and has shined a light on how scientific findings that could inform personal and public policy decisions on matters as consequential as health care, economics and the environment are often prohibitively expensive to read and impossible to aggregate and datamine.
“Realistically only scientists at really big, well-funded universities in the developed world have full access to published research,” said Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics, genomics and development at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime champion of open access. “The current system slows science by slowing communication of work, slows it by limiting the number of people who can access information and quashes the ability to do the kind of data analysis” that is possible when articles aren’t “sitting on various siloed databases.”
Amos Dudley, a broke undergrad, casted a mold of his teeth using “cheap alginate powder, Permastone, and a 3d printed impression tray,” then 3D printed and vacuformed a series of alingment trays for a fraction of what it would have cost to get name-brand invisaligns.
Obviously, this only works if you have ready access to “knowledge of orthodontic movement, a 3D scanner, a mold of the teeth, CAD software, a hi-res 3D printer, retainer material, and a vacuum forming machine.”
But if you do, it doesn’t look all that challenging to roll your own alignment trays.
Released a few days back was the newest version of AMD/RTG’s HIP compiler as part of their Boltzmann initiative in porting CUDA code to run on Radeon hardware with their new software stack.
Fire has badly damaged a 16th Century hall in Manchester destroying the roof and causing extensive damage to an upper floor.
The blaze started in the roof of Wythenshawe Hall at about 03:30 GMT, Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS) said.
More than 50 firefighters tackled the “serious blaze” at the Tudor hall.
Five fire engines are still at the scene as an investigation is under way into the cause.
The timber-framed hall was built in 1540 and was home to the Tatton family for about 400 years.
Senate Bill 1342, which will be heard this week by the House Education Committee, would authorize the use of the Bible “for reference purposes” in any class where “an understanding of the Bible may be useful or relevant.” Of course, our courts have repeatedly made clear that instruction in the Bible and creationism is neither useful nor relevant nor constitutional in science class. But that didn’t stop the bill’s drafters from explicitly listing astronomy, biology, and geology among the courses into which teachers may incorporate the Bible.
One of the many frightening aspects of life under Joseph Stalin was the central direction of science by the Communist party. This led to egregious scientific data, disregarded in the west, but celebrated in the Soviet Union. One of the best examples was the nonsensical doctrine known as Lysenkoism, which rejected concepts such as genes and natural selection in favour of “natural cooperation” and the belief that physical changes imposed on one generation of organisms would pass down to the next – for example that plucking the leaves from a plant would encourage leaflessness in its descendants. Scientists who questioned the official view, such the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, were denounced, exiled and in many cases sentenced to death.
Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and senior committee member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, today released comments from the health care and patient community in response to the policy questions raised in their report, “The Price of Sovaldi and Its Impact on the U.S. Health Care System,” released on December 1, 2015.
While US funding for medical research declines, China steadily progresses as shown by a total $1,1 billion investment in new drug development between 2011 and 2015.Despite this growth, China remains, however, far behind countries (such as the US and in the EU) renowned as home to top drug industries simply because the majority of Chinese companies are not competitive with foreign big corporations. As a result, almost all Chinese firms are currently focused on the production of generic medicines (more than 95 percent of chemicals produced in the country are, in fact, generics).
The once quiet city of Flint, Michigan is facing a drinking water crisis that is drawing concern from around the nation. Here’s what you need to know about how the public health crisis has evolved.
Last week I spent a good while on writing a new security realm for KDE’s Jenkins setups. The result of my tireless java brewing is that the Jenkins installation of KDE neon now uses KDE’s Phabricator setup to authenticate users and manage permissions via OAuth.
In a shocking move, cyber criminals recently hacked the Linux Mint Web server and used it to launch an attack against the popular distro’s user base.
System rescue tools provided by antivirus makers are often used to clean infected systems after the main antivirus software detects infections.
Most antivirus makers bundle this functionality in their main products, but a few offer more specialized tools that also repair damaged files, attempting to restore the system to its earlier working point as much as possible.
Only five of such tools are currently available on the market as free tools. They are AVG Rescue CD, Avira EU-Clean, Bitdefender Rescue CD, ESET SysRescue, and Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool.
Spammed Word documents with malicious macros have become a popular method of infecting computers over the past few months. Attackers are now taking it one step further by using such documents to deliver fileless malware that gets loaded directly in the computer’s memory.
Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks analyzed a recent attack campaign that pushed spam emails with malicious Word documents to business email addresses from the U.S., Canada and Europe.
The journalist Eva Golinger (US – Venezuela) has repeatedly questioned the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. The website aporrea.org quotes her statement: «Everything that Washington was trying to achieve during the administration of Hugo Chávez is today being realized in his absence. The cancerous illness from which Chávez suffered was unusually aggressive and suspicious, and every day turns up more evidence that it is possible Chávez was murdered».
Jeffrey Goldberg’s newly published book-length article on Barack Obama and the Middle East includes a major revelation that brings US Secretary of State John Kerry’s Syrian diplomacy into sharper focus: it reports that Kerry has sought on several occasions without success over the past several months to get Obama’s approval for cruise missile strikes against the Syrian government.
Last spring, Shoshana Walter with the Center for Investigative Reporting filed a routine public records request with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department for a story on a rogue firearms instructor. The request was unceremoniously denied, so Walter did exactly what reporters do in that situation: she pushed back. Moments later she received an email that she was never meant to see.
While other states seem distressingly focused on exempting law enforcement from greater transparency — whether by crafting new loopholes in FOI laws or deciding body camera footage should remain in the control of police — California is going the other way.
‘In short, we are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2.0°C warming over pre-industrial levels’
February smashed a century of global temperature records by “stunning” margin, according to data released by NASA.
The unprecedented leap led scientists, usually wary of highlighting a single month’s temperature, to label the new record a “shocker” and warn of a “climate emergency.”
Bill McShea broke into an infectious belly laugh when I ask him the question I’ve been posing to biologists, conservationists, and zookeepers for months: What is it about the panda?
“Look at it,” he said, gesturing to snapshots of him jovially clutching baby pandas to his chest, which were tacked in his office at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia. “It’s cute as hell. You have to say, ‘Is that real? Does something really look like that?’”
McShea, a rosy-cheeked, bespectacled research biologist, has spent the last two decades devoting part of his studies to pandas, including annual pilgrimages to China to study the species’s habitat and collaborate with local conservationists. If pressed, he’ll admit a deeper fascination with the lesser-known creatures that share the pandas’ habitat—the Asiatic black bear, the takin, the tufted deer—but McShea has no trouble identifying what it is about pandas that’s so appealing to everyone else. And you really only have to look at one photo, or video, or GIF of a panda to solve the mystery.
With its round ears, fluffy fur, stub snout, tubby tummy, and those distinctive, big black polka dot eyes, it’s not hard to see why people around the world are enamoured. But there’s a growing group of dissenting voices who openly and actively hate pandas.
Nearly two-and-a-half months ago, I started a daily examination of the Trans Pacific Partnership focused on the intellectual property and digital policy issues raised by the agreement. My initial plan for the Trouble with the TPP series was to write for one month leading up to the planned signing in New Zealand on February 4th. However, the more I dug into the TPP, the more trouble I found. With this final post in the series, I wrap up the key IP and digital policy concerns with links to all the original posts.
Canadians interested in the TPP now have an opportunity to have their voices heard. The Standing Committee on International Trade has been conducting hearings on the agreement for several weeks and has announced plans for cross-country consultations. Canadians can provide written submissions by April 30th. Alternatively, they can ask the committee to appear as a witness. Details on the committee opportunities can be found here. In addition, Canadians can send their comments directly to Global Affairs Canada, which is managing the government’s consultation. The email address is TPP-PTP.Consultations@international.gc.ca.
Unit uses psychology and social media to help ‘fight in the information age’
Since hearing about Hillary and her superdelegate count, many Sanders supporters believed Bernie was automatically doomed. But actually, the superdelegates’ pledge to Clinton isn’t finalized, and each can still change his or her vote prior to the final vote following the last state primaries. Superdelegates generally vote in line with the popular vote when the time comes, but there is nothing requiring them to do so.
[...]
So how would that affect Americans?
“I think the inequality would heighten, I think that would pretty much cinch it,” Grayson told the Young Turks, adding “if you have a billionaire for the leader of the country, then it really is an oligarchy. Game over.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s key primaries, supporters of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York City to call voters in Illinois, Florida and Ohio. Many of the phone bankers were former Occupy Wall Street activists who returned to the site of the 2011 encampment because they saw parallels between Occupy and Sanders’ message. “We were really inspired by the incredible amount of grassroots momentum and energy that’s been inspired by the Sanders campaign and its critique of Wall Street, of money in politics and a rigged economy,” said Beka Economopoulos, a former Occupy activist who helped organize the phone bank. But other Occupy activists disagreed with what they saw as the co-opting of the movement; they staged a “mic check,” using Occupy’s signature call-and-response to say the movement should remain independent of political candidates.
Hackers affiliated with the Anonymous hacktivist collective have vowed to relaunch cyber-operations against US presidential candidate Donald Trump from 1 April. They threaten to ‘dismantle his campaign’ by taking his election websites offline in a large-scale and orchestrated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Hackers affiliated with the Anonymous hacktivist collective have vowed to relaunch cyber-operations against US presidential candidate Donald Trump from 1 April. They threaten to ‘dismantle his campaign’ by taking his election websites offline in a large-scale and orchestrated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
In December 2015, Anonymous officially ‘declared war’ on Trump after a radical speech in which he said Muslims should be banned from entering the United States. The operation at the time resulted in a number of websites being targeted by hackers, but failed to have lasting impact.
Despite this news media have given him a free ride saving $millions in advertising expenses and he’s leading in the GOP primaries despite ⅔ or voters voting for anyone but Trump. I hope he gets kicked out at the convention or he’ll just cause an order of magnitude more trouble before being defeated in the general election. In the unlikely event he becomes president, the world, not just USA is in for a Hell of a lot of trouble. So, it may actually be a good thing Anonymous is going after his networks.
As Donald Trump’s campaign predictably moves from toxic rhetoric targeting the most marginalized minorities to threats and use of violence, there is a growing sense that American institutions have been too lax about resisting it. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan on Sunday posted a widely cited Twitter essay voicing this concern, arguing that “Trump’s rise represents a failure in American parties, media, and civic institutions — and they’re continuing to fail right now.” He added, “Someone could capture a major party [nomination] who endorses violence [and] few seem alarmed.”
EFF is basically right: While accurate in some cases, the White House’s assertion is an overly optimistic characterization of TPP’s probable effects. For example, EFF argued that TPP would not prevent potential signatory Malaysia from suppressing, within its own territory, Internet-based political speech relating to alleged governmental misappropriation of hundreds of millions of dollars of development funds. I think that EFF’s analysis is correct.
It is possible to argue that North Korea has the world’s strictest media censorship system. North Korean media outlets are, essentially, a branch of the government propaganda bureaucracy. Their goal is not to inform, but to indoctrinate and control common people, to explain to them what they should think about the world. In a sense, North Korean media exists to distort the picture of the world in accordance with the ever-changing demands of the ruling elite.
North Korean leaders believe that this system is necessary to keep people obedient and controllable, to prevent the rise of criticism about the government. This might be the case, indeed: Being unaware of the alternatives to their lifestyles, people are less likely to dream about a change.
The Censorship of Publications Board of Ireland has banned The Raped Little Runaway by Jean Martin.
Over the last couple of years, the increasing popularity of the open source streaming software Popcorn Time has turned into one of the film industry’s biggest nightmares. Not just because it’s free, but also because it provides an extremely easy-to-use service. The fact that it is open source — and therefore essentially impossible to eradicate — just makes things worse. As part of the film industry’s attack on Popcorn Time, a UK judge was persuaded a year ago to order a group of web sites to be blocked purely on the grounds that they were distributing the Popcorn Time software. That was the first step down a slippery slope, and it seems that the second step has now been taken in Norway.
The Spectre of censorship has visited Hollywood’s secret service agent in India, where 007’s kissing scenes have been cut by half. But there’s more than meets the eye. Dennis Hanlon and Shorna Pal explain.
On 19 November 2015, the day before it was due to be released in Indian theatres, the Times of India announced that the Central Board of Film Censorship (CBFC) had ordered the kissing scenes in the latest James Bond film, Spectre, to be reduced by half.
A very active and lively discussion has been taking place on the Prime Minister’s Facebook page regarding the No Jab, No Pay law. I made several posts in response to Dr Patrick Stokes – a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy who supports censorship when it comes to vaccination as evidenced by his article on The Conversation entitled: No, You’re Not Entitled to Your Opinion.
Dr Stokes is an Australian academic who readily admits that he is not an authority on the this issue. Furthermore, he openly states that he does not WANT to know about the science of vaccination, instead claiming that everyone should defer to doctors and health authorities because they are the only ones capable of understanding the subject.
Graffiti artist Danilo Maldonado Machado, known as “El Sexto”, found this out when he was locked up for most of 2015 for painting the names of Raúl and Fidel – the names of the Castro brothers who have been in power since 1959 – on the backs of two live pigs. He had planned to release the animals as part of an artistic performance but, before he could, he was accused of desacato (contempt) and thrown in prison for ten months. He was never formally charged or brought before a judge.
As if it isn’t bad enough that Ireland still has a Censorship of Publications Board, at the weekend we discovered that this archaic outfit is still active. Given that it’s been 18 years since these book-burners in chief forbade publication of a book in Ireland – 1998’s The Base Guide to London, a book about seedy London hangouts – you could be forgiven for thinking they’d done the decent thing of realising it’s the 21st century and calling it a day on their censoring antics. But no – on Saturday it was revealed that the CPB has banned The Raped Little Runaway, a weird novel by Jean Martin, which means it’s an offence to distribute the book anywhere in the Republic of Ireland.
The UK’s investigatory powers bill receives its second reading on Tuesday. At present the draft law fails to meet international standards for surveillance powers. It requires significant revisions to do so.
First, a law that gives public authorities generalised access to electronic communications contents compromises the essence of the fundamental right to privacy and may be illegal. The investigatory powers bill does this with its “bulk interception warrants” and “bulk equipment interference warrants”.
Second, international standards require that interception authorisations identify a specific target – a person or premises – for surveillance. The investigatory powers bill also fails this standard because it allows “targeted interception warrants” to apply to groups or persons, organisations, or premises.
Mark Zuckerberg has a gargantuan social network. If you add up the number of accounts from the services he owns – Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram – you get a figure of 3.5bn, which is roughly half the world’s population. Granted many people will have multiple accounts and belong to multiple services, but still, that’s a lot of pokes, likes and cat gifs. Especially impressive given the scepticism and the love-hate relationship many have with his empire, particularly the Facebook mothership – or Dark Star, depending on your point of view. Being part of modern society without being involved somehow with the Zuck is increasingly tricky: instant messaging is hard without going via Facebook’s servers; you’ll need Instagram if you want to show off your perfectly arranged avocados and children’s fancy-dress outfits to the world; and if you want to date, no Facebook means no Tinder. Even if you’re one of those refuseniks who proudly claim “I’m not on Facebook”, you probably are – what about that chemically inconvenienced stag weekend in Tallinn that your pals created a Facebook album for? Yes, you’ll have to join to find out.
The government’s investigatory powers bill faces its second reading in the House of Commons today. Having represented many individuals in cases against the police and the security and intelligence services as a human rights lawyer, and having also worked with those same bodies as director of public prosecutions, I know all too well the challenges this legislation will throw up and the importance of making sure parliament gets it right.
“In short, domestic law enforcement officials now have access to huge troves of American communications, obtained without warrants, that they can use to put people in cages,” the ACLU of Massachusetts notes in a post on its PrivacySOS blog. “FBI agents don’t need to have any ‘national security’ related reason to plug your name, email address, phone number or other ‘selector’ into the NSA’s gargantuan data trove. … That means information the NSA collects for purposes of so-called ‘national security’ will be used by police to lock up ordinary Americans for routine crimes.”
Other spokespeople had similar nods of “yes, more restrictions” to add and even hinted that these new limits may be made public at some point. Heartening news… perhaps. We don’t know how expansive the data-sharing was prior to the new guidelines and we still don’t know how scaled back it will be post-restrictions.
“This is particularly timely given the passage of the current Investigatory Powers Bill with its authorisation for State-sponsored mass hacking and intrusion into individual privacy and personal freedom.”
A gathering of journalists, hackers and whistleblowers in Berlin this weekend heard former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, Edward Snowden, issue a call for citizens to find ways to take direct control over the information technologies we use everyday.
Labour MPs will abstain in a vote on the Government’s latest so-called “Snooper’s Charter”, the shadow home secretary has said.
Andy Burnham said the Investigatory Powers Bill, which contains a raft of government spying powers, should give people “a presumption of privacy” but said he would work constructively with the Government on it.
As the government’s fight to eliminate encryption as we know it, and ensure themselves unfettered access to all of all Americans’ communications, spreads out of the most-mediagenic example with Apple, Barack Obama has weighed in, using some of the oldest and sleaziest scare tactics available.
It looks as though the National Security Agency (NSA) crown jewels are about to be fondled by the rest of America’s intelligence agencies. The NSA monitors and collects various types of communications including emails, phone calls, and even transmissions conducted by our foreign allies (and foes). As we learned from the the Edward Snowden leaks, this information is stored in bulk and is one of the reasons for the ever-increasing use of encryption in our smartphones (see Apple vs FBI).
Historically, the data collected has mainly been kept within the halls of the NSA and only offered to other intelligence agencies — i.e. the CIA and the FBI — after being scrubbed of “irrelevant” identifiable personal information. But now, according to sources familiar with the matter, the Obama administration will allow the NSA will share any and all information, unfiltered, with other intelligence agencies.
There is only one number you need to know to determine why encrypted devices and those who want them will win this legal battle between the FBI and Apple.
The guy that warned George Bush about an imminent al-Qaida attack before 9/11 is taking Apple’s side in the company’s fight against the FBI over whether it can be compelled to break into the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone.
A former counter-terrorism chief has laid into the Feds over its ongoing Apple iPhone battle – saying FBI director Jim Comey is exaggerating the need for access and that if agents really wanted into the phone, they would just send it to the NSA…
Perhaps you’re beginning to see a pattern. Everything our government uses against foreign enemies, eventually makes its way back home. Every war is an opportunity to try out new technologies, before turning around and using them against American citizens. It just goes to show, that war really is the health of the state.
As part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the nation’s de facto secret police force is now recruiting students and teachers to spy on each other and report anyone who appears to have the potential to be “anti-government” or “extremist.”
If you’re thinking that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is busy drinking Cristal champagne and enjoying caviar, take a moment to notice South Korean spy agency’s report that tells that the number of cyberattacks on the South has doubled over the past month.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been left politically damaged after her Christian Democrat (CDU) party suffered significant losses in regional elections, as the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party put on significant gains in regional elections.
Yet again the US is simply disappearing people into secret prisons on foreign soil. Obama has in effect maintained the Bush doctrine that “enemy combatants” are neither alleged criminals nor soldiers. They do not get the rights of alleged criminals to decent treatment and a fair trial, nor do they get the Geneva Convention rights of soldiers captured during a war. They are non-persons who can simply be pitched into a black hole.
One of the world’s best female tennis players, Maria Sharapova, has been suspended, because a medicine she has been taking legally under a doctor’s prescription for ten years was suddenly retroactively declared to be a prohibited substance that is a “metabolic modulator.”
The medicine, known as mildronate and also as meldonium in its banned name, has been in medical use for thirty years. Its inventor declared that the prohibition of mildronate “is a crime” and will lead to deaths among athletes. He says that it has not been proven that the medicine enhances athlete performance, but it does protect their hearts from over-exertion.
It only took five minutes from the time he began. Donald Trump was in the middle of a riff about “Lyin’ Ted Cruz” when a protester stood up.
“So early,” Trump said. “Get ’em out.”
The Republican frontrunner made it through just four more sentences before the next one stood up. “Hello! Go home to mom.”
RHINESTONES twinkling around the perimeter of her shades, cornsilk curls undaunted by the Pensacola sun, Elizabeth Kemper, a supporter of Donald J. Trump, is all certainty. She is fed up. “You know, this country is so dang political correct,” she tells a CNN reporter. “I’m afraid to say what I really feel, you know?”
On her shirt, a silhouette of Mr. Trump’s head nestles in the protective crook of the state of Florida, his face turned stalwartly eastward, away from Mexico, his Mordor.
Ms. Kemper is blazing, passionate, incredulous. “I think this country better go back to some of those values. Some of the values my parents grew up with, my grandparents grew up with,” she says. “Whatever was wrong, they could point it out and tell you.”
On the morning of December 26th, 2015, as Amrik Singh Bal was waiting near his home for a ride to work, two men in a pickup truck stopped nearby to yell racial slurs at him. Singh, a 68-year old Sikh American who worked at a nearby farm outside Fresno, California, attempted to cross the street to get away from his assailants. As he did so, the men struck Bal with their vehicle, knocking him to the ground before jumping out of the truck and assaulting him. By the time they were done, the elderly Bal was left bleeding in the street with a broken collarbone and cuts across his face. The attack was described by local police in Fresno as a hate crime.
Unfortunately, assaults against Sikh Americans are nothing new. In the first month after the 9/11 attacks, the Sikh Coalition, an advocacy group, tallied more than 300 cases of violence and discrimination against Sikh Americans. Many additional incidents followed in subsequent years, the most high-profile being a 2012 terrorist attack in which a white supremacist shot and killed six congregants at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, wounding several others. Now, as U.S. politicians, led by Donald Trump, increasingly embrace xenophobia, and as fears of terrorism surge back, Sikh activists say their community is experiencing another spike in discrimination.
The DEA seems very concerned about controlled substances. Internal control of these substances? Not so much. A recent Inspector General’s audit found multiple problems with the DEA’s handling of seized drugs, the most egregious of which appears to be this particular aspect.
[...]
The OIG recommends the DEA start doing the thing it should have been doing 100% of the time already. The DEA concurs and will presumably correct it at the speed of bureaucracy. The problem is that this is obviously a systemic issue that has gone unaddressed for years. This lax handling of evidence should call into question the amounts cited during prosecution, not to mention any statements in court regarding the integrity of the evidence it supplies.
Just after 5 p.m. on July 29, 2015, two Colorado Springs cops raced with lights and sirens to a burglary in progress. They’d been told 72-year-old Albert Schmeiler, who has Alzheimer’s disease, could be “very violent.”
But on their arrival, Officers David Isue and Nicholas Ryland found Schmeiler calmly standing in the driveway with his mother-in-law, Margo Alvarez, according to a police report.
Hillary Clinton told a man who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent almost four decades on death row that she was still in favour of the death penalty.
In the run-up to primaries in five states on 15 March, Ms Clinton said she was “struggling” with the concept of the death penalty but that it should still be applied for “horrific mass killings” under the federal, not the state, system.
The Democrat was asked a question on the subject by exonerated man Ricky Jackson, who “came perilously close to [his] own execution.” Mr Jackson was convicted at 18 years old for killing a salesman in Cleveland, Ohio in 1975. The key witness was 12 years old at the time and later recanted in court, as reported by CNN.
When FCC boss Tom Wheeler was first appointed to head the agency, few expected much. After all, here was yet another FCC revolving door regulator with a history of lobbying for both the cable and wireless industries — now tasked with heading an agency that oversees both. Yet the one-time “dingo” surprised everybody by fighting for tougher net neutrality rules, raising the standard definition of broadband, standing up for municipal broadband and improved broadband competition, and now fighting to unlock the cable industry’s stranglehold over the cable set top box.
Several cable operators managed to eek out some modest subscriber gains in the fourth quarter of last year, prompting some renewed claims by the industry that cord cutting was “on the ropes” or was otherwise an unfair hallucination of the media. After all, Comcast saw a net gain of 89,000 pay TV users during the fourth quarter. Time Warner Cable similarly saw its best year since 2006 with a net gain of 54,000 TV subscribers. Charter also saw a net gain in the fourth quarter of 29,000 video subscribers. For some of these companies, this was the best performance they’ve seen since 2006.
It’s early March in Marrakech, and a gleaming conurbation of hotels run in the kind of rare equilibrium of slick organisation and genuine friendliness that Tyler Brûlé might dream about.
Inside, the people who run the internet’s naming and numbering systems have been meeting with some of the governments who would rather be doing the job themselves. Eventually they cut a deal, and then negotiators from countries mostly in the northern hemisphere staggered blinking into the sunlight and splayed like lizards around the azure swimming pools, almost too tired to drink. Almost.
And so another conspiracy theory falls, this times at the hands of faulty DRM. I’ll put this here so nobody has to in the comments: never blame malice when incompetence is just as likely. Or maybe just blame DRM always and for everything. You’re going to be right a decent amount of the time.
We’ll rally in front of the global office of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to oppose a disastrous proposal by Hollywood and proprietary tech companies: adding Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to the HTML standard that undergirds the Web. We’ll hear experts and activists speak on the topic, and distribute flyers, right outside an ongoing W3C event.
The UK IPO will provide updated guidance for design applicants after the Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeal’s decision that PMS International’s Kiddee Case does not infringe Magmatic’s registered community design (RCD) for the Trunki suitcase
Halo (a Hong Kong based company) sued Comptoir (a Canadian company) in N.D. Illinois Federal Court for infringing its intellectual property rights associated with its furniture designs. The IP rights here include design patents, copyrights (pending registration) and non-registered trademark rights.
Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group BREIN has announced that it will begin pursuing legal action against individual BitTorrent users who share copyright infringing content. These pirates can look forward to settlement demands of several thousands of euros and the group plans to punish VPN users even harder, if they are exposed.
Let’s go back just a few months to remind you about two stories that seem fairly unrelated.
To Kill a Mockingbird is obviously one of the most well-known and widely read books in American literature. And, of course, there’s been some controversy of late around its author, Harper Lee, who passed away last month. Much of the controversy focused on the decision last year to publish Go Set a Watchman, which was initially described as something of a long lost “sequel” to TKAM, but which it was later admitted was actually an early draft of TKAM. Many argued that Lee didn’t actually intend for the book to be published, and that she may have been taken advantage of by those around her. Either way, the controversy is now growing, following Lee’s death, as what appears to be the first and second orders of business for Lee’s estate was to (1) have the details of her will sealed and (2) stop publishing the mass market paperback version of To Kill a Mockingbird, making sure that the only new versions of the book that will be available will be the noticeably more expensive trade paperbacks.
No room for free speech about Željko Topić at the EPO…
…because it’s embarrassing to Team Battistelli
Summary: The highly controversial person who initiated a lot of the union-busting chaos has quite an extraordinary past back in Croatia
THIS morning we wrote about a possible successor (replacement rather) of Battistelli, the current EPO President. Both MIP* and IAM’s editor in chief nodded in a possible agreement over at Twitter (relaying the article to their followers) and as promised, here is an English translation of this article which we said would be published at a later date (well, it’s almost 5 AM now on a Tuesday, so technically it’s another date).
The following text includes possible evidence that Battistelli should drag Topić along with him as he leaves the Office. We highlight in yellow some noteworthy bits because the article is fairly long.
Criminal proceedings pending against Topić in six cases
Non-certified translation from the original Croatian.
Wednesday 11th, April 2012, 07:00
Author: Franjo DobrovicPicture caption: Croatia is faced with an international scandal
The announcement on the official website of the State Intellectual Property Office of the Republic of Croatia that Željko Topić has been appointed as of 1 May 2012 to a post at the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich, could lead to a disgrace and a scandal – not only for Mr. Topić himself, but also for the Republic of Croatia. In such a law-abiding country as Germany it may prove difficult to conceal the criminal proceedings already pending against Mr. Topić – although he himself appears to have managed to conceal details of these affairs from the EPO and from the international professional public so far.
According to our information, there is also an appeal pending before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which includes mention of Mr. Topic’s alleged bribery of the former education minister in the government of the corrupt Ivo Sanader. Currently there are criminal proceedings pending against Željko Topić in six cases that are in various stages of processing to which a number of civil lawsuits against him must also be added.
Intellectual criminal
In the documentation, which accompanies the file before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, it is alleged that Željko Topić literally “purchased” his position as director of the State Office of Intellectual Property [in Croatian: DZIV] in 2008, paying the then Minister of Education Dragan Primorac nearly 500,000 kuna. This is also well known to the current government. In January 2009, the then government of the Republic of Croatia requested an explanation and a review on the part of the former Ministry of Economy, Labour and Entrepreneurship [Croatian: MGRP] concerning the allegations of bribery and other illegal acts by Mr. Topić. However, the MGRP never complied with the request. Had the then government and monitoring system been functioning properly, Željko Topić should already have been replaced in 2008 – following the exposure as a result of the state inspection of his violations of financial and labor laws, the cover-up of criminal offences by the previous Director-General of the DZIV, the payment of bribes and other matters, reflected in numerous criminal complaints. According to our information, even the Bishop of Banja Luka, Franjo Komarić, lobbied the Cabinet of Ivo Sanader in 2008 on behalf of this esteemed “intellectual criminal” for a renewal of his mandate as Director-General of the DZIV.
Interesting spicy stories
We are further informed that a confidential urgent memorandum with all the juicy details on the “Topić Case” including the risk of a possible international scandal at the expense of the Republic of Croatia has been lying for a number of days now on the desks of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Croatia, the first deputy prime minister, the deputy prime minister Mimica and other members of the Government of the Republic of Croatia. However, there has been no official response so far, either from this quarter or from the government department responsible for the DZIV headed by Minister Željko Jovanović. The only information issued by the Croatian government so far has been a brief notification referring to the appointment of the Deputy Director, Liljana Kuterovac as acting Director-General of the DZIV for a period of six months. This appointment has proven to be questionable, as the newly appointed Director-General is a graduate in electrical engineering, whereas the post actually requires a person with legal qualifications. Additionally, in 2008 the then Director-General, Mr. Topić, carried out a restructuring of the DZIV, against the recommendations of the EU and contrary to official undertakings given by the DZIV to the EU in the framework of the CARDS-programme, by effectively abolishing the department dealing with authors’ and similar rights. Intellectual property is divided into two sectors: industrial property, an area in which over a hundred people work in the DZIV, while only a single official is now responsible for the other fundamental area – authors’ and related rights. In view of various criminal complaints and other proceedings against Željko Topić there is reason to suspect that this matter constitutes a joint offence in the form of abuse of office and power under Article 333 of the Croatian Criminal Code*. There are at least three persons who appear to be involved here, namely the Director-General of the DZIV, Željko Topić, his former deputy Romana Matanovac Vuckovic (who was previously active in the Association of Composers ZAMP which she failed to publicly disclose) and her best friend Tajana Tomic.
On 14 March 2012, the “Intelektiv” Conference on Intellectual Property organized by the American Chamber of Commerce (AmChamCroatia) took place in the Forum Convention Centre Zagreb. The main sponsor of the “Intelektiv” Conference on Intellectual Property was the Croatian Composers’ Union (Croatian HDS ZAMP). Additional information about this “interesting” case can be accessed on the official website: www.intelektiv.com
Although it had been announced in the official programme of the conference that the Director-General of DZIV, Željko Topić, would give a talk, to the general astonishment of those present he failed to appear as scheduled. Instead – whether by coincidence or not – Mr. Ivan Mijatovic, Mag. Iur., who was presented as a Chief Police Inspector, appeared as a speaker and representative of the Ministry of the Interior. Ivan Mijatovic has been working at the Ministry since 1993, initially assigned to the Police Headquarters in Zagreb where he was
responsible for dealing with the infringement of intellectual property rights. From 2008 onwards he has held the post of Chief Police Inspector of the police department which deals with white-collar criminality and corruption, where his tasks include monitoring the violation of intellectual property rights and computer criminality. Perhaps Mr. Mijatovic from the Ministry of the Interior could have explained to the Prime Minister in a few words who Željko Topić really is and what his appointment to an international organization like the EPO means at a time when Croatia is subject to EU monitoring in relation to its legal system – with the aim of determining how and by whom his appointment was facilitated, particularly in view of the series of very dangerous and serious criminal charges tailing him from behind and of which the law enforcement agencies do not yet appear to be aware.In view of the fact that the EU, as well as the international media, are following the matter with great attention, it is to be expected that Mr. Topić will be subject to particular scrutiny by the media upon his arrival at the EPO in Munich as the European and the German public learn at first-hand who exactly their new guest is.
* Article 333: Associating for the Purpose of Committing a Criminal Offense
(1) Whoever organizes a group of people or in some other way associates in joint action three or more persons, the objectives of whom are directed toward the perpetration of a serious criminal offense for which, according to the law, imprisonment for five years or a more severe punishment may be imposed shall be punished by imprisonment for three months to three years.
(2) Whoever organizes a criminal organization or manages it shall be punished by imprisonment for six months to five years.
(3) A member of the group referred to in paragraph 1 of this Article shall be punished by a fine or by imprisonment not exceeding one year.
(4) A member of the group referred to in paragraph 2 of this Article, shall be punished by imprisonment for three months to three years.
(5) If the member of a group or a criminal organization uncovers such a group or criminal organization prior to committing a criminal offense as a member of it or for it, the court may remit his/her punishment.
It is important to remember that a lot of the union-busting chaos began when Topić’s reputation was at stake. Everywhere Topić goes chaos follows, or so it seems… █
____
* MIP (Managing IP) also pointed out that Antonio Campinos has his existing term until 2020, but then again Battistelli has got his for another couple of years and given the state of emergency at the EPO he can be fired once he accepts his golden parachute (superfluous severance).
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