05.03.17
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 7:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Related: EPO Budget Obscures and Distorts Facts About the Unitary Patent (UPC) in a Classic Antidemocratic Exercise by an Unaccountable Institution
Last year: Bristows LLP’s Hatred/Disdain of UK/EU Democracy Demonstrated; Says “Not Only Will the Pressure for UK Ratification of the UPC Agreement Continue, But a Decision is Wanted Within Weeks.”
Summary: A look at the self-serving parties in the UK which resort to lies (for lobbying purposes) and keep pushing for patent trolls to prey on the British market, wreaking havoc while nobody but litigators get paid aplenty
HELPED by the regime of the EPO, and with Bristows having taken charge of much of IP Kat, blogs such as these (formerly critics of the EPO’s regime) are becoming indistinguishable — at least at times — from IAM, the EPO-leaning think tank.
“So now comes IAM, funded by patent trolls, citing a patent troll in support of patent trolls, even in the UK (where IAM is based).”There is a growing risk that patent trolls will soon flock to the UK. IAM’s long series of pro-trolls (in the UK) articles regarding this case have been making it abundantly clear that IAM is totally in favour, citing Justice Birss and InterDigital (an anti-Android troll which was last mentioned in December after we had written about it for years). Yesterday IAM wrote that “a lawsuit always remains a distinct possibility in today’s environment, but on the analyst call Merritt also highlighted how the recent decision from London’s High Court in Unwired Planet v Huawei should be a boon to licensors.”
They mean a boon to trolls.
So now comes IAM, funded by patent trolls, citing a patent troll in support of patent trolls, even in the UK (where IAM is based). It’s like opening one’s country/town gates to the enemy.
“Patent trolls are a business opportunity for IAM and Bristows.”Bristows too has run a long series of pro-trolls articles, piggybacking this case. The Bristows-run IP Kat, one might say, has become a proponent of patent trolls. Isn’t it wonderful? A British blog cheering for foreign patent trolls to come to Britain and sue companies…
As usual, as can be seen yesterday (latest in the pro-trolls series). Bristows staff is reprinting other Bristows staff, even with sheer lies in tact. Bristows lies right there in the headline (consistent with its coverage of UPC matters). For the uninitiated, Unwired Planet is a patent troll that has trolled in the UK and eventually won. We wrote about it when this whole thing started in 2015. It’s a dangerous precedent.
“But,” says Bristows, “attendees are never in short supply, and for the latest Rapid response event following the handing down of the latest judgment in the Unwired Planet cases (see IPKat summary here) patent litigator and new AIPPI member, Rachael Cartwright (Bristows), took to expertly reporting for the IPKat.”
“British companies oppose UPC, knowing it would lead to more patent trolls in the UK.”‘Reporting’ maybe. In scare quotes. These people have a habit of lying. It’s marketing, not “expertly reporting”. From Cartwright, the only part which somehow alludes to or speaks about trolls is this: “Additionally, he did not appear to appreciate the fact that the historic royalty rates in this market are heavily reduced due to the negotiations occurring primarily between manufacturers and that the recent rise of the NPEs has affected this balance.”
That does not agree with what the headline says. Well, they need to fix the headline, but as it uses a question mark at the end they can defend it being as is (it’s well known that headlines with question marks at the end are usually wrong and deserve “No!” as the answer).
Patent trolls are a business opportunity for IAM and Bristows. Never mind if they derive this money from actual producers, i.e. by destroying British companies.
“It once again proves we were right about the UPC, unlike Bristows and IAM with its fake news.”British companies oppose UPC, knowing it would lead to more patent trolls in the UK.
Speaking of Bristows lies, remember how it misled clients on UKIPO and UPC? Well, British media says today that there is no UPC ratification any time soon. To quote WIPR:
The UK’s ratification of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement will have to wait until after the election of the next government.
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In February, nearly three-quarters of WIPR readers were sceptical over the December start date, citing Brexit as a major spanner in the works.
Team UPC and UPC proponents are noticing the above [1, 2]. It once again proves we were right about the UPC, unlike Bristows and IAM with its fake news. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Because “production”!
Reference: genome.gov (US)
Summary: With fewer opposition/appeal opportunities, not to mention lack of oversight, terrible patents are being fast-tracked under Battistelli, paving the way to truly devastating things which would likely cost lives
MUCH as we had feared, the EPO under Battistelli (i.e. totally dysfunctional) went on to granting all sorts of crazy patents, making itself the world's laughing stock when it comes to patent quality. Battistelli does not even understand patents. He didn’t touch the subject until he was near retirement age. He thinks of them like commodities in a factory and uses words like “demand”, “production”, etc. That’s how frustratingly hopeless he is.
“Battistelli does not even understand patents.”Based on these two press releases from yesterday [1, 2] and a new article from the UK, in spite of oppositions and objections (from courts even), the USPTO follows crooked Battistelli and lets CRISPR be patented. “Scientists and inventors have been watching the decisions of the EPO and USPTO,” says the article, “because these decisions may leave one of these entities with a patent portfolio worth billions of dollars.”
“It does not take a genius to understand why hitherto, for a very long time in fact, patents on CRISPR have been verboten.”So it’s all about greed, isn’t it? And at whose expense? Where are the honest economists of the EPO as opposed to French cronies of Battistelli? (Yann Ménière)
It does not take a genius to understand why hitherto, for a very long time in fact, patents on CRISPR have been verboten. “In parallel with the USPTO’s review,” the article says, “the EPO was considering what, if any, patent protection it should grant UC. UC’s European patent application was the subject of great interest, as several third-party observations were submitted to the EPO seeking to impede the issuance of the patent. These observations included arguments that the UC patent publications did not support a claim scope that encompassed CRISPR in a eukaryotic environment, similar to those presented in the United States. Despite these submissions, the EPO has notified the public that it intends to issue a patent to UC for the use of CRISPR-Cas9 in either prokaryotic or eukaryotic cells. Within nine months of issuance, this patent may be the subject of third-party oppositions that challenge whether the patent should have issued. If filed, an opposition will afford the third-party a substantive role in the arguments before the EPO than it had before, similar to the procedure in the US where a third-party cab remain involved during an interference proceeding. This may increase the likelihood of the EPO questioning a claim scope that includes use in a eukaryotic cell.”
“That’s why scientists, not crooked politicians, are needed for top positions at the EPO.”As is widely known by now (even by EPO stakeholders, not just insiders), Battistelli has attacked oppositions and appeals, narrowing their impact and ensuring that a massive decline in patent quality will be harder to detect and measure.
Battistelli’s regime and bullies have already cost many people their lives. With patents like the above, Battistelli might soon have a lot more ‘blood on his hands’ (maybe millions of people). That’s why scientists, not crooked politicians, are needed for top positions at the EPO. Battistelli’s political associations have in fact disqualified him, but he doesn’t obey rules, not even his own. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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MacBooks are quite popular within the commercial open source community. I cover a lot of open source events and all I see are MacBooks running macOS. I myself carry a MacBook to such events.
Why?
The short answer is that it just works.
The longer answer is that macOS is UNIX so you get access to all utilities, commands and tools that you get on your desktop Linux box, including running cronjobs, rsyncing files and writing USBs with the ‘dd’ command from macOS’s native Terminal app.
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Over 50 per cent of US schoolchildren use Chromebooks in class and now…
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Server
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Just over a week ago, Ben Golub was on stage at the DockerCon 17 conference explaining how well his company Docker Inc. was doing and why container use is the future of technology. While Golub was optimistic about the future of Docker Inc., apparently his future as CEO of the company was to be short-lived. Today Docker Inc. announced that Steve Singh will be the company’s new CEO.
What is surprising about the move is that there was no indication, at DockerCon 17 or elsewhere, that a CEO search or replacement exercise was under way. As it turns out, discussions about a new CEO have been ongoing for weeks, though there was no formal executive search under way.
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Kernel Space
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Another pull request worth mentioning for Linux 4.12 are the MD (Multiple Device) Software RAID changes.
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Intel’s P-State CPU frequency scaling driver continues getting in shape with the latest mainline Linux Git code and the CPUFreq Schedutil governor also received some tuning, among other power management and ACPI changes vetted for Linux 4.12.
For the Linux 4.12 kernel, the Intel P-State driver’s sysfs interface has been reworked so it’s now “more straightforward and more intuitive”, P-State should now work with all CPUs advertising hardware P-States (HWP), the load-based P-State selection algorithm will now be used on a wider range of systems, there is now Gemini Lake support in P-State, and there has been other clean-ups and optimization work to this Intel CPU scaling driver alternative to ACPI CPUFreq.
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For those making use of the Linux kernel’s integrated livepatch functionality, the time to load patched modules will be faster in some instances with the in-development Linux 4.12 kernel.
Jiri Kosina of SUSE sent in the livepatching updates today for the Linux 4.12 kernel. Aside from a per-task consistency model and other changes, what caught our attention is that the patch module load time is reduced for some modules.
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Applications
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Version 0.7 of the Jailhouse Linux hypervisor has been released.
Jailhouse 0.7 adds support for debug console access from the root Linux cell, support for Intel’s Denverton SoC, gcov code coverage statistics, and a configuration for the Orange Pi Zero.
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PeaZip, an open-source and cross-platform file archiver utility for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems providing a unified and portable interface and supporting around 190 file formats, was updated to version 6.4.1.
PeaZip 6.4.1 comes about one month after the release of version 6.4.0, the first in the new stable series, and, as expected, it’s a maintenance update adding various improvements and fixing some of the issues reported by users lately.
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Proprietary
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If your company hasn’t already chosen to utilize Slack, it’s probably only a matter of time. For anyone who has been around IRC before, Slack might seem like a total ripoff. I’ll be honest, when one of the companies I work for starting using it, I wasn’t impressed, because I could do all the same things with IRC.
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Hi guys, it is been a long pause on our website due to our exams and stuff but we are now back with more interesting stuff for you guys. Today we are going to meet Discord. If you are into online gaming and MOBA type games then you must have used or heard about Discord. It is one of the most versatile app out there for voice and text based chat. There are other apps like Skype or Teamspeak but Discord is unique in it’s own way. Let’s get to know more about this app.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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The Wine Staging release 2.7 is now available.
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Wine Staging, the experimental area for future Wine development builds has a new version out. Not much exciting in this release compared to previous releases.
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The Wine Staging development team announced today the release and immediate availability of download of the Wine Staging 2.7 open-source implementation of Wine on GNU/Linux operating systems.
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Building off last week’s Wine 2.7 release is now an updated Wine-Staging.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The last two weeks have been busy for the KDE Community. On April 20 we announced the release of KDE Applications 17.04, and five days later we released a new set of bugfixes and translations for Plasma, officially versioned Plasma 5.9.5.
Both new versions of our products have introduced several features and stability improvements to the overall KDE user experience. Here are some of the highlights from the latest KDE Applications and Plasma releases. As always, you can find a lot more information in their respective changelogs.
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From Sunday, 10th to Saturday, 16th of September we will meet in the middle of Europe to make more KDE Applications accessible to as many people as possible and to improve some of our PIM (Personal Information Management) apps.
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One contribution that people can easily do/make and doesn’t need a lot of Unix skills is the Debian SSO documentation , you could do in the Debian wiki or if mediawiki is your tea then the Debconf wiki is also welcoming which uses mediawiki. The current documentation is text-based, it would be an improvement if we have the same thing with help of pictures showing how you get the certificate and add it to your favourite browser. Let somebody who is new try it, if nobody steps up say in a week, then will do that documentation myself.
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New Releases
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Terry Fage from the Koozali SME Server development team was proud to announce today, May 2, 2017, the release and general availability of the Koozali SME Server 9.2 operating system.
After being in development since early March, the Koozali SME Server 9.2 release is now the latest stable and most advanced of the server-oriented GNU/Linux distro based on CentOS, which in turn is derived from the freely distributed sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Sayre’s law states: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake”. In that context, it is perhaps easy to understand why the discussion around the version number for the next major openSUSE Leap release has gone on for hundreds of sometimes vitriolic messages. While this change is controversial, the openSUSE board hopes that it will lead to more rational versioning in the long term — but the world has a way of interfering with such plans.
OpenSUSE Leap is an interesting hybrid distribution; its core packages come from the slow-and-stable SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) release, but those packages are replaced or supplemented by much newer software where desired. The current (and only) openSUSE Leap release was originally based on SLE 12 and openSUSE 13.1. The project had an immediate problem in that it needed to come up with a version number for this new distribution; in the end, it did what any of us would have done and chose 42. The current release is openSUSE Leap 42.2.
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That said, this decision has set up another existential crisis for the future: what happens when the SLE 42 release comes out and openSUSE Leap is faced with reusing a version number — a deed seen as being even more foul than going backward? Brown shrugged off this problem, saying that, at the current release rate, SLE 42 isn’t due for over 100 years. There should, he implied, be time for plenty of other flame wars before that one needs to heat up.
Brown’s math is neglecting an important fact, though: SLE just skipped over two numbers, and might well be expected to do the same thing again in the next century. After all, 16 is a power of two, and all those zeroes might make some potential customers nervous. It’s also the atomic number of sulfur; best to just skip it. Italians see 17 as an exceptionally ill-starred number. 18 is voting age in much of the world, and nobody has had luck with voting recently, so that one should be avoided too. 19 is suspiciously prime, but might yet prove acceptable pending further research. And so on; SLE 42 may come far sooner than anybody expects.
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Red Hat Family
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Gordon Haff, Technology Evangelist at Red Hat, discusses container technology and how it impacts cloud computing.
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Red Hat is launching OpenShift.io today, its first major foray into offering cloud-based developer tools. As the name implies, OpenShift.io sits on top of the company’s Kubernetes-based OpenShift container management platform and provides developers with the tools they need to build cloud-native, container-based apps. That includes team collaboration services, Agile planning tools, developer workspace management, an IDE for coding and testing, as well as monitoring and — of course — continuous integration and delivery services.
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For the first time ever, Red Hat will align its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), development and release dates with a third-party: Amazon Web Services (AWS). This alliance underlines just how important the cloud is to Red Hat as it moves from being a Linux distributor first to being a cloud services provider first.
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Red Hat customers will now be able to deploy Amazon Web Services (AWS) tools directly from Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform, thanks to a new partnership announced Tuesday.
The AWS services can be leveraged through OpenShift in the cloud and on-premise, according to a press release announcing the integration. Also, the integration of new AWS products and services will come to Red Hat Enterprise Linux even faster as a result.
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The Red Hat Summit got underway today, highlighted by a new partnership with Amazon for OpenShift that doesn’t involve the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) as well as some bold pronouncements about competitors in the cloud market.
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Finance
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Fedora
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This week is the huge, annual conference where Red Hat comes together with its customers, partners, and key communities. One of the main features of the Partner Pavilion here is the gigantic Community Central area. Anchoring that space are the Fedora and CentOS booths, back to back.
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Debian Family
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I was assigned 15 hours of work by Freexian’s Debian LTS initiative and worked 13.25 hours.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s Simon Fels announced today that he’s working on bringing the Snapd Snappy daemon to the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Raspbian operating system to allow the installation of Snaps.
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Flavours and Variants
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Lubuntu 17.04 continues to deliver a nice and friendly environment for those who like a light and snappy uncomplicated experience without many graphical bells and whistles. And it still lacks a common theme for applications and their design, because LXDE is not fully a “desktop environment” per se.
The Live session of Lubuntu 17.04 felt quick and snappy for me, which is no wonder on my new laptop.
The only small problem I mentioned in this review was the set of default applications. But that’s easy to fix, isn’t it?
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Advantech’s Linux-driven “ROM-7510” module offers TI’s dual-core AM5728 SoC, 8GB eMMC, USB 3.0, PCIe, GbE, SATA, and industrial temperature support.
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An Android-based “Clazio” speaker and smart home hub features a 7-inch touchscreen, dual 5W speakers, and support for both Alexa and Google Assistant.
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Eurotech has spun two rugged, Linux-friendly COM Express Type 6 modules in Basic and Compact form-factors, built on Intel’s 6th Gen Core CPUs.
Eurotech’s 125 x 95mm COM Express Basic Type 6 “CPU-162-22” and 95 x 95mm Compact Type 6 CPU-161-17 modules expand upon Intel’s 6th Gen Core “Skylake” processors, in EQ- and U-series models, respectively. Both COMs can run Linux or Windows 10 IoT Enterprise, and support Eurotech’s optional Everyware Software Framework (ESF), an IoT framework based on the Java/OSGi Eclipse Kura project.
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Raspberry Jam is the name for Raspberry Pi meetups—and they come in many different formats. Some are like traditional tech user groups, but many are family-friendly events that provide opportunities for kids to learn to code and make things. The Raspberry Pi Foundation supports the community of Raspberry Jams and has just released a Guidebook to help people get started.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Android
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Will Google FINALLY merge ChromeOS into Android inside Android Oreo?
This one’s being doing the rounds for years now, but I still think it is worth talking about as merging Android and ChromeOS does make a lot of sense.
Why? Simple: it gives Google some serious reach into spaces currently dominated by Apple and Microsoft with their respective iPads and Surface machines.
But will it happen this year?
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Nobody really writes their own code anymore, right? We go out to GitHub, download some libraries, avoid recreating unnecessary wheels, and package those wheels together along with our own glue to create new software. Then we download a half dozen front-end frameworks to make it all pretty and responsive and we’re off the races. In my review of apps, both in my company and others, I’ve found that more than 90% of the code that makes up an app these days is something we borrowed, not wrote ourselves.
Most of us scan our own code for flaws with static analysis tools, but what about all the stuff we didn’t write? How do we know what’s actually there? Once you find out what’s in there, what actions do you take to either clean it up or keep it fresh? How do you avoid getting pwned because you let a nasty in the backdoor with that whiz-bang library that does the really cool thing you couldn’t live without?
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The HSA Foundation through its member companies and universities has also released many additional projects which are all available on the Foundation’s GitHub site…
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The Nextcloud development team announced today the release and immediate availability of the Beta build of the project’s next major milestone, Nextcloud 12.
A lot of goodies are about to hit Nextcloud 12 in the coming weeks, but those who can’t wait until then to get their hands on the cool new features implemented so far can fetch the Beta milestone right now from the usual places and discover that it introduces push notifications that notify you instantly of shares, comments, calls, etc.. Client support should also be available in the final release.
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Atlanta-based bitcoin payments provider BitPay announced today that it has entered into a multi-million dollar development agreement with China-based Bitmain Technologies, the foremost provider of the “mining” hardware used to secure blockchains. Over the course of its multi-year agreement with new customer Bitmain, BitPay will create advanced open source software for the miners, mining pools and full node operators which maintain and secure blockchain transactions.
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IBM has recently announced that they’ve open sourced their API Microgateway. This means that any developer/business can now take advantage of this software in their own computing projects at no cost.
An API gateway is a software layer between one to many API services and their consumer applications. The purpose of this software is to provide a variety of common services useful for all APIs. Examples of such services are security, rate limit, and change management tooling. IBM’s Microgateway is written in Node.js and utilizes the Swagger 2.0 spec. The open sourcing of this software is a huge boon to the development community as API gateways from major corporations such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. are usually licensed. The IBM Microgateway is not to be confused with IBM’s DataPower Gateway, which is a different Enterprise solution which has a greater emphasis on security.
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Events
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About 10 years ago, mobile networks began experiencing massive increases in demand with the launch of the iPhone and the introduction of other smart phones. In a keynote at the Open Networking Summit, Andre Fuetsch, President AT&T Labs and CTO, AT&T says that the demand increased over 250,000% in the past 10 years. What AT&T quickly realized was the hardware-centric approach they’d been taking for decades wasn’t going to be enough, and they believed that shifting to software was their best bet to meet this accelerating demand. However, individual companies working alone tend to build similar solutions and duplicate effort, so AT&T isn’t doing this alone. They are collaborating together with other companies in a consolidated effort around ONAP, Open Network Automation Platform.
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The Linux Foundation will be at OpenStack Summit in Boston — one of the largest open cloud infrastructure events in the world — with many conference sessions, intensive training courses, giveaways, and a chance to win a free OpenStack training course or a Raspberry Pi 3 Starter Kit.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Have you heard about Firefox containers? Until today neither had I. But this neat experimental feature recently picked up a neat new feature, so it feels like a good time to mention it. Firefox Containers Firefox containers is an experimental feature that let you segment tabs in to separate silos while you browse.
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SaaS/Back End
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OpenStack has evolved over the past several years to serve as the de facto standard for open source cloud computing. But what makes an open source project deserving of a superlative?
Recently, the various groups that govern OpenStack—the Technical Committee, User Committee, Board of Directors, and the staff of the OpenStack Foundation—gathered to have a conversation about the future of the project and assess its health. To begin, they took some time to analyze the status of the current community. Is it growing or shrinking? Is it sufficiently diverse? And is it cultivating the next generation of technical and non-technical leaders who will keep the project evolving and adapting to tomorrow’s challenges?
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The intent behind Rackspace Inc. and NASA’s OpenStack project was to build a community around the first fully open-source cloud platform towards the creation of cloud infrastructure. At the time in 2010, development resources were split between both public and private cloud solutions, pitting OpenStack against market giants like Amazon Web Services with their own proprietary solutions.
But today, while Rackspace still supports the OpenStack public cloud with innovations and seemingly endless scalability, the focus for the company has shifted to primarily work with private cloud solutions because that’s where they have seen the most growth, according to Bryan Thompson, general manager, OpenStack Private Cloud, at Rackspace.
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Day one of Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, brought together major open-source contributors in a keynote address to discuss how open-source collaboration and the 5G network are combining to manifest a hyper-connected world.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Nearly a year ago I wrote a blog post describing the LibreOffice crash reporting setup and how the crash reporting code works. Since then we have released two minor versions with the crash reporter enabled (5.2 and 5.3) including many bug fix releases and release candidates. According to the crash reporting server a total of 27 versions are recognized and it is time to list some of the statistics surrounding the crash reporter.
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Education
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I’d been using primarily Linux and open source software for only 4 months when I started at Syracuse University. I started with Linux Mint, a distro (slang for distribution or operating system) focused on easing the transition to Linux. It does this by pre-installing necessary open source software alternatives for the average user – i.e. GIMP image editor, Banshee, and VLC media players, Firefox web browser, and LibreOffice, and Mozilla Thunderbird email client.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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Since 2000, 124 journalists have been killed in Mexico, according to the National Human Rights Commission, the government’s independent watchdog. Article 19, a nonprofit that advocates for media protections in Mexico, recorded 426 threats or attacks against the press last year, including beatings and torture.
Only Syria and Afghanistan surpassed Mexico in the number of journalists killed in 2016, according to Reporters Without Borders.
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There were 78 violent attacks on journalists in 2016, up from 42 attacks in 2015 and 40 in 2014. The AJI found only a few attackers from those 78 attacks had been brought to justice.
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Ever since Indonesian troops first marched into West Papua in 1961, the government has sought to tighten its grip on this resource-rich, lushly forested territory. This has involved military occupation – at least 15,000 troops are stationed in West Papua1, making it one of the most militarized zones in Southeast Asia – and also the transmigration of Indonesians into West Papua. In several key regions, the Indigenous population is now outnumbered by Indonesian settlers. ‘In 1999, Indonesia had set up just nine regencies [local administrative areas] within West Papua,’ says Octovianus (Octo) Mote, Secretary-General of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP). ‘Today, they have 43, and are planning to expand to 73, each with its own police stations and military base. This is all to accommodate new settlers and further outnumber our people. The kind of colonial history that took Western powers many years to carry out is happening here at high speed.’
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Dissent is often met with violence and arbitrary arrest. According to Jason Macleod of the University of Sydney: ‘Acts of state violence occur all over West Papua and are carried out by all parts of the security forces. [Human rights violations] include killing, torture, sexual assault and deprivation of liberty.’
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As everyone knows, the code for open source software (OSS) is made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone for any purpose. OSS is typically developed in a collaborative public manner, relying on the intelligence and creativity of crowdsourcing to create platforms, applications and infrastructure that in many cases rivals that of its proprietary, closed-source cousin.
While smaller companies can quickly adopt open source products, many larger enterprises are laggards due to structural constraints. Though a group within an enterprise may use an open source solution, the tools rarely end up being deployed enterprise-wide because open source solutions are built to solve a specific problem for a specific line of business. If another line of business struggles with the same problem, they can’t simply adopt the same solution – they need to spend time setting up initial configurations and establishing the right IT support mechanisms. Bottom line: most large enterprises don’t do open source.
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Think open source is a meritocracy? It is, but only if no one knows you’re a woman [Ed: FOSS basher Liam Tung (there's track record) plays along with the misleading headlines. It's not a FOSS issue, it's a programming/CS issue. If anything, FOSS has made it easier to see women's contributions and analyse these, highlighting an issue proprietary software hides.]
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BSD
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One of the features OpenBSD’s ksh shares with its more popular friends is user definable completions! Something that sets it apart, however, is the simplicity of these completions.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GnuBee is a personal NAS (Network Attached Storage) cloud server that is currently being funded on crowdsupply. It is a low-cost, low-power, NAS device that runs GNU/Linux and it is claimed to be based on free, libre, and open source software. No proprietary drivers needed to use GnuBee.
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We are proud to announce the next, major release of the GNU Compiler Collection, 7.1. This year we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the first GCC beta release and this month we will celebrate 30 years since the GCC 1.0 release.
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The GNU Compiler Collection 7 (GCC 7) stable release is now available with today’s announcement of GCC 7.1.
GCC 7.1 features experimental support for all of the C++17 draft, various performance improvements, improved debugging/diagnostics, optimization work, various hardware-specific improvements, OpenMP 4.5 offloading to NVIDIA PTX, and much more. More details in Changes To Find With The Upcoming Release Of GCC 7.
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Jakub Jelinek happily reports today, May 2, 2017, for the GCC project on the general availability of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 7.1.0, the latest and most advanced release of the open-source and free compiler for the GNU system.
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Programming/Development
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For those who are starting to code and want to make open source software, sometimes starting is hard. The idea of contributing with that fancy and wonderful library that you love can sound a little bit scary. Lucky for us, many of those libraries have room for whoever is willing to start. They also give us the support that we need. Pretty sweet, right?
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The third edition of the Chinese Encyclopaedia will be “the nation’s first digital book of ‘everything,’” featuring 300,000 entries of about 1,000 words each, according to the South China Morning Post, which reported the news on Sunday. More than 20,000 authors from universities and research institutes will contribute to the effort. Ultimately, that will make the Chinese Encyclopaedia twice as large as Encyclopedia Brittanica and about the same size as the Chinese-language Wikipedia.
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Science
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The Economist quantifies the problem. According to its article, voice-biometrics software similar to the kind deployed by many banks to block unauthorized access to accounts was fooled 80% of the time in tests using the new technology. Humans didn’t do much better, only spotting that a voice had been cloned 50% of the time. And remember, these figures are for today’s technologies. As algorithms improve, and Moore’s Law kicks in, it’s not unreasonable to think that it will become almost impossible to tell by ear whether the voice you hear is the real thing, or a version generated using the latest cloning technology.
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Health/Nutrition
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Federal prosecutors say the alleged female genital mutilation conspiracy started in 2005 and ended last month. That time period overlapped with some of the period that Bhabrawala, 52, was president of the Farmington Hills mosque.
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Burchett is the first elected official in Tennessee to make the connection between reporting FGM to the Department of Health and medical licensure, noting that, “If anybody in the medical community is performing that, they need to lose their license.”
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Security
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On April 11th, 3 weeks ago, we published a story discussing routers at a specific set of ISPs that have been hacked. These routers have been used to launch attacks on WordPress websites. The ISPs with compromised routers included Telecom Algeria, BSNL in India, PLDT in the Philippines and many more large ISPs around the world.
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Former members of Team Espionage recently expressed their concern that the Shadow Brokers’ dump of NSA Windows exploits had done serious damage to the security of the nation. The unwanted exposure of NSA power tools supposedly harmed intelligence gathering efforts, even though the tools targeted outdated operating systems and network software.
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Sensofusion, a Vantaa-based developer of drone countermeasures, has been awarded a contract by the US Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL) and the Defence Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) to further develop its proprietary technology, Airfence.
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This is the first stable fix release for the LibreSSL 2.5.x branch.
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Building on the efforts of Elena Reshetova, Hans Liljestrand, and David Windsor to port PaX’s PAX_REFCOUNT protection, Peter Zijlstra implemented a new kernel API for reference counting with the addition of the refcount_t type. Until now, all reference counters were implemented in the kernel using the atomic_t type, but it has a wide and general-purpose API that offers no reasonable way to provide protection against reference counter overflow vulnerabilities. With a dedicated type, a specialized API can be designed so that reference counting can be sanity-checked and provide a way to block overflows. With 2016 alone seeing at least a couple public exploitable reference counting vulnerabilities (e.g. CVE-2016-0728, CVE-2016-4558), this is going to be a welcome addition to the kernel. The arduous task of converting all the atomic_t reference counters to refcount_t will continue for a while to come.
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Defence/Aggression
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Bodies of two Indian soldiers killed in action were mutilated by attackers from across the border.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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There’s something going on inside the intelligence communities in at least two countries, and we have no idea what it is.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Finance
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Real estate site Zillow is getting sued. Again. The company has already been sued for trade secret theft, copyright infringement, and settled multiple lawsuits related to harassment and other workplace violations. This time it’s getting sued for handing out a “Zestimate” the plaintiff feels is too low.
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The measure, backed by Republicans, would let employers give workers paid time off instead of time-and-a-half pay the next time they put in extra hours. The vote tally was largely along party lines, with no Democrats voting in favor of the bill. Six Republicans also voted against it.
G.O.P. leadership has touted the legislation, called the Working Families Flexibility Act, as an attempt to codify flexibility for employees.
“I don’t think there’s anything more powerful than giving them more control over their time so that they can make the best decisions for themselves and their families,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington said Tuesday morning in a press conference held by Republican leaders in the House.
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The American tech giant said it had sold 50.7m iPhones in the three months to the end of April, 1pc below the same period last year.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Senior Republican aides confided this week that President Donald Trump’s puzzling statements over the last few days have left them confused.
According to Politico, GOP aides on Capitol Hill and at the White House have been unable to explain why Trump unleashed a string of baffling claims over a 24-hour period in interviews with Bloomberg, CBS News and SiriusXM radio.
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Politico reported that White House officials insisted there was “no broader strategy” for scheduling the interviews.
“They were not helpful to us,” a senior administration official explained. “There was no point to do all of them.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill, however, were dumbfounded.
“I have no idea what they view as a successful media hit,” one GOP consultant told Politico.
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The real significance of the leaks from the Downing Street dinner between Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker is what the detail reveals about the UK’s lack of grasp about the process and issues of Brexit, and about how weak the arguments are which UK ministers are seeking to deploy.
These details are telling, even taking due account of spin and bias. These details are also such that they cannot have been invented (or even exaggerated) by the leakers. (On these details see my thread on Twitter here, republished at my FT blog here.)
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Istanbul authorities have withdrawn an invitation sent to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to attend a major conference in the city. The reversal comes after Turkey blocked the website, citing objections to its content.
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Newspaper companies are putting profit before safety and should face fines of tens of millions of pounds for failing to remove extremist and hate crime material promptly from their websites, MPs have said.
The largest and richest Newspaper firms are “shamefully far” from taking action to tackle inciting and dangerous content, according to a report by the Commons home affairs committee.
The inquiry, launched last year following the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right gunman, concludes that Newspaper multinationals are more concerned with commercial risks than public protection. Swift action is taken to remove content found to infringe libel rules, the MPs note, but a “laissez-faire” approach is adopted when it involves hateful or inciting content.
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The UK’s Home Affairs Select Committee released a report yesterday following its inquiry into hate crime, in which it criticised social media companies’ handling of illegal content. The report recommends, for example, that the government considers introducing “meaningful” fines for social media companies which fail to remove illegal content within a strict timeframe. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, argues here that the recommendations would threaten free expression and risks censorship of legal content.
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Censoring the Internet is easier than ever. In the past, governments tried to rely on technology to stifle online dissent, but now they have another option: They can just use trolls and social media to rob protest movements of their power.
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Here’s the thing: social media still censors photos of breasts that include nipples, even if the photo is for breast cancer awareness. Why is this a big deal? Because women need to know what they’re looking for to detect breast cancer. Thanks to this type of censorship, people can’t circulate photos of actual breasts, so a photo of lemons emulating signs of breast cancer went viral. Seriously. It’s a dozen lemons in an egg carton. We can’t show boobs with breast cancer, but bring on the lemons with lumps!
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Just days after sporting First Amendment pins at the White House Correspondents Dinner – to celebrate freedom of the press – the mainstream U.S. media is back to celebrating a very different idea: how to use algorithms to purge the Internet of what is deemed “fake news,” i.e. what the mainstream judges to be “misinformation.”
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The culture of self-censorship could help prevent society from falling into negative influences, says Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi.
Ahmad Zahid, who is also the Home Minister, added self-censorship could also stop Malaysians from making inaccurate decisions.
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There is a need to practise self-censorship when uploading information online, particularly in this era where information technology is rapidly advancing, said Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi.
He stressed that the habit of self-censorship can help prevent the spread of negative news from being circulated online.
“This will also prevent the public from making irrational decisions,” he said in his speech at the National Book and Telenovela Awards 2017 ceremony held at the Seri Pacific Hotel.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Then a few weeks later, Marc Zuckerberg took to the stage of a developer’s conference to tout a Facebook vision of 24/7 augmented reality with sensors, camera, and chips embedded in clothing, everyday objects, and eventually the human body-–-with Facebook the central processing station for those terabytes upon terabytes of data and the central transaction platform for our commercial lives lived digitally. And finally, last week, the newly appointed head of the FCC announced his intention to revisit, revise, and eliminate the rules of net neutrality that treat internet service providers as utilities and constrain them from charging different prices for speedy data.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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A 12-year-old girl was forced to withdraw from a chess tournament because her outfit – a knee-length cotton child’s dress – was deemed ‘too seductive’.
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The U.S. Capitol Police officer who decided to arrest an activist because she briefly laughed during Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearing in January is a rookie cop who had never conducted an arrest before nor worked at a congressional hearing. Nevertheless, prosecutors persisted this week in pursuing charges against the 61-year-old woman the rookie had taken into custody.
Katherine Coronado of the U.S. Capitol Police was in her second week on the job when she was assigned to keep watch over Sessions’ confirmation hearing on Jan. 10. Coronado was involved in the arrest of Desiree Fairooz, an activist affiliated with the group Code Pink, after Fairooz laughed when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said that Sessions’ record of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented.” (Sessions had been rejected as a federal judge in the 1980s because of concerns about his views on race, and back when he was still a Democrat, Shelby himself actually ran an ad suggesting Sessions had called the Ku Klux Klan “good ole boys.”)
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A white South Carolina police officer accused of the video-taped shooting of a fleeing, unarmed suspect pleaded guilty Tuesday to a single federal civil rights violation. A video of Officer Michael Slager shooting and killing 50-year-old Walter Scott was secretly taken in 2015 by a passerby. The video has been viewed millions of times online and on television. It was a key factor in the North Charleston Police Department’s decision to abandon its initial backing of the shooting.
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Last week we reported on the lives of Google raters, people whose job is to provide Google with data on the usefulness of its algorithms. The 10 anonymous raters we spoke with were all contractors at Leapforce, a staffing firm that provided rater services to Google. Yesterday, one of those raters, Kyle Martin Medeiros, was fired by Leapforce for an unspecified “breach of contract.” Every Leapforce rater signs a contract that includes a broad NDA.
Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Nine Republican US senators yesterday submitted legislation that would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from ever again using the regulatory authority that allowed the commission to impose net neutrality rules. The “Restoring Internet Freedom Act” would prohibit the FCC from classifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act and “from imposing certain regulations on providers of such service.”
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Last June, you’ll recall that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the FCC’s net neutrality rules, claiming the FCC was within its rights to reclassify ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. In fact, the FCC was driven toward that move by Verizon, which sued to overturn the agency’s much weaker 2010 rules. Needless to say, ISPs were quick to try and appeal last June’s court decision by requesting an en banc hearing before the whole court.
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The Motion Picture Association has advised the Indian government to forge exceptions in any eventual net neutrality regulation so that the fight against infringing content is not hindered. ISPs should be permitted to block or throttle unlawful transmission of pirate material, the Hollywood group argues, without “judicial determinations” prior to every instance.
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Democrats including Sens. Edward Markey (Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) and Technology and Communications subcommittee ranking member Brian Schatz (Hawaii) have all said that Republicans have been too far to the right on net neutrality for them to come to the table on a compromise.
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Senator Mike Lee from Utah, along with 8 other cosponsors, has introduced S.993: “A bill to prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from reclassifying broadband Internet access service as a telecommunications service and from imposing certain regulations on providers of such service” aka the Restoring Internet Freedom Act. Senator Lee’s plan is to forbid the FCC from even being able to declare internet service providers (ISPs) as Title II common carriers – essentially negating the Open Internet Order from 2015. Senator Lee also sponsored an identical bill in 2016 during the 114th Congress with the same 8 cosponsors.
Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Independent academic experts have denounced these plans in untypically frank terms as “ill-conceived”, “undesirable”, “unlikely to achieve anything”, “an interference with freedom of speech”, “displaying an alarming disregard for fundamental rights” and bad for everyone from authors, small publishers and startups to the news industry as a whole. (See sources below.)
The European Parliament will soon make a decision on these plans. While some members clearly share the experts’ criticism, others aren’t just cheering on these plans but even, incredibly, seeking their expansion.
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