09.05.19

Guest Post: Hostile Communities and Arrogant Developers

Posted in Free/Libre Software at 11:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Easter Eggs

Summary: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, whether regarding your software or your community.”

As a free speech advocate who once spent an entire decade establishing a single point about development that was hostile to a community, I’ve spent a long time thinking about what makes certain things so difficult to say or get acknowledged in a community — about how communities can delude themselves and use coordinated abuse to defend their positions.

For those who feel this is a familiar problem, my advice to you is: don’t put all your eggs in one basket, whether regarding your software or your community. If the people around your favourite software are toxic in some way, find a good way to create or seek an alternative.

Humility is a hard problem in computer science, and people will judge you based on their own notions of fairness. Fairness is a difficult concept for basically everyone. No matter how interested you are in finding truth, playing devil’s advocate or viewing things from multiple perspectives (without succumbing to false compromise) you’re ultimately going to choose between being agreeable and taking a lot of criticism.

“I like people that are outspoken, I like that Torvalds flipped off Nvidia and I like that Stallman doesn’t coddle corporations and excuse their corruption and poor behaviour towards the user.”If you are a critic, you will have every critique turned back on you. People say they are thick-skinned, but a lot of that is about appearances and what people tell themselves. Most people are more vulnerable than they admit.

One of the things that I try to promote as a free speech advocate is for people to be allowed to be their true selves — but not allowed to be untrue. This means for one thing, that we aren’t putting up a facade of being agreeable when we feel something is wrong. It also means people have faults, and no matter where you are in your journey as a person, that you screw up and other people screw up, and pretty much everybody has played the fool before.

Some of the most vulnerable people in the world like to project their need for perfection onto others. They don’t always hold themselves to similar standards; they either feel great amounts of shame, or none at all, and they maintain this by being unfair to everyone. This doesn’t actually bother everyone, because being consistently unfair has different effects on different people — some get pissed off, others walk away, some people treat it as a learning experience, and if you make it a goal in life to treat every experience as an opportunity to grow, you probably will grow. Sometimes.

I’m not here to paint myself as a saint. I like people that are outspoken, I like that Torvalds flipped off Nvidia and I like that Stallman doesn’t coddle corporations and excuse their corruption and poor behaviour towards the user. I think there are (at least) two kinds of assholes: those who are assholes for a good cause (Bill Hicks, George Carlin — when he is maintaining the kernel, Linus Torvalds — Spider Jerusalem) and people who are “really just assholes.”

The whole concept of becoming the niceness police is a very corporate thing, which in practice allows people like Torvalds to be hypocritically stifled by people who are just as rude, but who have worse intentions. I don’t support it, I don’t defend it, it is a recipe for hypocrisy.

“That’s part of the fairness — if we decide to treat anything we consider offensive as yet another scarlet letter, all we have done is made the world more corporate and authoritative.”Any concept of being better people has to acknowledge that many of the best people in the world are assholes sometimes. That’s part of the fairness — if we decide to treat anything we consider offensive as yet another scarlet letter, all we have done is made the world more corporate and authoritative.

Then again, if someone is being a jerk without a good reason (and who is to say? Should we make it about what the reason is, about context, or should we make it authoritative?) You still have the right to call them on it.

If you do, is the bully protected? Is the community really introspective enough to not favour their own over fairness? Will they turn against you for speaking up, and then neglect to address the bully you stood up to? Because this sort of injustice doesn’t becomes less common under a Code of Conduct. It often increases. This particular sort of injustice is the same problem with or without a CoC.

Consider the Bill of Rights. These are ideals and freedoms a lot of us want every person to have; it is not just a list of privileges for citizens, in fact they are drawn from a concept of natural rights. The Bill of Rights places natural rights firmly outside the reach of (legitimate) government. If you rip up the Constitution, the rights still exist — all that has changed is whether those rights are officially recognised by the government.

Do we extend that sort of baseline fairness to people outside our communities? Do we recognise the rights of other people we consider inalienable? I admit this question is mostly rhetorical, but all I’m really trying to say here is that I believe truth often transcends a local community take on it — there are always areas in which a community forgets the obvious about one matter or another.

Not being a jerk is a great goal for any person, never being considered a jerk is a goal that is probably unobtainable for most or all good people. I love Dave Chappelle and what he says about Kevin Hart, and either are surely considered jerks by many now — due to their politics or pasts. Are they wonderful comedians? I think so. Not all of us are offended, or need to be.

“Not being a jerk is a great goal for any person, never being considered a jerk is a goal that is probably unobtainable for most or all good people.”But there are efforts to destroy people based on holding them to an unrealistic standard. There is nothing that really makes Richard Stallman a horrible person, but there are plenty of arguments for treating him no differently than someone who is. To me, that’s a fine example of arrogance — of creating a different concept of fairness to take down a great person than one we would accept for ourselves in the same shoes.

But even if we are terrible at figuring out who deserves it, I also think we have a right to stand up to bullies, and argue with people who are being unreasonable. Being “nice” to everyone is a fine solution, if you really believe it is the answer to everything — if you’re capable of really being nice to everyone.

“There is nothing that really makes Richard Stallman a horrible person, but there are plenty of arguments for treating him no differently than someone who is.”I think more people are capable of being jerks to those who deserve it, and there’s a lot of room to talk about the times we turn that on the wrong people, or for the wrong reasons. But I don’t believe that it’s never justified. I think if we make a rule that you can never argue, never protest, never be “rude”, and that doing so somehow ruins something — that’s just nonsense. It is a convenience for exactly the sort of person who needs to abuse the sort of authoritarian regime it inevitably creates.

A better rule would be to try to understand why people are being jerks — if they have a reason to be that way, if they are being misunderstood, if there is context — if there is no interest, then just ignore it. This is a good idea, but some people will be certain to exploit our best nature.

When I wrote a book on how the Free software movement could become twice as effective, I included a chapter on narcissism — I think there is more of it out there than people realise or understand. It isn’t just an inflated sense of self. It isn’t just ambition. Narcissism is a fundamental unfairness, and if lots more people understood it better, I think communities would be able to deal with it more effectively.

So if I talk about “hostile communities” or “arrogant developers,” I’m not just saying that there are jerks there. There are “jerks” everywhere. Some of them are even valuable to us.

The context of such labels, if applied fairly, is that a fundamental unfairness, a persistent injustice infects a project — due to its community, its project leaders, or both. It’s not just about what people are doing, but what reasons they have, and what they are trying to defend with their abuse.

“I don’t like Torvalds because of the way he smeared the Free software community selfishly and unfairly, while stealing so much credit from them during the course of his career.”And if you’re one of those people who really are nice to everybody — great, you make the world a better place. Most people aren’t as good as you, but you deserve credit for setting a good example. Cheers.

I don’t like Torvalds because of the way he smeared the Free software community selfishly and unfairly, while stealing so much credit from them during the course of his career. To me, that is fundamentally unjust. What I would like for him to do instead is to turn his ability to forcefully defend the kernel on such matters exclusively, and not have it spill over onto how he treats reasonable critics.

But since that will never happen, I will simply retain my opinion of him. I’m not going to stop using his kernel, because I don’t think he’s a monster. I just think he’s a dick. If a better kernel came along, sure, that’s great.

I’m not saying there is no threshold where I wouldn’t boycott a piece of software over someone’s attitude, I’m just saying that for me personally, the importance and quality of Torvald’s kernel outweighs his smearing of the entire Free software community. It leaves me using his software and disliking him as a person, and commenting on his unfairness. If he wrote a text editor, and it wasn’t the very best text editor in the history of the world, I might not use it just because he’s a jerk.

But I also believe that he is a better person than the one who will take his place, that he shows great integrity when defending the quality and goals of the kernel (quality and goals I strongly agree are worthwhile) and that it’s just too bad that integrity doesn’t extend to his treatment of Free software, or of corporations.

Facebook is disease, hating Microsoft is a disease. How can you be so inconsistent? But as someone who gets some things very right, and other things very wrong, he’s a very useful example. We are never going to get an apology from Linus. What we will get, is a worse replacement.

When I start mentioning toxic communities, I’m talking about endemics — something that can only be solved via personal integrity from a threshold of more than one individual working together for a higher purpose. I don’t think you can force toxicity out of a community — they can only repair themselves from within, or they can be abandoned if there is a viable alternative.

If instead, we just try to purge all the jerks from every corner — what do we get? A world with no Carlins, no Chappelles, no Stallmans, and we get a worse person than Torvalds instead of Torvalds.

“Hostile communities also have a certain level of unfairness towards outsiders; they claim one principle, but that principle doesn’t hold up once you go outside the innermost community.”I don’t recommend being that superficial. The only way for humanity to reach perfection is if it takes forever, or takes shortcuts to damn itself. We are so attached to the latter these days — I would rather it take forever. But I would still like for communities to at least try to maintain a good overall direction. There are too many places right now, that we don’t even have that.

Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about, and that’s alright. One thing I’ve noticed from years of talking about the politics of communities, is that most people are constantly told (and to some degree, believe) that there is no problem. Others think it is irrelevant unless there is a proven solution. Others thing it is irrelevant even if there is a proven solution.

When it comes to a community or government that stifles people, the people who believe there is stifling are always the minority — often a small one.

There are lots of people who love to play a victim too, and there is no simple way to ever be sure who is whom. But where there is stifling, the people to notice and say something are often the first to experience the full brunt of it. If you ask around — “Are people being stifled? What about this guy? What about her? How about these people over here?” You are typically going to have to be an investigative reporter to find the stifling going on. If it were obvious, more people wouldn’t support it.

You have to care really deeply about a community to change this, and you also have to be respected in the community enough to stand up to it and not become another victim.

“You have to care really deeply about a community to change this, and you also have to be respected in the community enough to stand up to it and not become another victim.”There are no easy answers, but that doesn’t mean these problems don’t exist. It is the very worst when the arrogance and hostility protects things that don’t deserve protection — things like corporate takeovers, slacking about security, and protecting the dishonest. Hostile communities also have a certain level of unfairness towards outsiders; they claim one principle, but that principle doesn’t hold up once you go outside the innermost community.

It is passe to refer to these hostile communities as cults, but not entirely without point to make the comparison. Sometimes, non-cults circle the wagons and become gradually more cult-like with time.

It’s important to point out that you can have a highly toxic community for an otherwise good project, even if the developer is a decent person. Ideally, the developer would fix this — unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes in the Free software world, the lead developer is the real problem. Sometimes it has nothing to do with them, and they are sort of a victim of their own supporters; it’s not that the supporters don’t appreciate the developer, its just that they are incapable of not being toxic. Realising they didn’t get into software to raise and babysit a community, the developer throws their hands up and lets the community be a mix of friendly people, narcissistic co-leaders, and their many victims.

“For Debian, it was systemd — for Puppy Linux, it will likely be the use of GitHub.”There is often some singular political truth being propped up by such a community — that the community is protecting a single lie (such as an exaggeration of the effectiveness of their effort or their ability to keep a core promise to users, once abandoned) and most of the abuse towards the unguarded centres around tripping over that one lie with a simple truth.

In other words, the narcissistic defense of a single false promise to users (I can think of several examples among several different communities) rather than admitting limitations is often at the core of these quiet feuds, disputes and endemic abuse.

Eventually these disputes become controversy, and later on they become a project’s downfall. For Debian, it was systemd — for Puppy Linux, it will likely be the use of GitHub. These are not even the worst examples, which I have neglected to mention at this time. There are also many lesser examples. Of course, it may not matter to you. If you have never experienced this sort of thing first hand, it may never matter to you.

If you have witnessed it in more than one community, you might feel obliged to comment on it. But it is seldom easy to do so, even for good people. To gain respect in a community often takes more than being a good person — if your contributions aren’t among the top concerns, you may find that silence amidst corruption is your only saving grace.

Is that a privilege you really even want? █

License: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 (Public Domain)

Richard Stallman Lectures Microsoft on Free Software and Software Freedom

Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, GNU/Linux, Google, GPL, Microsoft, Red Hat at 1:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

A great Microsoft selloff or a chance/opportunity to turn Microsoft staff away from the anti-GPL agenda?

GPL/RMS

Summary: Richard Stallman (RMS) reportedly went to Microsoft to speak about Software Freedom; this seems to be part of Microsoft’s campaign to come across as ‘friends’ with FOSS (even whilst attacking it, both directly and indirectly)

THE technology tabloid of CBS says that “Free software advocate Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week” and the article was composed by one of their full-time Microsoft boosters (some were literally Microsoft staff on Microsoft’s payroll!).

“Is Microsoft trying to pay off RMS? It doesn’t look like it, but his visit there can be distorted to say all sorts of bizarre things.”The Microsoft booster who controls Linux.com soon rewrote the headline and added his own interpretation as follows: “Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet reports that Microsoft invited free software legend Richard Stallman to speak at its Microsoft Research headquarters this week. Stallman, known for launching the Free Software Movement to develop the GNU operating system, was and still is a staunch Microsoft critic. Stallman delivered his standard talk around four freedoms.”

“[I]t doesn’t excuse developing proprietary software. A desire for profit is not wrong in itself, but it isn’t the sort of urgent overriding cause that could excuse mistreating others. Proprietary software divides the users and keeps them helpless, and that is wrong. Nobody should do that.”

–Richard Stallman

Is Microsoft trying to pay off RMS? It doesn’t look like it (he’s not corruptible), but his visit there can be distorted to say all sorts of bizarre things. For example, one might claim that his visit ‘endorses’ Microsoft. This is the kind of spin one can expect to find on TFiR, where Swapnil’s partners are now promoting proprietary software for Microsoft (obviously!). It’s about exFAT, which isn’t about “Linux” but about Microsoft, all about Microsoft [1, 2]. It’s not even a Free software implementation of it but an old proprietary one with patent tax on it (Paragon’s). “The technology can be purchased as an SDK library that can be embedded in any application,” says the puff piece, soon to be followed by promotion of other proprietary software in spammy ‘articles’ (same author). What worries us is that Linux.com was put in these hands…

“Sadly, we’re seeing some certain betrayal of principles from all sorts of directions.”We’ve also just noticed more new evidence (post by Juozas Auskalnis) of Microsoft exercising control over Red Hat (using money). It’s all about money. At what cost? As one blogger put it this afternoon, “the worst case scenario is when one’s life depends on (especially when closed) source code that one has not written oneself.”

Sadly, we’re seeing some certain betrayal of principles from all sorts of directions. Google also. Early this morning we wrote about Google openwashing and privacywashing by outsourcing code to a proprietary software platform, GitHub. This brings hilarity to new heights. Obviously Google outsourced all the ‘open’ code (for ‘privacy’) to NSA PRISM and Microsoft [1]. Google pretends to care about privacy while fighting a war against it and letting the NSA’s back doors partner maintain the code. Corbet has just written about this [2]. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Enabling developers and organizations to use differential privacy

    Differentially-private data analysis is a principled approach that enables organizations to learn from the majority of their data while simultaneously ensuring that those results do not allow any individual’s data to be distinguished or re-identified. This type of analysis can be implemented in a wide variety of ways and for many different purposes. For example, if you are a health researcher, you may want to compare the average amount of time patients remain admitted across various hospitals in order to determine if there are differences in care. Differential privacy is a high-assurance, analytic means of ensuring that use cases like this are addressed in a privacy-preserving manner.

  2. Google’s differential privacy library

    Google has announced the release of a new library for applications using differential privacy techniques.

Jo Johnson Quitting Twice in Two Years is a Terrible Sign for the Unitary Patent (UPC)

Posted in Europe, Patents at 1:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Jo Johnson

Summary: The UK IP minister has once again quit; this is the fourth time since the Brexit referendum and it has become almost comical; it also says a lot about the state of the Unified Patent Court (UPC)

TEAM UPC has long relied on Lucy to deliver its agenda, but she left and so did her successor in 2018. In about 3 years we saw the so-called ‘IP’ minister resigning four times. Yes, 4 times in 3 years! Not kidding. In 2018 we published “Jo Johnson's Departure is Another Major Blow for Team UPC (Unified Patent Court)“ and that wasn’t long after he had done photo ops with a criminal, Battistelli, who put his friend António Campinos in charge of the European Patent Office (EPO) like his brother, Boris Johnson, put him in charge of a key position. It’s nepotism everywhere, so UPC couldn’t look any more like a joke at this stage! It’s all corrupt — like nothing we ever saw at any point in time at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), JPO, KIPO and SIPO/CNIPA (IP5).

Jo Johnson has once again resigned, as Edward Nodder noted this afternoon, as did IAM when it wrote: “Jo Johnson – UK IP minister and brother of PM Boris Johnson – has resigned just weeks after being appointed. There is, he said, “an unresolvable tension” in his role and he is “torn between my family loyalty and the national interest”. Unlike his brother, Jo opposed Brexit.”

“It’s nepotism everywhere, so UPC couldn’t look any more like a joke at this stage!”Let us just state again that this is the fourth time in about 3 years that it happens. Nobody can hold this job. It’s a total mess. It’s like the EPO, which actively undermines European businesses with software patents (against the law in Europe, just like it’s in defiance of caselaw and 35 U.S.C. § 101 in the US). “The final stop in 2019 for our #IPforbusiness training roadshow is Ljubljana,” the EPO wrote today, adding in another tweet:

What are we doing to ensure that we deliver the highest-quality products and services, and how do we engage with our users and take their feedback on board? We’ll be answering those questions and more at this event: https://bit.ly/2MPOAyN pic.twitter.com/rW6P5tIy3Q

Nonsense. The EPO actively destroys, perhaps intentionally, its own quality; its staff union says so in its publications. The coverup won’t work.

“The EPO actively destroys, perhaps intentionally, its own quality; its staff union says so in its publications.”In Lexology we’ve meanwhile noticed this update from Mitscherlich PartmbB’s Sebastian Roth and Lexology promoted an ad from Cohausz & Florack’s Caroline Kersjes. They speak of the Boards of Appeal, which are in limbo and enjoy no independence. To quote: “On 26 June 2019, the new Rules of Proce-dure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) of the European Patent Office were adopted. They will enter into force on 1 January 2020 and will apply to all pending and newly-filed appeals. [...] In addition, important elements of case ma-nagement have been introduced in the new RPBA. This is intended to give the Boards of Appeal more flexibility in the allocation of cases and scheduling to counteract the backlog of appeal proceedings and to reduce the duration of proceedings.”

“Unless or until these issues at the EPO are being properly tackled expect no UPC, no increase in patent applications (their number is reportedly decreasing and quality declining), no patent justice and more patent trolls in Europe.”These new rules accomplish nothing. No progress or any step/s towards restoring the judges’ independence (which was lost ages ago). This remains one of the biggest barriers to the UPC, never mind other aspects such as Brexit. There’s not even an impression of justice at the EPO and the whole system is at risk of reputational collapse. Unless or until these issues at the EPO are being properly tackled expect no UPC, no increase in patent applications (their number is reportedly decreasing and quality declining), no patent justice and more patent trolls in Europe. █

Links 5/9/2019: LibreOffice 6.3.1 and LibreOffice 6.2.7, PinePhone and Librem 5 Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 12:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop

      • Crostini Could Offer More Linux Distros in The Future

        You might already be familiar with Crostini if you aren’t new to the Chrome OS family but if you are, Crostini is Google’s initiative to expand the usability of Chromebooks.

        The company wants to achieve this by creating an evenly balanced environment where Linux apps can easily co-exist side by side with their Chrome OS counterparts and in the process creating a remarkably intuitive yet resourceful working space where users won’t need to leave Chrome OS for the sole purpose of using their preferable Linux programs to accomplish tasks.

        Google is betting big on Crostini and the company hopes its success could effectively turn Chromebooks into enticing products for the development community but according to a feature request, Linux Beta on Chromebooks could be a lot more welcoming if the Linux flavor being offered by default isn’t limit to only Debian.

      • Dell Has A New Dedicated Site For Ubuntu And RHEL-Certified Linux Desktops And Laptops

        For those of you following the Project Sputnik initiative — a project within Dell to offer and promote a premium range of Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux-certified systems — you’ve probably had one chief complaint. Finding these systems hasn’t been the most intuitive process. Searches on Dell.com can often lead to completely unrelated items, and sometimes it’s difficult to find Developer Edition versions of the XPS 13 or Precision Mobile Workstations, for example. That changes today, as Dell has launched a dedicated landing page for its developer-focused Linux desktops and laptops.

        In a recent interview with Dell’s Project Sputnik lead Barton George, I learned that increasing the overall visibility of these Linux systems is of paramount importance.

        Right now you’ll be able to find the entire lineup of XPS 13 Developer Edition and Precision Mobile Workstation laptops, as well as 6 different Precision Tower Workstation desktops.

        “We had an old landing page from the very beginning for Project Sputnik, but it wasn’t going to win any beauty awards,” George says. “This new page fits right in with the existing Dell.com responsive template and it looks much slicker. We’d like to grow this over time, because we have more than 160 platforms that ship with Linux.”

    • Server

      • Want to quickly connect OpenStack and Ceph? SUSE OpenStack Cloud has you covered

        Integration is the name of the game when it comes to software-defined infrastructure, and tools that take away much of the pain area ideal for any fast-moving IT shop. When it comes to connecting OpenStack with Ceph storage, SUSE has integrated tools that make it a snap.

        SUSE OpenStack Cloud Crowbar 9 offers users simple graphical or command-line options to make SUSE Enterprise Storage the target for Cinder, Cinder Backup, Glance and Nova using Ceph’s built-in gateways. That means ready, scalable access to block, file and object storage for all your OpenStack needs.

      • 7 tips for sysadmins to improve communication skills

        The notion that system administrators and other IT pros are social misfits who don’t work well with other humans is a stereotype. It’s a long-held one, too, mythologized both in corporate and popular culture.

        Readers of a certain age might recall, for example, Jimmy Fallon’s recurring SNL sketch, Nick Burns, Your Company’s Computer Guy. (That particular episode first aired in 2001, to give a sense of the stereotype’s endurance.) Nick overcompensated for, um, questionable communication and interpersonal skills by doling out heaps of arrogance and condescension—borne of his superior IT knowledge—toward the non-technical end users in his office. Suffice it to say, Nick wasn’t an office favorite.

        Perhaps this is an extreme example of the grumpy IT pro stereotype, but it fits a larger landscape of assumptions about sysadmins and other technical people: They’re all introverts or lack interpersonal skills that their colleagues in, say, marketing, have in spades. The truth is far more nuanced. Are some sysadmins introverts? Sure. So are plenty of people who do entirely other kinds of work. Moreover, being an introvert is not a bad thing—far from it.

        There is, however, a perfectly reasonable basis for the notion that sysadmin and similar IT jobs attract certain personality types: There’s a lot of heads-down, hands-on work involved in implementing and maintaining IT systems.

        “While it might be a stereotype that technical people tend to be introverts who prefer to work by themselves, the truth is that technical people do tend to have jobs where they’re focused on working on tasks that require concentration and cause us to have fewer human interactions,” says Gloria Metrick, owner at GeoMetrick Enterprises, which implements software (such as the Laboratory Information Management System, or LIMS) in R&D and product testing laboratories. “These types of tasks don’t help people be more communicative.”

        That fact means that if you’re not a natural-born communicator, becoming a sysadmin won’t necessarily push you to become one. Take comfort, though: You’re not alone, and it’s most definitely not an IT-only thing.

        “It’s a fallacy to assume that many people in this world are born as great communicators,” Metrick says. “In fact, some extroverts are the worst communicators. Some of them think their automatic love of people allows them to understand what others want and need from them and that’s often false.”

      • IBM

        • Introducing virtio-networking: Combining virtualization and networking for modern IT

          If we’ve learned one thing about IT at-scale over the past several years, it’s that there is no “silver bullet” when it comes to choosing deployment environments. Virtualization, private cloud, public cloud, and Kubernetes have all entered the arena, but there is no clear winner—yet. Instead, IT organizations face layers of complex infrastructure technologies, each with various facets of abstraction and their own “rules” with the added challenge of making these disparate stacks play nicely together for the benefit of the business at-large.

        • Red Hat OpenShift 4 on your laptop: Introducing Red Hat CodeReady Containers

          We are pleased to announce that Red Hat CodeReady Containers is now available as a Developer Preview. CodeReady Containers brings a minimal, preconfigured OpenShift 4.1 or newer cluster to your local laptop or desktop computer for development and testing purposes. CodeReady Containers supports native hypervisors for Linux, macOS, and Windows 10. You can download CodeReady Containers from the CodeReady Containers product page on cloud.redhat.com.

          CodeReady Containers is designed for local development and testing on an OpenShift 4 cluster. For running an OpenShift 3 cluster locally, see Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK) or Minishift.

          In this article, we’ll look at the features and benefits of CodeReady Containers, show a demo of how easy it is to create a local Red Hat OpenShift 4 cluster, and show how to deploy an application on top of it.

        • Six transformation steps to succeed in today’s digital era

          While banks continue to modernize, so do their competitors—traditional banks, startups, and even unexpected rivals like Amazon launching new digital brands. Banks are investigating, and some are even testing, advanced technologies like intelligent automation, blockchain, robo-advisers, and chat bots, and embedding them into business processes to deliver new and optimized services that help customers manage their finances and financial futures. The challenge is to successfully employ these new technologies amidst an IT environment that typically has thousands of systems and interfaces across a variety of both legacy and newer technologies.

          Banks are already planning for and indeed pursuing digital transformations. In fact, according to a 2018 Boston Consulting Group survey, a large majority of banks surveyed said that digital will impact both the “competitive landscape and the economics of the business.” But less than half actually have a solid strategy to digitally transform, according to the study.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • Graphics Stack

        • mesa 19.2.0-rc2
          Hi List,

I'd like to announce the availability of mesa-19.2.0-rc2. This is the
culmination of two weeks worth of work. Due to maintenance the Intel CI is not
running, but I've built and tested this locally. I would have preferred to get
more testing, but being two weeks out from -rc1 I wanted to get a release out.

Dylan


Shortlog:
--------

Alex Smith (1):
      radv: Change memory type order for GPUs without dedicated VRAM

Alyssa Rosenzweig (1):
      pan/midgard: Fix writeout combining

Andres Rodriguez (1):
      radv: additional query fixes

Bas Nieuwenhuizen (3):
      radv: Use correct vgpr_comp_cnt for VS if both prim_id and instance_id are needed.
      radv: Emit VGT_GS_ONCHIP_CNTL for tess on GFX10.
      radv: Disable NGG for geometry shaders.

Danylo Piliaiev (1):
      nir/loop_unroll: Prepare loop for unrolling in wrapper_unroll

Dave Airlie (2):
      virgl: fix format conversion for recent gallium changes.
      gallivm: fix atomic compare-and-swap

Dylan Baker (1):
      bump version to 19.2-rc2

Ian Romanick (7):
      nir/algrbraic: Don't optimize open-coded bitfield reverse when lowering is enabled
      intel/compiler: Request bitfield_reverse lowering on pre-Gen7 hardware
      nir/algebraic: Mark some value range analysis-based optimizations imprecise
      nir/range-analysis: Adjust result range of exp2 to account for flush-to-zero
      nir/range-analysis: Adjust result range of multiplication to account for flush-to-zero
      nir/range-analysis: Fix incorrect fadd range result for (ne_zero, ne_zero)
      nir/range-analysis: Handle constants in nir_op_mov just like nir_op_bcsel

Ilia Mirkin (1):
      gallium/vl: use compute preference for all multimedia, not just blit

Jose Maria Casanova Crespo (1):
      mesa: recover target_check before get_current_tex_objects

Kenneth Graunke (15):
      gallium/ddebug: Wrap resource_get_param if available
      gallium/trace: Wrap resource_get_param if available
      gallium/rbug: Wrap resource_get_param if available
      gallium/noop: Implement resource_get_param
      iris: Replace devinfo->gen with GEN_GEN
      iris: Fix broken aux.possible/sampler_usages bitmask handling
      iris: Update fast clear colors on Gen9 with direct immediate writes.
      iris: Drop copy format hacks from copy region based transfer path.
      iris: Avoid unnecessary resolves on transfer maps
      iris: Fix large timeout handling in rel2abs()
      isl: Drop UnormPathInColorPipe for buffer surfaces.
      isl: Don't set UnormPathInColorPipe for integer surfaces.
      util: Add a _mesa_i64roundevenf() helper.
      mesa: Fix _mesa_float_to_unorm() on 32-bit systems.
      iris: Fix partial fast clear checks to account for miplevel.

Lionel Landwerlin (2):
      util/timespec: use unsigned 64 bit integers for nsec values
      util: fix compilation on macos

Marek Olšák (18):
      radeonsi/gfx10: fix the legacy pipeline by storing as_ngg in the shader cache
      radeonsi: move some global shader cache flags to per-binary flags
      radeonsi/gfx10: fix tessellation for the legacy pipeline
      radeonsi/gfx10: fix the PRIMITIVES_GENERATED query if using legacy streamout
      radeonsi/gfx10: create the GS copy shader if using legacy streamout
      radeonsi/gfx10: add as_ngg variant for VS as ES to select Wave32/64
      radeonsi/gfx10: fix InstanceID for legacy VS+GS
      radeonsi/gfx10: don't initialize VGT_INSTANCE_STEP_RATE_0
      radeonsi/gfx10: always use the legacy pipeline for streamout
      radeonsi/gfx10: finish up Navi14, add PCI ID
      radeonsi/gfx10: add AMD_DEBUG=nongg
      winsys/amdgpu+radeon: process AMD_DEBUG in addition to R600_DEBUG
      radeonsi: add PKT3_CONTEXT_REG_RMW
      radeonsi/gfx10: remove incorrect ngg/pos_writes_edgeflag variables
      radeonsi/gfx10: set PA_CL_VS_OUT_CNTL with CONTEXT_REG_RMW to fix edge flags
      radeonsi: consolidate determining VGPR_COMP_CNT for API VS
      radeonsi: unbind blend/DSA/rasterizer state correctly in delete functions
      radeonsi: fix scratch buffer WAVESIZE setting leading to corruption

Paulo Zanoni (1):
      intel/fs: grab fail_msg from v32 instead of v16 when v32->run_cs fails

Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer (1):
      glsl: replace 'x + (-x)' with constant 0

Rafael Antognolli (1):
      anv: Only re-emit non-dynamic state that has changed.

Samuel Pitoiset (7):
      radv: allow to enable VK_AMD_shader_ballot only on GFX8+
      radv: add a new debug option called RADV_DEBUG=noshaderballot
      radv: force enable VK_AMD_shader_ballot for Wolfenstein Youngblood
      ac: fix exclusive scans on GFX8-GFX9
      radv/gfx10: don't initialize VGT_INSTANCE_STEP_RATE_0
      radv/gfx10: do not use NGG with NAVI14
      radv: fix getting the index type size for uint8_t

Tapani Pälli (3):
      util: fix os_create_anonymous_file on android
      iris/android: fix build and link with libmesa_intel_perf
      egl: reset blob cache set/get functions on terminate

Thong Thai (1):
      Revert "radeonsi: don't emit PKT3_CONTEXT_CONTROL on amdgpu"
        • Mesa 19.2-RC2 Released Following Delay – Many Iris, RADV & RadeonSI Fixes

          Mesa 19.2 fell off the release train and is now likely to be released more towards the end of September rather than the middle of the month or even the end of August as was their original time-table.

          Mesa 19.2-RC2 was released on Wednesday and incorporates two weeks worth of fixes rather than being on the usual weekly release regiment. Some blockers bugs have been cleared up in the process, but now likely an extra week / release candidate will be in order to ensure sufficient test coverage.

        • XWayland Sees Updated Protocol Support To Help WLROOTS & KDE

          X.Org Server 1.21′s XWayland implementation has added support for the xdg-output-unstable-v1 version 3 protocol to help the likes of KDE and compositors like Sway based on WLROOTS.

          The xdg-output-unstable-v1 version 3 protocol update changes the protocol behavior to ensure a wl_output.done event happens after xdg_output changes. More details on the change in that aforelinked Git commit with KDE and WLROOTS being the mentioned Wayland compositors/users affected by the previous behavior resulting in the XWayland monitor not changing position or the cursor being able to reach all of the surface area.

        • AMD Working On Better Page Fault Handling For Navi / Vega GPUs

          Longtime open-source AMD Linux driver developer Christian König on Wednesday sent out a set of patches providing “graceful” page fault handling support for Navi and Vega graphics processors.

          This graceful page fault handling support is on their trek to providing recoverable page fault handling for newer Radeon GPUs with the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. This ultimately is for improving the behavior of applications/games to avoid hangs and/or invalid access messages being spewed to their dmesg and the like.

    • Benchmarks

      • Running Intel’s Clear Linux On AMD EPYC Rome? Still Significant Performance Uplift Over Ubuntu

        The current AMD EPYC 7742 2P benchmarking that is happening at Phoronix is an interesting Linux/BSD operating system performance comparison. That’s in the works while so far are some Ubuntu and Clear Linux numbers. Yes, Intel’s open-source Clear Linux platform does run fine generally on AMD hardware — including the new AMD “Rome” processors — and generally does still run damn fast. Here is a look at Clear Linux on this 128 core / 256 thread server with Clear Linux against Ubuntu 19.04 as well as the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10.

        To the surprise of many in the community, Intel’s Clear Linux operating system generally works fine on AMD hardware while retaining many of the performance benefits compared to general purpose Linux distributions. About the extent of Clear Linux issues on AMD hardware I have personally encountered are sometimes NVMe SSDs not being detected, mostly due to power management quirks between the chipset and various power management tuning done by Intel’s open-source team, but with time they have rectified those issues. One issue currently encountered is Clear Linux not detecting the PCI Express 4.0 Corsair Force MP600 SSD on AMD Ryzen 3000 + X570 setups, but I’ll have some similar Ryzen tests with a PCIe 3 SSD there in the days ahead.

      • Linux Benchmarks Of NVMe SSD Performance With Varying I/O Polling Queues

        A Phoronix reader recently pointed out a little known kernel tunable option to adjust the number of I/O polling queues for NVMe solid-state drives that can potentially help improve the performance/latency. Here are some benchmarks from the NVMe poll_queues option.

    • Applications

      • 6 Open Source Paint Applications for Linux Users

        As a child, when I started using computer (with Windows XP), my favorite application was Paint. I spent hours doodling on it. Surprisingly, children still love the paint apps. And not just children, the simple paint app comes handy in a number of situations.

        You will find a bunch of applications that let you draw/paint or manipulate images. However, some of them are proprietary. While you’re a Linux user – why not focus on open source paint applications?

        In this article, we are going to list some of the best open source paint applications which are worthy alternatives to proprietary painting software available on Linux.

      • Albert – An amazing keyboard launcher for Linux

        Linux has many features and tools that make the user experience very convenient and rich. There are regular updates, a very enthusiastic community that supports you out at every step. In the same quest, today we will learn about an amazing tool called Albert. It is basically a keyboard launcher. Now you may ask, what is a keyboard launcher?

        Keyboard launcher is an application that allows you to do things from the keyboard which you normally have to carry out with a mouse. Having one makes your interaction with your computer very easy and quick.

        Now, you may be saying, “are you talking about keyboard shortcuts because I already know that”. My replay to this question is, Naah!

      • Proprietary

        • A New Version Of SoftMaker FreeOffice Adds Dark Mode, Improved Microsoft Office Compatibility

          The update to FreeOffice also expands compatibility with LibreOffice by adding full ODT (Open Document Text) functionality.

          Additionally, FreeOffice adds a new dark interface to make things easier on your eyeballs. I appreciate this, because I dark mode all the things.

          Though FreeOffice is a multi-platform Office suite, SoftMaker says these features are a direct response to requests from its Linux community. As it stands now, FreeOffice may be a viable alternative to the widely-used LibreOffice, which is included by default in a number of popular Linux distributions. In fact, making the switch is boldly encouraged in the accompanying press release.

          Both non-paid and paid commercial versions of FreeOffice are available to download for Linux, Windows and macOS at freeoffice.com.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • The FOSS 2D game engine GDevelop continues advancing the 5.0 release

        GDevelop, a FOSS (Free and open-source software) 2D game engine seems to be really coming along nicely for the current overhaul.

        Tools like GDevelop are incredible for quick prototyping, introducing a younger generation to developing and professional games too. What I love about GDevelop, is that it uses a visual programming events system. It could be compared with Clickteam’s Fusion or Scirra’s Construct.

      • The Jackbox Party Pack 6 is coming later this year with Linux support

        Ready for more excellent party games? The Jackbox Party Pack 6 is coming later this year and Jackbox Games, Inc. will be continuing to support Linux with this latest pack.

        Following on from the bundle of games included in packs 1 to 5 which all support Linux, this newest version already sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun.

      • Co-op puzzle game We Were Here Together launching on October 10th

        We Were Here Together, the third game in the co-op puzzle series from Total Mayhem Games has been confirmed for release on October 10th.

        The previous games We Were Here and We Were Here Too both support Linux and the gameplay is a lot of fun with the right partner. It’s a game that requires co-op, as there’s no single-player here. You start together, you end up alone and you have to communicate using in-game walkie-talkies to solve puzzles and keep moving.

      • FOSS fantasy turn-based strategy game Battle for Wesnoth has a new Beta, still porting to Godot Engine

        The team behind the popular free and open source fantasy turn-based strategy game Battle for Wesnoth have announced the start of a big new release.

        Wesnoth 1.15.1 is the first in what will be a long series of Beta releases which includes a brand new campaign called Wings of Victory, an “Intermediate level Drake campaign with 11 scenarios”. The Dunefolk faction got a big re-work as well to improve balance against the six Default factions, lots of translation updates, AI improvements, IPv6 improvements for multiplayer, the Font Scaling preference is back and much more included.

      • Nanotale – Typing Chronicles confirmed for Linux at the full release

        Remember Epistory – Typing Chronicles The typing adventure game from Fishing Cactus? Well, they’re working on another called Nanotale – Typing Chronicles.

        It’s certainly an intriguing concept and it did work really well in Epistory, so I’m pretty keen to see more.

      • CodeWeavers still looking for more developers to work on Steam Play/Proton

        CodeWeavers, the company that helps to support development of Wine and partnered with Valve to help with Steam Play/Proton are still looking to bring in some more developers.

        I spoke to James Ramey, the CodeWeavers President last night who confirmed that there has actually been a good amount of interest as the position has been open for a while. They need more though, especially if Wine and Proton development is going to keep pushing forwards.

    • Distributions

      • Multiple YaST Packages, Major Versions of Gawk, Swig Update in Tumbleweed

        The snapshots brought two new major versions and two Linux Kernel updates.

        Snapshot 20190902 brought the second Linux Kernel update for the week with an update of kernel 5.2.11; the new kernel brought several fixes for ASoC audio drivers. The snapshot also provided an updated version of Ceph to address a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures.The IRC Client irssi 1.2.2 version fixed a crash and libreoffice 6.3.1.1 removed some patches. The updated libsolv 0.7.6 fixed repository priority handling for multiversion packages and the network discovery and security auditing utility nmap 7.80 resolved a compatibility issue with OpenSSL library configured with security level 2. Qt4 support was removed with the polkit-qt5-1 version 0.113.0. MicroOS integration tests and an added required cryptomount coding for EFI boot were added with core appliance builder python-kiwi 9.18.12. The interface compiler connecting programs written in C and C++ with scripting languages, Swig, received the 4.0 update in the snapshot; the new major version improves support for parsing C++11 and C++14 code and removes php5 support. Several YaST packages updated the name type X-SuSE-YaST-AutoInstResource. The snapshot is trending at a rating of 88, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

        Snapshot 20190829 updated three packages. The three package updates were freeipmi 1.6.4, texlive-specs-m and texlive-specs-n. The snapshot recorded a moderate rating of 90, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

      • New Releases

        • Linux Lite 4.6 Has Been Officially Released, and it Comes With Several Changes

          Jerry Besancon has announced a new version of Linux Lite 4.6, which is based on Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS.

          This is the fourth release of the Linux Lite 4.x series. But it is not shipped by default with the HWE (Hardware Operating) Linux 5.0 kernel.

          At the same time, users are allowed to install a variety of custom kernels from versions 3.13 to 5.2.

          There are many changes to this release, and more details below.

          The Linux Lite Welcome Screen allows us to easily select a light or dark theme.

          Also, it comes with new keyboard and number lock info guide.

        • Septor 2019.5 (September 5)

          Tor Browser is fully installed (8.5.5)
          System upgrade from Debian Buster repos as of September 4, 2019
          Update Thunderbird to 60.8.0.1
          Update openjdk-11-jre to 11.0.4
          Update VLC to 3.0.8.0
          Update ffmpeg to 7.4.1.4
          Update youtube-dl to 2019.08.13

      • Fedora Family

        • F30-20190904 updated Live isos Released

          The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F30-20190904 Live ISOs, carrying the 5.2.11-200 kernel.

          This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have 1.2GB of updates)).

          A huge thank you goes out to irc nicks dowdle, paddy, Southern-Gentleman for testing these iso.

        • Internationalization (i18n) features for Fedora 31

          All next week, we will be testing internationalization (i18n) features in Fedora 31.

      • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • 4MLinux 30.0 STABLE is Released, Which Includes New Multimedia Applications

          Zbigniew Konojacki has announced the new stable release of 4MLinux 29.0 on Sunday, September 1, 2019.

          This major new release brought some new features, and the details are below.

          OpenGL is working out of the box in games (No need to install additional drivers).

          It automatically disables Pulseaudio when needed (for example, in classic games like DOOM).

          Few multimedia applications are included in this release like FlMusic (audio player), Sound Studio (sound editor), fdkaac (command line front-end for Fraunhofer FDK AAC codec library).

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Developers Italia and the New Guidelines: Let the Open Source Revolution Start! An Interview with Leonardo Favario

        Yes, I must admit that for me the Free Software movement was love-at-first-sight! I immediately felt it was a natural tool to empower people and I really enjoyed the thriving communities that were flourishing around even small pieces of wonderfully written code. As such, as many youngsters do, I jumped from channel to channel trying to fit all the small pieces together and get the complete puzzle in place. Soon I decided that lurking was not my way of being, so I started to create communities around Free Software, getting friends to work together. I am particularly fond of communities striving to improve education by using technology and that’s where I have been active lately, especially in Italy. One example is the Open edX community where it’s possible to find a great combination of actors, ranging from full stack devs to educators, all trying to work together on the future of education. That’s something that I love about FOSS communities.

      • Events

        • Tobias Bernard: GUADEC 2019

          Last week I was in Thessaloniki (Greece) for this year’s GUADEC. This time I took vacations before the conference, visiting Athens and Delphi among other places, before coming to Thessaloniki.

          [...]

          I made an effort to see more talks this year, because there were so many interesting ones. Kudos to the speakers and organizers for getting such an excellent program together! Among my favorites were Allan’s talk on UX strategy and tactics, Cassidy’s about his research on dark styles, and Deb Nicholson’s closing keynote on building a free software utopia.

        • Going to Akademy together with MBition

          MBition is still in the learning phase as organization when it comes to Open Source, but the enthusiasm among my colleagues, including the leadership team, with the posibility of becoming contributors in the near future makes me confident about our Open Source journey.

          [...]

          In order to learn about community driven projects, I think KDE is a great place to start and not just because I am involved in the project. There are several additional reasons.

        • Change of Plans

          TL;DR; foss-north IoT and Security Day has been cancelled, or at least indefinitely postponed, due to health reasons.

          For the past three weeks (from August 11, to be exact) I have had a fever that I couldn’t really shake. At the same time my wife had pneumonia for which she was successfully treated. Antibiotics is treated with care in Sweden, so I basically waited for my CRP tests to return a high enough value for my doctor to be convinced that I had an infection.

      • Web Browsers

        • Mozilla

          • Great News! Firefox 69 Blocks Third-Party Cookies, Autoplay Videos & Cryptominers by Default

            If you’re using Mozilla Firefox and haven’t updated yet to the latest version, you are missing a lot of new and important features.

            To start with, Mozilla Firefox 69 enforces stronger security and privacy options by default. Here are some of the major highlights of the new release.

            A lot of websites offer auto-play videos nowadays. No matter whether it is a pop-up video or a video embedded in an article set to autoplay, it is blocked by default (or you may be prompted about it).

          • Firefox 69 Web Browser Released. Download Now

            Firefox 69 Released with Default Tracking Protection Enabled.

            The famed open-source browser, Firefox lands its latest release 69 with some major privacy focused changes for its users.

          • Firefox 69 Is Out with Enhanced Tracking Protection for Better Privacy, Security

            Mozilla officially announced today the general availability of the Firefox 69 web browser for all supported platforms, including Linux, Android, Mac, and Windows, a major release that adds new features and improvements for a better browsing experience.
            One of the most important features of the Firefox 69 release is that the Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) functionality is now enabled by default for stronger security and privacy protections by automatically blocking third-party tracking cookies and cryptominers, as well as an optinal setting that also blocks fingerprinters. This feature is now available for Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android systems.

            Another new feature implemented by Mozilla in the Firefox 69 web browser is called Block Autoplay, which, as the name suggests, gives users the ability to block video content from automatically playing, wheather they are playing with sound or without. Moreover, Firefox 69 ships with a revamped “New Tab” page experience focused on Pocket’s content.

          • Introducing Glean — Telemetry for humans

            In the last few years, Firefox development has become increasingly data-driven. Mozilla’s larger data engineering team builds & maintains most of the technical infrastructure that makes this possible; from the Firefox telemetry code to the Firefox data platform and hosting analysis tools. While data about our products is crucial, Mozilla has a rare approach to data collection, following our privacy principles. This includes requiring data review for every new piece of data collection to ensure we are upholding our principles — even when it makes our jobs harder.

            One great success story for us is having the Firefox telemetry data described in machine-readable and clearly structured form. This encourages best practices like mandatory documentation, steering towards lean data practices and enables automatic data processing — from generating tables to powering tools like our measurement dashboard or the Firefox probe dictionary.

            However, we also learned lessons about what didn’t work so well. While the data types we used were flexible, they were hard to interpret. For example, we use plain numbers to store counts, generic histograms to store multiple timespan measures and allow for custom JSON submissions for uncovered use-cases. The flexibility of these data types means it takes work to understand how to use them for different use-cases & leaves room for accidental error on the instrumentation side. Furthermore, it requires manual effort in interpreting & analysing these data points. We noticed that we could benefit from introducing higher-level data types that are closer to what we want to measure — like data types for “counters” and “timing distributions”.

          • Debugging TypeScript in Firefox DevTools

            Firefox Debugger has evolved into a fast and reliable tool chain over the past several months and it’s now supporting many cool features. Though primarily used to debug JavaScript, did you know that you can also use Firefox to debug your TypeScript applications?

            Before we jump into real world examples, note that today’s browsers can’t run TypeScript code directly. It’s important to understand that TypeScript needs to be compiled into Javascript before it’s included in an HTML page.

            Also, debugging TypeScript is done through a source-map, and so we need to instruct the compiler to produce a source-map for us as well.

      • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

        • LibreOffice Developers Announce Increased Focus on PPT/PPTX File Support

          And because working with Microsoft Office files is something that all LibreOffice users expect to do as smoothly as possible, The Document Foundation today announced that a dedicated team of developers would be in charge specifically of improving support for PowerPoint presentation files.

          In other words, LibreOffice should soon receive updates refining the way the freeware productivity solution works with PPT and PPTX files, albeit the timing obviously depends on a series of factors, including how smoothly the development process goes.

        • LibreOffice 6.3.1 and LibreOffice 6.2.7 announced, focusing on security

          The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3.1, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 6.3 family, and LibreOffice 6.2.7, the seventh minor release of the LibreOffice 6.2 family, with many bug fixes and a key security improvement.

          LibreOffice 6.3.1 and LibreOffice 6.2.7 consider the presence of any call to a script-like thing as equally hazardous as a macro, and present the user a warning dialog about the document trying to execute a script. Users should never allow the execution of macros and scripts embedded in documents, unless they are perfectly aware of the potential risks associated with the action.

          LibreOffice 6.3.1 “fresh” is targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, while LibreOffice 6.2.7 “still” is targeted at users in production environments and individual users who prefer robustness over advanced features. All LibreOffice users should update immediately their current version.

          LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

        • LibreOffice 6.3 Office Suite Gets Its First Point Release, over 80 Bugs Fixed

          Coming a month after the release of the LibreOffice 6.3 series, LibreOffice 6.3.1 is a maintenance update that fixes a total of 82 issues across various components, such as Word, Draw, Calc, Math, etc., and also introduces a new layer of protection for users before they attempt to run a script or a macro embedded in a document. The same level of protection has been implemented in the LibreOffice 6.2.7 release as well, also announced today.

          “LibreOffice 6.3.1 considers the presence of any call to a script-like thing as equally hazardous as a macro, and present the user a warning dialog about the document trying to execute a script,” explains Italo Vignoli. “Users should never allow the execution of macros and scripts embedded in documents, unless they are perfectly aware of the potential risks associated with the action.”

      • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

        • Sponsor Article: why open frameworks matter

          The use of computers to control buildings was an inevitable consequence of the falling cost of the technology and the huge increase in the complexity of the equipment required to achieve comfort in large modern buildings. As with computers, the nascent BMS market was initially supplied by manufacturers who offered highly-proprietary systems which only they could install and maintain. As the technology matured, so the software to program the required control logic was made easier. As a result, a wider range of people could provide the engineering. Meanwhile, pressure from end users, who didn’t want to be tied to only one manufacturer for the life of the building or campus, led to the development of open protocol standards that could enable one manufacturers’ system to talk to another.

          However, since the way buildings are contracted tends to require a functionally-biased packaging of sub-contracts, each piece of controls equipment in a building developed separately, and each sub-sector developed its own standards. The result today is a plethora of ‘standard’ protocols which are used by the various sub-systems in a building; BACnet for HVAC, DALI and KNX for lighting, Modbus for electrical metering and power management, M-Bus for heat metering etc. Some protocols such as LONworks did manage for a while to gain traction in multiple segments, but its adoption has declined in recent years. So, although people still dream of there being ‘one standard to rule them all’, the reality is much messier, and the challenge of how to get systems talking to one another has not gone away.

      • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

        • Free Software Supporter – Issue 137, September 2019

          Defective by Design is calling on you to stand up against digital restrictions management and join us in celebration of the International Day Against DRM (IDAD) on October 12th, 2019. Keep an eye on defectivebydesign.org for further announcements.

      • Licensing/Legal

        • Some Intel Firmware Binaries Will Reportedly Be More Liberally Licensed

          One interesting nugget of news from this week’s Open-Source Firmware Conference is that some Intel firmware binaries pertaining to their Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) will be more liberally licensed under their simpler microcode/firmware license.

          Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb shared that Intel will reportedly publish TXT-related binaries like BIOS and SINIT ACMs under a similar license to the Intel FSP and microcode.

      • Programming/Development

        • Introducing the guide to 7 essential PyPI libraries and how to use them

          Why is Python so beloved by programmers? It’s open source. It’s compatible with a variety of operating systems. It’s readable for beginners. And it’s powerful enough to use for developing complex applications.

          But best of all is its large community, making it easy to find a solution to whatever problem you’re having. This community is the reason we have such a large, diverse range of software packages available in the Python Package Index (PyPI) to extend and improve Python and solve the inevitable glitches that crop up.
          We’ve put together a collection of PyPI library tutorials by Python expert, Moshe Zadka, in a downloadable guide. Learn how to solve common Python problems such as how to simplify writing C extensions, format your code consistently, add methods to libraries retroactively, automate tests, and more.

        • Why Java is so hot right now

          The Java platform has become one of the most widely used platforms, with a huge ecosystem in the world of technology. Java lets developers create applications for several platforms, such as Windows, Linux, embedded systems, and mobile.

          Java also has received criticisms, such as: Java is fat; Java takes a lot of memory; Java is verbose. But, Java was created to solve big problems, not small problems. Of course, you can also solve small problems with Java, but you see the real benefit of Java when you have a big problem, especially when creating solutions for enterprise environments. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the current Java ecosystem.

          Java is great for enterprise environments because of its power to solve complex problems and its multi-platform characteristics, but also because it promotes more security to business promoting backward compatibility and offers solutions based on specifications.

        • 10 pitfalls to avoid when implementing DevOps

          In companies of every size, software is increasingly providing business value because of a shift in how technology teams define success. More than ever, they are defined by how the applications they build bring value to their customers. Tickets and stability at the cost of saying no are no longer the key value of IT. It’s now about increasing developer velocity by partnering with the business.

        • Excellent Free Books to Learn Scala

          Scala is a modern, object-functional, multi-paradigm, Java-based programming and scripting language that’s released under the Apache License 2.0. It blends functional and object-oriented programming models. Scala introduces several innovative language constructs. It improves on Java’s support for object-oriented programming by traits, which are stackable and cannot have constructor parameters. It also offers closures, a feature that dynamic languages like Python and Ruby have adopted.

          Scala is particularly useful for building cloud-based/deliverable Software as a Service (SaaS) online applications, and is also proficient to develop traditional, imperative code.

          The language helps programmers write tighter code. It uses a number of techniques to cut down on unnecessary syntax, which helps to make code succinct. Typically, code sizes are reduced by an order of 2 or 3 compared to an equivalent Java application.

  • Leftovers

    • Security (Confidentiality/Integrity/Availability)

      • Security updates for Thursday

        Security updates have been issued by Debian (webkit2gtk), Fedora (systemd), openSUSE (go1.11, python-Twisted, SDL2_image, SDL_image, and wavpack), Oracle (kdelibs and kde-settings, kernel, and qemu-kvm), Red Hat (chromium-browser and firefox), Slackware (seamonkey), SUSE (java-1_8_0-ibm, kernel, and python-urllib3), and Ubuntu (firefox and npm/fstream).

      • Top NSA cyber official points to ransomware attacks as key threat to 2020 elections [iophk: Microsoft Windows TCO]

        “Ransomware is really interesting — 4,000 attacks a day over the last number of years. … That is certainly something that would be a key concern for the elections,” Neuberger said at Billington CyberSecurity’s 10th annual summit.

        Neuberger noted that ransomware attacks in general would be a “focus” of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate, which was announced in July and will be formally set up on Oct. 1.

      • The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History [iophk: Windows TCO]

        NotPetya was propelled by two powerful [attacker] exploits working in tandem: One was a penetration tool known as EternalBlue, created by the US National Security Agency but leaked in a disastrous breach of the agency’s ultrasecret files earlier in 2017. EternalBlue takes advantage of a vulnerability in a particular Windows protocol, allowing [attackers] free rein to remotely run their own code on any unpatched machine.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Colombian Peace Agreement in Peril: Rebels Return to Armed Struggle

        Civil war in Colombia may have a new lease on life. Appearing in a video released on August 29, Iván Márquez (formerly Luciano Marín Arango) spoke for former FARC guerrillas accompanying him.  He announced they had returned “to the mountain,” to armed struggle.

      • Private Sale Allowed Texas Gunman to Evade Background Check

        ODESSA, Texas–The gunman in a West Texas rampage that left seven dead obtained his AR-style rifle through a private sale, allowing him to evade a federal background check that blocked him from getting a gun in 2014 due to a “mental health issue,” a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

      • Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Praises Pinochet in Chile

        Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro criticized on Wednesday U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, who is from Chile, by praising that country’s 1973 military coup.

      • Danny Haiphong – The Project Censored Show

        Hosts Mickey Huff and Chase Palmieri spend the hour in conversation with Danny Haiphong, co-author of the new book with Roberto Sirvent “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence” out from Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. He explains his assertion that throughout U.S. history, “fake news has been the only news disseminated by the rulers of U.S. empire,” which has in turn been canonized as the dominant historiography of American Exceptionalism. Excellent book and discussion! Tune in!

      • The siege through journalists’ eyes 15 years after a horrific terrorist attack in Beslan, ‘Meduza’ asks reporters on the ground what they remember

        On September 1, 2004, terrorists seized a grade school in Beslan, capturing 1,128 children, parents, and staff. For the next two and a half days, the assailants mined the building and waited. By the end of the ordeal — one of the worst terrorist attacks in Russian history — 333 people were dead, and 783 were injured. Throughout the tragedy, Russian and foreign journalists were in Beslan, reporting the story live from on the ground. Fifteen years later, Meduza asked some of these journalists what they remember about those difficult, dark days.

      • Boko Haram: Bloody Terror, No End in Sight

        “The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, gives billions of dollars in aid to northeastern Nigeria. The problem is that aid, which helps fix small amounts of damage, is not a sufficient answer. As long as groups such as Boko Haram are able to keep destroying whole villages and infrastructure — while devastating populations — NGOs will never be able to keep up.” — International Christian Concern’s regional manager for Africa, Nathan Johnson, to Gatestone Institute.

      • Private Sale Allowed Texas Gunman to Evade Background Check

        The gunman in a West Texas rampage that left seven dead obtained his AR-style rifle through a private sale, allowing him to evade a federal background check that blocked him from getting a gun in 2014 due to a “mental health issue,” a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

      • U.N. Report Finds U.S. Likely Guilty of War Crimes in Yemen

        A new report by a group of investigators commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council says the United States, Britain and France may be culpable for war crimes in Yemen. The three countries back a Saudi Arabia- and United Arab Emirates-led coalition fighting on the side of the government in the current Yemeni civil war, which has been ongoing for five years.

      • How the U.S. Shattered the Middle East

        Yemen is a nightmare, a catastrophe, a mess—and the United States is highly complicit in the whole disaster. Refueling Saudi aircraft in-flight, providing targeting intelligence to the kingdom and selling the requisite bombs that have been dropped for years now on Yemeni civilians places the 100,000-plus deaths, millions of refugees, and (still) starving children squarely on the American conscience. If, that is, Washington can still claim to have a conscience.

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • Justice Department To Force Imprisoned Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond To Testify Against WikiLeaks

        FBI informant Hector Xavier Monsegur was instrumental in targeting and carrying out a cyberattack on the private intelligence firm, Stratfor, in 2011. The FBI allowed several individuals to submit stolen information from the firm to WikiLeaks, and it ultimately led to the prosecution of hacktivist Jeremy Hammond, who was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison in 2013.

        Now, the Justice Department has transferred Hammond from the Federal Correctional Institution Milan in Michigan to the William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center in Alexandria, Virginia so they can force him to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.

      • The French Press and the Assyro-Chaldeans

        A new book titled La France et les Assyro-Chaldéens – qu’en dit la presse? (France and the Assyro-Chaldeans — What does the press say?) has been published by Claire Weibel Yacoub, a French historian and author of three books on Assyrians.

        The book’s introduction starts with the bold title “Return of the Assyro-Chaldeans on the stage.” The French “stage” at least, in form of an extended historical press review, is traced meticulously and in a scholarly manner for almost two centuries by the author.

        Given the existential threat Assyrians have faced since World War One, Mrs. Waibel Yacoub’s asks what do French people know about the Assyro-Chaldeans based on the French press? Are they the forgotten ones? Compared to the Armenians, with whom the French public opinion is familiar with, the Assyro-Chaldeans seem less visible. The book is structured into seven chapters, each representing an important historical phase in modern Assyrian history in the Middle East and its coverage in the French press.

      • Deutsche Welle Journalists Threatened With Punishment In Russia

        The head of a Russian parliamentary commission pursuing Moscow’s claim that Germany’s public broadcaster promoted unrest in Russia has threatened punishment against Deutsche Welle journalists working in the country.

        Lawmaker Vasily Piskarev, who chairs a State Duma commission set up to probe foreign meddling in domestic affairs, said a Deutsche Welle representative must appear before a parliamentary hearing or draw its ire, according to an Interfax report cited by dpa.

    • Environment

      • Plastic Will Be the Shameful Artifact Our Descendants Dig Up

        Today in Science Advances, researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography report how the Earth itself is tainted with microplastic particles. By taking a core sample of sediments just off the coast of Southern California, the scientists could observe in its layers how plastic concentrations have changed year after year. And exponentially so: Since the 1940s, when plastic production began to take off, microplastic deposition rates have doubled every 15 years. This correlates with both figures on plastic manufacturing and coastal population growth in California, and brings us to a troubling conclusion: As seaside cities continue to boom, so does the amount of microplastic flowing into the sea, tainting whole ecosystems.

      • Climate change underlies Europe’s rapid warming

        Europe’s rapid warming means the world’s hottest property could now be on the continent. It has seen the strongest intensification of heat waves anywhere in the world in the last 70 years. The hottest of hot summers are now 2.3°C hotter than they used to be.

        And winter extremes of cold are dwindling. The number of extremely cold days has fallen twofold or even threefold, and the coldest days are now 3°C milder than they used to be, according to readings from 94% of the continent’s weather stations.

        This, say Swiss scientists, adds up to “a climate change signal that cannot be explained by internal variability.”

        That is, thanks to a steady increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases driven by ever-increasing use of fossil fuels, Europe is warming even faster than global climate models predict.

      • Elizabeth Warren Details Bold Plans for Green New Deal

        Declaring the climate emergency an “existential crisis” that requires bold and urgent action, Sen. Elizabeth Warren Tuesday night unveiled a proposal that calls for repealing President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and corporations to help fund a transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035.

      • ‘We Need Help’: Rescuers in Bahamas Face a Blasted Landscape

        Rescue crews in the Bahamas fanned out across a blasted landscape of smashed and flooded homes Wednesday, trying to reach drenched and stunned victims of Hurricane Dorian and take the full measure of the disaster. The official death toll stood at seven but was certain to rise.

      • The Impossibility of Intransigent Transcendence

        On Thursday, August 22, 2019, the Resolutions Committee of the Democrat’s National Committee (of Super-delegates) voted 17 to 8 against the possibility of a debate between their presidential candidates focussed on climate change. That means that slightly over 2/3rds of the Resolution Committee opposes such a debate.

      • Killing the Ocean

        The oceans are “crying for mercy,” a fact that is starkly revealed in a telling 900-page draft of a forthcoming UN report due for release September 25th. The draft report obtained by Agence France-Presse (AFP) assesses the status of the oceans and cyrosphere. It’s a landmark UN report, and it’s not a pretty picture.

      • Apartheid Had Always Been the Plan

        What do wealthy capitalists do in response to the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation or a biosphere teetering on the edge of collapse? Why they build enormous, fortified bunkers deep underground, of course. Here they can live like the descendants of the mammals that survived the extinction of the dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous and early Paleocene around 65 to 100 million years ago. The long deceased necrolestes patagonensis, whose shockingly appropriate meaning for this comparison is “grave robber,” are the descendants of the cronopio who narrowly escaped the dinosaurs’ fate by burrowing deep under the earth’s soil.

      • Energy

        • Fighting Fossil Fuels in South Africa: Campaigners Invoke Specters of Climate Chaos

          South Africa is one of the most difficult places to combat fossil fuels, including the petrochemical complexes that regularly poison the third largest city, Durban, founded by white settlers on the east coast in the mid-19th century. The average South African emits 9 tons of CO2 annually, which is the 11th highest among countries with at least 10 million residents. And measured in CO2/capita/GDP – in order to assess an economy’s carbon intensity – it the world’s third highest level, behind only Kazakhstan and the Czech Republic.

      • Wildlife/Nature

    • Finance

      • Burundi Bans Trading of Digital Currencies

        Burundi banned all trading of cryptocurrencies on its soil, saying it couldn’t offer digital money users protection in case of problems.

        Some Burundians lost money while trading virtual currencies and asked the government to intervene, according to Alfred Nyobewumusi, a director at the central bank’s micro-finance department. Digital coins such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are now illegal in the country, he said.

      • Top 20 Best Cryptocurrency Exchange Platforms in 2019

        In today’s world, cryptocurrency has become one of the hottest topics. It uses a peer-to-peer digital cash system, and like other transaction systems, you need a bank account while sufficient balance is necessary for exchanging. To prevent double spending or to solve the problem of repetitive use of the same entity, every action is checked and verified by the miners. Miners take transactions, stamp them as legitimate, and spread them in the network. Several reliable cryptocurrency exchange platforms are available for selling or buying cryptocurrencies.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • When Evil Devoured a Good Man

        Wedat Aydin didn’t have a say in why he was born a Kurd in an international colony called Kurdistan part of which is now reeling under the jackboots of the Turkish Army.

      • East Timor and Australia: a Loveless Affair at Twenty

        Cringe worthy, a touch molesting in sentiment: this was the celebratory occasion of the gathering of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison with his East Timorese counterparts. During the course of its history, the state has been pillaged and bombed, its residents massacred and its politicians spied upon. The exposure of that seedy little matter of espionage came in December 2013, when it was revealed that an Australian intelligence officer known as Witness K had spilled the beans on how his masters were attempting to undercut the East Timorese in their 2004 negotiations for a maritime boundary. The Australian delegation had eyes on underwater oil and gas revenue; nothing would be left to chance.

      • San Francisco council calls NRA ‘domestic terrorist organisation’

        The resolution says the US is “plagued by an epidemic of gun violence” and accuses the NRA of using “its considerable wealth and organisation strength to promote gun ownership and incite gun owners to acts of violence”.

      • Tech giants meet intelligence officials to talk 2020 election security

        Executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter huddled with U.S. intelligence officials in Menlo Park, Calif., on Wednesday to discuss how the companies are working to prevent election meddling ahead of 2020, sources familiar with the meeting confirmed to The Hill.

      • FEC can’t enforce election laws right now, because of Mitch McConnell’s obstruction

        There is no good reason that the FEC, which is supposed to have six members, has just three. Two new FEC commissioners are usually nominated every two years. Since Mitch McConnell, an opponent of campaign finance laws who has blocked multiple election security bills, became Senate majority leader in 2015, not a single commissioner has been confirmed. There has been no indication McConnell plans to address the FEC issue, even though the president nominated a pro-Trump lawyer to the panel two years ago. The Senate has yet to hold a confirmation hearing.

      • North Carolina Has Won a Huge Victory in the Fight Against Rigged Elections

        But here’s the difference between the two cases: The North Carolina judges determined that the Republican maps violated the state constitution: “it is the carefully crafted maps, and not the will of the voters, that dictate the election outcomes in a significant number of legislative districts and, ultimately, the majority control of the General Assembly.”

        The state court’s 357-page decision was detailed and firm in its conclusion that legislative contests in the state had been “significantly tainted in that they unconstitutionally deprive every citizen of the right to elections for members of the General Assembly conducted freely and honestly to ascertain, fairly and truthfully, the will of the People.” [...]

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Pro Tip: Don’t Send A Completely Bogus Defamation Threat To A Website That Employs A Former ACLU Badass

        If you happen to recognize the name Jamie Lynn Crofts, it may be from the truly amazing amicus brief she filed two years ago in the nutty SLAPP lawsuit that coal boss Bob Murray filed against comedian John Oliver after Oliver did a (very funny) segment about coal and coal jobs that talked a fair bit about Bob Murray. Crofts, at the time working for the ACLU in West Virginia, filed an amicus brief that was truly wonderful to behold, including sections entitled “The Ridiculous Case at Hand” and “Anyone Can Legally Say “Eat Shit, Bob!” and “You Can’t Sue People for Being Mean to You, Bob” and “You Can’t Get a Court Order Telling the Press How to Cover Stories, Bob.”

      • ‘Deutsche Welle’ refuses to participate in Russian parliamentary hearings on political interference by foreign media

        The Deutsche Welle broadcasting company has refused to participate in hearings held by a State Duma committee investigating supposed foreign interference in Russia’s domestic affairs, according to a letter sent by the news agency’s head of general management, Johannes Hoffmann. In the text, Hoffmann said DW is accountable to the German authorities, and explained that there is therefore no “legal recourse” for a company representative to attend the committee’s hearings.

      • Pinterest’s Way Of Dealing With Anti-Vax Nonsense And Scams Is Only Possible Because Of Section 230

        A key argument by many who are advocating for getting rid of Section 230 is that various internet platforms need to “take more responsibility” or have some sort of “duty of care,” to rid their platforms of malicious content (however that’s defined). I even heard one staunch anti-Section 230 advocate complain vocally that internet services “aren’t experimenting enough” with policing their platforms. The argument that there’s not enough experimentation struck me as quite odd — because if you look around, there’s actually a ton of experimentation going on in platform moderation methods and techniques. And, even more weird, is that most of this experimentation is only possible because of Section 230.

      • Knight Institute Warns Rep. Ocasio-Cortez That She, Like Trump, Can’t Block People On Twitter

        Earlier this summer, we wrote about the 2nd Circuit appeals court affirming a district court ruling against Donald Trump, saying that it’s a 1st Amendment violation for him to block followers on Twitter. The reasoning in the decisions was a bit nuanced, but the short version is that (1) if you’re a public official, and (2) using social media (3) for official purposes (4) to create a space of open dialogue, then you cannot block people from following you based on the views they express. The four conditions do need to be met — and the lower court at least noted that such public officials can still “mute” people. That is, the officials don’t need to listen — but they cannot limit access to the narrow public space that is created in response to their official social media posts.

      • Remembering Gene Crick, Digital Rights Pioneer

        We pause this week to celebrate our longtime friend Gene Crick, a digital rights activist and former president of EFF-Austin, who passed away August 14 in Texas at age 73. Gene was a tireless advocate for free speech, a free, open, and inclusive Internet, and digital rights for everyone in the state of Texas. He worked for many years to bring free Internet access to communities, especially rural and underserved areas, and advocated for broadband access for rural communities.Gene was ahead of his time in recognizing the power and community-building potential of the Internet, and the pitfalls of an Internet controlled by marketing interests. “He was devoted to community networking,” said Jon Lebkowsky, co-founder, secretary, and board member of EFF-Austin, who knew and worked with Gene for many years.Gene, he remembers, was a folksy Texan from a small town east of Austin who had a great sense of humor. “I thought he was one of the funniest guys I’d ever run into,” said Lebkowsky about first meeting Gene at EFF-Austin’s monthly public meetings back in the 1990s.Later, when the web was in its toddler stage, deep in the throes of excessive speculation that marked the first dot com bubble, Gene talked in 2000 about the “dark horse on the horizon” that threatened to turn the web into one big shopping mall with no place for innovators, creators, culture, and speech just for the sake of speech.“We are creating, if we’re not careful, a commercial medium that is being controlled upstream by infrastructure-level decisions,” Gene said an article about the Internet’s effects on society and politics. “There’s interests that want to determine whether we can have proprietary architecture and proprietary access to infrastructure. That’s scary, because decisions are being made from a commercial engine.” Capitalism isn’t evil, he said—it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. “What it’s not supposed to do is set the national agenda and maintain that ethical mooring that we’ve been talking about,” he said.Gene founded and worked at several organizations whose missions were to provide open access to communities. He was executive director at the Metropolitan Austin Interactive Network (MAIN), a nonprofit that provided web access to other nonprofits and training in developing web sites. The organization, partnering with arts and library groups, established access stations in 25 cities in the mid- to late-1990s. To this day, it still provides free websites for nonprofits. Gene believed strongly in an inclusive Internet and recognized it could be used to polarize and segregate if access and control are only available to certain groups.Gene was president of EFF-Austin in the 1990s. The nonprofit group originally was formed in 1991 with the intention that it would become the first chapter of Electronic Frontier Foundation. However, EFF decided not to become a chapter-based organization, and EFF-Austin became a separately-incorporated, independent nonprofit organization focusing on cyber liberties, digital rights, and emerging technologies. EFF-Austin is now a member of the Electronic Frontier Alliance, which EFF launched in 2016.Gene founded the Texas Internet Service Providers Association and was a board member for Rural Telecom Congress, which advocates for broadband access for rural communities. He was a member of the FCC Consumer Advisory Committee, and advised Australia and New Zealand on community technology development.“The thrust of all the work he was doing was to make telecom services like the Internet as broadly available as possible,” said Lebkowsky. His work “did touch a lot of people.”We are grateful for Gene’s passion for inclusiveness, and his vision of enabling underserved communities and organizations all over Texas—and beyond—to connect with each other and world. His successors at EFF-Austin continue to advocate for digital rights, representing an enduring legacy in which we are proud to have played any role.

      • Bedbug Privilege: Bret Stephens Uses His NY Times Column To Suggest Jokingly Comparing Him To A Bedbug Is Prelude To Ethnic Genocide

        It’s one thing to trigger a massive Streisand Effect. It’s another to keep on making it worse. Bret Stephens is entering new territory here. Last week, we wrote about his bedbug freakout, in which he misread a tweet that basically no one had seen or read, and tried to use his high and mighty position as a “NY Times Columnist” to get a professor fired, by angrily emailing that professor and cc’ing university provost. As you’ll recall, the professor, David Karpf of George Washington University, had simply cracked a mild joke in response to someone at the NY Times tweeting that there were bedbugs in the NY Times offices: “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Facebook And Twitter Hope To Fix California’s Troubled Privacy Law With…Misleading Ads?

        With the federal government doing little to pass a real privacy law for the modern era, states have begun rushing into the void. That’s unfortunately resulting in some state privacy laws that are a lacking in the…quality department. That’s been particularly true in California, where the government recently passed the new California Consumer Privacy Act. While the law may be well intentioned, we’ve noted how the rushed bill has plenty of problems that need fixing if it’s ever going to actually work. Murky definitions and drafting errors leave the bill a bit of a muddled mess, with the potential to even undermine other, existing laws.

      • Lawmakers Must Not Listen to the Internet Association and Weaken the California Consumer Privacy Act

        Hundreds of thousands of Californians last year demanded that big technology companies respect their privacy rights, and supported a movement that led to the California Consumer Privacy Act.

        The law will go into effect on January 1, 2020. Big technology companies fought hard against the CCPA and have been leaning heavily on Sacramento legislators ever since to gut the law. With just weeks to go before the legislative session ends, they are pulling out the stops for an eleventh-hour effort to weaken the CCPA before it goes into effect.

      • White House Now Thinks Harvesting Fitness Tracker Data Could Stop The Next Mass Shooting

        In the wake of more mass shootings, everything coming from up top has been bat shit insane. The Trump Administration has a bunch of suggestions, and they’re no better than those offered by a bunch of policy makers who think pulling the plug on certain areas of the internet will somehow reduce the frequency of mass shootings in the US.

      • Facebook is Changing Its Face Recognition Settings. We Have Questions.

        Yesterday Facebook announced it was changing its settings for face recognition, which it has used since 2010 to match known faces in user profile pictures and other photos to unknown faces in newly uploaded photos. This leads to two questions:

        News media are starting to report that Facebook has turned face recognition into an “opt-in” feature for all users. This is something EFF and many others have pushed for for years. It’s also the law in Illinois. However, Facebook’s announcement, while far from clear, definitely does not say that face recognition is now opt-in for all users.

      • Just As Attorney General Barr Insists iPhone Users Have Too Much Security, We Learn They Don’t Have Nearly Enough

        You may recall a few years back, John Oliver did one of his always excellent Last Week Tonight shows all about encryption. It concluded with an “honest Apple commercial” that highlighted the difficulty of keeping phones secure, and noting that it’s a constant war against malicious attackers who are always trying to figure out new ways to break into people’s phones…

      • Facebook Blocks Sharing of Links to Prominent Pirate Sites

        Facebook is preventing users from sharing links to several prominent pirate sites, including YTS.lt and LimeTorrents. According to an error message that pops up, links to these sites go against the company’s community standards. The Pirate Bay, which was temporarily blocked by Facebook years ago, is not affected as of yet.

      • Report: Millions of Facebook users’ phone numbers found in unsecured database

        Each record in the database included a phone number along with an identifier that could easily be linked to a specific Facebook account. Some of the records even included the user’s name and gender.

      • Google accused of secretly feeding personal data to advertisers

        Google is secretly using hidden web pages that feed the personal data of its users to advertisers, undermining its own policies and circumventing EU privacy regulations that require consent and transparency, according to one of its smaller rivals.

        New evidence submitted to an investigation by the Data Protection Commissioner, which oversees Google’s European business, accused the US tech company of “exploiting personal data without sufficient control or concern over data protection”.

        The regulator is investigating whether Google uses sensitive data, such as the race, health and political leanings of its users, to target ads. In his evidence, Johnny Ryan, chief policy officer of the niche web browser Brave, said he had discovered the secret web pages as he tried to monitor how his data were being traded on Google’s advertising exchange, the business formerly known as DoubleClick.

      • Welsh cops’ use of facial recognition is legal, High Court rules

        Civil rights group Liberty and local Cardiff resident Ed Bridges had challenged the deployment of facial recognition in the first legal challenge to UK police use of facial recognition technology. It was first used by South Wales Police in a trial during the Champions League Final at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium in June 2017.

    • Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

      • Russian Blogger Sentenced to Five Years Over ‘Extremist’ Tweet

        A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced a blogger to five years in a penal colony for a tweet calling for attacks on the children of police, a ruling his lawyer said was unprecedented.

        Vladislav Sinitsa, 30, posted the tweet in the wake of a police crackdown against protesters who have called for free elections.

        “It’s an act of intimidation,” said lawyer Denis Tikhonov after a Moscow district court found Sinitsa guilty of inciting hatred.

      • Jeremy Hammond, Anonymous Hacker and WikiLeaks Source, Summoned to Testify Before a Federal Grand Jury

        Hammond’s transfer and potential testimony, which supporters say he’s unlikely to give, raises new questions about the scope of the government’s criminal case against WikiLeaks. The charges against Assange have thus far been limited to events linked to the release of classified U.S. government documents provided by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who has herself being held in a Virginia jail for refusing to give a grand jury her testimony.

      • Scoop: Trump allies raise money to target reporters

        President Trump’s political allies are trying to raise at least $2 million to investigate reporters and editors of the New York Times, Washington Post and other outlets, according to a 3-page fundraising pitch reviewed by Axios.

        Why it matters: Trump’s war on the media is expanding. This group will target reporters and editors, while other GOP 2020 entities go after the social media platforms, alleging bias, officials tell us.

      • Imprisoned Activist Jeremy Hammond Called Against His Will to Testify Before Federal Grand Jury in the EDVA [iophk: plea "deal"]

        “The government’s effort to try to compel Jeremy to testify is punitive and mean-spirited. Jeremy has spent nearly 10 years in prison because of his commitment to his firmly held beliefs. There is no way that he would ever testify before a grand jury. The government knew this when they gave him immunity in every federal jurisdiction in exchange for his guilty plea. In bringing him against his will to the Eastern District of Virginia, the government has put an end to his participation in the RDAP drug program, effectively adding a year to his sentence. (If Jeremy had been permitted to complete the 9-month program, he would have earned a 12-month sentence reduction.) When he refuses to testify, his sentence will be prolonged indefinitely when he is punished with further incarceration for contempt of a court order to testify.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • RuNet: The Miniseries ‘Meduza’ interviews creator of new documentary about Russian Internet’s rise

        This week, the television and digital network Current Time will release “Holy War,” a new miniseries by journalist Andrey Loshak about the evolution of the Russian Internet, spanning the first experiments on the Web to the rise of giant corporations, covering everything from the first startup investments to the explosion of government regulations and the arrest of Baring Vostok founder Michael Calvey. Meduza deputy chief editor Sultan Suleimanov spoke to Loshak about the miniseries and the figures who feature in the show. “Holy War” will be available on YouTube on September 5.

      • How Kentucky Gambled for Hundreds of Millions of Dollars From a Broadband Program It Didn’t Qualify for

        In the spring of 2015, KentuckyWired, the Bluegrass State’s ambitious plan to bring high-speed internet access into rural areas, had ground to a halt.

        Officials were in talks with Macquarie Capital, an Australian investment bank known for organizing big infrastructure projects around the globe, to build and manage the new network. But the bank wanted $1.2 billion over three decades — money Kentucky didn’t have on its own.

    • Right To Repair/Digital Restrictions (DRM)

      • Pressured By ‘Right To Repair’ Movement, Apple Will Sell Parts To Independent Repair Shops

        Apple has never looked too kindly upon users actually repairing their own devices. The company’s ham-fisted efforts to shut down, sue, or otherwise imperil third-party repair shops are legendary. As are the company’s efforts to force recycling shops to shred Apple products (so they can’t be refurbished and re-used), and Apple’s often comical attacks on essential right to repair legislation, which only sprung up after companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sony, John Deere, and others created a grass-roots counter-movement via their attempts to monopolize repair.

    • Monopolies

      • Inside Google’s new ‘Digital Garage’ for jobseekers in downtown Helsinki

        The new space is open to everyone, but will have a special focus on those looking to enroll in workshops for digital skills and who wish to learn how to navigate Finland’s tech scene.

        The space occupies a sprawling building on Kluuvikatu and is open to children as well as adults. Google has stated that they aim to educate over 10,000 Finns over the course of the next year.

      • 14 women sue Lyft for alleged ‘sexual predator crisis’ among drivers

        The women, who are unnamed in the suit, allege Lyft drivers sexually assaulted or raped them in 2018 and 2019, based on a copy of the suit. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in San Francisco, where the company is based.

      • Uber rides away from taxi services in ride-sharing market battle

        While younger Australians are Uber’s best customers, Australians aged 65+ had the lowest proportion (6.6%) of Uber usage among them.

        Taxi usage, however, is far more consistent across age groups, with the study revealing that those aged 35-49 had the highest proportion of taxi usage (25.3%), with 14-17 years old’s recording the lowest (14.8%).
        So, what else do we know about Uber users?

        According to the Roy Morgan study Uber users are far more likely than the average Australian to be in Generation Y and Generation Z, to be in the ‘Young Optimism’ and ‘Socially Aware’ Roy Morgan Value Segments, and to be in a ‘Young Single’ or ‘Young Couple’ household life cycle.

      • Trademarks

        • Even Kirk Herbstreit Thinks THE Ohio State Is Being THE Silliest With Its ‘THE’ Trademark Application

          A few weeks back, we talked about the dumbest trademark application I’ve ever seen, with the Ohio State University deciding to try to get a trademark on one of the most commonly used determiners in the English language: “The.” Honestly, the whole thing is painfully stupid, as trademarking such a common word cannot possibly be worked into the original purpose of trademark law, but here we are. The only good thing thus far to come out of all of this was the University of Michigan’s playful suggestion that maybe it should trademark the word “Of.”

      • Copyrights

        • Getting Upload Filters Wasn’t Enough: EU Copyright Industry Starts Stealth Campaign To Demonize Internet Companies Even More

          The EU Copyright Directive was supposed to bring copyright into the digital age. Instead, it turned into an attack on the Internet ecosystem by companies that once dominated analog media, and which are still struggling to accept the arrival of online services with a global reach. For example, the upload filters that are unavoidable under Article 13/17 of the Directive are really directed against Google, which ironically won’t be much inconvenienced by them. Ordinary people, by contrast, may find their perfectly legal uploads forbidden without explanation. You might think the EU copyright companies would be pretty satisfied now they have this powerful new right to block uploaded materials using automated filters as their proxy, without needing a judge’s approval. Not a bit of it. The German Web site Netzpolitik has obtained a leaked document revealing a coordinated campaign by copyright companies to hammer home the message that Internet companies are today’s baddies:

        • Three Years Later And The Copyright Office Still Can’t Build A Functioning Website For DMCA Agents, But Demands Everyone Re-Register

          In early 2016, we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous plan by the Copyright Office to — without any basis in the law — strip every site of its registered DMCA agent. In case you’re not aware, one of the conditions to get the DMCA’s Section 512 safe harbors as a platform for user content, is that you need to have a “Designated Agent.” As per 512(c)(2), it says:

        • Book Preview: “Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians”

          The CC Certificate program is Creative Commons’ official training in open licensing. It targets copyright law, CC legal tools, and the recommended practices of working in our global, shared commons. The CC Certificate is currently offered as a 10-week online course, or as a 1-week in-person training (bootcamp) to educators and academic librarians.

Fake Software Patents in Europe (Invalid Patents) Would Only Discourage or Drive Away the European Software Industry, But Lawyers Don’t Care

Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

When one litigates for a living computer code looks like something to be taxed, nothing else

Louvre at night

Summary: Patent maximalists are running the largest patent office in Europe and despite the law clearly disallowing abstract patents these continue to be enshrined as European Patents; the EPO’s management wants judges that it controls (already besieged in Haar) to say “OK” to this illegal practice

THE Campinos/Battistelli-led European Patent Office (EPO) is an utter embarrassment to Europe. It disproves perceptions about Rule of Law in Europe and it harms the European industry. In that respect, today’s EPO also discredits the world’s patent systems. It makes them look anarchic and uncaring about underlying laws, constitutions etc.

“It’s a ‘fixed’ game that gives an illusion of so-called “growth” in “productivity” (as measured using ludicrous yardsticks).”Back in 2007 and maybe before that we wrote about software patents in Europe, a year or two after the subject had been hotly debated in European and international media. We wrongly assumed that the European Parliament put an end to these ridiculous patents once and for all. The EPO’s management pretends that it’s still an unanswered question and in the meantime it instructs examiners to grant such patents; it just throws loads of ridiculous buzzwords at them while encouraging applicants to leverage these buzzwords. It’s a ‘fixed’ game that gives an illusion of so-called “growth” in “productivity” (as measured using ludicrous yardsticks).

Earlier this week we saw promotion of an article about “stay of national proceedings pending outcome of opposition,” citing Coloplast v Salts Healthcare. To quote: “With the parallel systems of patent revocation in Europe (opposition before the European Patent Office (EPO) and revocation/nullity before the national courts), where the opposition runs slower than the national courts, there is a risk that a patent found to be valid and infringed by the national courts is subsequently found to be invalid by the EPO.”

Only the lawyers benefit and many parties would choose to settle without actual justice. Fake patents, unfounded and unsound as per the EPC, can result in payments and it’s no secret that patents are an extreme injustice when monopoly is given for unoriginal ideas, trivial ideas, or abstract ideas. Sadly, however, it happens far too often nowadays and the public rarely talks about it. Lawyers lie to the public to keep the public uninvolved. Jargon and lingo contribute to that (e.g. FRAND and other intentionally misleading terms).

“Only the lawyers benefit and many parties would choose to settle without actual justice.”SUEPO, the staff union of the EPO, openly speaks about bad quality of European Patents. It says it has gotten far worse very fast. It repeatedly warns that, according to the EPO itself, not many European Patents even comply with the EPC!

Patent maximalists obviously aren’t bothered. Fake patents too are business to them (applications, litigation/lawsuits and so on). Serial litigants couldn’t ask for more!

Rose Hughes has just mentioned T 0703/19, a decision before the EPO’s boards; she very well knows these boards are 10,000 cases behind and won't deal with questions of EPO breaking the law (the blog where she wrote this used to write about this subject regularly before it self-censored and she joined the monopolists). To quote her blog post:

The Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) recently dealt thoroughly with the thorny issue of the consequences of appeal fee payment after the deadline for filing an appeal (G 1/18, IPKat post here). Readers with an enthusiasm for the legal intricacies surrounding appeal filings, may also be interested in a recent Technical Boards of Appeal (TBA) decision (T 0703/19). In this decision, the TBA considered another issue arising from appeal fee payment: when may a user of the EPO have legitimate expectations to be informed of an underpayment of an appeal fee?

[...]

The patent in question, EP11700179, was a Swiss originating patent related to a dental implant. Following a negative decision by the Opposition Division, the patentee filed a notice of appeal by online filing by the deadline for filing an appeal. The notice of appeal included a completed form and accompanying letter. The letter included the statement (in German) that the appeal fee was thereby paid via online fee payment. The form stated the amount of the appeal fee, but not the method of payment. The method of payment was indicated as “not specified” (“nicht angegeben”). An account number for debit of the amount was not provided, and payment was thus not taken.

TBA’s upcoming decision that many people look forward to actually concerns software patents; it has the potential to become ‘European Alice‘, albeit it’s unlikely to happen because of rigging by EPO (Office) management. We saw that before. At the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) the impact of Alice is still being felt; over at Watchtroll this week litigation zealot Robert Sachs calls the demise of software patents (Alice) “Benevolent Despot or Tyrant,” which is a false choice, two negatives. These are greedy litigation ‘activists’ (working for their pockets, for patent trolls etc.) and they are attacking the law itself. It’s not just this one article (“Alice: Benevolent Despot or Tyrant? Analyzing Five Years of Case Law Since Alice v. CLS Bank”) but also another one by Mark Nowotarski at Watchtroll: “If You Want to Protect Your Business Method, Reframe It as a Technical Invention”

They give ‘tricks’ for getting patents that are bogus, in effect invalid (as judged by courts).

“They give ‘tricks’ for getting patents that are bogus, in effect invalid (as judged by courts).”Watchtroll now has a ‘Webinar’ for patents at the EPO (“IPW Webinar: Getting to Grant: How to get your patent approved by the EPO”).

It says: “What are the necessary steps for obtaining a Notice of Allowance at the European Patent Office (EPO)?”

Notice how patent extremists in the US ‘interfere’ with EPO affairs? And the EPO works closely with Watchtroll. Today’s EPO is in bed with people who habitually attack judges, just like EPO management does.

Here in the UK, according to Cambridge Network’s new announcement, the EPO will participate in some patent propaganda very soon. To quote: “The event will feature an impressive array of speakers including a keynote address from Professor Christopher R Lowe (University of Cambridge), and speakers from companies including AstraZeneca, Tokomak Energy and the EPO.”

Notice who the EPO speaks alongside; AstraZeneca et al. (the firms that nowadays have key positions at IP Kat as well).

“Today’s EPO is in bed with people who habitually attack judges, just like EPO management does.”Earlier this week the EPO invited feedback on its software patent policy, G 1/19 (“Patentability of computer-implemented simulations”).

Hardly to our surprise, Hans Wegner and Tobias Kaufmann, two patent zealots from Bardehle Pagenberg (i.e. the usual), are already lobbying the EPO for these illegal software patents. Why? Simply because they profit from frivolous lawsuits over bogus, abstract patents.

Bastian Best, their colleague, wrote in Twitter: “Should computer-implemented simulations be patentable? This is a very important question for the future of the digital economy in Europe. I hope the @EPOorg Enlarged Board of Appeal follows our position.”

Why? So you can destroy yet more European software companies, Bastian?

What he says there is akin to, “I hope EPO breaks the law (as it already does every day)…”

Benjamin Henrion has already noticed this and said: “For those with a brain: “These inventions cannot be classified as merely mental or abstract ideas” Like software is not abstract, nor the other items excluded in the EPC […] Red Dove software patent decision is 50 years old https://www.bardehle.com/de/ip-news-wissen/ip-news/news-detail/amicus-curiae-brief-concerning-g-119-patentability-of-computer-implemented-simulation-methods.html”

“Earlier this week the EPO invited feedback on its software patent policy, G 1/19 (“Patentability of computer-implemented simulations”).”A longterm activist against software patents (hired since then by Red Hat and thus working for IBM now) said: “It’s still called „software“, no matter how much EPO er al try to push „computer implemented X“. We are talking about patents on software. It’s that simple.”

The EPO “breaks the law,” I told him, “and hopes to disguise that using semantics.”

Here’s what the EPO wrote (warning: epo.org link): (“EPO technical tautologism at its paroxism,” as the above puts it): “can the simulation of a technical system solve a technical problem by producing a technical effect which goes beyond the simulation’s implementation on a computer, if the simulation is claimed as such?”

What baloney; I’d gladly submit another letter to the boards as I did a decade ago (to the Enlarged Board); but this time, under the new and profoundly rogue administration (not Brimelow), it doesn’t look like these boards are liberated/permitted to rule as they see fit, i.e. based on the EPC.

“it doesn’t look like these boards are liberated/permitted to rule as they see fit, i.e. based on the EPC.”Buzzwords, buzzwords, buzzwords, buzzwords…

Just stick one in: “AI”? “CII”? What next?

Here come ENSafrica’s Hugo Biermann and Rowan Forster with another promoted pile of literary nonsense entitled “When intelligence is artificial” (just more of the “hey hi” hype in the context of patents, quoting the EPO which exploits the buzzword to grant illegal patent monopolies).

This is what they wrote:

The abovementioned article in The Patent Lawyer discusses the fact that a team led by a university professor has successfully filed the first patent applications for inventions created by AI, with the inventor having been named as DABUS. DABUS is the name given to the machine in question and stands for “device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience”. Both the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) have apparently indicated that there are no issues with novelty, inventive step or industrial applicability in respect of these inventions.

But what about the fact that the inventor is not human, but rather an AI machine or program? That’s the tricky part. According to the article there “have been claims of AI generating inventions for decades, but an AI inventor has never been disclosed in a patent application.” However, that is likely to change. “Modern AI may fundamentally change how research and development takes place. In some cases AI is no longer a tool, even a very sophisticated tool; in some cases, AI is automating innovation.”

The article explains that no country’s law specifically deals with the issue of whether or not AI inventions can be patented. However, most jurisdictions have restricted inventorship to natural persons, in order to prevent corporate inventorship. The article suggests that the right approach is for the AI to be listed as the inventor and for the AI’s owner to be recorded as the owner or assignee of the patent.

In another article dealing with the DABUS applications, a spokesman for the EPO is quoted as follows: “The current state of technological development suggests that, for the foreseeable future, AI is… a tool used by a human inventor.” We’re told that a UKIPO spokesman has also confirmed that an inventor must be a natural person. Whilst conceding that, change may well be required: “The government believes that AI technology could increase the UK’s GDP by 10% in the next decade, and the IPO is focussed on responding to the challenges that come with this growth”.

There are two aspects to this “hey hi” hype; one is about automating applications (or drafting thereof) and another regards patenting of such processes. The EPO often conflates the two aspects, probably by intention.

“Today’s EPO is a highly dysfunctional patent office which often seems to be run by litigation firms, for litigation firms.”Yesterday we spotted OSE Immunotherapeutics celebrating a new EPO-granted monopoly on cancer treatment. This is nothing to be celebrated, but they issued a paid-for press release [1, 2]; imagine what would happen if the boards weren’t 10,000 cases (appeals) behind and were able to actually decide on the legality of such controversial patents.

Today’s EPO is a highly dysfunctional patent office which often seems to be run by litigation firms, for litigation firms. █

Patent Trolls Are Destroying Free/Open Source Software and They’re Coming to Europe, Thanks to the European Patent Office

Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Patents at 7:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Patent trolls already infest London, but that’s good for London-based law firms (not a tourism attraction, just a drain and a stain on the British economy)

London taxi

Summary: The EPO was forewarned about its impact on innovation and facilitation of cumbersome litigation by trolls; but the EPO ignored all the warnings as if its goal was to attract the trolls

TODAY’S European Patent Office (EPO) organises events with front groups of patent trolls.

Here’s a new example: “If you want to create an IP strategy that supports your business strategy, join us at our joint event with @LESIntl in Dublin…”

There were more examples like that earlier in the week. Why is the EPO associating with and even promoting LESI? As if they don’t know who (or what) LESI fronts for…

“Why is the EPO associating with and even promoting LESI? As if they don’t know who (or what) LESI fronts for…”The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) under Iancu also sides with patent trolls while denying such a thing even exists, but that’s another matter. Today’s EPO regularly meets litigation and trolling front groups; it never meets actual scientists! That exposes the alarming bias. António Campinos does this just like Battistelli did. Nothing has changed. Both of them also promote software patents in Europe (not merely tolerating these but promoting these — a subject we’ll cover in our next post).

Mind yesterday’s blog post from Mozilla ([1] below, already included in yesterday’s daily links but re-added because of importance). This patent troll, Skyhook, has quite a history attacking FOSS with patent lawsuits [1, 2]. About a decade later it’s still doing that and it now targets relatively small companies.

What do the lawyers think about all this? Fantastic! Good for business. Theirs.

Audrey Horton (Bird & Bird, Team UPC) writes some new nonsense from the UK, promoted by IAM’s parent company for a fee (for extra audience). Remember the Unwired Planet case in London (there are already several such cases)? Horton uses misleading euphemisms like RAND, ZRAND and FRAND (all the letters in these acronyms are white-washing lies) to describe what boils down to patent trolls infesting Europe, looking to exploit frivolous litigation with questionable and possibly illegal European Patents. In her words:

Under the Unwired Planet decision, it might not be open to Z selectively to claim the right to be granted a RAND licence. If the licence was a unitary, portfolio, worldwide, group to group licence, arguably Z had to take it as a whole or not at all. It did not follow that Z was somehow prevented from saying to T, and the court, that it no longer relied on any licence to which it was entitled to resist the grant of relief for infringement of the UK patents. Such a waiver ought not to be treated as ineffective or invalid. Unwired Planet did not suggest that a patent owner had an independent right to come to the court for a declaration as to the scope and extent of the licence he was required to offer to an implementer, when the implementer expressed no interest in taking such a licence.

The case above is significant (we covered it many times before) because several years ago we saw this troll increasingly turning to British courts. It’s looking to shake down everything that moves. It doesn’t develop anything, so the money sinks into black holes. Germany too is rapidly becoming a hotspot for patent trolls. Thanks, EPO! █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Mozilla Cloud Services Blog: A New Policy for Mozilla Location Service

    Several years ago we started a geolocation experiment called the Mozilla Location Service (MLS) to create a location service built on open-source software and powered through crowdsourced location data. MLS provides geolocation lookups based on publicly observable cell tower and WiFi access point information. MLS has served the public interest by providing location information to open-source operating systems, research projects, and developers.

    Today Mozilla is announcing a policy change regarding MLS. Our new policy will impose limits on commercial use of MLS. Mozilla has not made this change by choice. Skyhook Holdings, Inc. contacted Mozilla some time ago and alleged that MLS infringed a number of its patents. We subsequently reached an agreement with Skyhook that avoids litigation. While the terms of the agreement are confidential, we can tell you that the agreement exists and that our MLS policy change relates to it. We can also confirm that this agreement does not change the privacy properties of our service: Skyhook does not receive location data from Mozilla or our users.

    Our new policy preserves the public interest heart of the MLS project. Mozilla has never offered any commercial plans for MLS and had no intention to do so. Only a handful of entities have made use of MLS API Query keys for commercial ventures. Nevertheless, we regret having to impose new limits on MLS. Sometimes companies have to make difficult choices that balance the massive cost and uncertainty of patent litigation against other priorities.

    Mozilla has long argued that patents can work to inhibit, rather than promote, innovation. We continue to believe that software development, and especially open-source software, is ill-served by the patent system. Mozilla endeavors to be a good citizen with respect to patents. We offer a free license to our own patents under the Mozilla Open Software Patent License Agreement. We will also continue our advocacy for a better patent system.

Bristows UPC Propaganda (in Pseudonymous Form) Shames the Government’s Officials in Order to Install Corrupt Officials

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 6:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Team UPC is no better than “Brexit Party” with its extortion-like tactics

A despot of Brexit
Litigation giants are still pursuing a ‘UPC coup’, but in the process they show endless disdain for truth, for the law, for constitutions etc. They actually cause damage to their ‘precious’ UPC and greatly harm the EU’s reputation (they don’t care about the EU).

Summary: The patent maximalists are up in arms and their dangerous agenda is taking more radical forms; lying is apparently not enough anymore as demands are made and doxing-like tactics are approached

THE abuses of the European Patent Office (EPO) will become more apparent this month because workers come back from holidays and more statements are being issued.

“Campinos meanwhile facilitates and covers up corruption at the EPO.”António Campinos has just been mentioned by an EPO retweet that said (with an image of Campinos): “Fruitful meeting @prv_se with Mr Antonio Campinos president of @EPOorg and the delegation. Coordinated meeting with key IP stakeholders in Sweden and strengthening collaboration between the officies on the agenda.”

“…we’re supposed to believe that this criminal administration can somehow administer courts, too?”
Notice who Campinos is meeting; he never meets actual scientists, except on stage when he can ‘steal’ credit for their work in exchange for an award that drains the EPO’s budget. Campinos meanwhile facilitates and covers up corruption at the EPO. Hiding at CEIPI we have the UPC ‘judge’ wannabe Battistelli, whom Campinos invited/welcomed as a 'judge' some months back.

Citing a French article, Benjamin Henrion wrote that “INPI, like most National Patent Offices (NPOs), want renewal fees from the EPO, pushing for patent maximalism (software patents, UPC) to get more money…”

People from INPI also got EPO jobs because of Battistelli’s connections (nobody was ever held accountable for it!) and we’re supposed to believe that this criminal administration can somehow administer courts, too?

Don’t ask Bristows LLP about that; they deny any troubles even exist! Earlier this week, boosted by Kluwer Patent Blog, “Kluwer Patent blogger” ("Kluwer Patent blogger" is Bristows probably) insulted the German government for not ratifying the UPC (Team UPC posts a lie in quote form as a headline). At the time we last checked it only one comment (from Russell Barton) made it past moderation and said:

What is meant by “the German government will have to finish the ratification procedure immediately”?

If this just means that informing “the depository that they have received parliamentary approval to ratify, the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court” will happen immediately, then that works as it allows the provisional application phase (PAP) to start. You would then expect deposit of ratification itself to follow later, at least 3 months into the PAP, when the Administrative Committee indicate that the system will be ready within 3/4 months.

If instead it means that deposit of the ratification will also happen immediately then that would automatically trigger the UPC coming into full operation on the first day of the fourth month that follows. According to notices from Preparatory Committee that would not give them enough time to recruit the judges etc and the court would seemingly be operational before it is ready.

Team UPC offers nothing but a pile of Big Lies and humiliation of those who stand in the way of these lies. And they nowadays write using pseudonyms to avoid being held accountable for lying, insults, etc.

Henrion picked from their own interview an admission of their own lies: “Who is the patent system for? “I think that SMEs will litigate less, because they won’t have the necessary financial resources”…”

So even Team UPC now admits that UPC would harm SMEs. After they spent years lying about it. █

A Linux Foundation Without Linux-Using Staff

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 4:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The meat-eating ‘vegan society’

Linux Foundation is sucking the life out of Linux

Summary: The Linux Foundation is sucking the life out of Linux, for a profit…

THE Linux Foundation is not dedicated to Linux any more than its pertinent members, which are mostly proprietary giants…

In that regard, Foundation members might be absolutely fine with that. They already dominate the Board.

“Linux is a powerful brand and if this misuse of this brand continues, its value will diminish.”The seniors at the Foundation think that Linux sucks, e.g. on laptops/desktops! They only use its name (trademark) for their openwashing services…

Linux is a powerful brand and if this misuse of this brand continues, its value will diminish. Its image will wane. What does “Linux” even mean when Microsoft calls its own, Vista 10, "Linux" (or WSL).

Yesterday we learned, based on a new “tweet”, that the sole editor of a Web site called Linux.com uses Xbox and Microsoft’s Vista 10. Running a Web site called Linux.com while using Windows is like running a Web site called EcoWatch while promoting tobacco (true story by the way!).

“Yesterday we learned, based on a new “tweet”, that the sole editor of a Web site called Linux.com uses Xbox and Microsoft’s Vista 10.”The person’s name isn’t what’s important*; let’s just say that yesterday he wrote about Microsoft’s ‘gift’ to Linux (“exFAT Is Coming to Linux”). exFAT has nothing to do with or in Linux; it’s about lousy copycats with bugs, not Microsoft’s proprietary and secret implementation of it; it’s not a working implementation but some inferior ("horrible," according to Linux developers) code. Same as happened with OOXML, which Microsoft itself never bother implementing.

To the people of the Linux Foundation Linux is, at best, a ‘side dish’. So they won’t care as long as Microsoft, a big sponsor, is pleased. Microsoft is at the top of the list of the Foundation’s sponsors, as absurd as that is.

“To the people of the Linux Foundation Linux is, at best, a ‘side dish’.”Is this a problem?

It certainly is.

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish? Maybe. Not before Microsoft owns (or controls) Linux, which it tried to destroy many times (but always failed). According to this morning’s article from Phoronix about a Clear Linux survey: “By far the most used development tool was Visual Studio Code at 37.6%! That was quite surprising to see the Microsoft IDE coming out well ahead of Qt Creator at 8% and others like Intellij, Eclipse, Android Studio, GNOME Builder, and others. ”

Phoronix has a misleading headline; it cites a survey of just a couple hundred people choosing to use a lousy distro from a back doors giant; that’s what Clear Linux is (it’s not representative of GNU/Linux as a whole). So they obviously don’t care about Software Freedom. Earlier this week Linux.com actually promoted some rubbish about Visual Studio Code, together with proprietary software (SQL Server). █
___
* The name is Swapnil Bhartiya, but he doesn’t want his name mentioned. I didn’t respond to Swapnil after many abusive tweets he had sent me (maybe 8 in a row ignored by me). Now he blocks me in Twitter, where I ignore him anyway. Pathetic. Just like Jim Zemlin did. I’m not sure what Zemlin expected when he put Windows/Microsoft fans in charge of a site called Linux.com. Critics of it? BLOCKED. Just like Zemlin did. I’m also blocked by him. Not open for criticism/critics. Trying to hide from them instead.

Linux.com is run by a person who — going by his very own bio — currently works as a “science fiction writer.” Yes, lies are a form of fiction. Like openwashing proprietary software…

Like the notorious Laura DiDio with her fictional writings about houses ‘haunted’ by ‘ghosts’ (she actually meant that). She wrote fake stuff whilst attacking Linux through the Yankee Group.

At the Linux Foundation people’s past/background is mostly omitted; There’s no sign of eduction or formal training in technology. Jim Zemlin told Swapnil upfront in this public interview: “I have a very weak technical background.”

People with no grasp of technology and no suitable background (e.g. education in technology) dominate the Linux Foundation, where a tiny portion of the total budget goes to actual techies. The Linux Foundation being run by people with no background in technology isn’t an innocent ‘anomaly’. That’s like a car salesman who never drove a car and does not have a car.

Well anyway, Linux.com is a misleading domain name because it’s no longer about Linux and usually it’s not about Open Source, either. Here’s an example from yesterday. Does Swapnil know that both companies are 100% proprietary software and nothing to do with GNU/Linux (he probably doesn’t; and doesn’t care)? This morning he promoted a Windows-only laptop.

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