10.17.21
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 0b878085120e5065accd501a44428421
Summary: The EPO‘s current regime seems to be serving a money-hungry lobby of corrupt officials and pathological liars; tonight we focus on Austria
IN Part 15 of the current series we saw one of many enablers of Benoît Battistelli; some of them are convicted fraudsters, sure, but António Campinos‘s EUIPO was happy to give them honourable jobs, nevertheless. Jobs as bribes are a thing in Alicante.
“Team Battistelli and Team UPC are mostly the same people (or overlapping interests).”The video above is the first of several regarding Austria and Rude-Liar. We will continue tomorrow, but along the lines (towards the end) I decided spontaneously that it would be worthwhile examining the latest 3 EPO “news” items, posted over the past week in the EPO’s site. The plans these people have for Europe are very dark. Some examiners at the EPO might be late to realise it. They should carefully examine the evidence and push back. Team Battistelli and Team UPC are mostly the same people (or overlapping interests). Lots of lying and cheating. New examples below (found hours ago). █
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10.16.21
Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft, Windows at 5:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The hype started this past summer
Windows market share as a function of time from 2009 until October 16th (today). Raw data [ODS] available.
Summary: The very latest figures from Web usage show that it’s hardly even a blip on the radar; Windows continues bleeding to death, not only in servers
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: As we shall see tomorrow night, the EPO regime was supported by a fair share of corrupt officials inside the Administrative Council
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Posted in Deception at 9:33 am by Guest Editorial Team
Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original
The Facebook Whistleblowers, as they are called, didn’t tell us much that we didn’t know already.
The platform is pure evil. It spies on people, and ignores extremists and political terrorists (like Trump’s January 6th “supporters”) in order to drive “engagement”.
Over time, it’s been getting worse. It’s certainly no wonder why young people are abandoning it.
They may not be primarily concerned with the spying or the manipulation.
If it’s true that they are just going to other Facebook platforms like Instagram, WhatApp, as well as the non-FB Snapchat, which is actually worse in some ways, then they aren’t learning the important lessons.
But, all things being aside for the moment, since Facebook was invaded by “Your Parents” and they started posting a bunch of racist crap, “We hate Biden!”, and “Gee, don’t you miss Trump even though he nearly destroyed our entire country and did the majority of that in just his last 9 months!”, their userbase on Facebook itself has been plummeting.
The remaining users are left going down a rabbit hole of increasing insanity as increasingly the only thing left are a bunch of self-important, entitled baby boomers, who are obviously going through their second childhood (I mean, when the police have to come out because you knocked someone’s teeth out over a “mask dispute”….), and don’t understand shit about science. (Vaccine “hesistancy”. AKA, I don’t know how this works, so instead of learning about how it works, I’ll decide to be ignorant and afraid instead!”)
All other things aside, and there are plenty of other things, do we really want to share a platform with right-wing terrorists and trolls who support Trump and are dumb enough to not only break the law, but take pictures of themselves doing it, admit everything on CNN, and then upload the evidence to Facebook?
Both of my parents voted for Trump and they were very “Hah! In your face!” about it, but they’re very weak now and don’t want to discuss the fact that he lost to Joe Biden, of all people. Even though Biden spent a lot of his Senate career doing things that they would have approved of had they actually paid any attention to it. He was behind the 1994 Crime Bill and he’s still fighting in court to deport asylum seekers under Trump’s made up “Title 42” nonsense.
CBP and ICE are as bad as they ever were under Trump. Why, just a few weeks ago, they were photographed on horseback whipping black people from Haiti at the border.
So not much has changed. To hear mom and dad, you’d think that Biden will turn us into a Communist country, even though the facts don’t support this either. It was Trump that signed the biggest corporate welfare bill ever (the CARES Act) and mollified the anger of those whom he caused to become unemployed with rent moratoriums, the illegal CDC eviction ban, and “extended unemployment checks”. Biden let the unemployment program expire, the eviction ban is gone, and the CARES Act and “American Rescue Plan” money turned into state slush funds for bread and circuses and new prisons.
But they won’t pay attention. Facebook has radicalized and mentally perverted and corrupted them both to the point of no return. We should feel sorry for both of them, and those like them.
Of course some, like my parents, were already sort of like this, but Facebook made them worse. It put them in a bubble and let them speak with people who were even more fit for a lunatic asylum than either of them were, and they started getting crazier and crazier ideas in their heads.
In an episode of Babylon 5, when the Narn (who have been oppressed by the Centauri) wanted revenge, G’Kar has to shout “No! They are a DYING PEOPLE! We should just let them pass.”
I suppose the same can be said of our parents, the boomers, at this point. They can’t be reasoned with. They live in an alternate reality with “alternative facts”, and they are very much on the way out. It’s up to us to salvage what we can when they’re no longer as much of a force. █
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Search at 7:50 am by Guest Editorial Team
Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original
I’ve been writing lately about how DuckDuckGo is shady and their business is questionable.
It seems that some donations went the EFF’s way and now they plan on killing off HTTP Everywhere permanently.
$25,000 a year buys them the Tor Project and $150,000 keeps the EFF in their back pocket. But where does the money for this come from, and what does DuckDuckGo get from it?
No company gives out millions of dollars a year and expects to get back nothing.
Is it just DuckDuckGo’s own advertising paying for this?
DuckDuckGo pretends they’re a startup, but that’s not true. They admit that they have been profitable since 2014, have over 105 million searches a day sometimes, and are growing rapidly.
They’re not small. They have very close ties with Microsoft, which also dumps money into these sorts of organizations in order to corrupt them and shield itself from criticism.
(Relatively speaking, the chump change that Microsoft pays off the “Linux Foundation” with corrupted and silenced that organization too.)
In fact, the number one factor in DuckDuckGo’s search results is what Microsoft Bing returns to DuckDuckGo.
So I think it can fairly be said that DuckDuckGo is a way for Microsoft to gain market share with people for whom the Microsoft brand itself is toxic, due to their many decades of law breaking, bad software, spyware, advertising network, and corrupt business practices.
Microsoft itself tries to get away from its own brands too, but even though Edge is named differently than Internet Explorer, and uses a different rendering engine now, they haven’t had much luck in getting people, on Windows, to use it.
This despite malware tactics to steal back default settings and scream at the user that Firefox and Chrome and the others “aren’t safe” (Oh, but Edge is? Well, pardon the hell out of me!). Not that this has stopped their shills from recommending it to people on GNU/Linux, who actually have a choice about what’s on their computers. (Hey, and it ain’t gonna be Edge!)
Anyway, it seems the corruption (the intended effect of DuckDuckGo’s money, which is potentially gleaned from *cough* some other source), is convincing the EFF to shut down its own security applications and pitch DuckDuckGo’s products instead.
DuckDuckGo used to have an application for Android that merely let you search it from your Home screen.
Now, the only app they make for Android is an entire web browser, where DuckDuckGo is in a position to monitor everything you do in it. It’s also not particularly convenient because there’s no desktop version of it to sync with.
But just last year, it was caught tracking its users, and they had an explanation for the tracking when they got caught, like they always seem to. “Just a bug.” Was it?
DuckDuckGo also has a Chrome and Firefox extension called “Privacy Essentials”, and the EFF is also recommending users move from HTTPS Everywhere to DuckDuckGo’s extension.
As HTTPS Everywhere goes into “maintenance mode”, users will have the opportunity to move to DuckDuckGo’s Privacy Essentials or use a browser that has HTTPS by default.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
But DuckDuckGo certainly isn’t a charity. They want all of this software on your computers for a reason, and if that reason was only to bolster their search engine, they’re already in every major web browser, and you can already use them for search that way.
They have other things to be gained from having more of a presence on your computer, or they wouldn’t be writing this stuff in the first place.
It would be better to have nothing of the sort installed on your computer than to replace HTTPS Everywhere with a DuckDuckGo application.
As the corrupt EFF itself points out, Chromium is moving in the direction of HTTPS by default, and Firefox today has an HTTPS-Only Mode (you can make exceptions), without stuffing this ducking nonsense into your computer and letting their “Whoops it’s another bug that lets us track you, but pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” position keep coming up.
(Note: I had to pull that Reddit post about Gabriel Weinberg out of the Internet Archive because Reddit, a platform for censorship from “Conde Nasty”, removed it. Reddit operates with bans and shadowbans and removes posts all the time.)
It’s unlikely that DuckDuckGo keeps getting caught violating their own privacy policy (and these are just the times they get caught) and that it’s “just bugs”. At this point, it is more likely that their privacy policy is bullshit and a lie.
The EFF has gone from being a good cause to not being worth a bag of beans in the span of a few short years. █
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10.15.21
Posted in Deception, Google, Microsoft, Search at 5:11 pm by Guest Editorial Team
Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original
When I was perusing DuckDuckGo’s corporate website for their explanation of a tracker that they use which my Web browsers block, I found their corporate headquarters address.
The tracker is called Improving DuckDuckGo, and of course they always have explanations for everything they do that’s creepy, and they get caught lying all of the time. And of course, Techrights has pointed out things like this before.
The most concerning facts are that they’re US-based (a Five Eyes country with no decent privacy laws at the state or federal levels), and can be compelled to track you by law enforcement, and that they host on Microsoft Azure and also scrape Bing for your search results. Thus, Microsoft would see your IP address on both transactions and can log your activities on DuckDuckGo quite easily, using nothing else, unless you’re on some sort of a VPN that millions of people use (like I am).
But I googled (to get a Street View image) their address, 20 Paoli Pike Paoli, PA 19301, and it’s basically a small building that they share with a dentist’s office.
Due to copyright restrictions on the images, I can’t reproduce them here, but you have to go see this. Just trust me.
The building is so small that it’s like a one bedroom apartment with some DuckDuckGo images on the side.
I mentioned this to Roy Schestowitz in #techrights on irc.techrights.org and he replied that they don’t have to have much of a physical presence considering that they use Microsoft web hosting and scrape Microsoft Bing (which isn’t a very good search engine, privacy aside).
It was creepy enough when they used Amazon AWS, and it’s creepier now that they use Microsoft for both ends of the transaction.
DuckDuckGo claims that they have their own web crawling bot and that they’re not just Bing with different artwork, but for the most part, if you search both side by side, you see very little difference in what comes back.
DuckDuckGo has recently been advertising heavily on Chicago radio stations, including the rock station saying “The DuckDuckGo for privacy traffic report.”.
I don’t think they’re very private. They may be a little bit better than Google on privacy, but a lot of that certainly isn’t by choice.
Google got as big as it is by dominating search and paying off everyone to default to it, and then propping up other projects with that cash until they stood on their own. Google’s the biggest ad network on the internet, and the only advantages, I think, that DuckDuckGo, gives you, in a major way, vs. that is that they don’t have the scale of Google to insert trackers all over the web and DuckDuckGo doesn’t require you to sign in, in order to use much of anything on it.
Years ago, Richard Stallman mentioned that signing into Google to search with it was a bad idea, and he’s right. One of the reasons Google starts popping up annoying CAPTCHA images if you use a VPN is so you will give up and sign in, and then whenever they put an ad or a beacon on another site, it associates itself with you and your search traffic.
I have a GMail account, but I don’t sign into Google in my browsers. My email clients support signing in via OAuth and then I can pull in my mail without signing in. I also block most of their third party stuff in my adblock settings, and I use a VPN.
But Google still tracks. They and Facebook and Microsoft figure out dozens of ways to track in case you block any of those methods, something will work. █
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10.13.21
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 8:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Maybe paid and defanged, co-opted like many other German publishers and EPO “media partners”?
Summary: EPO ‘genius’ António Campinos enjoys shallow press coverage, which echoes or resembles Benoît Battistelli‘s corruption of the media (paid-for fluff)
Hours ago the EPO published the above fluff (text below). A “sign of renewed interest by the Süddeutsche Zeitung in the activities of the EPO”?
Sort of.
“Recently published on the EPO’s intranet,” as our source notes, was something “[m]ore like using the SZ as a vehicle for pushing software patents.”
So Süddeutsche Zeitung writes about the EPO again. “But not for critical investigative reporting on breaches of fundamental rights,” our source adds.
Here’s the full text about “EPO’s approach to CII patenting”:
Home → Organisation → DG 0 → PD Communication → Announcements → 2021
13.10.2021
Patents in a digitised finance sector
SZ Finance Summit: President advocates greater support for innovative SMEs
Invited as the first-ever EPO speaker to participate at the annual “Bayerische Finanzgipfel” President António Campinos, spoke last week on the EPO’s approach to patenting digital inventions, and the relevance of such inventions for the European economy.
The event was organised by the publishing house SZ-Verlag (Süddeutsche Zeitung) under the auspices of the Bavarian State Ministry of the Economy. Held in a hybrid format with strict COVID measures, the Finanzgipfel attracted some 70 attendees to the congress venue in Munich, and some 250 finance and insurance experts following by video stream. The invitation to President Campinos to speak at the conference can also be seen as sign of renewed interest by the Süddeutsche Zeitung in the activities of the EPO.
The central topic around which the conference presentations and podium discussion revolved was the need of the finance industry to re-invent itself after the pandemic with the help of digital technologies. Speakers from government institutions, leading banks, insurance groups and digital technology providers shared their business experience and discussed a wide range of new digital solutions to improve their services for clients.
The President’s podium dialogue with Herbert Fromme, a leading journalist from Süddeutsche Zeitung’s economics pages, was dedicated to discussing the suitability of patents as appropriate instruments for supporting the digital technology evolution, and whether patentability of software should be legally acceptable in Europe. President Campinos responded by setting out the EPO’s approach to CII patenting, and explaining the role of the EPO’s examiners, as well as the value of our databases and systems, such as Ansera, when processing applications for digital inventions.
President Campinos concluded by encouraging the sector to monitor more closely the development of new and promising inventions in the field, as they are often submitted by start-ups, SMEs and public research institutions. These enterprises need to be more effectively supported by investors if Europe is to catch up with its competitors in Asia and the US.
Süddeutsche Zeitung gave him a platform.
Notice the ridiculously promotional ending (makes one wonder who funded this puff piece, soon to be ‘cited’ with pride by the EPO itself): “President Campinos concluded by encouraging the sector to monitor more closely the development of new and promising inventions in the field…”
Yes, THANK YOU! Thank you, Dr. Professor Sir Campinos! █
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10.12.21
Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Security, Windows at 7:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: What are people being taught about so-called ‘security’? Might that explain so many security breaches? (Poor training, wrong assumptions)
OVER the years I saw criticisms of school or classroom indoctrination about copyrights. They’re basically teaching/pushing a bunch of lies to young children in an effort to “educate” them about “copyright law” (sounds reasonable on the surface… until one actually checks what these pupils are being told).
“It’s supposed to sound sophisticated, but the net gain for security is laughable.”For ISO compliance purposes, sometimes I’m required to take and pass some online “training” courses. Some of these are ridiculously bad, so I end up taking screenshots.
This post is about fake security mindset — a concept explained here several times earlier this year. It’s supposed to sound sophisticated, but the net gain for security is laughable. Complexity does not beget security (usually the opposite is true; simplicity is auditable). Basically, it boils down to what’s sometimes known as "security theatre", owing to a ‘fake security’ cargo cult of “phones” or “apps” and “clown computing” (i.e. giving all your access credentials to some other company, along with highly sensitive data).
During my latest “training” I stumbled upon about 40 examples of amusing errors and silliness (it’s all over the place, sometimes with repetition for extra effect or ‘good’ measure), but to keep things more concise and digestable I took screenshots and annotated them a little, just as I did last year with edX [1, 2], in effect shilling for the Linux Foundation in the guise of “training”. Where does one draw the line between courses and marketing, revisionism, and even outright lies?
“Basically, it boils down to what’s sometimes known as “security theatre”, owing to a ‘fake security’ cargo cult of “phones” or “apps” and “clown computing” (i.e. giving all your access credentials to some other company, along with highly sensitive data).”Below I present just a small sample. Almost at random I narrowed it down to just a dozen rather unique examples (there are many more similar instances of these). Surely, a more exhaustive list would take a lot of time to prepare while the clock is running. At the end, one is required to lie or say what they expect you to say in order to pass the test (which I did). To be fair, the questions aren’t as terrible as the supposed ‘training’, as they don’t mention brand names there or promote outrageous fallacies.
Without further ado, let’s begin.
It doesn’t take a genius to see what’s happening here and why it’s shallow. Infantile questions like, ARE CRIMINALS A THREAT? It’s like a colouring book quiz with heroes and villains. They present actual adults with such questions. We’ll come back to it later when it comes to “exam time”.
Notice how, just like Microsoft, they’re looking to blame computer users or “criminals” (or some nations like China or Russia). Anything to divert liability away from rogue software companies that write shoddy code, hide the defects, and code back doors for the NSA et al.
Let’s move on.
Wait, I’m confused.
As if it’s the user’s fault that Microsoft cannot secure its own systems…
Yes, let’s all use ‘phones’ to manage critical servers… with “apps”.
Missing part?
No mention of “weakened” (i.e. fake) encryption.
Why are they ignoring bigger players like Facebook and Twitter? Brand promoting? Wait, there’s more right after that…
It’s 2021 and they still think everyone uses Windows. Guess what… Windows market share is less than a third.
Windows again.
OK, questions time. First in the test:
So let me guess… “criminals” are the threat. Who would have guessed?
Did I learn something from this course? Absolutely nothing. But I got some giggles. Many millions of people are constantly subjected to this kind of propaganda, which sometimes seems more like marketing than actual education. █
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