10.30.19
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel at 11:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Torvalds this week:
Torvalds last year:
Summary: Torvalds has never been the same since returning to Linux; he knows who the real bosses are and speculations about his displeasure may be loosely affirmed by apparent health decline
ONE year ago Mr. Linux, Linus Torvalds, was pushed out of his own project or his ‘baby’ — the same thing that happened to Stallman a month ago. They made it look or seem willful, but if one examines what happened at the Linux Foundation and the FSF, respectively, then it’s clear something was amiss. Pressure led to these outcomes, not free will. They decided to ‘recuse’ themselves. We could not help but notice that almost all comments about Torvalds articles (where he shows up) are about his appearance. We mentioned this before [1, 2]. It’s very clear that it’s not just down to a “bad picture” or Torvalds being less photogenic; there’s a glaring deterioration in health, at least judging on purely visual criteria like skin, weight, hair.
“”It’s very clear that it’s not just down to a “bad picture” or Torvalds being less photogenic; there’s a glaring deterioration in health, at least judging on purely visual criteria like skin, weight, hair.The above article, for instance, has this comment: “Either that’s an extremely unflattering photo, or it looks as though Linus may perhaps have been eating a few too many over-hearty American-sized meals recently. I genuinely didn’t recognise him there, and he suddenly looks a lot older. We do all get older, unfortunately, but to ensure that we all continue to get older as gracefully and as slowly as we can, we need to look out for ourselves and keep an eye on what we eat and make sure that we get enough exercise. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always follow that advice as well as I should myself, but it’s meant with the best of intentions hoping that he stays healthy and happy.”
There are several more comments about this — at least 3 — and some were censored by the publisher (the author is a Microsoft propagandist). It even says: “This post has been deleted by its author” (responding to the above)
“Those things tend to relate to or correlate with general happiness (motivation to exercise, eat healthy foods, go out and so on).”It was similar in LWN. 7 out of 8 comments were purely about the appearance of Torvalds. They worried he had aged very fast. Those things tend to relate to or correlate with general happiness (motivation to exercise, eat healthy foods, go out and so on).
It’s worrying. Reminiscent of what Julian Assange’s visitors have been saying about him over the years, especially the past year (he lost 15 KG since his arrest). We don’t want to come across or ‘feel’ like Paparazzi/tabloid, but the health of important project leaders should definitely interest us; if they’re in bad shape, their projects will be too. We know who stands to benefit from that. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Humour, Microsoft at 10:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
They won’t pursue the desktop/laptop
Summary: When Microsoft sponsors the opposition/competition it also controls the opposition/competition
“You’re going out with a girl, what you really want to do is have a deep, close and intimate relationship, at least for one night. And, you know, you just can’t let her feel like that, because if you do, it ain’t going to happen, right. So you have to talk long term and white picket fence and all these other wonderful things, or else you’re never going to get what you’re really looking for.”
–James Plamondon, Lead Microsoft Evangelist
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Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 10:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
This is actually the site’s front page right now
Summary: Microsoft has found a new outlet through which to spread its lies; it’s known as Linux.com
THE Linux Foundation-run Linux.com (Linux dot com) is a joke site. The top two stories there — that’s 2 out of 2 right now (top of page; all of them!) — are proprietary software of Microsoft. It’s almost as though Linux dot com is a Microsoft site. Vendor capture? This is not the first time this is happening and it won’t be the last. It’s not a coincidence. And consider what’s being promoted there: lies! Pure, deliberate lies.
“And consider what’s being promoted there: lies!”A reader sent us this new article entitled “Spain and GitHub Are Blocking an App That Helped Protesters Organize” — a topic that wrote about it yesterday.
Looking closer at who’s constructing the lies and the spin, it’s the Foundation which calls itself “Linux”; do we wish to associate Linux with oppression?
Linux dot com has not only advertised Microsoft GitHub (which is proprietary software) using an incredible lie and link to a tabloid sponsored by Microsoft. It also insulted millions of Catalans.
“It also insulted millions of Catalans.”Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has sadly become a megaphone of Microsoft; he also defamed Richard Stallman. These people are in Microsoft’s pocket. It controls the supposed ‘opposition’ sites now. Microsoft propaganda replacing actual facts and nobody seems to mind as long as Microsoft pays the ‘right’ people? See what Swapnil posted only hours ago in his personal site (which habitually pushes Microsoft stuff/fluff).
The Register has meanwhile just highlighted how Microsoft does political censorship in GitHub (for the man in the White House usually). What have they turned Git repositories into? They’re actively excluding people from many nations, but a site called Linux dot com tells us the very opposite. It’s a megaphone of Microsoft employees. “Many of the critical posts on GitHub appear to be from supporters of the government in China,” The Register wrote, “and there are also many other accounts chiming in with political opinions of one sort or another.”
“Not too shockingly, albeit somewhat belatedly, Google News delisted the site a few months back.”So?
Anyway, as my wife put it, it’s better to just shut down Linux dot com altogether (than to run it like this). She had read it for more than half a decade, every day, until it was hijacked by Microsoft propagandists. Not too shockingly, albeit somewhat belatedly, Google News delisted the site a few months back. █
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Posted in America, Deception, Europe, Patents at 12:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Abstract patents being justified in the most laughable ways by clueless individuals technically unfit for the job (which they got owing to nepotism/connections)
Summary: EPOPIC, this year’s ‘patent circus’ of Romania, featured two actors who pretended to know what they’re talking about, instead delivering a mime show with more buzzwords than substance
THE tradition of buzzwords and other nonsense is not new. It has gone on at the European Patent Office (EPO) for at least a decade. We used to joke about “as such” before Battistelli became President and nowadays we mock António Campinos for all sorts of ridiculous mumbo-jumbo (remember he’s not a technical person!). Our favourite nowadays is “hey hi” (AI) and blockchains — typically masks for software patents being granted in Europe although they’re legally invalid* — all in the name of pseudo-’novelty’ (novelty in buzzwords and hype waves for the most part; great marketing!). We wrote about that as recently as the past weekend (so-called 'machine learning' as something not being reducible to maths/stats?).
“Experienced patent examiners certainly know that those aren’t properties and they’re not rights; neither technically nor legally.”Anyway, when dealing with the EPO in the management sense — especially nowadays — remember you deal with people who got the job because of people they knew rather than what they knew. This is embarrassing for Europe and embarrassing for the whole discipline. As recently as yesterday the patent trolls’ front groups (LES/LESI) were boosted by some account and then retweeted by EPO. Here’s what they said: “The High-Growth Technology Business Conference revolves around the importance of engaging Intellectual Property in your business. on the 5th November we are conducting IP and business track workshops…”
“Intellectual Property…”
“IP…”
All that nonsense. Experienced patent examiners certainly know that those aren’t properties and they’re not rights; neither technically nor legally. But these are the propagandists the EPO nowadays associates with, framing patents as “IP”. Honesty is no more. It’s like copyright giants calling people who share “pirates” (equating the act of sharing with murder).
“It’s like copyright giants calling people who share “pirates” (equating the act of sharing with murder).”Yesterday the EPO boosted U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu with his ‘novel’ buzzwords for invalid software patents. In his own words, as per EPO: “Andrei Iancu, Director @USPTO: “AI, Self-driving vehicles, biotech, personalised medicine, 5G communications. There will be technologies we cannot even imagine yet. Our IP system must be robust and flexible enough to accommodate and enable these technologies.”
So what have we got here?
“IP…”
“AI…”
All that usual nonsense.
Then came “the next Industrial Revolution”, as per this tweet: “Next on the #EPOPIC stage: Andrei Iancu, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property & Director of the @USPTO will talk about #IntellectualProperty and the next Industrial Revolution…”
“They share the same nonsensical buzzwords, as we’ve been pointing out for a number of months.”Say what?
“Intellectual Property?”
“Industrial Revolution?”
Then came Campinos with “IP and the next Industrial Revolution”. In the EPO’s own words: “EPO President António Campinos: “I’m delighted that today Andrei Iancu is here, as Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property & Director of the @USPTO, to talk about the subject of ‘IP and the next Industrial Revolution’.””
Notice the pattern. They share the same nonsensical buzzwords, as we’ve been pointing out for a number of months. Can anyone keep a straight face in this freak show? The EPO also used the hashtags #4IR #3Dprinting and #blockchain in here. To quote: “The EPO develops Patent Insight Reports in order to show the value of #patent information, but also to analyse future & emerging technologies #EPOPIC #4IR #3Dprinting #blockchain”
“Got to have “smart” there too. We’re losing count of all these ridiculous acronyms/fluff (there’s also “IoT”, “cloud”, “app” and “ICT”).”They also spoke of: “enable technologies like #blockchain, #smarthome technologies…”
Got to have “smart” there too. We’re losing count of all these ridiculous acronyms/fluff (there’s also “IoT”, “cloud”, “app” and “ICT”).
What ever happened to “CII”? Oh, look, as recently as yesterday Watchtroll‘s editor Eileen McDermott used the lie that is “CII”. In her summary she spoke of “Federal Circuit holding that computer-implemented inventions that do not improve the basic functions of the computer…” (no link because we never link to Watchtroll anymore)
“Campinos has the audacity to speak of transparency? Because wrongly-granted patents can be opposed for a fee (for a limited timespan and no assurance of positive outcome)?”That “CII” nonsense has spread to the US, as did the “AI” hype. Campinos on “hey hi” in yesterday’s tweets: “AI is impacting on the whole IP system, and even forcing us to question foundational concepts, such as the notion of ‘inventorship’, says the EPO President.”
So if a computer can process an application or generate one, then you cannot do your work anymore? That capability has been around for like half a century! Why does this ‘panic’ become so ‘trendy’ all of a sudden? Oh my god! Computer algorithms… can do stuff!
“Anyone can oppose a European patent within a period of nine months,” the EPO wrote, “from the mention of its grant. This kind of transparency can only help achieve converging views on quality & make our #patent system stronger, says EPO President António Campinos.”
Campinos has the audacity to speak of transparency? Because wrongly-granted patents can be opposed for a fee (for a limited timespan and no assurance of positive outcome)?
This has nothing to do with transparency; just like “quality” at the EPO no longer means quality, instead it means speed (pendency).
Going back to Iancu, in the EPO’s own words: “Andrei Iancu Director @USPTO: “ Our IP system creates a pro-competitive cycle. IP creates perceptual innovation at accelerating rates.”
“This has nothing to do with transparency; just like “quality” at the EPO no longer means quality, instead it means speed (pendency).”So says a man from the patent litigation industry, who got his job after he had worked for Donald Trump (nepotism likely). There’s also this: “Society does not know progress without a robust patent system, says Andrei Iancu Director…”
So no progress before patents existed? Incredible statement! █
______
* There’s this new example of software patents being rejected in Europe and another new one in the US: (35 U.S.C. § 101 in Simio v Flexsim; more new examples are, as usual, in our Daily Links)
This summer, the District of Utah dismissed Simio’s lawsuit against Flexsim Software, finding that the asserted patent was not patent eligible under Section 101. Simio responded by asking the court to vacate its judgment or, alternatively, allow Simio leave to file an amended complaint based on the Federal Circuit’s Cellspin v. Fitbit decision. Simio argued that new factual allegations in its proposed amended complaint ought to prevent the court from dismissing the case. The court disagreed with Simio.
The court first noted that while it could allow Simio to amend its complaint, an amendment could not “transform the deficient patent claim from one drawn to an ineligible software system to one directed toward an eligible machine.”
The court then addressed Simio’s argument that, pursuant to the Federal Circuit’s recent Cellspin decision, factual allegations in the amended complaint preclude dismissal at the pleading stage. The court again disagreed. “The Federal Circuit made clear that its decision should not be interpreted to mean that any allegation about inventiveness, wholly divorced from the claims or the specification, defeats a motion to dismiss automatically … Simio’s allegations of inventiveness are simply not plausible.”
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Cloud-native technologies like containers and microservices have made infrastructure infinitely more complex. Service meshes are there to help.
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IBM
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We are proud to announce that users of RHEL 7.7 can now use Podman 1.4.4 to find, run, build and share containers as regular users (also called rootless). This builds on the work we did in RHEL 7.6 (A preview of running containers without root in RHEL 7.6).
The new rootless feature can be tested with a fresh installation of RHEL 7.7 or by upgrading from RHEL 7.6. When doing a fresh install, just add a new user ID and the new version of the shadow-utils package will take care of everything (/etc/subuid and /etc/subgid entries). With an upgrade from RHEL 7.6, you will need to add the UID/GID mappings for existing users. For more detailed information, follow the Managing Containers guide in the RHEL 7 documentation.
The tech preview of rootless containers offers only the the VFS driver (no fuse-overlay support). This has the trade-off of better runtime performance at the expense of using more disk space. The VFS driver does not use copy-on-write, so when the container is started it will copy all of the data from lower layers of the container image.
The runtime performance is improved because there is no copy-on-write cost, though it will result in slower start up and can consume quite a bit more disk space. We are currently working on backporting the fuse-overlay capabilities to the 3.10 kernel with an eye towards full fuse-overlay support during the RHEL 7 life cycle.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Fedora 31 strikes the right balance, we get the latest on the Librem 5 situation, and an easy graphics boost for laptops.
Plus the best way to share your terminal yet, and more.
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In our Innards section, we talk about what makes Linux Mint so Minty.
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Do you do data science? Imagine you work with over 200 data scientists. Many of whom have diverse backgrounds or have come from non-CS backgrounds. Some of them want to use Python. Others are keen to work with R.
Your job is to level the playing field across these experts through technical education and build libraries and tooling that are useful both in Python and R.
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Kernel Space
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Intel’s IWD wireless daemon for Linux systems that could potentially replace WPA_Supplicant has reached the big 1.0 milestone.
Intel’s Marcel Holtmann presented on IWD at this week’s Open-Source Summit Europe and declared IWD as 1.0 with it now having stable D-Bus interfaces. IWD 1.0 also adds network configuration documentation.
Besides declaring the D-Bus interfaces stable and more documentation, there aren’t any other big changes with this 1.0 release over the earlier 0.xx releases.
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Linux inventor (and chief maintainer) Linus Torvalds says that the kernel is getting more reliable, and he is not anxious about it being used in safety-critical systems.
Torvalds, being interviewed on stage at the Open Source Summit in Lyon yesterday, told onlookers: “I don’t do speeches any more.”
The Finnish-American engineer is responsible for creating two of the most significant software projects of the last 30 years, one being Linux (which dominates both server computing and, in the form of Android, mobile devices), and the other being git, the most popular source code management and collaboration tool. Asking the questions was Dirk Hohndel, chief open source officer at VMware.
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Graphics Stack
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In addition to Mir’s other road-map items around replaceable renderers and hybrid graphics driver support, it also turns out the Canonical developers involved are working on expanding the graphics platform support.
Longtime Mir developer Alan Griffiths of Canonical wrote a post on Tuesday about the graphics platform support. To date Mir has released support for the KMS/Mesa drivers, Mir-on-X11 as a development target, eglstream-kms platform coverage for NVIDIA’s proprietary driver, and an Android target with libhybris going back to the original Ubuntu Touch / Mir days.
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The open-source MoltenVK is out with another new update based against the Vulkan 1.1.126 specification and allowing the Vulkan API to be used on Apple’s macOS and iOS by mapping those calls to the underlying Metal graphics drivers.
Tuesday’s MoltenVK update brings support for VK_EXT_swapchain_colorspace / VK_EXT_hdr_metadata, support for Metal 3.0 driver capabilities, native texture swizzling support, support for compressed 3D images on macOS, additional color-space options support, Xcode 11.1 toolchain support, reduced memory usage in some scenarios along with memory leak fixes, and a variety of other Vulkan bits were tweaked or added for this Apple portability layer.
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Benchmarks
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Today the Intel Core i9 9900KS is shipping at $513 USD for this specially-binned Coffeelake CPU that is capable of achieving a 5.0GHz all-core turbo frequency. The all-core 5.0GHz turbo is great, but it remains an eight-core / sixteen-thread 14nm processor going up against AMD’s similarly priced Ryzen 9 3900X. Here are our initial benchmarks of the Core i9 9900KS compared to the Core i9 9900K and Ryzen 9 3900X.
The Intel Core i9 9900KS 8c/16t CPU features a 4.0GHz base frequency with 5.0GHz turbo frequency that can be sustained across all cores. The Core i9 9900KS does carry a 127 Watt TDP compared to 95 Watts with the i9-9900K, which has a lower base frequency of 3.6GHz and its 5.0GHz turbo rating is only for a single core. The price of the i9-9900KS is launching at $513 USD while the i9-9900K is now priced at around $449. The rest of the specifications align between the year-old Core i9 9900K and the new Core i9 9900KS.
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Applications
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Diagrams are a great means for us to connect with information and process its significance; they help in communicating relationships and abstract information and enable us to visualize concepts.
The flowchart and diagramming tools are used for everything from basic workflow diagrams to complex network diagrams, organization charts, BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation), UML diagrams and much more.
Are you looking for free and open-source flowchart and diagramming software to create different kinds of diagrams, flowcharts, illustrations, maps, web graphics and more, on a Linux desktop? This article reviews 10 best flowcharts and diagramming software for Linux.
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Proprietary
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SUSE®, a Gold-level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and that Oracle has become a member of the SUSE Partner Program for Cloud Service Providers.
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“SUSE’s collaboration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure allows us to meet growing customer demand for the agility and cost benefits of cloud-based business-critical applications,” said Naji Almahmoud, SUSE vice president of Global Alliances. “SUSE partners with leading public cloud providers because we are committed to giving customers the tools they need to succeed as they deal with increasing pressure to become more agile and economically efficient to grow, compete and survive. Innovating with partners and communities, SUSE delivers and supports enterprise-grade Linux and other solutions that enable customers to create, deploy and manage workloads anywhere – on premises, hybrid and multi-cloud – with exceptional service, value and flexibility.”
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Messages left by the [attackers] on compromised computers claimed all servers and data were “hacked.” They also claimed to have dozens of backdoors that gave them control over everything in the city. “We can shut off everything with a button,” the [attackers] said.
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The hearing, the highest-profile congressional scrutiny of commercial aviation safety in years, heaps pressure on a newly rejiggered Boeing senior management team fighting to repair trust with airline customers and passengers shaken by an eight-month safety ban on its 737 MAX following the crashes, which killed 346 people.
“You have told me half-truths over and over again,” Senator Tammy Duckworth told Muilenburg, questioning why the manufacturer did not disclose more details about MCAS’s lack of safeguards. “You have not told us the whole truth and these families are suffering because of it.”
Duckworth said the pilots did not know enough about MCAS.
“You set those pilots up for failure.”
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Valve released a new update to the Steam Beta today that should fix the issues with Remote Play Together not working correctly on Linux.
Fantastic news, since it’s going to be an incredible useful addition to Steam. Allowing you to play games that only feature local multiplayer, with the host being the only one who needs to own the game. There’s so many amazing games that don’t have online play, so having this feature in the Steam client really does make it easy.
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Managing your Logitech Wheel on Linux doesn’t have to be a hassle, especially with applications like pyLinuxWheel.
A project covered here in GamingOnLinux a few months ago, earlier this month it had a big new release. Version 0.5.1 adds in support for Driving Force (EX, RX), G920, Logitech Racing Wheel USB, WingMan Formula (Yellow, GP, Force GP) and MOMO (Force, Racing) steering wheels so now it covers quite a lot.
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Incoming! The amusing multiplayer Golf game Golf With Your Friends has been invaded by Worms with a Team17 team-up.
This Worms themed update brings in a big new 18 hole course with Worms inspired scenery. New mechanics were added in too including a Jet Pack allowing you to stay in the air a bit longer, along with some amusing new obstacles like Mines, Super Sheep and more to spice up your next Golf session.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Announced this week, the KDE community has come together to map outs its development plans for the next few years.
The direction is neatly distilled on the KDE Goals mini-site, which provides a top-level overview on the areas of focus that those working on this free software project (and associated projects within its orbit) will keep in mind.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The Gnome Project was recently sued by a company called Rothschild Patent Imaging for a patent related to the Shotwell photo manager. The Gnome community has just announced that it is counter-suing Rothschild, which they refer to as a patent troll.
Keith Bergelt, OIN’s CEO, said in his keynote at Open Source Summit, Europe, “Rothschild is a bad company. This is an entity that’s antithetical to the goals of innovation. It will sue foundations. It will sue not for profits. It will sue individuals. It will sue corporations. Their playbook is to establish a pattern of wins through relatively modest settlements,” which can get other businesses to pay up without a fight.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Snapshot 20191027, brought an update to KDE Plasma 5.17.1. The bugfix update fixed the Mouse KCM acceleration profile on X11 on the Plasma Desktop and had a fix for KWIN with visibility of the Context Help button. Part of the update to Plasma 5.17.1 came in the 20191022 snapshot on the day of the release from the KDE Project. The kcalendarcore package was update to KDE Frameworks 5.63.0, which landed in last week’s snapshots. Quite a few YaST packages arrived in the snapshot as well; some of the those YaST packages adapted to new Keyboard handling. The other two packages updated in the snapshot were to the AV1 decoder dav1d 0.5.1, which fixed a build issue in ARM64 assembly if debug info was enabled, and desktop calculator, qalculate 3.5.0, which had a fix for steradian conversion that is related to the surface area of a sphere. The Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer is being fixed and doesn’t have a rating for the snapshot.
Seven packages arrived in the 20191025 snapshot and the openssh 8.1 was a major upgrade. The new major version added some new features like an experimental lightweight signature and verification ability. According to the changelog, “signatures may be made using regular ssh keys held on disk or stored in a ssh-agent and verified against an authorized_keys-like list of allowed keys. Signatures embed a namespace that prevents confusion and attacks between different usage domains (e.g. files vs email).” The VirtualBox hypervisor for x86 virtualization had a minor update to version 6.0.14; the maintenance release fixed potential issue in the networking with interrupt signalling for network adapters in UEFI guests. The Network Time Protocol package chrony 3.5 added support for hardware timestamping on interfaces with read-only timestamping configuration and Persistent Memory programming package pmdk 1.7 introduced two new Application Program Interface (APIs) in librpmem and libpmemobj.
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Fedora Family
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Fedora 31 Workstation has been released on October 30, 2019. The new version of the popular Linux distribution comes with the desktop environment GNOME 3.34 and several other improvements and changes.
New users may download the ISO image from the official Get Fedora website or, if they use Windows or Mac OS devices, use the Fedora Media Writer tool instead to download the Linux distribution. Fedora Linux can be run as a Live distribution, ideal for getting a feel for the operating system.
Upgrade instructions to upgrade existing installations to Fedora 31 are provided on the project website as well.
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Well it seems like Fedora 31 has been release, I’m feeling the need for an upgrade.
I think i’ll just download the ISO from here – https://getfedora.org/ but I know I can upgrade from the command line, so if you don’t know how to do it, try this [please note i've not tried it so if it hoses your system, erm sorry], it also might cause issues if you have any third party repos enabled on your system, but give it a try any way.
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The latest version of Fedora comes with new packages and libraries.
Red Hat sponsored Fedora community has announced the release of Fedora 31, the latest version of Red Hat’s community distribution.
Fedora now comes in many different editions – each targeting a different workload. Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server are aimed at developers using Fedora for development and then testing their apps on server. Other editions include Fedora CoreOS, Fedora IoT and Fedora Silverblue.
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This is a big deal of Fedora Workstation users, with the latest and greatest GNOME update 3.34, you will find some visual changes and performance improvements.
It is easier to change the background or lock screen wallpaper with GNOME 3.34, the options are user-friendly and useful.
In addition to this, you can also create application folders in the overview to organize your app drawer.
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Debian Family
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It seems I’ve been on a bit of a vintage computing kick lately. After connecting an original DEC vt420 to Linux and resurrecting some old operating systems, I dove into UUCP.
In fact, it so happened that earlier in the week, my used copy of Managing UUCP & Usenet by none other than Tim O’Reilly arrived. I was reading about the challenges of networking in the 70s: half-duplex lines, slow transmission rates, and modems that had separate dialers. And then I stumbled upon long-distance radio. It turns out that a lot of modern long-distance radio has much in common with the challenges of communication in the 1970s – 1990s, and some of our old protocols might be particularly well-suited for it. Let me explain — I’ll start with the old software, and then talk about the really cool stuff going on in hardware (some radios that can send a signal for 10-20km or more with very little power!), and finally discuss how to bring it all together.
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Oh! Boy. Finally been able to get something set up almost to my liking. After moving away from Drupal to Hugo, getting the commenting system in place was challenging. There were many solutions but I was adamant to what I wanted.
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I’m absolutely convinced we’ve reached a point where in order to respect the people trying to get work done, we need to figure out where we are as a project. We can either decide that this is work we want to facilitate, or work that we as a project decide is not important. If we choose to facilitate the work, then I can help. I can work with teams to help them get the resources they need to respond to concerns. The policy editors will likely be able to break some of their deadlocks. We’ll never force people to engage in work they don’t want to do. But those of us in leadership positions will benefit from understanding where the project wants to go.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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I’ve been using Ubuntu as my workstation OS for several months now. Ubuntu Server with the i3 window manager to be specific. I love it, and I’ve had to change my workflow a lot to make it work for me. But now that I’ve made the switch to it from Mac and Windows, I’m very happy with it.
I’ll be honest, there’s not a ton of hard evidence that working on a Linux distro is objectively better than working on Windows or Mac. I have almost equal amounts of time spent working on each of these platforms, and I think each one excels at something different. With that in mind, I think Ubuntu just feels right for the priorities I have now.
So what have I gained, what have I lost, and what did I learn along the way?
My physical computer now feels entirely replaceable.>
There’s pretty much nothing on this laptop I’m typing on right now that I wouldn’t be able to recover if it suddenly stopped working. This document hasn’t been pushed to git yet, and the contents of my ~/Downloads/ folder would be gone. That’s it. Everything else lives somewhere online where I can easily get it back from.
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I make no bones about being a big fan of System76. Not only do they walk the open source walk, but their in-house hardware (the Thelio) might well be the single best desktop computer I have ever owned, and their laptops are high on the list. That hardware is made even more impressive with Pop!_OS running on top.
For those that aren’t in the know, Pop!_OS is System76′s in-house take on Linux. Built on a foundation of Ubuntu, the operating system includes a few tweaks, geared specifically toward System76 hardware. Those tweaks make Pop!_OS truly sing on the Thelio (it runs fine on non-System76 hardware as well).
Recently, in accordance with Ubuntu 19.10, System76 released the latest iteration of Pop!_OS, and I’m here to tell you that this release is truly a wonder…. One that makes me wonder.
Let me explain.
First I want to discuss what makes this new release so good.
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In Ubuntu’s development process new package versions don’t immediately get released, but they enter the -proposed pocket first, where they are built and tested. In addition to testing the package itself other packages are also tested together with the updated package, to make sure the update doesn’t break the other packages either.
The packages in the -proposed pocket are listed on the update excuses page with their testing status. When a package is successfully built and all triggered tests passed the package can migrate to the release pocket, but when the builds or tests fail, the package is blocked from migration to preserve the quality of the release.
Sometimes packages are stuck in -proposed for a longer period because the build or test failures can’t be solved quickly. In the past several people may have triaged the same problem without being able to easily share their observations, but from now on if you figured out something about what broke, please open a bug against the stuck package with your findings and mark the package with the update-excuse tag. The bug will be linked to from the update excuses page so the next person picking up the problem can continue from there. You can even leave a patch in the bug so a developer with upload rights can find it easily and upload it right away.
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Devices/Embedded
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This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.
For this week, I’ve been surveying the music player scene from an RPI4 respective. I’ve published reviews for more than 20 open source music players. There’s at least half a dozen other open source music players that are under active development that I’ve not yet covered.
How many music players I’ve looked at provide a .deb compiled for the Raspberry? A solitary program (musikcube). And I have a lot of sympathy with open source developers in this regard. They cannot possibly be expected to provide packages for Linux distributions given the sheer number available, although many do provide packages for the most popular. And the RPI4 doesn’t even run the x86 instruction set. The responsibility for packages squarely rests with a distribution.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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For those interested in running Android on x86 Intel/AMD hardware, the Android-x86 project is still churning along but while Google is onto Android 10, this project is still tracking Android 8 Oreo.
Android-x86 8.1-r3 is the new release out today. Their third release based on Android 8.1 is focused on offering up the latest security updates as well as some bug fixes compared to the previous release.
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Notably, in some industries like IT or the Free & Open-Source software sub-industry, we have done a pretty good job at externalizing (for better or for worse) the software developers and designers’ todo list as “bug/issue trackers”, and their assignments may often be linear and fairly predictable, allowing them to be “goldsmiths”.
[...]
If you’re a chaos warrior, or you fit any of the goldsmith’s “exceptions” (or if you’re interested in the field of personal productivity in general), you’ll probably be interested in reading my next article (coming up this Friday!) on (re)building the best free & open-source “GTD” application out there (but before that, if you haven’t read it already, check out my previous article on “getting things done”).
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Events
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The foss-north event due a few days ago got cancelled due to health issues, but I’m happy to announce that I’m back and that the planning for foss-north 2020 already is on.
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Web Browsers
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Chromium
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Google has introduced a new update for the Chrome internet browser for Home windows, macOS and Linux. The Chrome 78 update is now Stay and is available for download. The update will offer you customers personalize choices for the New Tab site, amongst other modifications and additions. The update will come with quite a few characteristics and improvements as properly.
With the support of customize selection, consumers can now find images from their media gallery and use is as qualifications. On opening an new tab, consumers will be equipped to spot the cutomise selection on the base-correct corner. Moreover, ‘Shortcuts’ are a set of icons, which are noticeable right beneath the research bar. These include things like the ‘My Shortcuts’ where shortcuts tips are provided to users on the basis of the internet sites they keep on checking out. ‘Most visited sites’, where shortcuts are segregated by the person and ‘Hide shortcuts’.
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Mozilla
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A few days after the release of the Firefox 70 web browser, Mozilla kicked off the development of the next major version, Firefox 71, which is currently in the beta testing phase.
While Firefox 71 doesn’t look like a big update, it brings a couple of interesting new features, such as a new kiosk mode that allow you to open the web browser directly in full-screen mode without any other distractions. This is mostly useful for companies who want to use on their kiosks, and can be enabled via the –kiosk command-line parameter.
Another interesting feature that will land as part of the upcoming Firefox 71 web browser is Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode on Windows systems, which lets users pop a video out of its webpage into a floating window that can be resized and placed on top of all windows and in any part of your desktop.
On top of that, Firefox 71 promises a redesigned about:config internal configuration page, a new, easier to use Certificate Viewer that brings more features and more detailed information, and a new server-timing information in DevTools’ Network panel to allow web developers to analyze server-related timings in the context of other request and response details.
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Linux Foundation
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We’re only two years off the 30th anniversary of the Linux kernel, which gave the open source software movement a turbo boost. At the annual Open Source Summit Europe run by the Linux Foundation this week in Lyon, France, Data Economy attended to find out how open source will address the evolving needs of cloud, edge and IoT connectivity.
The first time this writer saw Linux creator Linus Torvalds give a presentation about open source it was at an Informix database conference in Seattle in 1998, and the big news from that event was that Informix had introduced an open source version of its database. Not that long after the event IBM acquired Informix to confirm its own interest in supporting the open source development community, as well as making money out of it.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) a global programme focused on bringing more student developers into free and open source software development. We ran six projects – and all were finished successfully. Both students and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 6.4 in early February!
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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While the world is awash in tens of millions of developers, virtually none of them regularly contribute to open source. Yes, most developers (68%) believe open source code is of higher quality than proprietary code (according to a TideLift survey) and, yes, virtually all developers (and their employers) end up using open source (according to a survey by The New Stack). Even so, according to the 2019 Stack Overflow survey, which polled over 85,000 developers, just 12.4% of the developers surveyed contribute to open source at least monthly; while another 23.1% contribute less than monthly but more than once each year, a whopping 64.4% either never contribute or do so less than once per year.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GIMP 2.10.14 comes with a new Show All view mode that allows showing pixels outside the canvas boundary. You can mark the canvas boundary with a new Show Canvas Boundary option that renders a dotted line around it. There’s also a new Keep Padding option in the new Show All view mode, to preserve the padding color instead of displaying the checkerboard.
Also, several features were updated to work with this new Show All mode, including color-picking, canvas grid, transform tools, bucket fill, and more.
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Programming/Development
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Deprecated for the upcoming GCC 10 compiler release and set for removal in GCC 11 one year later is the CC0 representation code that is being used for handle condition codes in GCC back-ends. That in turn means a number of older CPU targets will be removed in GCC 11 should they not receive some development attention to transition them to the modern MODE_CC representation.
Announced at the end of September (but flying under our radar until now) is the cc0 representation is deprecated with GCC 10 and then set for removal in GCC 11. The GCC 11 removal includes targets still using cc0 representation like avr (AVR micro-controller), cris (the Axis Communications’ ETRAX CRIS embedded processors), h8300 (the Renesas H8 microcontrollers), m68k (the Motorola 68000 series), vax (DEC VAX), and cr16 (National Semi CompactRISC).
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Graphical user interface (GUI) test automation is broken. Regression testing is not testing; it’s version control for a software’s behavior. Here’s my assertion: test automation without assertions works better!
In software development and test automation, an assertion is a means to check the result of a calculation, typically by comparing it to a singular expected value. While this is very well suited for unit-based test automation (i.e. testing the system from within), applying it to testing an interface (specifically the user interface) has proven to be problematic, as this post will explain.
The number of tools that work according to the golden master approach to testing, characterization testing, and approval testing—such as Approval Tests, Jest, or recheck-web (retest)—is constantly increasing. This approach promises more robust tests with less effort (for both creation and maintenance) while testing more thoroughly.
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While many fled from GitHub to GitLab following Microsoft acquiring the code hosting service, GitLab has come under a bit of fire of its own with plans they had been working on around telemetry support that would begin tracking its users and potentially sharing the data with third-party firms.
After announcing planned changes to their terms of service, following customer outrage they quickly stepped down on those plans. Below is an email GitLab sent out to their customers that was also then shared with Phoronix.
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The table below shows my favorite go-to R packages for data import, wrangling, visualization and analysis — plus a few miscellaneous tasks tossed in. The package names in the table are clickable if you want more information. To find out more about a package once you’ve installed it, type help(package = “packagename”) in your R console (of course substituting the actual package name ).
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I just released version 12.9.6 of Site.js with live reload support for static pages.
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Standards/Consortia
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Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year. In Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content. Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files. Most users and websites won’t see any impact from this change.
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Minus indexing, searches for Flash content will come up empty. If Google doesn’t index it, in other words, does it exist? For the vast majority on the web – analytics vendor Net Applications said Google accounted for 75% of global search activity last month – that would be a no.
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Students and faculty members gathered in the auditorium at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) recently to hear a panel discussion about “public art.” They were joined by citizens concerned about the controversial murals at George Washington High School, which were painted in the 1930s, by WPA artist and Communist Party member Victor Arnautoff who was born in Russia and who died in the Soviet Union. Before the panel began, Robin Ballinger, one of the organizers for the event, and a faculty member at SFAI, expressed the hope that the panel might get beyond theArnautoff murals and the controversies they have sparked. That was understandable. Articles about the murals have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere. In cafes and restaurants and on the streets of San Francisco, the murals are a topic of conversation. They have been for months.
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In my last couple years of university teaching before retiring, I repeated two catch phrases as often as possible—“reasonable people can disagree” and “if two things are both true, then both are relevant.”
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Health/Nutrition
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Promoters of genetic modification (GM) in agriculture have long argued that genetically engineered Golden Rice is a practical way to provide poor farmers in remote areas with a subsistence crop capable of adding much-needed vitamin A to local diets. Vitamin A deficiency is a problem in many poor countries in the Global South and leaves millions at high risk for infection, diseases and other maladies, such as blindness.
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A research study on a commercial computer program used to allocate health care resources on predicted future health care costs provided a window on the ongoing pervasive impact of structural racism in our nation’s health care system.Moreover, the research published in Science magazine reinforced how structural racism persists throughout society, including disparities in
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Security (Confidentiality/Integrity/Availabilitiy)
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We first wrote about the Landlock Linux security module in 2016 with its aspirations for offering powerful security sandboxing abilities. Landlock has seen revisions every few months and this week marks the 11th time the patches have been volleyed for this interesting sandboxing Linux Security Module (LSM).
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (imapfilter, libvncserver, and pam-python), Fedora (tcpdump), Mageia (file, graphviz, kernel, and php, pcre2), openSUSE (nfs-utils), Red Hat (heketi and samba), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), SUSE (libtomcrypt, php7, and runc), and Ubuntu (apport, libarchive, libidn2, samba, and whoopsie).
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Defence/Aggression
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“We have a right to say to the Israeli government that the United States of America and our taxpayers and our people believe in human rights, we believe in democracy, we will not accept authoritarianism or racism.”
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Russia’s Education Ministry has released methodological guidelines for schoolteachers to use on November 10, the 100th anniversary of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s birth. The guidelines call for a nationwide lesson on the inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle, arguing that such a class will foster patriotism, help schoolchildren form a Russian identity, allow them to understand the value of defending their fatherland, and facilitate interest in military service down the line.
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When US president Donald Trump announced his plan to relocate a few dozen US soldiers in Syria — getting them out of the way of a pending Turkish invasion — the Washington establishment exploded in rage at what it mis-characterized as a US “withdrawal” from Syria.
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Vladimir Vasilyev is suspected of causing a car crash in Yekaterinburg that killed two other people. According to Kommersant, sources familiar with the results of subsequent biological testing said Vasilyev turned in his father’s urine instead of his own for a test to determine whether the young man had consumed alcohol before the crash. Vasilyev’s father, identified by Znak.com as Russian National Guard Colonel Andrei Vasilyev, was reportedly with his son in the hospital at the time the urine sample was collected.
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It is a pity that some groups and individuals are urging palm oil importers in India to refrain from buying the commodity from Malaysia. The Solvent Extractors Association of India, India’s top vegetable oil trade body is one such outfit. Apparently, this boycott is a sort of “punishment” for Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s remarks on Kashmir at the United Nations General Assembly on 27th September 2019.
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Donald Trump’s use of the term “lynching” to describe the ongoing impeachment inquiry in the House naturally sparked bipartisan outrage.The president and his shameless apologist, South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, defended the use of the word, with Graham calling the investigation a “lynching in every sense.”
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“I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen,” Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman plans to tell House committees Tuesday
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Think back to the last time you cried at work. Did the tears come after your boss sent you a curt email? Or when you accidentally cc’d (instead of bcc’d) everyone? Maybe you just had a really, really long day and that one last little misstep pushed you over the edge.
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The draft of testimony from U.S. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, made public on Monday night is significant for a number of reasons.
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‘Normalization’ is a term that we have come to associate with domestic violence: the victim begins to think of abuse as a part of everyday life. Explosions have become so normalized in Sweden that SVT, Sweden’s equivalent of the BBC, did not even mention the three explosions in the country’s capital on its national news program that evening. Instead, the main domestic story was the purported censorship of ‘big female bodies’ on Instagram. Apparently, we mustn’t be referred to as ‘women’ any more, but ‘female bodies’, lest anyone’s gender be assumed. The explosions were left to the local news.
To understand how Sweden arrived at this degree of normalization, consider the statistics: between January and June this year, more than 100 explosions were reported in the country, up from about 70 in the same period last year. A total of more than 160 suspected attacks with explosives were reported last year. There are no comparable figures available for earlier years because it’s such a recent phenomenon. Until recently no one would have thought of adding a column on bombings to the national Swedish crime statistics.
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“This is huge: NC is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country.”
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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That’s when the red tape started. I expected questions to be raised by the Pentagon, and I was prepared to answer them. I also knew I’d need to submit my manuscript for a security review, a step necessary to preserve our nation’s security lest any classified information be inadvertently published. Despite working with some excellent professionals in the office that reviews books, I didn’t fully prepare myself for the backlash I experienced from other quarters.
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Environment
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Wildfires in California this weekend forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate and left millions more without power. Flames engulfed the Carquinez Bridge near San Francisco as drivers tried to escape across it on Sunday; another fire broke out yesterday morning, spreading rapidly across hundreds of acres in Western Los Angeles, prompting urgent evacuation orders. This is what climate change looks like. If we don’t act fast, scenes like these will grow far more common.
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Fires are a fact of life in California, but the state’s fire season has grown wilder and more destructive as the planet warms, and these fires give us a taste of what climate change will mean in human terms. Longer droughts and more unpredictable winds turn what would once have been manageable fires into region-wide catastrophes. We’re only one year removed from the largest fire in California history, and few think that record will hold much longer. The slow-moving nature of the climate crisis means that, under even the best scenarios, these fires will keep growing for the next 40 years. The longer we keep going this way, the more powerful they’ll get.
If a foreign country had caused something like this, we would be mobilizing for war. [...]
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So, climate change, per usual? Only sort of. The wind pattern is typical of this time of year, and indeed wildfire has been part of the western landscape since before people lived there. Certainly, lots of the things that make wildfires worse are consequences of climate change—hotter, drier summers, for example. Some of them are consequences of bad planning—a reluctance to build housing in cities that pushes new development to the wildland urban interface where most wildfires start, and failures to protect electrical distribution infrastructure.
The wind is the hazard; all that other stuff makes it into a disaster. A diablo might knock down an electrical line, which then sparks the tinder-dry vegetation nearby … or it might push a fire’s event horizon faster than firefighters can keep up with, or spread burning embers miles through the air (most buildings that burn in wildfires ignite because of windblown embers).
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“Young people are making it clear that we will support and vote for leaders who will listen to us because we will be here, striking, marching, rallying, and voting.”
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Energy
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Sen. Whitehouse called out the considerable investment by the fossil fuel industry and dark money interests in the Republican Party, which has gained a reputation as the party of climate science denial.
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That oil originates in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and Montana, where trains help take the place of scarce pipelines in order to move fracked crude oil to Washington’s refineries and ports along the coast. North Dakota and Montana have fought back against Washington’s law, which was passed in May, and filed a petition to PHMSA in protest just two months later.
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Survey results commissioned and publicized by the American Energy Alliance (AEA) seem on their surface to indicate that a majority of respondents are not thrilled about subsidizing EVs purchased by other consumers, particularly wealthy Americans. However, according to polling experts who reviewed the survey for DeSmog, the questions were designed to solicit a certain response and produce results to serve a predetermined narrative that supports the oil industry’s interests. According to polling expert Ed Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, the surveys relied on “highly biased questions designed to elicit highly misleading answers.”
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New York has long been a car-dominated metropolis where riding a bicycle has been a harrowing experience. But the city is vowing to change that with a bill spearheaded by Mr. Johnson that would create 250 miles of protected bike lanes.
Mayor de Blasio and the City Council have agreed to the legislation, expected to be passed tomorrow.
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Finance
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According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 485,000 U.S. workers were involved in strikes and lockouts during 2018. That’s the highest number since 1986. The data for 2019 won’t be released until 2020, but there’s a good chance that number will be exceeded, a point driven home by the fact that, over the last week, at least 85,000 workers participated in 13 different strikes
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The sectarian and ethnic civil wars that have ravaged a large part of the Middle East over the past 40 years are coming to an end. Replacing them is a new type of conflict in which protests akin to popular uprisings rock kleptocratic elites that justify their power by claiming to be the defenders of communities menaced by extreme violence or extinction.
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Those tens of thousands of largely young protesters demanding a non-sectarian Lebanon were joyful, filled with happiness, determined that this time they would change the wretched confessional nature of their state forever. Then the Hezbollah turned up, a truckload of them, dressed in black and shouting through loudspeakers and holding up posters of their all-Shia militia heroes. Squads of Lebanese interior ministry police appeared in the side streets.
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“This is in response to the will and demand of the thousands of Lebanese demanding change,” Saad Hariri said in a televised address.
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“The president pledged to drain the swamp, instead it appears he’s catering to the alligators.”
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“The whole political elite needs to change because the current system has done nothing for us,” one demonstrator against government corruption and high unemployement in Iraq said recently.
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Americans are more aware than ever that America has a race problem — and, more specifically, a racial wealth divide problem. As researchers from the Institute for Policy Studies and I found earlier this year, median white families are 41 times wealthier than median Black families in the United States.
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The decision won praise from many, but prompted a vow from one Republican senator to tax college athletes’ scholarships
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Illinois lawmakers approved a bill Tuesday that would eliminate driver’s license suspensions for unpaid parking tickets, putting an end to a decades-old practice that has hurt tens of thousands of motorists across the state.
The bill now awaits Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s signature. A spokeswoman for the governor said he looks forward to reviewing “this meaningful legislation.” Rep. Carol Ammons, a Democrat from Urbana-Champaign who co-sponsored the measure, said that the governor has told her he supports the bill’s intent and that she expects him to sign it.
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For a decade and a half, the IRS program to allow most Americans to file their taxes for free has been floundering.
Now, IRS emails obtained by ProPublica help show why: The agency has allowed the tax preparation industry to write the rules.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”
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“I want to convert the Democratic Party, to break its dependency on big money and corporate interests, and make it a party of working-class people, of young people, of all people who believe in justice.”
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Despite the yammering by the mainstream media and the neoliberals running the Democratic Party—not to mention Republicans and Fox News—the overwhelming majority of voters support progressive issues on a case-by-case basis, and the majority support the candidates who espouse them. Doubt that?
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Labour Leader says U.K. election “a once in a generation chance to build a country for the many, not the few.”
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“As we have said from the beginning, this is a campaign built to win and planning to win,” campaign manager Faiz Shakir told Common Dreams.
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Disqualifying Joshua Wong from running for office is just the latest example of the Hong Kong government’s increasingly anti-democratic tactics. The government’s rigging of the electoral process reinforces for many people that the only way to be heard is by protesting on the streets.
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“Voters should not lose their right to vote simply because they have decided not to express that right in recent elections.”
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The popular sports and culture site was instructed to stick to the former on Monday and did not.
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“We are taking this step,” explained Nancy Pelosi ahead of its release, “to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump Administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony, disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House of Representatives.”
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We’ve been highlighting lately how the situation with the whistleblower, who first tried to ring the alarm bells about President Trump’s now confirmed quid pro quo call with Ukraine to dig up dirt on a political opponent, showed why the “official channels” are useless for whistleblowers. Some suggested that we were premature in making that claim. However, since then, we’ve seen the President himself repeatedly try to attack the whistleblower while repeatedly demanding that the whistleblower be revealed. Now come reports that a staffer for Rep. Devin Nunes is going around revealing the name of the whistleblower…
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At every turn, he has sold out America for his own personal interest. Instead of putting America first, here are 6 ways Donald Trump has put himself first: 1) He has encouraged foreign powers to interfere in our democracy. Trump is using the power of the presidency to encourage foreign leaders to interfere in our elections – asking the President of Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political opponents in exchange for military aid. He has also publicly called on Russia and China to investigate his political opponents. 2) He receives money from foreign governments through his hotels and real estate business. Since taking office, representatives of at least 22 foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Russia, have spent money at properties owned by the Trump Organization. These payments are clear violations of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president from accepting anything of value from foreign governments. Trump had even planned to host next year’s G-7 meeting at his Doral golf resort, in Florida, but this brazen corruption was apparently too much even for his supporters in Congress. 3) He is making foreign policy on the basis of where his business is located around the world. The simplest explanation for why he cozies up to Turkey’s dictator Recep Erdogan, even withdrawing US troops from the Syrian border, is the Trump Towers Istanbul is his first and only office and residential building in Europe, and businesses linked to the Turkish government are also major patrons of the Trump Organization. 4) He has called on foreign powers to investigate Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who concluded that Trump’s campaign sought help from Russia during the 2016 election. The Trump administration has encouraged officials in Italy, Australia, and the United Kingdom to investigate details of Mueller’s investigation in an effort to discredit his report.5) He is favoring authoritarian regimes around the world, turning his back on America’s allies. Beyond Turkey’s Erdogan, Trump has said he’s “in love” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and, of course, praised Vladimir Putin. 6) He has ignored American intelligence agencies, relying instead on foreign governments. He has repeatedly disputed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, favoring Vladimir Putin’s version of what happened over the findings of our own intelligence community. Donald Trump claims to be a patriot at the same time as he sells out America. He has brazenly sought private gain from foreign governments at the expense of the American people. Instead of putting “America First,” he has repeatedly put “Donald First.”
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A White House National Security Council official who listened to President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s leader plans to tell House impeachment investigators in a sworn deposition Tuesday that he was so alarmed by the conversation that he reported it to his superiors and the NSC’s top lawyer.
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Last year, it seemed that Facebook might emerge relatively unscathed from accusations ranging from privacy violations to allowing Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The social media company did walk away with a $5 billion fine by the Federal Trade Commission for user privacy violations, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg sailed through a 2018 Senate hearing, partly because, as Casey Newton wrote in The Verge, “Senators don’t understand how Facebook works.”
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It was just a matter of time before the Bolivian government would be the target of a reactionary opposition. Indeed it happened at its most vulnerable time during an election process that had not officially ended. Following popular protests against neoliberal structural changes imposed by the governments of Ecuador and Chile, it was the conservative opposition in Bolivia that attempted to prevent the presidential re-election of Evo Morales.
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Helsingin Sanomat reports on criticism by the parliamentary group chairs of the language being used by politicians, and a warning that social media – particularly twitter – is responsible for a change in how MPs communicate. A number of politicians have been sharply criticised for the language they use both in parliament and on social media, with three prominent MPs the subject of a recent police investigation. Kai Mykkänen of the National Coalition Party tells HS that MPs seem more concerned with creating attention-grabbing soundbites than serious political debate.
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Hong Kong authorities barred high-profile pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong from an election, and the city’s leader ruled out political solutions before the end of the violent protests gripping the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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On October 15, members of the Federal Security Service in Kaluga arrested a 36-year-old local man and accused him of justifying terrorism in comments published on the social network VKontakte. A court later placed the suspect under house arrest for at least the next two months. This isn’t the first time Ivan Lyubshin has faced criminal prosecution for things he’s written online. In 2017, he was charged with distributing pornography and extremism, and “rehabilitating Nazism,” but he got off mostly with a few fines. Lyubshin’s father told Meduza that his son wasn’t so lucky this month, when FSB agents dragged him into the woods and beat him. Afterwards, forensic experts nevertheless concluded that the attack “caused no harm.”
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Comedian Danila Poperechny says the late night talk show “Vecherny Urgant” cut his joke about Russia’s anti-extremism police. In a tweet, the comic said he took the stage and explained to the crowd that he’d come on the show for two reasons: first, he likes the host, Ivan Urgant, and second “because when regional officers in the anti-extremism department see me on Channel One, for some reason they think I’m white-listed and they don’t fuck with me when I’m on tour.” This latter remark never aired for television audiences.
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Freedom of thought stands at a critical crossroads. Technological and psychological advances could be used to promote free thought. They could shield our inner worlds, reduce our mental biases, and create new spaces for thought. Yet states and corporations are forging these advances into weapons that restrict what we think.
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Still more alarming, several months later, in December 2017, a little-noticed amicus curiae brief sent by former high-ranking US intelligence officials asserted that Russia uses “political organizers and activists, academics, journalists, web operators, shell companies, nationalists and militant groups, and prominent pro-Russian businessmen” to subvert the American political process.
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Social media has many uses — some good, some mildly disturbing. But what we are seeing now in Bangladesh, most recently in Bhola and in many other places before that, is unmatched in its vileness, and reveals the existence of a mind-set in our country that most decent people would rather not think about.
[...]
Seven years later, we are still waiting to see the perpetrators brought to book.
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Now, in the wake of the NBC scandal, at least six former Fox News employees, including Gretchen Carlson, the first woman at Fox News to publicly file a lawsuit against Ailes, are calling to be released from their NDAs. “All women at Fox News and beyond forced to sign NDAs should be released from them immediately, giving them back the voices they deserve,” Carlson told me over the weekend. “None of us asked to get into a workplace dispute. We simply had the courage to stand up and say something—but in the end it’s our voices no one can hear. Because of our NDAs, we can never say what is factually correct or incorrect about what happened to us at Fox.”
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was called back to Capitol Hill to speak about the company’s impact on the financial and housing sectors—particularly in light of its proposal to launch a cryptocurrency wallet, Calibra, and its involvement in the creation of the Libra cryptocurrency.
We’ve criticized Facebook on many fronts for years, and we share the wide ranging concerns of lawmakers who want to ensure their constituents’ privacy and rights are protected from Facebook’s abuses as it looks to expand its reach. Throughout the hearing, we appreciate that the committee members focused on Facebook’s actions as the basis of their skepticism about Libra, rather than around blockchain technology.
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Internet Lab, the Brazilian independent research center, has published their fourth annual report of “Quem Defende Seus Dados?” (“Who defends your data?”), comparing policies of their local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and how they treat users’ data after receiving government requests. Vivo (Telefónica) still takes the lead, but Tim is not far behind. Claro/NET (América Móvil), SKY (DirectTV/AT&T), and Oi also show progress compared to 2018’s report.
In this year’s report, all companies, except Nextel, received at least a partial star for providing information on data disclosure to the government. Most of the ISPs have published details on how their users’ data is collected and processed. While Net joined the list in the new report, Algar lost the partial star earned in 2018. Vivo is still the only company to provide a comprehensive transparency report, but SKY and Tim scored partially this time. Brazilian ISPs could certainly do more with regard to transparency reports as well as law enforcement guidelines and user’s notification.
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An absurd thing is happening in the halls of Congress. Major ISPs such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon are banging on the doors of legislators to stop the deployment of DNS over HTTPS (DoH), a technology that will give users one of the biggest upgrades to their Internet privacy and security since the proliferation of HTTPS. This is because DoH ensures that when you look up a website, your query to the DNS system is secure through encryption and can’t be tracked, spoofed, or blocked.
But despite these benefits, ISPs have written dozens of congressional leaders about their concerns, and are handing out misleading materials invoking Google as the boogeyman. EFF, Consumer Reports, and National Consumers League wrote this letter in response.
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A couple of years ago, the Georgia state appeals court interpreted the Supreme Court’s Riley decision to cover data pulled from vehicles after accidents. If warrants were required to search cellphones — thanks to their ability to store all sorts of personal information — it stood to reason warrants should be needed to access other data not visible to the naked eye.
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Both Mozilla and Google have begun pushing encrypted DNS via their respective browsers, making it more difficult for outsiders to monitor and/or monetize your daily browsing habits. Not too surprisingly the broadband industry, which has a long, proud history of covertly collecting and selling this data, isn’t particularly happy about this evolution. With the help of unskeptical news outlets, telecom lobbyists have been trying to convince the government that what Mozilla and Google are up to is somehow nefarious, going so far as to (incorrectly) claim the move is even an antitrust violation.
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You understand the importance of online privacy. You understand that Tor offers holistic, privacy-by-design solutions that allow you to take back the internet from the grip of surveillance, tracking, and censorship.
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Now, another government body — the Department of Home Affairs — has submitted a response to that inquiry. Its totalitarian solution: start scanning porn viewers’ faces, and matching them up with government photos, to verify their ages.
Home Affairs — essentially the Aussie version of the United States’ Department of Homeland Security — is currently developing a Face Verification Service that would confirm a person’s identify by matching their face to a photo in a government identification document, such as a driver’s license.
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There’s one significant catch for the department’s proposal: the Face Verification Service isn’t actually fully operational yet. It won’t be until Parliament passes the Identity-matching Services Bill 2019, which was just rejected by the bipartisan joint intelligence and security committee due to its lack of privacy safeguards. The committee recommended the bill be entirely redrafted.
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Consumentenbond investigated 10 dating platforms and found that half of them violate the General Data Protection Regulation. All five above mentioned sites place tracking cookies – which show other sites your browsing history, for example for placing ads – before visitors accepted these cookies. Tinder, Parship and Paiq also forwarded the tracking information to Facebook.
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This is news because it’s not a business deal but rather a collaboration between Spain’s National Statistics Institute and all Spanish carriers, and because it’s run at a large scale. But, as I said above, this is not technically novel.
On paper, and also thinking as a scientist, it sounds very interesting. The actual experiment consists on tracking most Spanish phones for eight days in order to learn about holiday trips. With the results, the Government expects to improve public services and infrastructures during holiday season.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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We recently wrote about the many problems (even if created through good intentions) with California’s new AB5 law that will turn many freelancers into employees. As we noted, a big part of the problem is that many freelancers don’t want to be employees, and the law will almost certainly backfire, in making companies wary of hiring freelancers in California. The one area we focused in on (though many are impacted) is journalism, where the author of the bill, Lorena Gonzalez admitted upfront that she chose 35 submissions per year as the dividing line “arbitrarily,” despite the fact that many freelancers will contribute a much higher number than 35 stories for many publications.
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“In Defense of Julian Assange,” edited by Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler, is now available for OR Books.
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North Queensland politician George Christensen is fighting to bring Julian Assange home and will seek the British Government’s permission to meet with the controversial WikiLeaks founder ahead of his full extradition hearing early next year.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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After reading Louis Proyect’s article on the superhero movies we don’t need, I thought I’d send you a few suggestions of superhero movies we do need.
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For the past year, Ciudad Juarez has been a flashpoint of the migrant and refugee humanitarian crisis gripping the U.S.-Mexico border. It began a year ago when hundreds of Cubans and Central Americans asylum seekers camped out for weeks on the Santa Fe Bridge connecting Juarez with its sister city of El Paso, Texas.
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Longer yellow lights are on the way, thanks in part to a man a state government agency once forbade from criticizing red light cameras without a proper license.
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The following post was originally published at Ongoing History Of Protest Songs.
The experimental hip-hop trio, clipping., is made up of rapper Daveed Diggs and producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson. They recently released their third album, “There Existed an Addiction to Blood.”
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One simple fact cannot be hidden. The firefighters did not cause the fire. Phase 1 of Judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s report of the public inquiry into the Grenfell disaster has been released to relatives prior to publication tomorrow. According to the Guardian, it concentrates blame on the firefighters in charge of tackling the blaze. This is an entirely predictable Establishment ploy; blame the little people.
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Last week, police near Norilsk, in northern Russia, raided a campsite where more than 50 Jehovah’s Witness followers had gathered to pray. It was the latest example of an escalating crackdown on Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are targeted simply for practicing their faith.
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Local officials in Pakistan have shut down an art exhibition that depicts alleged extrajudicial killings by the Karachi police. The closure is both an attack on free expression and an attempt to sweep under the rug a longstanding human rights problem.
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A federal judge on Tuesday blocked Alabama’s near-total abortion ban from taking effect next month, saying the law, part of a wave of new abortion restrictions by conservative states, is clearly unconstitutional.
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“Missouri politicians have gone too far. Tracking patients’ periods is government overreach at its worst and a major violation of privacy.”
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Missouri’s health department director on Tuesday said he tracked the menstrual cycles of Planned Parenthood patients as part of an effort to identify what the agency says were “failed abortions” at a St. Louis clinic.
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The US House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly in favour of recognising the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War One as “genocide”.
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By the end of fiscal 2019 in September, U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 76,020 minors at the nation’s southwestern border, an increase of 52 percent from the previous fiscal year.
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The payment shortfall by one of the country’s largest grocery chains is the largest in Australian history and follows a series of wage scandals that have affected some of the country’s biggest names.
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In 2015, Robson filed a lawsuit against both the estate of Michael Jackson and those he accused of not only knowing about the abuse, but also facilitating it. But because of the law in force at the time, a judge dismissed the suit.
Robson then appealed the decision, which is why it is currently in appellate court. While he and his legal representatives believe that the new law could dramatically affect the outcome of their appeal, Jackson’s estate insists that the appeal should be based on the law as it is today and be concluded prior to the new law’s effect next year.
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The only hope for Muslim women in the West to free themselves is to become aware of the achievements of the feminist movements and other women’s liberation movements.
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“There are gross violations of child rights, especially against girl children. The students are not provided with basic facilities. The banat madrassas (women madrassa) keep the girl children in confinement. The food is of bad quality. There is a huge chance of sexual violations and above all, children are deprived of formal education,” Changkakoti said.
Dhubri is the least literate district in Assam with 58.34 percent literacy rate, as per the 2011 Census.
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Two of the prime accused in Kamlesh Tiwari murder case believed that killing of the Hindu Samaj Party leader was “justified as per Sharia”, a Gujarat police official said on Wednesday.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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In 2009, the FCC funded a Harvard study that concluded (pdf) that open access policies (letting multiple ISPs come in and compete over a central, core network) resulted in lower broadband prices and better service. Of course when the Obama FCC released its flimsy, politically timid “National Broadband Plan” back in 2010, this realization (not to mention an honest accounting of the sector’s limited competition) was nowhere to be found.
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Today has been declared the 50th anniversary of the internet, as on October 29th, 1969, a team at UCLA, lead by Leonard Kleinrock, sent a message to a team at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), representing the very first transmission over the then ARPANET, which later became the internet. This seems like a good moment to think about all that the internet has enabled — but also just how far we may have strayed from its early promise and how far we might still be able to go. On the historical side, Kleinrock himself has posts at both ICANN and the Internet Society, and both are worth reading. The ICANN post is all about that first message transmission…
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Much more traffic than that travels through the [Internet] these days, with billions of emails sent and searches conducted daily. As a scholar of how the [Internet] is governed, I know that today’s vast communications web is a result of governments and regulators making choices that collectively built the [Internet] as it is today.
Here are five key moments in this journey.
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On 29 October 1969 the first message was transmitted over ARPANET, the forerunner to the Internet. UCLA student programmer Charlie Kline used the University’s SDS Sigma 7 computer to login to an SDS 940 computer at Stanford Research Institute at Stanford University in Silicon Valley.
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Monopolies
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Brian Sweeney has a long list of complaints about Amazon, from the way it treats warehouse workers to the low taxes it pays and its effort to win concessions from cities to bring in jobs. So when he learned the online retail giant had poured $1 million into remaking the Seattle City Council with more business-friendly candidates, he pulled out his wallet.
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[Guest post] Event report: #FashionLawLDN – The Autumn Winter Review [Ed: When the so-called 'industry' called “fashion” (actually sweatshops with some rich glorified designer’s name in Milan/NY/London/Paris) is a bunch of predatory lawyers looking who to sue next]
The trio’s success with their first Review, the Spring/Summer Review, prompted the decision to hold another in the Fashion Law London series. Taking place on Friday 18th October, the day itself was advertised as an opportunity to “catch up with the latest fashion (law) trends; hear from industry innovators, world-leading luxury law experts, and those behind the most disruptive fashion businesses; and, join a frank and collaborative environment where you are at the centre of discussion,” and safe to say, it most certainly delivered. With a line-up of luxury brand creators, Intellectual Property icons, and fashion technology experts, this event was one not to be missed.
[...]
The lectures given on the day were robust whilst remaining accessible to all levels of the profession. Whether you’re a student with an interest in Fashion Law, or a fully experienced Fashion Lawyer in the peak of their career, future events held by Rosie, Eleonora and Giulia are not to be missed.
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Patents and Software Patents
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EasyTracGPS is a family-owned business that provides GPS tracking solutions to commercial shipping fleets. Recently, EasyTracGPS faced a litigation threat from Inventergy LBS, LLC, which accused it of infringing U.S. Patent No. 8,760,286. That patent supposedly claims a “[s]ystem and method for communication with a tracking device,” but like so many patents, actually claims generic steps of data collection and processing that any computer could perform. This is not the kind of invention that can be patented.
EFF represented EasyTracGPS pro bono, writing Inventergy a letter explaining that its patent was invalid, and that its bad faith assertion of patent infringement violates state law. Inventergy withdrew the lawsuit the same day it received the letter.
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[A]s to the supposed public use of Wyeth’s machine before his application for a patent. To defeat his right to a patent, under such circumstances, it is essential, that there should have been a public use of his machine, substantially as it was patented, with his consent.
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Applicants typically rely on outside counsel who use their expertise to navigate the response strategy. And for good reason. These outside counsel have developed years of experience in advancing client goals while complying with the numerous patent laws and rules. Here, however, we write about an ex parte appeal where the Board agreed with a pro se applicant in overturning the Section 101 rejection.
The decision Ex parte Yemmela Appeal No. 2018-005814 (Oct. 25, 2019). The art unit, 2659, handles technology related to Linguistics, Speech Processing and Audio Compression.
Before getting to the substance of the rejections, the Board appears to show some level of sympathy with the appellant in a footnote: “We recognized that Appellant may be unfamiliar with patent prosecution procedure. While Appellant may prosecute the application (unless the application is assigned to a juristic entity; see 37 C.F.R. § 1.31), lack of skill in the field of patent prosecution usually acts as a liability in affording maximum protection for the invention disclosed. If Appellant chooses to request continued prosecution of the application, Appellant is advised to secure the services of a registered patent attorney or agent to prosecute the application, since the value of a patent is largely dependent upon skilled preparation and prosecution.”
[...]
The Board proceeded to sustain others of the Examiner’s rejections (including Section 112 and 103 rejections).
A take home lesson from this decision is that a compelling argument under prong 1 is to argue that the claim addresses a problem that is solved by computers in a specific technique computers that humans cannot solve. A second lesson is that if an Examiner a broad characterization of what the asserted abstract idea is, it can be successfully pushed back. Especially if the analysis lacks specificity. The Examiner cannot have their cake and assert that the abstract idea is a broad concept, but ignore specific “additional” elements outside of that broad concept.
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Copyrights
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A new survey published today suggests that up to five million people may have accessed football matches illegally in the UK at some point in their life. While that headline figure is high, it’s the confusion among many consumers that seems the greatest concern for outfits like the Premier League.
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EFF legal intern Samantha Hamilton co-wrote this blog post
Nickelback never asked to become a meme. And yet, after the Internet decided it hated the Canadian alternative rock band and due to the lead singer’s unique voice, users have shared their image millions of times. But their record label decided to draw a line at President Trump tweeting a meme putting the Biden-Ukraine controversy into a Nickelback music video. We may tend not to think of memes as political speech, but they can be. And when someone expresses a political message via meme, using copyright law to silence their speech when it is very clearly fair use is an abuse of copyright.
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Posted in Site News at 11:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: One way to get difficult subjects/messages across is mild humour and sarcasm
‘Twas around September when we started using lots of memes in Techrights and some readers may wonder why we do this. It’s easier to get people’s attention and get them to understand technical issues/controversies when there’s a succinct joke. If readers get tired of these memes, then those who do can contact us and tell us to stop. Nobody has done that so far. We’ll carry on while it’s still legal and not legally risky in the EU (because of those notorious copyright/upload filters which can help censor memes). █
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Posted in Finance, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 10:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft is failing to hide its hideously racist, nationalist and intolerant nature; to make matters worse, the Linux Foundation follows its footsteps in that regard
WE will soon publish something about Microsoft’s financial state, which was never as healthy as the company wished us to believe. It’s based on deception, exploitation, and ‘creative’ accounting. For instance, Microsoft hides its demise using outsourcing tactics. It also hides layoffs this way (end of contracts) and grossly underpays people.
“Microsoft serves Donald Trump agenda from its bent knees and many people alleged — perhaps correctly — that Amazon didn’t get JEDI because Trump was and still is upset at Jeff Bezos.”Recently, or as recently as late on Friday, many headlines spoke about Microsoft becoming not just the vassal of ICE (racist detention camps and worse) but also the Pentagon. We’ve long viewed that as the company’s survival strategy (leaning on the massive military spendings of of the US). But it is misguided and short-sighted. Even Google — at times notorious for its ties to the Pentagon (this has been well documented) — refused to bid for JEDI though the tender may have seemed technically suitable. Some say that foreseeing the public backlash and seeing employees’ reaction to existing Google scandals (e.g. expansion to China the same way Microsoft already did a long time ago) Google decide to “do no evil” — even if that motto is no longer applicable (it hasn’t been for decades, but they made that formal only a few years ago).
We want to remind readers that this is part of a very clear pattern. Microsoft is metaphorically giving Trump a shoe-shine job. Microsoft serves Donald Trump agenda from its bent knees and many people alleged — perhaps correctly — that Amazon didn’t get JEDI because Trump was and still is upset at Jeff Bezos.
“We’ve long complained — repeatedly in fact — that the Foundation outsources almost all its projects to Microsoft GitHub which is proprietary software (in exchange for bribes from Microsoft/GitHub).”Earlier today we saw this tweet which said: “So doesn’t GitHub have open contracts with ICE? Also nobody asked me for permission to use my face here. Which means I also assume they neglected to ask the original author of the photograph. Maybe next time we could ask folks before sticking their face on a slide?”
Notice this response: “If you have a GH account, their TOS will state they can use your avatar for anything iirc.”
Separately, noted another person: “40 million open source developers on GitHub. All depending on a single proprietary platform to collaborate. Monocultures are bad, and critical at this scale. We have an incredible risk and single point of failure of a single organization.” (with the hashtags #OSSummit #OpenSource of the Linux Foundation)
We’ve long complained — repeatedly in fact — that the Foundation outsources almost all its projects to Microsoft GitHub which is proprietary software (in exchange for bribes from Microsoft/GitHub). This in its own right says a lot about the Foundation and the direction it has taken, more so in recent years.
“Later they try to lecture us all on “diversity”/”manners” and give Torvalds “training” for a month.”Take note of these new observations from Benjamin Henrion [1, 2]: “A pull request to fix Democracy in Spain #catalonia #tsunamidemocratic https://github.com/github/gov-takedowns/pull/8 … Microsoft’s Github censors Catalonian Tsunami Democràtic app so that people cannot download the Android apk https://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/2019-10-29/github-bloquea-tsunami-democratic-aplicacion_2305027/ … #deletegithub #iran #democracy”
The ‘new’ Microsoft right there for you…
Imperialistic, racist, totally not inclusive. As we stated before, the Foundation’s use of GitHub is against the Foundation’s own spirit not only because it’s proprietary but because it renders the Foundation — indirectly — racist and exclusionary. Later they try to lecture us all on “diversity”/”manners” and give Torvalds “training” for a month. Because he’s scoffing at people who repeatedly push bad code (and they’re usually male actually, but the media painted a very different picture one year ago). █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Finance, Fraud, Patents at 5:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Time to revoke diplomatic immunity and hold people accountable (culprits in top management positions, falsifying vital information in the public interest)
FFII President on EPO yesterday: “this entire body reshaped to fit a structure with accountability, checks and balances, separation of powers, rule of law etc. It certainly is not what we have at the moment and this is the primary reason EPO workers are protesting…”
Summary: Cheating of EPO staff and the European public must mean that the EPO lost its right to that controversial “above the law” status; it’s time for authorities to take swift action and tackle EPO corruption
TECHRIGHTS has covered EPO affairs for a very long time. It’s pretty amazing that nobody from the management of the EPO has yet been arrested. Nobody! There’s the (in)famous saying from Donald Trump about shooting someone in broad daylight; he bragged he would get away with it. Well, that’s like today’s EPO management.
“There’s the (in)famous saying from Donald Trump about shooting someone in broad daylight; he bragged he would get away with it. Well, that’s like today’s EPO management.”Earlier this month Konstanze Richter of JUVE relayed some EPO lies (SUEPO did not link to it). This reinforced the idea or the widespread perception that JUVE is a mouthpiece not of integrity but of the patent microcosm. Just consider the target audience, i.e. the source of income. Here are some portions:
The European Patent Office is facing a huge pension gap of several billion euros in the coming years. Initial proposals for savings also affect future salaries and pension entitlements. The latest EPO financial study has caused further unrest among the workforce.
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Overall, say staff representatives, the newest EPO financial study is based on “unrealistic assumptions.” This applies, among other things, to the expected increase in salaries. Salaries are calculated at 0.5% above inflation in the long-term. Career progression adds another 1.74%.
“It seems very unlikely that the recent negative trend in career progression will turn any time soon,” says the CSC. Only a few employees would actually benefit from the new career system introduced under Battistelli. It is said salaries for new employees in particular have been significantly reduced.
The CSC is quoted, but the journalist also repeats lies from the EPO; isn’t the job of a journalist actually checking the facts rather than parroting the lie and refutation of it? Should they also quote deniers of climate science? In the name of ‘balance’?
“The whole thing has become an embarrassment not just to the EPO and France but also Germany and the EU as a whole.”One person ended up tweeting back to the editor of JUVE [1, 2, 3]:”Congrats, you have been fooled by the EPO! Quote: “a huge pension gap of several billion euros in the coming years”, really? How do they know? Based on what? Studies? These studies are a joke, we all know it. [...] Surprisingly Battistelli, the former EPO President by the way, had claimed the exact opposite at the end of his presidential term, and in doing so has pocketed a fat reward. It sounds like a bad comedy, right?”
Dr. Thorsten Bausch’s (Hoffmann Eitle) latest good article, “Three Myths Debunked,” says that “The EPO is not poor” (in a heading) and this has been mentioned in some circles. He has, for quite some time, watched and commented on the truly corrupt financial moves of Battistelli — moves that António Campinos did not challenge and media did not even mention! Here’s the more relevant part (to us at least):
2. The EPO is not poor
A similar myth that seems to pervade through the heads of the EPO management every other year is that the EPO’s finances are not in good shape and that, as the current Office President put it, “we might face a gap”.
We might indeed, who can deny that? But the relevant questions are (i) when and (ii) under which circumstances/assumptions?
[...]
So everything was in order and “brought under control” in 2018 (so that the past President earned his extra bonus (???)), but only one year later a new study is presented wherein doubts regarding sustainability in 20 years are expressed. (Can one claim the bonus back?)
With this, let us turn back to reality. According to the EPO’s most recent figures (page 9 of this PDFinance_Presentation), the Standardised Operating result in 2017 was a surplus of €366 million. In the year 2018 it was €390 million, a plus of about 6% (don’t ask me why these figures are slightly different from the ones published in the Battistelli report). The productivity of the examiners (Products per Examiner) has likewise increased from 95.5 (2017) to 99.8 (2018) products per headcount. Thus, it indeed seems that the EPO has become more effective (as it was planned by the Battistelli management – note that I am not talking about quality here) and made an operating profit that I would describe as pretty breathtaking.
On top of that, the EPO Treasury Investment Fund (EPOTIF) which was established and activated in 2018 under external asset management control has assets of €2,4 billion, that is 2.400.000.000 EUR. If my understanding is correct, most of this money has been invested on the stock market in shares and bonds. Whether this is right or wrong may be a matter of debate, but the net effect of this policy in the year 2019 was clearly positive: Namely, whereas general interest rates were about zero, both stocks and bonds had a pretty good year and (so far) increased by about 8% from 1 January. Which adds another approximately 200 million EUR to EPOTIF’s asset sheets. Sounds great – but is this sustainable?
I have argued before that I do not perceive it as the core objective of a patent office to make huge profits. In the end, a patent office is to serve the common good, i.e. promoting technological progress by thoroughly examining patent applications and granting patents to those inventions that deserve it. In contrast, it is not a patent office’s task to impose additional liabilities on applicants in the form of fees, just to put the excess earned by these fees on the stock or bond market. It goes without saying that the European Patent Office should be self-financing and receive the money it needs for operating its business and paying the agreed staff pensions to its retired employees, and I have no doubt that the Administrative Council will provide the office with those means by allowing it to raise the necessary fees at any time. (Whether the EPO needs much more than that, e.g. to pay its past President an appreciable extra premium in addition to his generous salary or to sponsor lavish inventor of the year ceremonies, is another matter on which I have commented earlier.)
In any case, I would summarize that it is a pure myth that EPO is “poor” and that active measures would therefore be necessary to cut costs, particularly staff costs and pensions. On the contrary, staff has demonstrably become more effective, so if anything, I would argue that they have rather deserved a reward.
On this basis, it is quite difficult to see a gap anywhere in the EPO’s figures which would justify immediate action. Predictions about the long-term future are notoriously difficult and highly dependent on the assumptions underlying them, which therefore need to be thoroughly scrutinized and discussed. If my understanding is correct, most of the scenarios under which a “gap” has been prognosed seem to assume a global economic recession and slump in the stock market (“decline in equity earnings”) within the next few years, followed by a slow increase. There is also an optimistic scenario under which there would be no predicted gap at all. All of this may or may not happen, I don’t know. With my limited economic understanding, I just wonder one thing: If EPO management seriously believes in any of the more gloomy-gap predictions and thinks it is appropriate to invest a large proportion of both its investment fund and its pension fund on the stock market, would it not be wise to shorten the stocks now, thus generating a buffer, and re-invest after the slump?
The Treasury in Germany’s EPO office (not Berlin but Munich) is lying and cheating; it’s defrauding the public regarding the finances. What does the German government have to say about it? What has the EU said about it? Nothing! Big fat nada.
There’s a bunch of interesting comments so far (on the above article). Here they are with some highlights added:
Thank you Thorsten for highlighting what I believe is an area where increased public engagement and scrutiny are vital, namely the financial dealings of the EPO.
Like you, I can make no sense of the predictions in the 2019 Financial Study. The EPO has HUGE cash reserves and has decided to play with a large portion of those reserves on the stock market. If the EPO is following models of good governance, then it will not be gambling with money that it cannot afford to lose. Thus, one can only conclude that the EPO currently has a significant cash pile that is effectively surplus to requirements.
If the predictions in the Financial Study are to be believed, then one would expect the EPO to: (a) provide robust justifications for the assumptions upon which those predictions are based; (b) identify the causes of the predicted losses; (c) consider a range of options for dealing with the underlying causes; (d) provide robust justifications for the chosen solutions; (e) stop playing on the stock market; and (e) target investments with potentially smaller (but guaranteed) returns.
It has been a while since I read the Financial Study, but my recollection is that it most certainly did not follow the logical approach set out above. Indeed, I recall that one of the most “interesting” predictions used in the Financial Study was an assumption of ZERO increases in EPO official fees for an astonishingly long period of time. Thus, given that the users of the European patent system pretty much expect to cope with regular fee increases, one wonders what the basis was for this rather unbelievable assumption.
Of course, if one were a cynic, one might speculate that the authors of the Financial Study were instructed to identify a set of assumptions that might generate predictions of a potentially perilous financial situation in the long term. The question is, why would anyone provide instructions aimed at achieving a predetermined result?
In situations like this, it is often helpful to ask a simple question: cui bono? Let us consider a number of possible candidates.
EPO staff: it is pretty clear that the EPO’s (non-senior) staff will be the victims of the Financial Study, and not its benefactors. Indeed, it seems that the proposed “cost savings” are to be made entirely at the expense of those staff.
Patent applicants: for this group, it is a mixed picture. On the one hand, they might benefit from a freeze in EPO official fees (though it remains to be seen whether the EPO follows through with such a strange policy). On the other hand, applicants will get much less “bang for their buck” in terms of QUALITY patent examination. That is, with the “production” of EPO examiners constantly being pushed (significantly) upwards, the amount of time that applicants can expect an examiner to dedicate to their case is constantly reducing. Whilst it is possible that a relatively small reduction in time per case can be achieved without a reduction in quality, it is frankly inconceivable that year-on-year cuts will not lead to a lowering of quality (especially in view of the cuts already implemented in recent years).
Fund managers for EPOTIF: this group will undoubtedly be a benefactor of the EPO’s recent policies, and also (it seems) of policies devised in the light of the Financial Study, where “savings” made at the expense of EPO staff will be invested into EPOTIF. The funds invested in EPOTIF are truly enormous. Presumably, therefore, the (private sector) fund managers for EPOTIF will reap large rewards in terms of their fees for managing that fund.
You will note that I have not considered whether EPO management (or AC delegates) are possible beneficiaries. This is because, upon the basis of publicly available information, it is impossible to determine one way or another whether they stand to either lose or gain from the rather strange policies that have been implemented. Nevertheless, I think that it is possible to make a pertinent observation. That is, the only reason that it is possible for the fund managers for EPOTIF to earn huge fees is that the policies implemented by the EPO’s management directed the creation of EPOTIF (as well as continued, significant investments into those funds). This observation may or may not be significant. However, when there are well reasoned doubts about the rationale for creating the fund in the first place (let alone the rationale for predicting a dire financial situation that requires more cash to be squirreled away into EPOTIF), it becomes painfully obvious that there are insufficient safeguards in place that might prevent (or even monitor for) key decision-makers at the EPO from receiving kick-backs from the beneficiaries of their largesse.
I must stress that this is all hypothetical, and that I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any wrongdoing on the part of anyone involved in this whole scenario. However, the reason for pointing out the POSSIBILITIES for abuse is that it highlights what I believe could be a very serious failing of transparency and accountability in connection with the governance of the EPO.
“An EPO examiner” then wrote:
Dear Mr Bausch,
many thanks for your well-written articles.
Regarding your 3rd point, it might be time to put the DPMA under scrutiny, too. If the tales of my former colleagues there are correct, the judges at the BPatG are appointed in peculiar ways. In electrical engineering, they are always recruited from G01R examiners, even though there are almost no cases from this class. And if someone is intended to become a judge, he will get this IPC to examine… This has gone on for quite some time, so there is no judge left who has experience with, e.g., electrical machines or some of the other EE specialties…
And in physics everyone knows who is slated to become one of the next judges. And it just pure coincidence that he is the son of a former H1-head and presidung judge…
Maybe we see a general problem with patent offices…
An EPO examiner
PS keep up your great work!
Another person (familiar person, patent attorney “MaxDrei”) said:
Well done VPP. Well done Thorsten Bausch. Well done Wikipedia. Well done Angela Merkel. Well done Bielefeld. And while we are about it, well done Henning Wehn.
It is said in England that Germans have no sense of humour. One more sad sign of parochial ignorance on the island. This particular English reader is heartily fed up with English banter, what passes for English “humour”, and would much prefer the gentle but supremely effective wit of intelligent people like Axel Hacke or Dieter Nuhr. Readers, does anybody know: who are their media counterparts in England?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henning_Wehn
Having written many articles about this, I find none of this humourous as there seems to be profound corruption here; there needs to be an investigation, leading to potential arrests. But will that actually happen? Not likely. Where’s Campinos in all this? Covering the back of the thug who gave him this job. The whole thing has become an embarrassment not just to the EPO and France but also Germany and the EU as a whole. █
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