10.06.17

Links 6/10/2017: Systemd 235, Cockpit 152, More Kirigami

Posted in News Roundup at 4:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Amdocs launches open source-based software and services portfolio for carriers

    Amdocs has announced Amdocs Network Function Virtualization (NFV) powered by Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) – a portfolio featuring modular capabilities that accelerate service design, virtualization and operating capabilities on demand.

    As the communications and media industry moves from static appliance-based networks to software based, elastic networks, carriers will be increasingly capable of providing services and capacity on demand or based on predictive traffic patterns.

    Instead of building networks for high peak periods, carriers want to spin them up dynamically to provide better network services in the right locations at lower price points. Service providers using technologies developed in ONAP and its ecosystem of capabilities can provide enterprises the ability to design their own networks as part of a richer set of service features.

  • Tevora Releases Free, Open-Source Penetration Testing Tool, SecSmash

    SecSmash is available free of charge on GitHub. Its modular framework allows for integration with any available technology solutions.

  • Open source gaining momentum in Singapore

    If you live in Singapore and have started using the newly-minted parking.sg app developed by the government to pay for street parking at public car parks, you may have noticed something in fine print in one corner of the app’s menu that says “built with open source software”.

  • Open Source Health IT App Development Cuts Back Costs

    Cloud Foundry Applications Runtime is an open source application development platform for cloud-native application. The platform is used and modified constantly to help organizations quickly gain access to the latest development technology.

    The tool has been a part of the Cloud Foundry Foundation for three years. It was originally created at VMware in 2010 and then moved to Pivotal in 2013 before it was donated to Cloud Foundry.

  • Large-Scale Governance – 10 Apache Lessons

    Even if one of these applies, you still might be smarter to join an existing “umbrella” like Software Freedom Conservancy in the US or Public Software in the UK. But if you do end up devising your own organization, you won’t go far wrong my starting with the Apache Software Foundation’s principles.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla extends, and ends, Firefox support for Windows XP and Vista

        Mozilla has announced it will end support for its Firefox browser on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

        The organisation offers Firefox Extended Support Releases (ESRs) that keep getting bug fixes for 54 weeks, even though nine new versions of Firefox should come along during that time. Mozilla offers ESR releases so that organisations with standard desktop environments can pick a version of Firefox and run it for a year, without the need to update their gold images.

        Enterprise software vendors also like this arrangement: Oracle only certifies its wares for ESRs because keeping up with a six-weekly release cycle is too much effort.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Who Won at OpenWorld? Oracle, or Amazon and Splunk?

      As this year’s Oracle OpenWorld 2017 draws to a close, I’m convinced that the best seat in the house to watch this one wasn’t anywhere near San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center, the event’s venue, but sitting in front of a computer in your home or office.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • How a university’s 3D-printed prosthetics club provides devices for amputees

        Last fall, one of the co-founders of Duke University eNable published an article describing our club’s beginnings and visions for the future. In the spring of 2016, we started out as six engineering students with a passion for innovation and design, supported by a small stipend from the Innovation Co-Lab and a grant from OSPRI (Open Source Pedagogy, Research and Innovation), a project supported by Red Hat.

        Since then we have established ourselves as a presence on campus, grown into a large interdisciplinary team, and connected with multiple recipients—including a young boy in Milot, Haiti. The resources offered through Duke and the sponsorship we’ve received allow us to continuously transform our ideas into things we can share with open source enthusiasts, makers, and dreamers alike.

  • Programming/Development

    • Double Your Development Velocity without Growing Your Team

      The Developer Experience team at SendGrid is a small, but mighty force of two. We attempt to tackle every problem that we can get our hands on. This often means that some items get left behind. At the outset, we surveyed everything that was going on in our open source libraries and we quickly realized that we needed to find a way to prioritize what we were going to work on. Luckily, our team lives, organizationally, on the Product Management team, and we had just received a gentle nudge and training on the RICE prioritization framework.

      On our company blog, I wrote an article about how employing this framework, using a spreadsheet, helped us double our velocity as a team within the first sprint. Our development velocity doubled because the most impactful things for the time spent are not always the biggest things, but the biggest things tend to attract the most attention due to their size.

    • Review by many eyes does not always prevent buggy code

      Writing code is hard. Writing secure code is harder—much harder. And before you get there, you need to think about design and architecture. When you’re writing code to implement security functionality, it’s often based on architectures and designs that have been pored over and examined in detail. They may even reflect standards that have gone through worldwide review processes and are generally considered perfect and unbreakable.*

      However good those designs and architectures are, though, there’s something about putting things into actual software that’s, well, special. With the exception of software proven to be mathematically correct,** being able to write software that accurately implements the functionality you’re trying to realize is somewhere between a science and an art. This is no surprise to anyone who’s actually written any software, tried to debug software, or divine software’s correctness by stepping through it; however, it’s not the key point of this article.

    • Java Moving Forward With Faster Pace Release Schedule, Modular System
    • Onwards to Valhalla: Java ain’t dead yet and it’s only getting bigger

      Scale was big at the JavaOne conference this week. Spotify lauded its success scaling with Java, and Oracle execs practically squealed as they reeled off adoption statistics. Big Red believes the next ten years belong to Java.

      “We want the next decade to be Java first, Java always,” vice president Mark Cavage said on stage.

      Of course Java is already big and among those on stage was Alibaba, one of the world’s largest Java users, which talked up its ability to run more than a million JVM instances at once.

Leftovers

  • Why the Internet is worried that Microsoft’s consumer services are doomed

    Today, Microsoft sells more to businesses and enterprises than it does to consumers. The emphasis today is on subscriptions and abstract services, rather than on shrinkwrapped products it can put on store shelves.

  • A Pre-History of Slashdot

    I registered the domain name ‘Slashdot.org’ 20 years ago today. I really had no idea.

  • 20 Years of Stuff That Matters

    Today we’re marking Slashdot’s 20th birthday.

  • The U.S. Senate just took the next step to creating a national standard for testing and deploying self-driving cars

    The Senate Commerce Committee just took the next step in creating what could be the new national standard for the testing and deployment of self-driving cars. The committee unanimously agreed to send its bill, called AV Start, to the Senate floor on Wednesday.

    The bipartisan bill would establish nation-wide regulations for how companies like Uber, Tesla, Lyft, GM and others safely and legally test and then roll out their self-driving cars on public roads.

  • Science

    • Algorithm designer among those honored with the Chemistry Nobel

      The highest possible resolution we can get in a typical image is limited by the wavelength of the light we’re using. Although there are some clever ways around this limit, one alternative has been to use something with a smaller wavelength. That “something” turns out to be electrons, and the electron microscope has provided a glimpse of the details inside cells, showing us how their parts are ordered and structured.

      But this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a group of individuals who pushed the electron microscope to its very limit, figuring out how to use it to determine the position of every single atom in large, complex molecules. The award goes partly to a researcher who successfully used electron microscopes to image proteins. But it also goes to two people who developed some of the techniques to make the whole thing work: figuring out how to freeze water quickly enough that it formed a glass and developing an algorithm that could take a large collection of random data and convert it into a coherent picture.

    • ‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

      Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks who worry the race for human attention has created a world of perpetual distraction that could ultimately end in disaster

    • Do smartphone alerts make you angry? There may actually be a scientific reason for that

      According to a paper published by a team of academics from Nottingham Trent University, digital alerts from smartphones and tablets can have a direct and immediate effect on mood.

    • Growing social media backlash among young people, survey shows

      Almost two-thirds of pupils say they would not care if the technology did not exist and talk of negative impact on wellbeing

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Trump Guts Requirement That Employer Health Plans Pay For Birth Control

      The Trump administration is rolling back the Obama-era requirement that employer-provided health insurance policies cover birth control methods at no cost to women.

      According to senior officials with the Department of Health and Human Services, the goal of the new rule is to allow any company or nonprofit group to exclude the coverage for contraception if it has a religious or moral objection.

      “This provides an exemption, and it’s a limited one,” said Roger Severino, director of the HHS Office of Civil Rights. “We should have space for organizations to live out their religious identity and not face discrimination.”

  • Security

    • Security updates for Friday
    • Apple fixes Keychain vulnerability, but only in macOS High Sierra

      The zero-day vulnerability in macOS’s Keychain has been addressed by Apple, along with some other issues in High Sierra. But other recent versions of the operating system are still vulnerable.

    • macOS High Sierra bug exposes APFS passwords in plain text

      A Brazilian software developer has uncovered a bug in Apple’s macOS High Sierra software that exposes the passwords of encrypted Apple File System (APFS) volumes in plain text.

    • The September 2017 WordPress Attack Report

      This edition of the WordPress Attack Report is a continuation of the monthly series we’ve been publishing since December 2016. Reports from the previous months can be found here.

      This report contains the top 25 attacking IPs for September 2017 and their details. It also includes charts of brute force and complex attack activity for the same period, along with a new section revealing changes to the Wordfence real-time IP blacklist throughout the month. We also include the top themes and plugins that were attacked and which countries generated the most attacks for this period.

    • Step aside, Windows! Open source and Linux are IT’s new security headache [Ed: Microsoft propagandist Preston Gralla is back from the woods. The typical spin, lies. Deflection. Windows has back doors.]
    • Sex Toys Are Just As Poorly-Secured As The Rest Of The Internet of Broken Things

      At this point we’ve pretty well documented how the “internet of things” is a privacy and security dumpster fire. Whether it’s tea kettles that expose your WiFi credentials or smart fridges that leak your Gmail password, companies were so busy trying to make a buck by embedding network chipsets into everything, they couldn’t be bothered to adhere to even the most modest security and privacy guidelines. As a result, billions upon billions of devices are now being connected to the internet with little to no meaningful security and a total disregard to user privacy — posing a potentially fatal threat to us all.

  • Defence/Aggression

  • Finance

    • This ICO for an AI blockchain is the most tech-hype idea of the year
    • ‘Kleptocracy Tour’ Spotlights Nigerian Corrupt Money Funneled Through Britain

      Anti-corruption activists hoping to shine a light on the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled through London every year are organizing tours of properties allegedly bought with dishonest money.

    • Amazon Is Testing Its Own Delivery Service to Rival FedEx and UPS

      The service began two years ago in India, and Amazon has been slowly marketing it to U.S. merchants in preparation for a national expansion, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the U.S. pilot project is confidential. Amazon is calling the project Seller Flex, one person said. The service began on a trial basis this year in West Coast states with a broader rollout planned in 2018, the people said. Amazon declined to comment.

    • Average Fortune 500 CEO gets a pension of $253,088 every month until they die

      The average American worker has $95,000 in their 401(k), which will not even allow them to starve with dignity; this is a sharp contrast from earlier generations of American workers, whose employers provided defined-benefits pensions — but it also is quite a distance from the CEOs of the biggest US companies, whose average pension benefit is $253,088/month.

    • Average CEO has to make do with $253,088 in monthly pension payments

      Wiseman said it’s not much of a stretch to call this “collusion.”

    • Goldman Sachs is one step closer to making Frankfurt its new European home post-Brexit

      Goldman Sachs is pushing ahead with making Frankfurt, Germany, its key European base. This week, the Wall Street giant agreed to lease multiple floors for offices in a 38-storey building, as part of its Brexit contingency plans.

      The Marienturm tower is located in the heart of Frankfurt’s business district and Goldman is looking to take around the top eight floors, which is said to accommodate around 1,000 workers. “This expanded office space will allow us to grow our operations in Germany to serve our clients, as well as provide us with the space to execute on our Brexit contingency plan as needed,” said a Goldman Sachs spokesman to Bloomberg. Quartz also contacted Goldman for comment.

    • Brexit deadlock looms as European negotiators say they have lost faith in May

      Britain will refuse to tell Europe how much it is prepared to pay to settle the so-called “Brexit bill” when Brexit negotiations re-open in Brussels next week, the Telegraph can reveal, in a move that risks plunging the Brexit talks into fresh crisis.

      The British move comes as doubts emerged across Europe that Theresa May has the political clout to seal a Brexit deal following her disastrous party conference speech and public disagreements with Boris Johnson.

      Senior Whitehall sources said that negotiators will refuse to say which financial “commitments” Britain will honour, setting up a fresh showdown with Brussels.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Someone hacked [sic] the White House chief of staff’s personal phone

      Notably, the compromised phone was Kelly’s personal device, rather than the secure phone issued by the government. The White House told Politico that Kelly rarely used the device since joining the administration, although even occasional use could have exposed sensitive government information to attackers.

    • John Kelly’s personal cellphone was compromised, White House believes

      White House tech support discovered the suspected breach after Kelly turned his phone in to tech support staff this summer.

    • John Kelly’s phone was breached as early as December: report
    • Donald Trump’s passion for cruelty

      He revels in a public discourse that threatens, humiliates and bullies.

      He has used language as a weapon to humiliate women, a reporter with a disability, Pope Francis and any political opponent who criticizes him. He has publicly humiliated members of his own cabinet and party, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a terminally ill John McCain, not to mention the insults and lies he perpetrated against former FBI Director James Comey after firing him.

      Trump has humiliated world leaders with insulting and belittling language. He not only insulted North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with the war-like moniker “Rocket Man,” he appeared before the United Nations and blithely threatened to address the nuclear standoff with North Korea by wiping out its 25 million inhabitants.

    • Suspending the Catalan Parliament, Spain Destroys the EU’s “Rule of Law” Figleaf.

      It takes a very special kind of chutzpah systematically to assault voters, and drag them from polling booths by their hair, and then say that a low turnout invalidates the vote. That is the shameless position being taken by the Europe wide political Establishment and its corporate media lackeys. This Guardian article illustrates a refinement to this already extreme act of intellectual dishonesty. It states voter turnout was 43%. That ignores the 770,000 votes which were cast but physically confiscated by the police so they could not be counted. They take voter turnout over 50%.

      That is an incredibly high turnout, given that 900 voters were brutalised so badly they needed formal medical treatment. The prospect of being smashed in the face by a club would naturally deter a number of people from voting. The physical closure of polling stations obviously stopped others from voting. It is quite incredible that in these circumstances, over 50% of the electorate did succeed in casting a vote.

    • Lobbyists Tied to Trump Cash In on Their Connections

      The day after the presidential election, the Washington lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck touted its Republican team’s “significant relationships … with those who will steer the incoming Trump administration.” It highlighted Marc Lampkin, managing partner of its Washington office and a Trump fundraiser.

      Such efforts are among the ways lobbyists advertise their connections and ability to influence. One posted a pre-inauguration photo with the president on his firm’s website; another maintained a former campaign title on Facebook; others made sure to stress the backgrounds of their connected staff members online or in press releases.

      Despite Donald Trump’s campaign vow to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and special interests, Washington’s influence industry is alive and well — and growing. Former members of the Trump transition team, presidential campaign and administration, as well as friends have set up shop as lobbyists and cashed in on connections, according to a new report compiled by Public Citizen, a public interest group, and reviewed by The Associated Press.

      Records through Aug. 31 showed at least 44 registered federal lobbyists with ties to Trump or Vice President Mike Pence. These firms have collectively billed nearly $41.8 million to clients — seven of the 10 most lucrative being foreign interests, according to the analysis of federal lobbying disclosure filings.

    • Catalan parliament to defy Spanish ban on independence debate, official says

      Catalonia’s parliament will defy a Spanish court ban and go ahead on Monday with a debate that could lead to a declaration of independence, a regional government official said, as Spain’s worst political crisis in decades looked set to deepen.

      “Parliament will discuss, parliament will meet. It will be a debate, and this is important,” the Catalan government’s head of foreign affairs, Raul Romeva, told BBC radio on Friday.

      It was the pro-independence regional government’s first clear response to a Constitutional Court decision on Thursday to suspend Monday’s planned parliamentary session, and it raised the prospect of a tough response from the central government.

    • Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream

      In August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that “there’s no room in American society” for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK.

      But an explosive cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News proves that there was plenty of room for those voices on his website.

      During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”

    • The Rising of Britain’s ‘New Politics’

      Delegates to the recent Labour Party conference in the English seaside town of Brighton seemed not to notice a video playing in the main entrance. The world’s third biggest arms manufacturer, BAe Systems, supplier to Saudi Arabia, was promoting its guns, bombs, missiles, naval ships and fighter aircraft.

      It seemed a perfidious symbol of a party in which millions of Britons now invest their political hopes. Once the preserve of Tony Blair, it is now led by Jeremy Corbyn, whose career has been very different and is rare in British establishment politics.

      Addressing the conference, the campaigner Naomi Klein described the rise of Corbyn as “part of a global phenomenon. We saw it in Bernie Sanders’ historic campaign in the US primaries, powered by millennials who know that safe centrist politics offers them no kind of safe future.”

    • EU Official Warns War a Possibility in Catalonia

      The team captain of Spain’s storied football club Barcelona, which has become a focal point of secessionist Catalan sentiment, is urging politicians in Madrid and the Catalan capital to start negotiating about the future of Spain’s restive northeast province.

      “Before we do ourselves more damage, those in charge must open dialogue with each other. Do it for all of us. We deserve to live in peace,” Andrés Iniesta wrote on his Facebook page, apologizing at the same time for weighing in on “situations that are complex.”

      His appeal came as a top EU official Thursday warned that the separatist dispute, exacerbated by Catalan secessionists holding an illegal independence referendum Sunday, risks escalating into armed conflict.

    • Report: Facebook removed references to Russia from fake-news report

      Back in April, Facebook published a report called “Information Operations and Facebook” that detailed the company’s efforts to combat fake news and other misinformation campaigns on the site. The report was released in the midst of an uproar over potential Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. But the report doesn’t mention Russia by name, saying only that Facebook’s data “does not contradict” a January report by the Obama administration detailing Russian meddling in the election.

      On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the decision not to mention Russia was hotly debated inside Facebook. An earlier draft of the report discussed what Facebook knew at that time about Russian meddling, but that material was ultimately removed from the report before publication.

    • Obama, in Brazil, Offers Familiar Slogan to Corporate Audience

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • The Latest On Shiva Ayyadurai’s Failed Libel Suit Against Techdirt

      We have a quick update today on the defamation lawsuit that Shiva Ayyadurai filed against us earlier this year. Last month, Judge Dennis Saylor dismissed the lawsuit, pointing out that everything we said concerning Ayyadurai’s claim to have invented email (specifically us presenting lots and lots of evidence of email predating Shiva’s own work) was clearly protected speech under the First Amendment. Unfortunately, despite us being a California corporation, Judge Saylor did not grant our separate motion to strike under California’s anti-SLAPP law — which would have required Ayyadurai to pay our legal fees.

    • Harvey Weinstein to Sue N.Y. Times, Says His Attorney

      On the heels of The New York Times’ bombshell exposé published Thursday about “decades of harassment” on the part of Harvey Weinstein, the mogul’s attorney Charles Harder says he’s preparing a lawsuit against the paper.

      “The New York Times published today a story that is saturated with false and defamatory statements about Harvey Weinstein,” he writes in an email to The Hollywood Reporter. “It relies on mostly hearsay accounts and a faulty report, apparently stolen from an employee personnel file, which has been debunked by nine different eyewitnesses. We sent the Times the facts and evidence, but they ignored it and rushed to publish. We are preparing the lawsuit now. All proceeds will be donated to women’s organizations.”

      Harder is perhaps most famous as the lawyer who represented Hulk Hogan in the litigation that brought down Gawker. He also represented Melania Trump in a defamation action against the parent company of The Daily Mail. That case settled earlier this year. Harder also sent a cease-and-desist letter last year on behalf of Roger Ailes to New York Magazine, and in his career, he has represented many popular stars in entertainment including Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock.

    • Decades of Sexual Harassment Accusations Against Harvey Weinstein
    • Censorship Board warns ‘nude’ performers

      Responding to University of Zimbabwe lecturer, Ruby Magosvongwe’s concerns over the suitability of “semi-naked” Brazilian Samba girls performing at the Harare International Carnival, Chigwedere told a stakeholders meeting that his board would take corrective measures.

    • Dirty Chinese Restaurant mobile game canceled after racism criticism

      Developer Big-O-Tree games has halted development and promotion of a planned mobile game called Dirty Chinese Restaurant after the title drew negative attention from sources including a US Congresswoman for racist portrayals of Asian-Americans.

    • Return of the algorithm monster: YouTube auto-promoted conspiracy theory videos
    • Netizen Report: LGBTQ People Face Online Censorship and Threats in Egypt

      Egypt’s broadcast regulator, the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, has banned all forms of support to the LGBTQ community, allegedly to “maintain public order.” The move came after a rainbow flag was raised at a concert of the Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila in Cairo on Sept. 11. The band supports LGBTQ rights, and its lead singer, Hamed Sinno, is openly gay.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • That Flag-Burning NFL Photo Isn’t Fake News. It’s a Meme

      The photo was fake, but that didn’t seem to matter; within a day, it had racked up more than 10,000 shares, likes, and comments from furious people all over the country.

    • Trump Urges Supreme Court To Throw Out Prior Muslim Ban Rulings

      With a third version of the Muslim ban set to go into effect on October 18, President Donald Trump’s administration has asked the Supreme Court to vacate lower court rulings on previous versions of the ban.

      If allowed to stand, the lower courts’ decisions threaten to undermine the executive’s ability to deal with sensitive foreign policy issues in strategically important regions of the world,” Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco writes in a letter to Scott S. Harris, the clerk of the Supreme Court.

      Francisco adds, “The court should not permit that unnecessary consequence, especially when the rulings below are preliminary injunctions litigated on a highly expedited basis.”

      The letter celebrates supposed “time limits” on entry and refugee suspensions as features that were not part of any attempts to “evade judicial review.” They were “temporary measures to facilitate the government’s inter-agency review processes and to protect national security in the interim.”

    • Hundreds Of Cases Dismissed Thanks To Baltimore PD Misconduct

      After years of listening to tough-on-crime legislators and the tough-on-crime lawmen that love to hear them talk about filthy criminals beating the system by getting off on technicalities, it’s somewhat funny to discover lots of what’s complained about is nothing more than good old-fashioned due process and/or the collateral damage of crooked, inept, or lazy cops.

      We’ve seen a lot of en masse criminal case dismissals recently. Thousands of convictions and charges were dropped in Massachusetts as the result of a state crime lab tech’s years of faked drug tests. All over the nation, cops are letting perps walk rather than discuss law enforcement’s worst-kept secret: Stingray devices.

    • Baltimore prosecutor says more than 850 cases impacted by questionable police conduct
    • Miami Beach cops arrest man for Twitter parody of police spokesman

      A Miami Beach man is facing criminal charges after he created a parody account purporting to be Ernesto Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Miami Beach Police Department. The defendant, Ernesto Orsetti, is charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer, a third-degree felony, according to a press release posted by the Miami New Times.

      “Defendant falsely created and assumed the identity of the victim (active police officer/police information officer) via Twitter,” the police report says. “The Twitter account, @ernierodmb, had a marked Miami Beach police vehicle and a photo of the victim in uniform.”

    • John Kiriakou, CIA Officer in Torture Leak Case, Injured in Serious Traffic Accident

      John Kiriakou, a prominent ex-CIA officer, and among the first to reveal the agency’s torture program, was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident earlier this week in Washington, D.C., according to one of his attorneys.

      Kiriakou suffered broken ribs, a fractured clavicle and lumbar spine damage, according to Jesselyn Radack, one of the attorneys who represented him when he was charged in 2012 with leaking classified information about CIA waterboarding of an Al-Qaeda suspect at a secret site in Thailand. He eventually pleaded guilty to one count of leaking the identity of a fellow CIA officer to a reporter and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Anybody Claiming Net Neutrality Rules Killed Broadband Investment Is Lying To You

      In 2015 the FCC passed some fairly basic net neutrality rules designed to keep broadband duopolies from abusing a lack of broadband competition to hamstring internet competitors. Despite the endless pearl clutching from ISP lobbyists and allies, the rules were relatively modest, falling well short of the more comprehensive rules we’ve seen passed in places like Canada, Japan, and India. Still, ISPs have spent every day since trying to claim that the rules somehow utterly devastated broadband sector investment, despite the fact that independent economists and journalists have repeatedly proven that to be a lie.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Members Of Congress: Court Was Wrong To Say That Posting The Law Is Copyright Infringement

        Back in February, we wrote about a disturbing court decision that said that standards that are “incorporated by reference” into law, could still be copyright infringing if posted to the internet. In that earlier post I go into much more background, but the short version is this: lots of laws point to standards put together by private standards bodies, and say, effectively, “to be legal, you must meet this standard.” For example, fire codes may be required to meet certain standards put together by a private standards body. Carl Malamud has spent years trying to make the law more accessible, and he started posting such standards that are “incorporated by reference” into the law publicly. His reasoning: once the government incorporates the standard into the law, the standard must be publicly available. Otherwise, you have a ridiculous situation in which you can’t even know what the law is that governs you unless you pay (often a lot) to access it.

        Standards bodies weren’t happy about this — as some of them make a large chunk of money from selling access to the standards. But from a straight up “the law should be public” standpoint, the answer should be “too bad.” Unfortunately, the district court didn’t see it that way, and basically said it’s okay to have parts of our laws blocked by copyright. We thought that ruling had some serious problems, and Malamud and his organization Public.Resource.Org appealed. A bunch of amicus briefs have been filed in the case — which you can see at EFF’s case page on the lawsuit. There’s a good one from some law professors about how the lower court got it wrong, as well as a ton of library associations (and also other law professors and former gov’t officials). Public Citizen also filed a good brief on the importance of having access to the law. It’s worth reading them all.

      • Iran Cracks Down On Movie Pirates In The Most Inception-Esque Manner Possible

        For those of us that pay attention to copyright matters throughout the world, a story out of Iran has had us riding a strange sort of roller coaster. Late in September, the Iranian government arrested six people it says run the movie-streaming site TinyMoviez. That site is like many others on the web, focusing on the streaming of Hollywood movies in a manner that is pretty clear-cut piracy. Iran does have copyright laws on the books, which include punishments for “anyone who publishes, distributes or broadcasts another person’s work without permission,” ranging from imprisonment for a few months to three years for violating that law. There are, however, no agreements on copyright between American and Iran, for obvious reasons, so the application of Iranian copyright law tends to be focused on Iranian content. Many were left scratching their heads wondering why the arrest had been made.

Design Patents Should Not Exist, Trademarks and Copyrights Already Cover Designs

Posted in Apple, Patents, Samsung at 3:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Zach Snyder is listed as an “Inventor” of this:

Zach Snyder patent

Summary: The absurdity of broad patents on design ideas which are about as ludicrous as patents on paintings or sketch arts

WE have, for a long time, said that patents on designs should not exist. Trademark law already covers designs, sometimes copyright law covers these too.

This new book title irked us a little. Patently-O promoted it yesterday. The book’s name, “Design Rights”, is misleading. These are not “rights” per se. We often see words like assets, property, rights, protection etc. misused. Patently-O misuses these words too.

“The book walks through design protection available the various global regions,” Patently-O wrote, “US, Europe, Japan, China, India, S.America, etc – and is designed to help practitioners both understand the law and get started on strategy.”

It talks about “practitioners”, i.e. those who make a living not from designs but from telling designers that they need patents.

Design patents too often (more often than not) look like satirical ones. Patently-O gave this example the other day and even Crouch made fun/poked at it. To quote: [via]

Don’t stare too deeply into the pattern above – it embodies Columbia Sportswear’s U.S. Design Patent No. D657093 – covering “the ornamental design of a heat reflective material, as shown and described.” The recent $3 million jury verdict in Columbia Sportsware v. Seirus Innovative Accessories appears to be the first post-Samsung verdict on design patent damages.

Look at it. Ridiculous! How can that be monopolised? It’s almost outrageous.

The Samsung verdict Crouch alludes to is the Apple case, which revolves around a ridiculous design patent dispute. There’s an update on the case in this post from Florian Müller:

Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported on the high-volume business Apple is doing with Samsung, a key supplier of components for various products including the new flagship iPhone, the iPhone X, on which Samsung will reportedly make $110 per unit. But as device makers, the two remain fierce competitors–and adversaries in court.

And on the design patents:

In the famous design patents case, the DoJ agreed with Samsung on the key legal question (article of manufacture). It additionally brought up a procedural question that could have enabled Apple to defend the original damages award. Now, with respect to the more recent petition relating to invalidity, injunctive relief, and infringement, the DoJ cautiously distances itself from the en banc opinion and indicates only between the lines that it may disagree, to some extent, from a policy perspective (“rigid rules for demonstrating obviousness” etc.). It would have been nice if the DoJ had been clearer about the implications of this for U.S. tech companies and for the work of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which is supposed to protect real technological progress, which is hard to do if even weak evidence of non-obviousness gets a lot of weight. The DoJ could have expressed more clearly a concern over what this means for patent quality, but unfortunately it didn’t.

Those who have actually seen some design patents (not registered designs) will know that it’s a bubble of bad patents. Patently-O recently showed the explosive growth of such patents at the USPTO.

What next for patent maximalists? The crooked EPO has already begun granting patents on life itself, rendering EPs a laughing stock. █

China May be the World’s Last ‘Safe Haven’ of Software Patents

Posted in Asia, Patents at 3:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The Eastern District of Texas has gone East

China's trolls

Summary: China’s tolerance of software patents is now the exception rather than the norm and the net effect is patent trolls flocking to China, just like they did in the Eastern District of Texas

THREE days ago we mentioned Quiptel and its bad strategy. To quote this new article: “Quiptel’s technology and software patents will aim to drive the company’s primary business focus” (even though software patents are toothless where it is).

We try hard to think of anywhere in the world where software patents still have legitimacy. Australia recently moved away from these, Japan is getting stricter, and the US has changed a lot since Alice. Last night Forbes published “Why It’s So Hard To Patent Computer Software” (it’s hard to get these patents and it’s even harder to enforce software patents in a court of law right now).

The new reality is, software patents have become a thing of the past (unless one goes to China or merely threatens with them, as trolls do). Nations seem to be coming to grips with the fact that software developers don’t want such patents; it’s a bunch of law firms that pursue such patents.

Now that china is moving towards software patents (while the rest of the world is abolishing software patents) the CCPIT Patent & Trademark Law Office publishes this new article which contains the following section about software.

In April 2017 the revised Guidelines for Patent Examination came into effect and the means for drafting software-related or computer-implemented claims have since become relaxed. According to the revised guidelines, computer-readable media carrying program instructions – which were previously excluded from patent protection – have become patent eligible. In addition, claims seeking to protect an apparatus comprising a memory in which computer-executable instructions are stored and a processor configured to perform actions on execution of the instructions are now acceptable.

We are very gratified to say that our focus may need to shift to China, in order for Chinese authorities to understand just how misguided and unproductive the policy would turn out to be. Already, many patent trolls and patent assertion activities move to China (which is increasingly favourable to the plaintiffs). This may be good for a bunch of law firms, but it’s destructive to China’s productive economy and raises uncertainty for companies operating (or producing) in China. We presume the change in policy was the result of heavy lobbying by the legal ‘industry’ in China. █

Battistelli’s Club Med at the EPO – Part VI: “When Corruption Rules” in Portugal – Operation Marquês

Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Also see: Immunity of the Intellectual Property Office of the European Union Causes Outrage in Spanish Media

Trindade and Campinos

Summary: José Sócrates and his luxury lifestyle in Paris, one of many Portuguese scandals which may unfold further action next month

Today we continue our series that explores possible connections between Battistelli’s “validation agreements”, corruption in Angolan & Portuguese political affairs, and the ongoing efforts to parachute in Campinos as the head of the EPO with the assistance of Battistelli’s “Club Med”.

In part 1 and part 2 we focused a little more on the EPO, part 3 and part 4 looked at Angola, and part 5 looked at Portugal and its former colonies, primarily the corruption there. Today we focus on Portugal.

It would be unfair to blame all of Portugal’s current problems with corruption on the baneful influence of the nouveaux riche post-colonial ruling elite of its former colony. Portuguese politicians are no strangers to scandal in their own right and have managed to make headlines in this regard without any outside assistance.

“Portuguese politicians are no strangers to scandal in their own right and have managed to make headlines in this regard without any outside assistance.”As one commentator put it in an article with the headline “Portugal: When corruption rules”: “Cases of corruption emerge constantly, even in the so-called most developed and democratic of countries. Politicians embezzling money is nothing new, and Portugal is no exception. The difference is that in this country, those cases are following one another constantly, and the crisis is only making the situation worse. Irregularities can be found everywhere, even on some politicians’ résumés – as for example the former Portuguese Prime Minister Miguel Relvas, who obtained his degree illegally.”

Relvas, who was actually Deputy Prime Minister and a senior member of Pedro Passos Coelho’s government, resigned in disgrace in 2013 following a controversy about alleged irregularities in the degree he obtained from a private university (Universidade Lusófona).

“Relvas, who was actually Deputy Prime Minister and a senior member of Pedro Passos Coelho’s government, resigned in disgrace in 2013 following a controversy about alleged irregularities in the degree he obtained from a private university (Universidade Lusófona).”The Ministry of Education referred the matter to the Portugal’s Public Attorney’s Office which led to the revocation of Relvas’ degree by court decision in June 2016.

The affair surrounding Relvas’ degree is “peanuts” compared to the revelations emerging from “Operation Marquis” (a.k.a. “Operation Marquês” in Portuguese) which started off with an investigation into allegations of corruption against José Sócrates who was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 12 March 2005 to 21 June 2011.

In November 2014 Sócrates was arrested on suspicions of corruption and money-laundering after his luxury lifestyle abroad had come under investigation. It seems that after he departed from political life in Portugal in 2011, he lived the life of a millionaire in Paris with no visible source of serious income.

“In November 2014 Sócrates was arrested on suspicions of corruption and money-laundering after his luxury lifestyle abroad had come under investigation.”Initial investigations led to the discovery that a close friend was holding millions of euros for his benefit. Sócrates claimed that he merely borrowed from his friend, but there are no records of the amounts loaned. The funds were apparently used to finance his luxury lifestyle in Paris.

The subsequent investigations under “Operation Marquis” have led to the exposure of a whole network of corruption alleged to involve as much as € 22 million meticulously ‘laundered’ through sophisticated cloaking and masking mechanisms using intermediaries and offshore companies to conceal the final recipient (purportedly Sócrates).

Since the arrest of Sócrates in 2014 the list of defendants has grown to include his former wife, Sofia Fava; a former Director of Caixa Geral de Depósitos and former socialist minister, Armando Vara; his daughter Bárbara Vara; Luso-Angolan businessman, Hélder Bataglia, Carlos Santos Silva, the businessman and friend of the former Prime Minister; Joaquim Barroca of the Lena Group; João Perna, Sócrates’ former chauffeur; Paulo Lalanda de Castro from Octapharma; Henrique Granadeiro and Zeinal Bava, former directors of PT, Inês do Rosário who is Carlos Santos Silva’s mother; the lawyer Gonçalo Trindade Ferreira and the businessmen Diogo Gaspar Ferreira and Rui Mão de Ferro.

“The funds were apparently used to finance his luxury lifestyle in Paris.”One of the money trails reportedly led to a safety deposit box in a Swiss bank and this has caused some delay in the investigation as legal assistance had to be requested from the Swiss authorities. According to the latest press reports from Portugal the Attorney General’s Office in Lisbon has set a deadline of 20 November 2017 for the conclusion of the Operation Marquis investigation.

It will be interesting to see what further revelations emerge in this affair when the final indictment against Sócrates and his co-defendants is submitted by the public prosecutor and the proceedings are opened which is expected to happen towards the end of this year. █

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