10.29.17
Posted in America, Apple, IBM, Patents at 7:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Patents on software are just about as inane and worthless as patents on musical notes
Summary: In spite of misguided campaigns to accumulate/hoard tens of thousands of patents and then cross-license these, courts do not see the legitimacy of most of these patents
SEVERAL days ago someone pointed out this case of a lawyer who had been fired for being ethical. It’s not too shocking; lawyers aren’t expected to be honest, only to maximise profit. To quote:
The Third Circuit reversed the grant of the dismissal of a lawsuit by in-house counsel who sued because, he alleged, he was forced to choose between complying with an application filing quota or complying with his ethical obligations to the USPTO. The case, Trzaska v. L’Oreal USA, INc., (3rd Cir. July 25, 2017), is here.
“The complaint alleged that complying with the quota meant filing “frivolous” patent applications,” Generare Oy Ltd. told me about this. The situation may seem familiar to some.
What’s with all the stockpiling? Why has this become so normal? Yesterday we saw blind acceptance of patents and endless admiration of Apple/Steve Jobs, leading to this kind of terrible Web site which equates/conflates patents with innovation and celebrates accumulation of patents based on quantity alone (because large companies just cross-license a massive number of patents without even assessing these individually).
“What’s with all the stockpiling? Why has this become so normal?”The above is about Apple, but IBM too plays that game and IBM is far too proud of software patents that are likely invalid (it still uses these to bully rivals). See this press release [1, 2, 3] which said “IBM leadership in storage systems and software is based upon more than 380 system patents, including IBM FlashCore technology and more than 700 patents for IBM Spectrum Storage software.”
Around the same time (as this press release) we saw IBM’s patents chief gloating that “Snap-On gets hammered” by patents, having just been judged by a jury that probably does not understand what patents are. The report in question says this:
The Journal Sentinel reports Snap-on’s Rick Secor says the company strongly disagrees with the jury’s verdict and will “vigorously appeal.”
In the lawsuit, the Brookfield-based Milwaukee Tool says the lithium-ion battery packs it invented revolutionized the industry after the technology was introduced in 2005. It replaced packs that used nickel-cadmium batteries.
This particular case is not about software patents, but it’s interesting that IBM is keen to promote it. The patents chief has also just linked to a patent troll’s site (Dominion Harbor) in support of software patents. “The sad, confused state of US #patent eligible subject matter described here,” he said in relation to a patent troll known as Secured Mail Solutions (SMS) — a troll we just mentioned here the other day. To quote:
Because I believe that everyone, as a means of self-improvement, should occasionally test their patience and evaluate their ability to manage pain, I was reading the Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Secured Mail Solutions, LLC v. Universal Wilde Inc., upholding the district court’s ruling on the pleadings that Secured Mail’s seven asserted patents were all ineligible under 35 USC § 101. These patents all address tracking mail through an encoded marking, e.g., a barcode, QR code or URL, on the outside of a mailer which is intended to provide information to the recipient about the contents and the sender. Setting aside that when you see a panel of Prost, Clevenger and Reyna you know the patent’s dead, it’s just a matter of how they will craft the language to that desired effect, let’s just look at how the famed Alice test was handled in this case in general.
It’s safe to say that almost every such case now yields invalidity. Courts understand, in light of Alice, that it’s a matter of great certainty. Software patents are out.
“Software patents are out.”If the rumours are true, the USPTO‘s patent examiners too will soon follow suit. Maybe the EPO‘s also?
The EPO mentioned PCT applications a few days ago and so did Patently-O (compare China to Korea in this graph). PCT is the Patent Cooperation Treaty and if one nation abandons software patents, we can expect others to follow the lead.
Moreover, as Patently-O pointed out a few days ago, better examiners will result in fewer incorrect patent grants. The research explores the “[r]elationship between examiner specialization and examination outcomes.”
“So it shows empirically that “specialization is associated with a more stringent examination process,” as one might expect. Lack of knowledge (or ignorance) in the problem domain leads to more patents.”The summary says, “we find a significant degree of technological specialization among patent examiners working in the same art-unit. This specialization is less pronounced in some of the computer-related technology centers. We found no evidence that examiners specialize in handling important or controversial applications. And it seems that specialization is associated with a more stringent examination process, perhaps because it allows examiners to more easily identify relevant prior art.”
So it shows empirically that “specialization is associated with a more stringent examination process,” as one might expect. Lack of knowledge (or ignorance) in the problem domain leads to more patents. Here we see the importance of the recruitment process, or the ability to attract top talent. It’s hard to mislead examiners who assess patents in their own field of expertise. Consider for instance this new example that says: “The court found the defendant’s argument “not unreasonable,” but nonetheless rejected it. The “great weight of the case law” made clear that the duty to “disclose all material information to the patent examiner” did not extend to ensuring that “the patent examiner understands that information.””
Sadly, if the examiners don’t understand, they often just grant patents. It should be the exact opposite. If the applicant cannot properly explain to the examiners what is being claimed, then the examiner should assume it’s likely intentional. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough,” Albert Einstein famously said. He too was a patent clerk (before becoming famous). █
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Posted in America, Marketing, Patents at 6:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Marketing overload and wasted effort
Summary: Examples from the past week of patents whose sole purpose seems to be promotion of some software rather than prospects of successful litigation
UNOFFICIALLY, software patents are a thing of the past in the United States. The USPTO continues to grant them (not for long perhaps), but courts repeatedly reject them and PTAB does too.
We are watching software patents closely. We try to gain insights into how they get granted and where/when.
Days ago we saw this article about R3. The whole article is about a potential patent or two and it certainly seems like a misguided move from the startup. R3 seems not to know that such patents have no validity/weight in a court of law. These are a waste of time and money, but R3 is pursuing these anyway. To quote the article: “Consortium startup R3 has filed two patent applications detailing its work on applying distributed ledger tech to “dynamic” agreements between financial institutions.
“The two applications – submitted last year and published by the the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Oct. 19 – detail the use of a system for tracking, maintaining and updating agreements via a shared ledger.”
These are applications for software patents; the USPTO ought to reject these on grounds like Section 101 (abstract ideas).
Another new example we stumbled upon was Tangoe, which is trying to disguise or ‘dress up’ software patents using buzzwords like IoT. Based on
this press release, it’s another timely example of software patents that should not be granted by the Office.
Another new example comes from ProofPlus. It speaks of an “additional patent for the software engine that drives the ProofPlus electronic document system,” but the abstract nature of this is almost self explanatory within the sentence.
Accompanying this puff piece we have this press release [1, 2] titled “Chinese Government Allows Patenting of US Company’s Compliance Software for Financial Documents” (very similar to the headline above). Well, China has a patent bubble/gold rush going on right now; SIPO still grants the most hilarious and dumbest of patents, so there’s nothing to be proud of here. They are clearly pursuing self-legitimacy in the wrong places.
A few days ago we saw this announcement from VerifyMe, an obscure (to us) firm which describes itself as “a pioneer in patented physical, cyber and biometric technologies” (as if the patents matter).
Here is another new press release which boasts/brags about software patents by stating: “Intensity Analytics, a specialized software company with patented identity and cybersecurity products…”
FICO too has just wasted money pursuing software patents and then issuing a press release about them [1, 2]. Not enforceable post-Alice, but hey, at least they can use the “p” word to impress potential shareholders.
Here is another days-old press release that says “Enterprise IP management software is an automation system for modern corporate that supports in the tracking of patents, trademarks, copyrights and IP.”
These things barely work, but there’s plenty of marketing for them. Now, here’s a funny claim from British media a few days ago:
Crowdfunding in August 2015 led to industrial design, hardware, software, packaging and a patent.
Paul added: “Just two per cent of patents become products. But with passion you can do it.”
Where does that figure come from? Is it made up?
In conclusion, a lot of the media and especially press releases tend do market software around the idea that there’s a patent (or several patents) on it. Classic example of patents as means of marketing rather than any practical value. █
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Posted in America, Courtroom, Deception, Patents at 6:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) made history by overturning the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC)
Reference: TC Heartland v Kraft
Summary: A roundup of recent takes and spin surrounding the decision of the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), in which is was ruled that lawsuits in the Eastern District of Texas can be shifted to other venues (closer to the alleged infringements, typically involving dubious software patents)
THE impact of TC Heartland (2017, SCOTUS) has been spectacular. So far we’ve been hearing about a 60% decline in patent litigation in the Eastern District of Texas. That’s just the beginning!
The patent trolls’ lobby is understandably unhappy. Earlier today David Newman (Chair of Gould & Ratner’s Intellectual Property Group) wrote in Watchtroll that “TC Heartland decision follows the trend of eroding patent holder rights,” but actually what he meant to say was that SCOTUS fixes patent practice, bringing it into closer alignment with what the patent system was supposed to be all along (before it got profoundly debased). TC Heartland is here to stay and people like Newman might not. Jobs like his are becoming obsolete and he too might soon become redundant. If you’re a patent troll, then sure, TC Heartland is terrible news.
“If you’re a patent troll, then sure, TC Heartland is terrible news.”TC Heartland was also covered a few days ago by Patently-O (like Watchtroll, albeit less rude). If US courts like Gilstrap’s can just ignore SCOTUS on matters such as patents, then we’re in serious trouble. Here is what Patently-O said: “The E.D.N.Y. denied Yahoo’s motion to dismiss, holding (on oral decision): (1) that Yahoo had waived its right to challenge venue; and (2) that TC Heartland did not change the law (since Fourco has been the controlling law all along).”
It might be too early to say just to what degree the SCOTUS decision will enable venue challenges. The decision is less than half a year old and it also took Alice years to ‘mature’ — to the point where the USPTO might soon abolish software patents altogether.
In another new post regarding TC Heartland Dennis Crouch was nitpicking to help patent trolls. It certainly, based on the subtext, sounded like an effort to find exception to the norm and say that “TC Heartland defines residence at the state level, but 1400(b) requires a district-by-district focus — “the judicial district where the defendant resides.””
It later noted that “the whole point of TC Heartland was to focus attention on the patent venue statute and away from these more general definitions.”
“It might be too early to say just to what degree the SCOTUS decision will enable venue challenges.”I’m not a law professor, but I know enough about TC Heartland to say that its main/net impact will be the ability to relocate away from the likes of Gilstrap. Unless a company trades primarily in the Eastern District of Texas, it will be incredibly difficult to drag it down there (also unless the defendant is unaware of the consequences of letting it be). We have already seen how Gilstrap got ‘slapped down’ by higher courts, for refusing to let cases depart from the Eastern District of Texas (in defiance of SCOTUS).
Maybe we are being a tad harsh on Patently-O, but this year (more than in past years) it’s openly attempting to help the patent trolls and even linking to sites like Watchtroll, which watch out for the trolls’ interests. Sometimes even the software patents lobby or the patent troll Dominion Harbor receive links. What a neighbourhood for Crouch to have… Dominion Harbor is currently cherry-picking cases to try to scandalise Alice/Section 101. Look at the sorts of people who promote this; the software patents lobby. As for Watchtroll, it is still lobbying for software patents and pushes aggressively against Alice, in essence trying to get the law thrown aside, as usual. It even stated a few days ago in a tweet: “”Amicus Support needed for 101 case @ SCOTUS. Should claims be invalidated only on the pleadings? Important question.”
“The bottom line is, there’s a strong push for patent trolls’ ‘rights’, for the ‘right’ to patent abstract ideas, and for biased judges to rule on these matters in order to maximise profits around their court venue.”Patently-O is still a relatively good source (less radical than most) for some insights and days ago it published this figure about “patent size”. It was an automated analysis of patents’ scale, plotted based on pretty big data sets. For some patents, the composition can be just as shallow as putting together numbers and citations (from reusable templates), resulting in longer patent texts even when the substance is low and quality/merit is questionable.
The bottom line is, there’s a strong push for patent trolls’ ‘rights’, for the ‘right’ to patent abstract ideas, and for biased judges to rule on these matters in order to maximise profits around their court venue. Hardly noble causes. These are just things to watch out for. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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As a computer user in 2017, privacy is always on my mind — as it should be. I suppose I have always cared about securing my information and data, but in recent years, we have learned so many troubling things about government hackers — including the USA — that it seems more important than ever. Patriot Edward Snowden really shone a light on the unfortunate state of privacy, or lack thereof, in modern days.
This is why I was very intrigued by the Purism line of laptops. These are computers that are designed with privacy in mind. The Librem 13 v2, which I have been testing, features two hardware kill-switches — one will cut the webcam and microphone, while the other kills the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios. By cutting access on the hardware level, hackers cannot access these things when switched off. Instead of using a traditional bios system for booting, it even leverages Coreboot. It runs a Linux-based operating system called “Pure OS” which aims to be very secure and private. Unfortunately, the OS ends up being a little too secure, and the weak link of the overall package. But does that really matter?
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Server
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Kernel Space
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New features and improvements in this DRM driver for Qualcomm display hardware includes preemption support for Adreno A5xx hardware, display fixes for the Snapdragon 820, async cursor plane updates, refactoring of some code, improvements to the firmware loading, and a number of GPU debugging enhancements. For the preemption support it is already available in patch form for libdrm and the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for exposing context priority support.
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Graphics Stack
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Many Linux gamers are excited by the prospects of soon having FreeSync support working on the purely open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack.
Last week the AMD Linux developers began discussing with other upstream open-source graphics driver developers about plans for FreeSync / AdaptiveSync support in trying to come up with an approach and set of interfaces that could be adopted across drivers.
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Back in April Vulkan crossed 1,000 project mentions on GitHub while overnight it crossed the threshold of 1,500 references.
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The developers of the Mesa 3D Graphics Library are preparing to launch a new maintenance update to the current Mesa 17.2 stable series, which will bring more improvements to supported drivers.
Mesa 17.2.4 is currently being tested internally as a Release Candidate, which means it won’t be long until the final release hits the streets, so we want to give you a heads up to what you can expect from this version. This is a stability update, so you should expect it to fix annoyances and other reported issues.
For Intel GPUs, the Mesa 17.2.4 update brings several fixes, including for the compiler and the ANV Vulkan driver, but it looks like there’s also a patch for the Intel i965 OpenGL driver to avoid breaking Beignet and VA-API, as well as other contexts in the system when they’re used in combination with any version of the Mesa 17.2 series.
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NVIDIA and Carnegie Mellon University continue working on the Slang project for providing improved functionality around existing Direct3D HLSL and OpenGL GLSL shaders as well as developing its own shading language.
Besides working on its own shading language that is inspired by Microsoft’s HLSL, Slang allows cross-compiling shader code written in their language to HLSL, GLSL, DirectX bytecode, or SPIR-V. HLSL and GLSL code can also make easy use of Slang’s libraries. When feeding HLSL or GLSL code into the Slang compiler, it can take care of some tedious steps of the shader writing process, full reflection information about parameters of the shader code, and various other helpers around graphics shader writing.
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Benchmarks
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Following this week’s Ethereum and OpenCL benchmarks with Radeon vs. NVIDIA using the latest Linux drivers, some premium supporters requested a fresh AMDGPU-PRO vs. ROCm comparison. So here are a couple of those OpenCL benchmarks of AMDGPU-PRO vs. ROCm on different Polaris / Fiji and Vega GPUs.
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Applications
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A new version of Linux Twitter app Corebird has been released with improved user autocomplete, image-only tweets, links in profile bios, and more.
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So we’re at the stage where the structure is in place. How do we decode? Once we have the structure, it’s actually fairly straightforward:
First of all, we need to figure out where each slice starts and ends. This is done on the CPU, but it’s mostly just setting up pointers, so it’s super-cheap. It doesn’t see any pixels at all, just lengths and some probability distributions (those are decoded on the CPU, but they’re only a few hundred values and no FP math is involved).
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Instructionals/Technical
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As a Linux enthusiast and a distro hopper, I am always checking out new distros or newly released of distros I already know about. There are a few handy tools available on Linux for writing ISO images to disks or USBs. Some of these tools include Unetbootin and Etcher amongst others.
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Wine or Emulation
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WineConf 2017 is taking place today and tomorrow in Wroclaw, Poland. The event began today with a keynote by Wine founder Alexandre Julliard where he talked about Wine 3.0 plans and what’s further out on the roadmap.
Since the Wine 2.0 release almost one year ago, the Wine project has shifted to annual, time-based releases. We’ve been expecting Wine 3.0 around the end of 2017 or early 2018 and that still looks like it will be the case. Julliared reaffirmed plans for shipping Wine 3.0 around the end of the year.
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Games
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A new release of the open-source SuperTuxKart racing game is out just ahead of Halloween.
SuperTuxKart 0.9.3 features new Halloween-themed assets, new tracks, and updates to some of the racing karts. SuperTuxKart 0.9.3 also now features a built-in screen recorder, HSV colorization for some scenery, graphics engine improvements, faster loading times, lower RAM/vRAM usage, improvements to their older OpenGL 2 rendering pipeline, and various other fixes and in-game improvements.
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UK-based Linux and macOS video games publisher Feral Interactive recently announced that they’re porting the F1 2017 racing game to Linux on November 2, 2017.
Launched on August 25, 2017, on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms, F1 2017 is currently one of the hottest racing games of the year. The game is developed and published by Codemasters, the makes of the Colin McRae and DiRT Rally titles.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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New Releases
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LibreELEC 8.2.0 provides a mid-year bump to improve hardware support on Intel and Raspberry Pi hardware. It also resolves minor support issues on a range of devices and fixes a number of important security issues affecting the core OS reported in recent months. Kodi is bumped to 17.5, and Samba bumps to 4.6 which brings support for SMB2/3 to LibreELEC for the first time. PLEASE READ THE RELEASE NOTES below before posting an issue in the forums as there are disruptive changes to Samba, Lirc and Tvheadend.
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The developers of the LibreELEC Linux-based operating system for Raspberry Pi and numerous other embedded devices announced today the release of LibreELEC 8.2 stable series.
LibreELEC 8.2 has been in development for the past several months, during which it received several beta versions that implemented many of the new features and improvements. The OS is now powered by the latest Kodi 17.5.1 open-source media center to allow users to transform their SBCs into HTPCs (home theater PCs).
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There’s a new release of LibreELEC, the Linux distribution focused on delivering a premiere HTPC/multimedia experience by being built around the Kodi HTPC software.
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While many folks prefer to leverage legal streaming services like Netflix on hardware such as Apple TV and Roku nowadays, other people still prefer accessing locally stored media files. Is that concept dying? Yeah, but it will be a while before it is dead completely. Not to mention, music and movie pirates will keep locally stored downloaded media content alive for quite some time.
Don’t get me wrong, not everyone that watches locally stored media files are pirates, but some certainly are. Whether you are accessing downloaded media or streaming content using an addon, the Kodi media center is a great way to experience it. Taking it a step further, a Linux-based operating system that exists just to serve Kodi is even better. Today, one of the best such distros, LibreELEC, gets a major update to version 8.2.0.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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The first public beta of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is now available for their Enterprise Server, Enterprise Desktop, Enterprise Workstation Extension, and Enterprise High Availability products.
SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 will be the successor to SUSE Linux Enterprise 12. Development efforts for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 have been around creating a common code-base for traditional and containerized approaches, allow a single install medium for all SLE 15 products, become more modular, support multiple architectures and deployment scenarios, and be a compliant and secure product.
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SUSE recently kicked off the development of the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 operating system series and they just opened the closed beta program this week by releasing the first beta milestone.
SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 will be developed with a few key objectives in mind, including support for installing and using modules and extensions easier than before, use packages across the entire SUSE universe, support multiple scenarios and architectures on 64-bit, IBM System z (s390x), ARM64 (AArch64), and Power LE systems, as well as on cloud, virtual, physical, host and guest environments.
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Another week has passed, and OpenSuSE Tumbleweed users received no less than seven snapshots, which brought numerous of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source applications, including the Linux 4.13.9 kernel, KDE Plasma 5.11.1 desktop environment, and KDE Applications 17.08.2 software stack.
The LibreOffice office suite has been updated to version 5.4.2, the Qt and Samba stacks were bumped to newer releases, namely 5.9.2 and 4.7.0 respectively. On top of that, LLVM4 has been reworked into a single libLLVM library, and Display Manager is no longer resolved through /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager.
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The developer of GeckoLinux, a GNU/Linux distribution based on both openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed operating systems, announced the release of a beta preview of the next stable GeckoLinux Static series.
It’s been quiet lately for GeckoLinux, and it has to do with the merging of SUSE Studio with the Open Build Service (OBS) distribution development platform, which forced the developer to find an alternative build method of his distro. After a long search, it appears that Kiwi on VPS is the best method for GeckoLinux.
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Red Hat Family
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Open source is at the heart of much of the innovation transforming the global economy and society today. OpenGov spoke to Mr. Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen (above), Senior vice president and General Manager, Asia Pacific at Red Hat Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, to learn about how governments are leveraging open source to deliver services at the high standards expected by citizens.
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Finance
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Debian Family
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Turns out that it is surprisingly easy to build most packages without (fake)root.
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Derivatives
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The developers of the Debian-based Elive GNU/Linux distribution leveraging the Enlightenment desktop environment are still trying to finish the major Elive 3.0 release, and they just published a new Beta.
Elive 2.9.12 Beta is here almost two months after the previous beta (versioned 2.9.8), and it looks like it’s a big one, adding an extra layer of performance improvements to the desktop and window effects with up to 194%, as well as to video playback, which is now smoother than on previous betas.
Elive’s graphical installer, yes the one you don’t have to pay to use it anymore, has been refactored in this new beta release to include a validator of characters for usernames, passwords, and hostnames, make the entire installation process a lot easier than before, and also fix numerous bugs, especially for the built-in browser.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Exton|OS Light Live DVD Build 170918 is, in fact, one of the first GNU/Linux distributions to have been rebased on Ubuntu 17.10, which was officially released on October 19, 2017, as the first Ubuntu release in seven years to replace the Unity user interface with the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
However, Exton|OS Light doesn’t use GNOME, but, instead, it deploys the ultra lightweight and low on resources Openbox window manager, which the developer customized to look as modern as possible. Not to mention that Exton|OS Light ships with only a minimum of packages pre-installed.
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Canonical’s Matthias Klose shared the news on the Ubuntu development mailing list.
The first few weeks of every Ubuntu development cycle is spent syncing key packages from upstream sources, plumbing in the base infrastructure on which future changes lay, and so on.
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For those of you unaware Ubuntu’s April (xx.04) releases follow a 27-week schedule (as opposed to October releases’ 25 week schedule, owing to the little matter of Xmas and New Year).
During the cycle time 2 alpha milestones, 2 beta milestones and 1 release candidate build are issued for public testing. Ubuntu flavors often take advantage of all of these.
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Flavours and Variants
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A few months ago I reviewed Linux Mint KDE edition. At the time I reviewed it, I didn’t thought it could be the second last review of mine of Linux Mint KDE edition. The team has decided to stop the Linux Mint KDE development after the next release Linux Mint 18.3. So the last release of Linux Mint KDE will be 18.3.
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They recently put up a testing backports repository for Kubuntu 16.04 LTS and they now need your help to install those packages containing the KDE Plasma 5.8.8 LTS desktop environment and Krita 3.3.1 digital painting app, and report any issues you might encounter.
At the moment, the Kubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) repositories contain the KDE Plasma 5.8.7 LTS and Krita 3.2.1 packages, so installing the versions prepared in the testing backports PPA will overwrite any previous ones.
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Internet of Things and connected devices are everywhere. And though they solve a number of specific problems, these Internet of Things devices can easily be converted into the Internet of Threats if they are not patched for security vulnerabilities.
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Android
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For those new to Linux, the concept of Open Source software may be foreign. In this short video, I attempt to explain the concept in non-geek speak for the Average Joe to understand.
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Events
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Open source summit Wednesday started with a keynote by members of the Banks family telling a packed room on how they approached raising a tech family. The first hurdle that Keila (the teenage daughter of the family) talked about was something I personally had never actually thought about: Communication tools like Slack that are in widespread use come with an age restriction excluding minors. So by trying to communicate with open source projects means entering illegality.
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The 2017 Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Open-Source Summit Europe events hosted by the Linux Foundation this year in Prague wrapped up earlier this week.
For those that missed the event in person, didn’t tune into the available livestreams, and want to catch up on the material presented, most of the sessions do have their PDF slide decks available for download this weekend.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The uClibc project is still advancing as a lightweight, performant C standard library even while glibc has been making performance advancements and other improvements as well.
Alexey Brodkin of Synopsys spoke at this week’s Embedded Linux Conference Europe about how uClibc is still relevant today and “makes sense” for organizations like Synopsys.
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Not to be confused with C++17 that brings many notable additions and improvements, C17 is also coming soon as an update to the C programming language.
The C17 programming language update is just a “bug fix version” to the C11 standard. C17 will soon go to ballot for voting and still might end up being known as C18, but for now the GNU Compiler Collection is getting prepped with patches as C17.
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Public Services/Government
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The new Dutch government, consisting of liberal-conservatives (VVD), christian democrats (CDA), democrats (D66) and orthodox protestants (CU), published the new coalition agreement: Vertrouwen in de toekomst (“Trust in the future”). I scanned through all sections of this document, searching for the word software.
According to the new government, software is a matter for the justice department. Software is not mentioned in any other section, including the economic, education, labor policy, innovation policy and living environment sections.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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The public should be able to read and use the scientific research we paid for. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act, or FASTR (S. 1701, H.R. 3427). Despite broad bipartisan support on both sides of the aisle, FASTR has been stuck in Congressional gridlock for four years. As we celebrate Open Access week, please take a moment to urge your members of Congress to pass this common-sense law.
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In the past six years or so, close to 800 universities have created more than 8,000 of these MOOCs. And I’ve been keeping track of these MOOCs the entire time over at Class Central, ever since they rose to prominence.
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Programming/Development
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The reputable IDE for FASM named Fresh comes on 29.10.2017 06:47:22 with new news.
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The uClibc project is still advancing as a lightweight, performant C standard library even while glibc has been making performance advancements and other improvements as well.
Alexey Brodkin of Synopsys spoke at this week’s Embedded Linux Conference Europe about how uClibc is still relevant today and “makes sense” for organizations like Synopsys.
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Not to be confused with C++17 that brings many notable additions and improvements, C17 is also coming soon as an update to the C programming language.
The C17 programming language update is just a “bug fix version” to the C11 standard. C17 will soon go to ballot for voting and still might end up being known as C18, but for now the GNU Compiler Collection is getting prepped with patches as C17.
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While Steve Job’s commencement speech is inspiring, it is also an example of the “reality distortion field” at work. While he claimed that a calligraphy course at Reed inspired him to provide typography support in the Macintosh, the Xerox Alto and Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC in 1979 are surely more important. The Macintosh owes everything from the WYSIWYG editor and spline-based fonts to the bitmapped display and laser printer to the Xerox Alto. Of course, Steve Jobs deserves great credit for making desktop publishing common and affordable with the Macintosh and the LaserWriter, something Xerox failed to do with the Xerox Star, an expensive ($75,000) system that commercialized the Alto’s technology.
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[...] also because the copies are unreliable, too. File and media formats are in constant flux;
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Science
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There is something very troubling about what the Viking “Allah” story — both its rise and its equally rapid fall — reveals about the relationship between news media and experts, who, in the absence of a peer-reviewed paper by Larsson, should have initially been consulted for verification of Larsson’s findings.
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Health/Nutrition
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After Hurricane Harvey had passed, Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve staff loaded up a pickup truck full of 30 safe-and-sound sea turtles and released them back to where they had come from, rehabilitated and unharmed. The remaining 30 were sent to the Texas Sealife Center in Corpus Christi for further rehabilitation and will be released over time.
In the days leading up to Hurricane Harvey, staff at Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve in Corpus Christi, Texas, had countless critical preparations to make—solidifying structures, protecting valuable equipment, and ensuring people and property were safe. All this, of course, was in addition to planning for the safety and evacuation of their own families.
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Researchers have warned that virtual reality headsets could pose risks to users, particularly children. The scientists, based at Leeds University, believe continued use of VR sets could trigger eyesight and balance problems in young people unless changes are made to devices.
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We also learned there was a lot to be said for growing your own feed as opposed to purchasing it, again there was that learning curve, but using pasture as part of a crop rotation of hay, grain and cover crops— at least once you figured it out, made you wonder why you ever needed pesticides at all.
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President Trump announced Thursday that he is directing the Department of Health and Human Services to declare the opioid crisis a public health emergency—walking back his plans, announced in August, to declare it a more serious “national emergency.” The shift means the federal government will not, as of now, direct any new federal funds to address the opioid crisis, which killed 64,000 Americans last year. We speak with Columbia University psychology and psychiatry professor Carl Hart, who argues people are dying because of ignorance, not because of opioids.
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Security
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Joanna Rutkowska recently gave a presentation titled “Reasonably Secure Computing in the Decentralized World (An Operating System Architect’s Perspective)” at a public event hosted by The Golem Project in Berlin, Germany called “Golem and Friends: Data, Security, Scaling and More….” The slides from her presentation are available here. The event was streamed live, and the video is available here.
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The National Audit Office (NAO) said that 19,500 medical appointments were cancelled, computers at 600 GP surgeries were locked and five hospitals had to divert ambulances elsewhere.
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Defence/Aggression
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On the morning of Tuesday, June 8, 2004, a taxi navigated the serpentine barriers toward the gate of Forward Operating Base Warhorse in Baquba, Iraq. A U.S. Army officer who was on watch saw it and ran forward toward the vehicle. That is when it exploded, killing the soldier, Capt. Humayun Saqib Muazzam Khan, and two Iraqis who stood nearby. Khan was a Muslim-American, killed by a suicide bomber who was likely of the same faith. He was laid to rest in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, along with thousands of others killed in the so-called Global War on Terror. His family privately mourned their loss daily, frequently visiting his gravesite. Then the openly racist presidential campaign of Donald Trump swept them into the center of a political storm.
Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and pledges to ban all Muslims from entering the country incensed Humayun Khan’s parents, Khizr and Ghazala Khan. Natives of Pakistan, they are extremely proud of their U.S. citizenship. Khizr Khan was invited to address the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in late July 2016.
“If it was up to Donald Trump, [my son] never would have been in America. Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities, women, judges, even his own party leadership. He vows to build walls and ban us from this country,” Khizr Khan said, with his wife at his side. “Donald Trump, you’re asking Americans to trust you with their future. Let me ask you: Have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy.” The thousands of delegates rose in thunderous applause at his remarks, as he held his pocket-sized copy of the U.S. Constitution aloft.
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Not exactly the narrative that was sold to the world – and certainly not the narrative that J. Edgar Hoover proclaimed must be defended to the world.
Here is Douglas P. Horne, via LewRockwell.com, detailing the photographic evidence of a bullet hole in JFK’s limousine’s windshield “hiding in plain sight.”
In 2009, I believed I had discovered new evidence in the JFK assassination never reported by anyone else: convincing photography of the through-and-through bullet hole in the windshield of the JFK limousine that had been reported by six credible witnesses. I revisited that evidence today, and am more convinced than ever that the bullet hole in the limousine windshield is what I am looking at in those images. But the readers of this piece don’t have to take my word for it — you can examine the images yourself, and make up your own minds. The evidence is contained in one of the banned, suppressed episodes of Nigel Turner’s The Men Who Killed Kennedy — episode 7 in the series, called “The Smoking Guns,” which was aired in 2003, and then removed from circulation by The History Channel in response to intense political pressure by former LBJ aides Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers.
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Submarines don’t have much rigging, which somewhat spoils the chorus, but I am delighted to hear that sailors on board Britain’s nuclear deterrent are heavily into sex and drugs. As the North Korean diplomatic standoff shows, nuclear weapons are utterly useless even within the context of the one situation in which they are supposed to be of use. Nobody has yet argued that the solution to nuclear proliferation is to start an atomic war, so what are the things for? The notion that Putin has a secret desire to send tanks rolling up the streets of Dumfries is obvious nonsense.
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Are the Air Force preparations a bluff? Donald Trump would not be the first president to engage in a nuclear bluff. In October 1969, President Richard Nixon approved Operation Giant Lance. US B-52 bombers loaded with nuclear bombs circled in the Arctic above the Soviet Union. Nixon thought this would persuade the Kremlin to pressure Hanoi to end the war in Vietnam. It was the birth of Nixon’s “Madman Theory,” the idea that the Soviets could be forced to come to terms by convincing them that Nixon was crazy enough to do anything.
President Harry Truman played high-stakes nuclear poker on two occasions. The first was during the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948-49. President Truman sent two squadrons of B-29 bombers to Western Europe. This was a double bluff. The planes were similar to the B-29s which had dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, but had no atomic bombs on board.[1]
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With its prominent position in the arms trade, and the impunity it grants countries like Saudi Arabia, Britain is playing with fire.
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Most Americans’ broad ignorance regarding Africa is a long-standing phenomenon, one perpetuated from the top down. In 2008, the campaign staffers tasked to wrangle Sarah Palin were terrified people would discover she thought Africa was one big country. In 2001, President George W. Bush told a gathering in Sweden, “Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease.” Vice President Joe Biden, speaking to none other than the US-Africa Leaders Summit in 2014, said, “There’s no reason the nation of Africa should not join the ranks of the world’s most prosperous nations.” That’s twice in one sentence, Joe.
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In fact, the US has some 6,000 troops spread throughout virtually every country in Africa, with heavy concentrations in the middle third of the continent where groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab are most active. US Special Forces are, at any given time, carrying out approximately 100 missions in Africa, ostensibly in the name of the nation they are operating from. “In 2006, just 1 percent of all US commandos deployed overseas were in Africa,” writes journalist Nick Turse. “In 2010, it was 3 percent. By 2016, that number had jumped to more than 17 percent. In fact, according to data supplied by US Special Operations Command, there are now more special operations personnel devoted to Africa than anywhere except the Middle East.”
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Despite all its armed might and long history of conquests, America remains a perpetually frightened country without a strong movement to protest this imperialism and warmongering, notes poet Phil Rockstroh.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Historically, the vast majority of the world’s power has been consumed as quickly as it is made, or it’s wasted. But climate change has made governments interested in renewable energy, and renewable energy is variable—it can’t be dispatched on demand. Or can it? As research into utility-sized batteries receives more attention, the economics of adding storage to a grid or wind farm are starting to make more sense.
But grid-tied energy storage is not new; it has just always been limited to whatever resources a local power producer had at the time. Much like electricity production itself, storage schemes differ regionally. Power companies will invest in batteries that make sense on a local level, whether it is pumped storage, compressed air, or lithium-ion cells.
Looking at the kinds of storage that already exist is instructive in helping us see where storage is going to go, too. Lots of the latest battery projects merely build on engineering that has been in service for decades. To better see our way forward, we collected a number of images and diagrams of the world’s biggest energy storage schemes.
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In Extreme Cities, I place Hurricane Sandy in a broader context, weaving together stories of cities around the world that are threatened by climate chaos. Extreme Cities draws on interviews with researchers at the cutting edge of climate science, landscape architects whose work uses natural processes to build our capacity to endure extreme weather, and activists fighting to diminish the inequalities that render cities vulnerable to climate chaos. Cities, I contend, are at the forefront of the coming climate chaos, their natural vulnerabilities heightened by social injustice. Cities are the defining social and ecological phenomena of the twenty-first century: they house the majority of humanity, they contribute the lion’s share of carbon to the atmosphere, and they are peculiarly vulnerable to climate chaos.
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency, citing unspecified “potentially sensitive information,” is declining to release a document it drafted several years ago that details how it would respond to a major hurricane in Puerto Rico.
The plan, known as a hurricane annex, runs more than 100 pages and explains exactly what FEMA and other agencies would do in the event that a large storm struck the island. The document could help experts assess both how well the federal government had prepared for a storm the size of Hurricane Maria and whether FEMA’s response matches what was planned. The agency began drafting such advance plans after it was excoriated for poor performance and lack of preparation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
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Finance
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Arithmetic fans would evaluate this assertion by looking for evidence that the debt is causing problems such as high interest rates and inflation, and creating a large debt-service burden.
The opposite is the case, with long-term interest rates still under 2.5 percent, compared to more than 5.0 percent in the surplus years of the late 1990s. Inflation remains under the Fed’s 2.0 percent target, and has actually been trending downward this year. And debt service is less than 1.0 percent of GDP (net of interest rebated by the Fed), compared to over 3.0 percent in the 1990s.
In short, there is no evidence that debt is limiting our ability to spend more in these and other areas. There is a strong case that fears over the debt, raised by folks like Zakaria, are limiting our ability to invest for the future.
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With cuts to his office looming after the demise of Cook County’s controversial soda tax, Assessor Joseph Berrios testified Friday about his efforts to shed positions in an office that is already down more than 30 percent.
The budget pressure comes as the office was sharply criticized following a Chicago Tribune investigation earlier this year that found widespread inequities in residential property tax assessments.
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A single statistic explains it all: 1 percent of Americans – that is the tiny, exclusive club of billionaires and millionaires – get 80 percent of the gain from this tax con. Eighty percent!
But that’s not all! To pay for that unneeded and unwarranted red-ribbon wrapped gift to the uber wealthy, Republicans are slashing and burning $5 trillion in programs cherished by workers, including Medicare and Medicaid.
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The largest companies in the digital economy are U.S. and Chinese companies, plus South Korea’s Samsung. As a Wikipedia page shows, no EU company has been among the world’s largest 10 companies (from all industries, but with digital businesses now leading) by market capitalization since Royal Dutch Shell in the second quarter of 2014. That’s a huge failEUre, and a strategic issue because it means that to the extent Europe has any innovative businesses at all (such as SAP), they’re not at the top of the M&A food chain.
While that tax plan Q&A still claims the EU wants its digital startups to succeed, the EU’s digital industry commissioner has just given an interview to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which she says Europe doesn’t need a company like Google. How little weight the digital economy has in the EU is reflected by the commissioners assigned to that area of responsibility. Presently, the EU’s digital commissioner is Mariya Gabriel, a young Bulgarian politician with an even less impressive track record than her technology-illiterate predecessor, Germany’s Guenther Oettinger, who became the laughing stock of many people in the EU tech industry. Mrs. Gabriel said in the aforementioned interview that the EU should focus on fields such as nanorobotics, security chips, and “automotive digitization”, where she says EU companies are leading the way. I checked on who the current leaders in nanorobotics are and found more U.S. than EU companies among the top 10, with all of those EU companies being small enough to be acquired sooner or later, and I’ve previously outlined my thinking on the automotive future.
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So what will happen? It’s widely anticipated that British people won’t want to pick food – and the main growing areas of the country coincide with areas of low unemployment. So do – as Harris’s article implies – inevitably face a future where Britain relinquishes even more of its food sovereignty, with domestic production decreasing and food miles and prices rocketing?
While the above bleak scenario has a ring of truth, it misses some key factors that have led to Britain’s dependency on foreign agricultural labour. Any discussion about the future of British agriculture must take into account issues of access to land, price rigging and working conditions. If we ignore them, the future may indeed be bleak.
The crisis of British agriculture is closely related to other crises in British society, and linked to the global crisis of the late 20th century capitalist model of industrialised agriculture. It’s as hooked on cheap labour and poor working conditions as it is on fertilisers and pesticides. They are all symptoms of a fundamentally flawed and bankrupt way of producing food. One way or another it will have to change. Without addressing the questions of access to land and food monopolies we have no chance of getting out of this mess. Brexit hasn’t created the crisis, it is only bringing it to a head.
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After repeated claims by Republicans suggesting their tax reform plan would offer the middle class a much needed break, we now know that is a trick. Independent analyses have shown that rather than helping the middle class, the GOP would bilk working families to pay for a multi-trillion dollar treat to the wealthiest few.
The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center found that under the Ryan-McConnell plan, 30 percent of taxpayers with incomes between $50,000 and $150,000 would see a tax increase, along with a majority of households making between $150,000 and $300,000. The TPC also concluded that 80 percent of the tax relief would be enjoyed by the top-earners comprising just 1 percent of the country’s population.
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Because people make money when America’s public schools are in crisis.
And who sits atop this mountain of bribery and malfeasance?
Who gives the money that buys the politicians who make the laws that hurt the kids and profits the donors?
It’s none other than Mr. and Mrs. Public School Sabotage!
Systemic underfunding, laissez-faire segregation and privileging privatization – this is what our children face every day.
It’s time we as a nation stop, take a moment – and offer our hearty congratulations to this years most pernicious saboteurs.
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Clueless, arrogant, outgunned. The attitude displayed towards the UK’s Brexit negotiators in much of the media is derisive. Witness the treatment of July’s notorious negotiating table photo opportunity: on one side, the European Commission behind piles of neatly stacked papers and, facing them, David Davis’s team, empty table gleaming. Without pausing to consider possible explanations, reporters gleefully proclaimed that this demonstrated UK unpreparedness and the naive expectation that it could fly by the seat of its pants.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Words. “I have the best words,” Trump famously proclaimed during the campaign, and just the other day he told Maria Bartiromo of Fox News how “well-crafted” his goofy tweets are. The same man announced from the White House lawn on Wednesday that “I’m a very intelligent person” — words that sounded more self-deceptive than presidential.
Trump does have a way with words. Unfortunately, it’s a gruesome way. His way is to use them as a blunt instrument to bully and belittle opponents. The rest of the time — when he’s not reading prepared remarks from a teleprompter — his way with English is fumbling, incoherent, reckless and untruthful. Look no further than the contretemps that began with his false claim that unlike him, “most other presidents” didn’t make phone calls to the families of military killed in action, which then rapidly nosedived even further, using the dead as a political football, then insulting the widow of a dead Green Beret hero and a Florida congresswoman.
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Hillary Clinton blames others for last year’s electoral defeat, never recognizing that many Americans — both Democrats and Republicans — found her public record appalling…
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According to a study conducted by Storyzy on 1,800 fake news sites representing 1,7 billion visits per month, 22 new fake news sites on average were created every month in the US since the beginning of 2017, a strong trend that began in 2016 during the US presidential campaign. Robots are the only way to detect these new sites and eventually stop the increase and spreading of fake news.
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Speech by company executive contradicts denial by Trump campaign that claimed the company used its own data and Facebook data to help the campaign
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Last week, the paper published an op-ed by Douglas Schoen, “Why Democrats Need Wall Street” (10/18/17). Who is Douglas Schoen, you might ask? He’s billed by the Times as having been “a pollster and senior political adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000.” More relevantly to the current century, he’s a corporate PR consultant who works for the likes of Walmart, AT&T, Time Warner, Procter & Gamble and GlaxoSmithKline.
He has a side career as a commentator for mostly right-wing outlets like Fox News, Forbes and Newsmax, where his nominal relationship to the Democrats mostly serves to bolster his credibility when he attacks them—as in a series of columns he co-wrote in 2010–11 urging Barack Obama to step aside in favor of Hillary Clinton, only to declare in 2016 (The Hill, 10/31/16) that “I am not able, under the circumstances we are now facing, to vote for Secretary Clinton” (the circumstances being that “emails potentially pertinent to the Clinton probe had been found on Anthony Weiner’s computer”).
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The Spanish Government’s refusal yesterday of the offer of a 20 December election in Catalonia vividly highlights that the thing they are most scared of is any kind of free and fair vote. They wish to take over all the Catalan institutions and media, and institute a judicial ban on pro-Independence campaigning, before they allow any election – that is why they prefer a six month delay. All of which yet again highlights the outrageous lie the western corporate and state media have been repeating and repeating for weeks, that only a minority in Catalonia support independence. At the last Catalan parliamentary election the explicitly pro-Independence parties gained 48% and explicitly anti-independence parties gained 39%, while the most recent recent poll, by GESOP, indicates that would not change in a new election.
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A snap analysis of social media across Europe in the major languages, excluding Spaniards and Catalans, shows about 75% of posts are broadly sympathetic to Catalan Independence – or at least sympathetic to the Catalan right to self-determination – and about 25% support the Rajoy position. It is not possible directly to extrapolate from social media users to the entire population, but at the very least we can say that the unanimous attack on the Catalans from European governments and the unequivocal support for Rajoy plainly does not reflect the views of their people.
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Zero companies have left Catalonia. The BBC, Sky News, France24 and Deutsche Welt have all told me repeatedly today that 1500 companies have left Catalonia. Goodness knows what the Spanish media is like – El Pais, soon to be renamed The Ecstatic Francoist, has put me off looking any further. But despite the media bombardment of fake news, actually no companies have left Catalonia at all. What have left Catalonia are not 1500 companies, but 1500 emails and forms giving a change of Head Office address. The companies and the jobs are still exactly where they were. In Catalonia.
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President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to its lowest level since he took office, with Americans disapproving of his performance as commander in chief and handling of some policy issues while largely favoring his work on the economy, a new Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll finds.
Mr. Trump’s job approval rating stood at 38%, a five point drop from September, the poll showed. Over all, 58% said they disapproved of the job Mr. Trump has done.
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Another Donald Trump mural believed to be the work of Australian graffiti artist Lushsux has popped up on Israel’s barrier in the occupied West Bank, this time depicting the U.S. president sharing a kiss with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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The FBI’s investigation of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, includes a keen focus on a series of suspicious wire transfers in which offshore companies linked to Manafort moved more than $3 million all over the globe between 2012 and 2013.
Much of the money came into the United States.
These transactions — which have not been previously reported — drew the attention of federal law enforcement officials as far back as 2012, when they began to examine wire transfers to determine if Manafort hid money from tax authorities or helped the Ukrainian regime close to Russian President Vladimir Putin launder some of the millions it plundered through corrupt dealings.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Poland will try to “save from censorship” a sculpture of Pope John Paul II, which might be removed in northwestern France, by moving it to Poland, Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło has said.
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Twitter said on Thursday that it had overstated its monthly-user figures since 2014 after mistakenly including data from third-party applications in its counting.
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Twitter reported a net loss of $21.1 million for the quarter, compared with a $102.9 million loss for the same period last year. The company’s revenue declined 4 percent, to $590 million.
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One hundred years ago, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party seized control of Russia in the October Revolution and founded the Soviet Union. As with all good revolutionaries, one of the first things that Lenin’s gun-toting Red Guards did was seize the post offices and telegraph stations throughout the capital of Petrograd.
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On October 26, Twitter decided to ban “advertising from all accounts owned by Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik,” two Russian state-owned media outlets. Twitter was reacting to an assessment by the United States intelligence community that RT and Sputnik interfered with the U.S. election on behalf of the Russian government, as well as Twitter’s (non-public) internal research. Many may be tempted to celebrate Twitter’s decision as a move to protect democracy from an authoritarian state. We fear it’s just the opposite.
There seems to be little question that the Russian government uses Russia Today and Sputnik to stir up division and influence foreign politics, including the last U.S. presidential election. But it would be ironic if our response to that effort was to step back from defending freedom of expression.
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NEW DELHI: Amidst controversy over Tamil superhit film Mersal, veteran film actor Amol Palekar has told the Supreme Court that pre-censorship of films by Central Board of Film Certification must be done away with as it is used by the Centre to “enforce and propagate its ideology” through the medium and suppress independent views of filmmakers.
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hares of Weibo (NASDAQ:WB) rallied nearly 140% this year, but the company now faces major headwinds as Chinese regulators tighten their control over the country’s top social networking platforms. The latest crackdowns started in June, with regulators ordering Weibo and two other platforms to halt their live video and audio broadcasts until they obtained new government-backed licenses.
It accelerated in September as regulators fined Weibo’s parent company SINA (NASDAQ:SINA), Baidu, and Tencent (NASDAQOTH:TCEHY) for allegedly allowing its users to “spread information of violence and terror, false rumors, pornography, and other information that jeopardizes national security, public safety, and social order.”
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America’s New Red Scare escalated in mid-October as the US Department of Justice demanded that the US division of television network RT (formerly known as Russia Today) register as a “foreign agent” under the aptly named Foreign Agents Registration Act.
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Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency abruptly pulled a group of its scientists from speaking at a scientific meeting set to take place Monday.
The conference was focused on exploring ways to protect the Narragansett Bay Estuary in Rhode Island. Climate change happens to be one of the threats to the estuary and the EPA’s researchers were set to talk on this issue.
Given the administration’s hostility to climate science, the new leaders of the EPA were quickly accused of censoring their own scientists.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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An invasive spying law is set to expire at the end of this year, and Congress is gearing up for a fight over what will replace it. As lawmakers weigh various proposals to reform that law, they would do well to consider the sordid history of warrantless surveillance in this country, and the people who have most suffered from it.
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Unlike the ironically named USA Liberty Act, the USA RIGHTS Act actually ends the legal backdoor that allows the NSA to collect domestic communications and it also forcess the government to give notice when FISA Section 702 surveillance data is used against Americans and to give the more powers to address that in court. Specifically, unlike the so called USA Liberty Act, the USA RIGHTS Act would end “about” data collection. Additionally, the bill sets a 4-year sunset on Section 702 so complete elimination can again be on the table after a potential changeup in political roster.
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That’s according to a new report from Canalys which claims smartphone shipments in India crossed the 40 million mark for the first time in Q3 2017 courtesy of 23 percent annual growth. That means that India has overtaken the U.S. on sales with only China ahead of it.
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We live in a weird dystopian Orwellian world, where most don’t care what’s going on and the few that do – don’t have the courage to rattle the cage.
“Oh Look, a like button.”
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Still, the problem with backdooring encrypted platforms is that they are no longer secure or private. And as we see every week in the news about everything cyber, if there’s a backdoor, the “bad guys” will find it and use it long before the so-called good guys know what’s happened. It also really, really doesn’t help that, right now, Trump’s “cyber czar” can’t even be bothered to show up to work.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Donald Trump is the least popular president to serve in US history, so it’s no surprise that the call for mass, “J20 demonstrations” at his inauguration would be answered by massive crowds.
As with many protests, there was a small number of black bloc participants who engaged in minor acts of vandalism, smashing six windows. The DC police kettled hundreds of protesters in response, and after more than 100 escaped, they slapped the remaining 200 protesters with felony conspiracy charges, so that each protester now faces up to 70 years in prison for being in the same place as a black bloc action.
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ON THE FIRST DAY of the trial, Josh Walker wore a long navy jacket, a white shirt, beige pants, and black shoes. He stood outside the courthouse clutching a cigarette and shivering slightly in the cold morning air. “I’m beginning to feel nervous now,” he said, glancing toward the entrance of the court building.
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The Met reiterated their previous information that: “Since 2010, 270,000 pieces of illegal terrorist material have been removed by social media providers, following referrals from the Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit.”
However, they declined to list any other statistics, stating that “disclosure of the requested information would be likely to prejudice the prevention or detection of crime”.
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Davis explains that university administrations are rarely in favor of collective bargaining. “Those students at University of Chicago fought against long odds,” he says. The university “threw everything possible at them to stop this from happening, and the students did an amazing thing. It should be a message to graduate students everywhere that it is possible.”
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A Pennsylvania woman who beat and tried to strangle her daughter for incorrectly reciting Bible verses has been sentenced to prison.
Forty-one-year-old Rhonda Shoffner was sentenced Wednesday to 2½ to five years in prison after pleading guilty to charges including aggravated assault of her daughter, who was younger than 13.
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This week on CounterSpin: Thanks mainly to independent and social media, and of course activism like Black Lives Matter, Americans have been forced to confront, and to know more about, police brutality and racism in the criminal justice system than just a few years ago. But corporate media conversation about what to do with that knowledge is constrained. We may hear editorial calls for better training, or more data, or sometimes even convictions of individual officers. But somehow we never see the problem of policing whole, so the deeper reckoning necessary for real change is forestalled.
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These words from a stranger comforted my grandmother, Chawa Guterman, when her boat first reached the United States in 1950. A 17-year-old Jew in Poland when World War II began, she had lost everything but her life at the hands of the Nazis. They sent her to a work camp away from the rest of her family, where she was worked to the bone, barely fed.
After liberation, she was alone — her parents and her six siblings had all perished in the Holocaust. She lived in a displaced persons camp in Landsberg, Germany, where she met and married my grandfather. Together they immigrated to the United States with the support of a U.S. based resettlement organization. When their boat first reached the U.S. shore, my grandmother took in the scene around her. People filed off the boat, charging into the extended arms of loved ones, waving hellos, and exchanging hugs and kisses.
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In September, the board of supervisors in Dane County, Wisconsin, passed a resolution to protect immigrants from the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.
The board, which represents the half a million people who live in Dane County, endorsed the ACLU’s Freedom Cities campaign and its nine model policies, which shield immigrants from discrimination, unjust government targeting, and attacks on their privacy.
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The suit notes a “systematic, companywide wrongful classification” system for Client Solutions Managers, Customer Solutions Managers, Customer Account Managers, “or other similarly titled positions.”
According to the lawsuit, the primary duties of these various classifications is nearly identical. Their duties “involve communicating with existing Facebook advertising customers, implementing their marketing plans, and selling Facebook marketing products and services to existing customers.” The suit says a “large percentage” of their compensation comes from “commissions from the sale of Facebook’s marketing products.”
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After years of sending youths to solitary confinement for days, weeks and even months at a time, the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice has taken drastic steps to reduce the time young offenders spend in isolation.
The decision to move away from solitary confinement, or segregation, came as part of a consent decree in federal court between the department and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Thursday night, the FCC unveiled a proposal to relax its media-ownership rules. The plan would lift a ban preventing companies from owning both a broadcast station and a newspaper in the same market, and ease restrictions on the number of television and radio stations a single owner can control in a market. The FCC is expected to vote on the proposal during its open meeting next month, and with Republicans in the majority at the agency, it will likely pass.
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Zero-rated services are controversial. Critics argue that the concept fundamentally undermines the principles of net neutrality; that all data should be treated equally. If a service is “free” to access, customers are more likely to use it, regardless of whether the competition is better. That poses a problem for startups who could have great features or ideas, but don’t have the cash to “buy-in” to zero-rated services like their established competition. In short, the fear is that juggernaut media companies will stifle any rival before it has a chance to innovate or attract customers.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Another court has ruled that the public still has the ability to play old music that almost everyone believed they lawfully had the ability to play. The Florida Supreme Court, following in the footsteps of New York State’s high court, ruled yesterday that its state law, which governs sound recordings made before 1972, doesn’t include a right to control public performances of sound recordings, including radio play. Both this decision and the reasoning behind it are good news for digital music companies and radio listeners.
This case stems from a broader debate about copyright in sound recordings. Although federal copyrights in sound recordings cover reproduction and distribution, they don’t include a general right to control public performances, except for “digital audio transmissions” like Internet and satellite radio. That’s why AM and FM radio stations, and businesses like restaurants that play music, have never had to pay record labels or recording artists, nor ask their permission. (Songwriters and music publishers do get paid for public performances, typically through collecting societies ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC). But recordings made before February 15, 1972 aren’t covered by federal law at all. Instead, they fall under a patchwork of state laws and court decisions, most of them pre-Internet. The labels have tried for many decades to win a performance right, but so far neither Congress nor state legislatures have created one.
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The Committee will vote on the result in January, which then needs to be confirmed by the entire Parliament in a plenary vote. Meanwhile, the EU member state governments are working on their own common position in the Council.
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Posted in America, Patents at 12:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: PTAB, which invalidates a lot of software patents, receives broad support from everyone but those who profit from patent litigation; we present a roundup
DISDAIN if not hatred of PTAB comes from all the expected directions. Patent trolls and companies with low-quality patents fear the possibility of their patents coming under scrutiny, sometimes without them even suing. It makes patent shakedown (like extortion/blackmail) a lot more risky, sometimes hard if not impossible.
That more or less explains the very purpose and rationale of PTAB. It helps keep people and companies more honest.
The other week we saw PTAB coming under scrutiny from the anti-Section 101 Anticipat. This is another one of these parasitic firms and it spoke of yet another Section 101 rejection (typically software patents being invalidated):
It has seemed like the PTAB has been on a recent roll in reversing abstract idea rejections. In the past four weeks, 13 decisions have reversed abstract idea rejections. But in that same time period, there have been over 60 abstract idea appeals that have been affirmed. See Anticipat Research Database. So the recent trend has actually been consistent with historical reversal rates of about 20%, which is far below other grounds of rejection reversal rates.
Yes, 80% has been that number since last year. It was repeatedly noted by various blogs and what it comes to show isn’t that 80% of software patents are invalid but that 80% of patents deemed invalid by PTAB (only after petition) and also revisited by CAFC were confirmed as invalid. In many cases CAFC leaves these patents to rot without even looking into them.
Therein lies the great power and value of PTAB. Software patents don’t receive any respect there and appeals of PTAB decisions rarely turn out to be fruitful. Inter partes reviews are a giant leap towards abolition of software patents at the USPTO. David Longo recently spoke about a “decision [which] is important because it was recently made precedential by the Board.” (Ex parte McAward)
These people still try digging very deep for any glimmer of hope. They just don’t know how to stop PTAB and thwart inter partes reviews (IPRs).
Michael Loney, who has covered PTAB for a long time, wrote some days ago that “PTAB has designated as informative three opinions addressing its ability to reject petitions because the same prior art or arguments previously were presented to the USPTO. Some believe this helps give guidance on how to make patents “IPR proof”” (as if the task is to dodge scrutiny rather than endure it).
Remember efforts to slow down PTAB/IPRs? Patent maximalists have already attempted that, but it never worked for them.
Michael Loney has another new article in which he wrote: “The PTAB has extended the one-year deadline in Minerva Surgical v Hologic by six months. The final written decision in the inter partes review was originally set to expire two days after the Federal Circuit released its en banc Aqua Products opinion”
These delays may serve to cause a pileup/scatterback/backlog, but at the end PTAB does its job and eliminates bad patents.
What next on the agenda of PTAB opponents. Well, they rely a great deal on Oil States, they try to 'scandalise' PTAB, and they sent many briefs to the Supreme Court. They wrongly assume that Justices will fail to see the agenda of these briefs.
Thankfully, briefs in support of PTAB are already piling up. It’s pleasing to see that Patently-O, which keeps attacking PTAB, is finally willing to also acknowledge the existence of pro-PTAB briefs. As he put it some days ago:
Amici briefs supporting AIA Trials and Inter Partes Review are beginning to be filed. The first brief in is filed by John Vandenberg’s team at Klarquist representing SAP, Gilead, Nautilus, and others. The Brief presents a reexamination linkage and slippery-slope argument in two forms: (1) killing inter partes review will also kill reexaminations; and (2) pre-AIA patentees ‘consented’ to reexamination and that should be seen as consent to inter partes review.
Our previous post spoke about how the American Intellectual Property Lawyers Association (AIPLA) was lobbying against PTAB. They also intervene in Oil States, according to this article which says that the “Federal Circuit judges discussed how they handle appeals from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board during an AIPLA session. Judge Newman also took the chance to offer a solution for the Supreme Court ruling on the pending Oil States case…”
We have good reasons to believe that Oil States will merely make PTAB stronger and more solidly protected. Sites such as Patently-O, knowing that PTAB proponents are watching, still hope they can turn the tide of SCOTUS scepticism on patents. It is worth noting that Patently-O habitually lies about what patents are, e.g. in order to make it seem like the government is ‘stealing’ ‘property’. As it turned out, even the government now debunks Patently-O — a fact which the blog covered some days ago in “Government Explains Its Position – A Patent is not Property but Merely a Limited Franchise”. The blog is noting this at the end: “I’ll note here that to make its policy-case that there are too many patent applications for the PTO to properly handle, the Government perpetuated the USPTO’s false statement that “In 2015, the USPTO received more than 600,000 applications—more than three times as many as it had received two decades earlier.” That statement includes 273,000 requests for continued examination as “applications.””
It does not matter how big the backlog is; they need to properly assess patent applications and if they lack manpower, then they can hire more examiners. Doing what David Kappos did, namely issuing a lot of bad patents, is a lot worse than a large backlog. Watch the next article from Patently-O. This latest propaganda from Dennis Crouch uses 3 consecutive lies (and propaganda words): “Stealing Invention Ownership”. It’s about sovereign immunity — like that which patent trolls are exploiting these days.
Patents are not “ownership”, they cannot be “stolen”, and many patents have nothing whatsoever to do with inventorship. Crouch certainly knows this. But, alas, facts don’t matter when he has an agenda to push.
The above is about Ali v Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of Massachusetts (Supreme Court 2017), but it’s worth noting that these same pretexts now piggyback the immunity of indigenous tribes. Congress intended to stop this and in fact high courts too are upset about this exploitation and rule accordingly. According to this new blog post, this loophole won’t last much longer. In other words, PTAB will be gaining power and no patents will be outside its reach. It sounds as though US politicians will put an end to this patent "scam" and even IAM says that the “House Judiciary Committee [is] set to hold hearing on controversial issue of sovereign immunity and IPRs” (one can imagine where this will go). To quote:
The hot topic of Native American sovereign immunity and inter partes review (IPR) is set to be put under the microscope in a hearing by the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee. Although details on the hearing are scant at the moment a House Judiciary aide confirmed to IAM that Chairman Bob Goodlatte is “very interested in this topic and intends to hold a hearing”. It’s not clear when that might happen, but given the amount of attention this issue is currently receiving it seems likely to be a matter of weeks rather than months.
[...]
It’s not just judges who have expressed concerns, some legislators have also heaped scorn on the transfer strategy, with Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri introducing a bill to clamp down on the use of sovereign immunity in this way. A group of representatives from the House Oversight and Government Committee, meanwhile, has launched a probe into the Allergan/St Regis deal.
With the involvement of the House Judiciary Committee, one of the principal drivers of IP policy on Capitol Hill, the topic isn’t about to fade from view. But perhaps the bigger picture, as committee members will surely hear from some quarters in the next few weeks, is that the steps taken by Allergan and SRC Labs are symptomatic of what many patent owners see as broader problems with the IPR process.
What will happen in 2018? We expect the Supreme Court to reaffirm PTAB’s position in Oil States, we expect the number of petitions (IPRs) to grow, we expect loopholes (like tribal immunity) to be closed and patent quality will necessarily increase, if not at the patent office, then at PTAB and the courts. It’s a tough time to be a patent lawyer. █
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Posted in America, Deception, Patents at 10:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Related: IBM, IPO, AIPLA, ABA and Other Lobbying/Front Groups of the Patent Microcosm Are Trying to Change US Law for Software Patents
Lobbyists such as David Kappos are trying hard to destroy the integrity of the Office for the sake of the litigation ‘industry’
Summary: The American Intellectual Property Lawyers Association (AIPLA), a front group of people who profit from mass litigation, is pressuring politicians and USPTO officials to reduce the quality of patents, remove barriers to frivolous lawsuits, and generally put the interests of prosecutors/trolls ahead of the interests of technologists
YESTERDAY we covered some of the good news regarding the USPTO, including the rumoured abolition of software patents, as a whole.
As we stated at the time, there’s a reactionary lobby, namely that of the patent microcosm. Recent developments in the patent system may render them obsolete. It is important to see their reaction in order to better understand what they plan to do next.
AIPLA is a group of saboteurs who manipulate the law to encourage patent litigation (i.e. maximise profit for lawyers). That’s litigation at our expense (for them to pocket).
The other day Managing IP published a long series of posts for AIPLA. These were all puff pieces, starting with this interview of AIPLA’s president, who is described as “associate patent counsel at Johnson & Johnson, where she has worked since 2000. She joined AIPLA in 1995 and has done stints on the Professional Programs Committee, the Board of Directors (from 2004 to 2007) and the AIPLA Fellows.”
So basically, AIPLA is now run by a massive multinational company and it is trying to water down Alice/Section 101, as the following part of the puff piece reveals:
Seeking consensus on Section 101
One example of AIPLA reconciling disparate views has been its work on patent eligibility under Section 101 of the Patent Act.
AIPLA executive director Lisa Jorgenson believes Section 101 problems remain the number one issue on members’ minds.
“Our members tell us that the Section 101 issue is still the most important issue for them,” says Jorgenson. “They are very concerned about the current uncertain state of the law. We believe this has discouraged investment in US-based research and development activities.”
In another post in this series they ask a loaded question (“When should the USPTO intervene in PTAB appeals?” is the headline) even though PTAB ought to work independently, just like the EPO’s appeal boards (BOA). To quote: “The USPTO intervenes in less than a quarter of appeals of PTAB decisions to the Federal Circuit. Nathan Kelley, USPTO deputy general counsel for intellectual property law, recently shed some light on when and why the office chooses to do so” (it ought to stay out of it altogether).
The patent fanatics’ groups (like AIPLA) are reportedly lobbying politicians to destroy PTAB (i.e. restore patent insanity) and they are looking for allies in Congress:
In speeches at the AIPLA annual meeting, Senators Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch listed a number of areas they are targeting in Congress, while Hatch said he was concerned about the effects of IPR proceedings on Hatch-Waxman cases
We are going to write more about that later on. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is basically ensuring reduction in abusive litigation; there’s nothing wrong with that unless one is in the business of litigation. Here we have one of Watchtroll’s latest attacks on PTAB. which is yet another attack on technology itself. The trolls’ lobby just hates science and labels those who actually do science “big tech infringers”.
Meanwhile, as it turns out, in the above event there were pressuring the USPTO to stop PTAB. The term “PTAB improvements” was used, but by improvement they mean watering down. Here we have fanatical lobbyists pressuring USPTO to enrich them by weakening PTAB:
Joseph Matal, who is performing the duties of USPTO director, gave a speech discussing the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, including upcoming USPTO guidance on Aqua Products, how the precedential General Plastic opinion will reduce serial attacks on the same patent, the evolving 325(d) jurisprudence, and two PTAB cases he thought have a shot of being taken up by the Supreme Court
Matal has evidently come under great pressure from these lobbyists, having already seen how his colleague Michelle Lee got bullied out of her job. He is currently being sued as well (Aqua Products, Inc. v Matal among other cases and here’s an update on that).
We certainly hope that PTAB won’t be weakened or watered down. Given a growing number of petitions it ought to be expanded. █
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