12.31.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The day of strike, the 7th of April (2016), also had this poster with a list of requests.
Summary: A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
THE EPO‘s management lies. It lies a lot. It kept telling the media that only a disgruntled minority was complaining and that there were no strikes (saying nothing about a lot of protests in 2015). Battistelli is an emperor of lies, the Liar in Chief as we often call him, and his staff generally knows this. Almost every sentence that comes out of his mouth these days contains at least one lie.
At the beginning of the year, after Battistelli had showered the media with money (EPO’s budget, not his), one could come across bogus claims that only few employees were causing all the noise and yielding negative publicity for the Office. This lie needed to be debunked and the erroneous claims tackled convincingly enough. That’s why an anonymous individual or group initiated a call for strike and the strike’s result was later advertised as follows:
Dear colleagues
As we write this, the final numbers for the strike on 7 April are not yet known, but it seems possible that it was the biggest ever strike in the history of the EPO. This is an amazing result and it shows what is possible when colleagues committed to the future of our office work together.
Our goal, as initiators of the strike, was to counter the President’s claim that only “a small minority of staff” were against him and his “reforms”. Thanks to you, we achieved that goal resoundingly. Today, there can be no doubt that across the entire EPO, people are profoundly angry about what is happening. On 7 April 2016, staff of the EPO said unmistakably that they will never accept injustice against colleagues, or abusive rules and regulations. We are sure the Administrative Council was listening. The ball is now in their court. Our thanks go to each and every staff member who went on strike!
Your colleagues,
The initiators of the strike on 7 April
We already published a lot of letters about this at the time. One letter which we never published was sent to Battistelli himself. The letter laid out 4 points and now, at the end of the year, we can say with certainty that Battistelli has fulfilled not even one of the conditions. Here is the letter:
Open Letter
Mr Benoît Battistelli
President of the EPO
ISAR – R.1081
cc.: Administrative Council
Notification of a strike
Dear Mr President,
Ms Bergot announced in her publication to staff dated 8 March 2016 the result of the strike ballot organised by the Office: Staff has voted in favour of a strike. Following this decision to start a strike, we inform you of the following.
Grounds for having to resort to the strike
No essential progress has been made on Staff’s claims as expressed in the call for strike entitled “Lawfulness at the EPO” that you received on 10 February 2016:
• the immediate suspension of the disciplinary measures against the three staff representatives
• a truly independent review of the cases against the staff representatives by a body that enjoys the full trust of both the management and the staff of the EPO
• the revocation of all recent changes to the Service Regulations and their implementing texts concerning the legal framework, …
• the initiation of open and fair negotiations between management and staff representatives, led by an internationally recognised mediator/conciliator.
Calendar and EPO sites concerned
The initiators of the call for strike have informed us that they would like the strike to happen at the earliest opportunity. Accordingly, the strike shall take place on 7 April 2016 at all sites of employment: Munich, The Hague, Berlin and Vienna.
Please be assured that the Central Staff Committee has always been prepared to enter a fair social dialogue and continues to be so. The CSC recognises the recent resolution of the AC as a positive signal and a step into the right direction. If social dialogue in the time before the strike day leads to a substantial progress on the grounds for strike, we are willing to recommend to Staff to cancel the strike action.
Yours sincerely,
The Central Staff Committee
We confirm that this letter was legitimately decided and produced by the Central Staff Committee 1.
_______________
1 Pursuant to Article 35(3) ServRegs, the Central Staff Committee shall consist of ten full and ten alternate members.
The CSC presently consists of 9 full and 8 alternate members, because two have resigned in December 2014, one has been dismissed in January 2016 (against the recommendation of the Disciplinary Committee) and one refused replacement of a full member against Article 7(3) of Circular 355.
One full member of the CSC has been downgraded in Jan 2016 (against the recommendation of the Disciplinary Committee). In fact, the Office has launched investigations and disciplinary procedures against several other Staff representatives as well, affecting negatively their health.
[...]
cc.: Mr Tobias Kirchgessner, Lawyer of the initiators of the strike “Lawfulness at the EPO”
Suffice to say, as Battistelli has done not a single thing to improve things, all those who went on strike probably continue to distrust Battistelli and disapprove his regime. A lot of those who did not go on strike probably just feared retribution, as we explained at the time (there was no opportunity for anonymity for those who participated in the strike).
2016 was another slide down a steep hill for Battistelli and his goons. 2017 will be no better until more people like Minnoye gradually exit. There is no room for peace at the EPO as long as megalomania or perception of omnipotence persists at the very top. █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 2:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The very antithesis of the Office under Battistelli’s horrible regime…
Reference: Social democracy
Summary: Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term “social democracy” whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by ‘King’ Battistelli
STAFF of the EPO is suffering. Staff representatives suffer even more.
The following Open Letter, published earlier this year, helps reveal just to what extent the union-busting activities of Battistelli have contributed to fear and erosion of staff representation in an institution that, without these safeguards, is basically no better than North Korea, with Battistelli as its “Supreme Leader”. To perfume it a little, Team Battistelli attempted to hijack adopt the term “Social Democracy” (something akin to the term used by Bernie Sanders in the US and in various other countries). Here is the letter in full (except the names of representatives, as they are already subjected to enough abuse from Battistelli and his goons):
Open Letter
Mr Benoît Battistelli
President of the EPO
ISAR – R.1081
Dear Mr Battistelli,
The so-called “Social democracy” was one of the policies introduced in July 2014 under the HR roadmap (CA/39/14), with claimed goals to “fill a legal vacuum, adapt and modernise [the EPO] social framework and provide improvements for a more efficient management of the Office.”..
After almost 2 years of implementing these policies none of these goals have materialised. Quite to the contrary and as pointed out by the AC in its recent resolution, the reality is a social situation that gives reasons for grave concern and has been acknowledged as a crisis, not only internally but by the media and other external, interested circles. The conclusion is that this situation is unsustainable and action will be required to meet the challenges set by the AC in its March resolution.
1. “Social Democracy” has a flawed design
The shortcomings of the “social democracy framework” have been pointed out repeatedly by the CSC and SUEPO, both during the statutory (albeit formally superficial) consultation processes and in diverse publications since its introduction, all to no avail.
A non-exhaustive list of unanswered communications is set out in the Annex.
2. Actual “Social democracy” is even worse than anticipated
Unfortunately, the reality of “Social Democracy” has gone well beyond Staff’s already pessimistic forecast. Just to cite some key points (see the CSC letter to the AC for more details):
- Despite all the promises made, the effective time allocated to Staff representation work has been reduced by well over 50% compared to historical figures (in accordance with Communiqué 49, the framework formerly in place). Internal documents show that this is not an accident but according to plan.
- Despite declarations that the new framework would “enhance the representativity and functions of both the Central and Local Staff Committees, regular arbitrary restrictions on nominations, duty travel and training have led to substantial disruptions to the internal functioning of these staff representation bodies. To summarise, staff representatives have been systematically hindered in organizing themselves in an autonomous, independent manner.
- The existing provisions for filling vacated positions, have not been followed: for instance, Mr Brevier (CSC deputy member from The Hague) has still not been allowed, since October 2014, to replace a CSC full member who resigned, He is still not allowed to dedicate 100% of his time for Staff Representative duties, due to an investigation, initiated by Ms Bergot now more than a year ago.
- Other staff representatives have also been targeted by the same and other investigations, which have already resulted in disciplinary procedures, the dismissal of two elected staff representatives and the downgrading of another one. These sanctions have been perceived as political rather than legal actions and were commented to be unfair and disproportionate disciplinary measures by both the media and the AC.
- Many Staff Representatives have in the meantime resigned because of perceived pressure (threats) from the administration and undue work pressure from their hierarchy. Of those remaining, many have suffered severe damage to their health, resulting in e.g. sickness, depressions or even burn-out.
To conclude, the work environment for staff representatives has become unsustainable. Maintaining the present framework amounts to harassment, is irresponsible and has led to severe damages both to the functioning of the institution representing Staff interests in the EPO and to the health of the individuals acting therein.
3. Negligent, unsustainable and not fit to meet the clear challenges set by the AC
The so-called “Social-Democracy” framework no longer allows the nomination of non-elected staff representatives to any working groups and statutory bodies. This has led to a situation where grooming of new staff representatives and delegation of work are impossible.
Combined with unfilled positions, due to resignations and dismissals, the result is today, that particularly in the big sites, the effective work capacity of available “fully fit and functional” staff representatives has reached an all-time low, which is not compatible with their duty to fully represent staff interests. More pertinently, this has become an issue of great concern in the context of the request made by the AC in its March resolution.
Clearly the situation is not sustainable in the long run and urgent action is required both to protect the health of the individual staff representatives and their capacity to genuinely and thoroughly represent staff interests.
4. Urgent action required: request authorisation to delegate work to non-elected Staff members
In the medium term, an in-depth review of the so-called “social democracy” is not only expected but required. The CSC is of the opinion that essential features of Communiqué 49 should be reconsidered and built in to the framework to overcome the obvious shortcomings of the present framework and render it more in line with democratic, best-practice standards used in similar international organisations in western civilisations.
In the short term, urgent action is required now to redistribute the workload. Hence the CSC herewith requests the President to immediately allow Staff Committees to delegate autonomously tasks to non-elected staff representatives as experts and to provide the necessary time to adequately compensate them.
The Central Staff Committee would like to stress that the Office’s apparent lack of due diligence on this matter, i.e. not following the recommendations outlined above, will continue to seriously jeopardise the announced negotiation process. It constitutes institutional harassment of the staff representation and, if continued, may lead to further complaints.
Yours sincerely,
The Central Staff Committee
We confirm that this letter was legitimately decided and produced by the Central
Staff Committee1.
_____
1 Pursuant to Article 35(3) ServRegs, the Central Staff Committee shall consist of ten full and ten alternate members.
The CSC presently consists of 9 full and 8 alternate members, because two have resigned in December 2014, one has been dismissed in January 2016 (against the recommendation of the Disciplinary Committee) and one refused replacement of a full member against Article 7(3) of Circular 355.
One full member of the CSC has been downgraded in Jan 2016 (against the recommendation of the Disciplinary Committee). In fact, the Office has launched investigations and disciplinary procedures against several other Staff representatives as well, affecting negatively their health.
[...]
cc.:
Principal Director 4.3
Members of the WG SR resources
Council Secretariat
Annex:
Non-exhaustive list of communications on the shortcomings and events of the so-called “Social-Democracy”:
- 23/06/2015 social democracy: staff representation dismantling is on track!
- 18/03/2015 [csc] letter to heads of delegation; restoration of social dialogue at the epo
- 08/12/2014 social democracy vs social peace
- 14/10/2014 [csc] battistelli’s “social democracy” – staff representatives banned from attending the administrative council for the first time in the history of the office
- 24/03/2014 letter to the members of the admin. council ” ‘social democracy’ will be quickly outdated”
- 24/03/2014 letter to ac delegations – “social democracy” – mr battistelli’s reform of the staff representation
- 24/01/2014 meeting the president 27.01.14 – social democracy
- 18/12/2013 trias politicabeyond the problems, the way out: “feuille de route” for social democracy by suepo
- 23/10/2014 [csc] the organisation of your central staff committee
- 26/05/2014 letter of vp1 to the local and central staff committee of 26.05.2014 – social democracy in progress
- 02/04/2014 reform of staff representation “social democracy”
- 12/03/2014 opinion of the members of the gac appointed by the staff committee on gac/doc 7/2014 – “social democracy”
- 14/03/2014 report of the 257th meeting of the gac on 4.3.2014 in the hague
- 21/02/2014 letter to mr r. lutz – request concerning “gac 7/14 – social democracy”
- 07/02/2014 social democracy reform of mr battistell
- 05/12/2013 letter to b. battistelli: working group social democracy
The exploitation or misuse of the term “social democracy” is rather gross. There is neither of those two things at today’s EPO. Battistelli does not understand democracy and probably never will. As staff representatives put it earlier this year [PDF] in another context, “President Battistelli has broken an EPO promise to staff to be properly involved in the management process in a Healthcare Insurance Advisory Committee in exchange for the additional risk put on them. President Battistelli seems to dislike advice: not only has he failed to create HIAC, he disbanded General Advisory Committee (GAC) and replaced it with the General Consultative Committee which, although fully populated by Vice-Presidents, is an inferior statutory body when compared to the GAC.”
In other words, Battistelli allows only Team Battistelli, i.e. those totally loyal to him, to decide on matters that don’t even involve them. It’s neither social nor democratic. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Bodyguards at nearly 100,000 Euros each?! (mysterious contract with private firm)
Summary: Even the EPO’s Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
A document published internally by the Central Staff Committee was recently leaked to us [PDF]. Part of this document is in German, but the majority is in English and it deals primarily with financial aspects although staff representatives correctly point out that patent quality has been compromised to temporarily — while unsuspecting applicants are unaware of this compromise — artificially boost some figures.
“Look what Battistelli has turned the EPO into.”The part shown above vindicates us as we previously wrote about both aspects of the Paranoid in Chief, who is buying positive media because all he otherwise receives is negative press. The subject was more recently covered in light of highly misleading puff pieces about the UPC, courtesy of papers that the EPO had paid for propaganda.
The figure above, 880,000 Euros, is already out of date and is estimated at over a million Euros per year — basically budget thrown at a highly notorious firm that manipulates the media for truly unethical firms.
Look what Battistelli has turned the EPO into. It’s not just a corrupt institution itself; it now corrupts the media too. It misinforms the public, not just employees. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Autocracy so powerful that it destroys the whole Office, rather than ensure control and stability
Reference: Omnipotence paradox
Summary: The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
Anonymously posted over a year ago was a long piece in French which compared Battistelli to Napoleon in a not-so-flattering way, putting aside corporate angles. Earlier this year we published a partial translation, but that leaves out some other bits that are worth highlighting.
For example, as one reader put it to us, with additional bits from the original (the only such article posted there from this author):
Ses maréchaux et ministres connurent des sorts divers : de l’exécution capitale jusqu’au service servile de la monarchie restaurée, alors qu’ils devaient leurs carrières à la Révolution et leur fortune à Napoléon. Rares furent ceux qui surent se tenir.
In English: “His marshals and ministers experienced various fates, ranging from capital punishment to the groveling service of the restored monarchy, even though they owed their careers to the French revolution and their fortunes to Napoleon. Few were those who knew how to behave.”
This also aptly describes Mr. Battistelli and his confederates.
Lui, intégra l’École Nationale d’Administration, l’ENA, créée en 1945, qui ne dispense pas de formation à l’autoritarisme. Mais, si elle fournit à la France des administrateurs pétris du sens de l’intérêt général ou de l’État, elle en produit aussi qui imbus d’eux-mêmes ont seuls foi en leur omniscience : il convient donc de dire qu’elle nourrit assez bien l’aspiration à l’omnipotence de certains de ses élèves.
In English: “He was admitted to ÉNA, the National School of Administration, an institution which doesn’t offer training in authoritarianism. But if she provides France administrators steeped in a sense for the common interest or of the State, she also produces self-imbued others who are believe in their personal omniscience; one must admit that she feeds the yearning for omnipotence of a few of her students.”
National School of Administration.
His portrait is thus mostly complete, with the exception of that neo Carlovingian empire bit. I’m coming to that.
Le voici donc décrit, à ceci près qu’il y manque ce néo-Empire Carolingien. J’y arrive.
Let us look at the facts in a broad sense.
Changement dans le régime des pensions à partir de 2009 et passage d’un régime de répartition à un régime par capitalisation : cela a et ne cessera mécaniquement d’avoir pour effet de réduire considérablement la responsabilité financière future de l’OEB au titre des pensions, et cet effet ira toujours en s’accroissant au fur et à mesure que partiront les anciens et arriveront les nouveaux impétrants.
Change in the pension regime beginning 2009, and transition from a pay-as-you-go system to a funded one: this has, and will, automatically reduce the EPO’s future financial liabilities for pensions, and this effect will become increasingly important as new recruits will replace leaving older staff members.
Suppression de facto du droit de grève auquel on substitua une hypothétique autorisation – car fait du prince – de prendre des jours de congés sans solde : ceci était le préalable pour donner naissance aux forceps à un nouvel Office.
De facto abolition of the right to strike, against which was substituted a theoretical permission of taking unpaid holidays, dependent of the monarch’s good will: this was the prerequisite for permitting the forceps delivery of a new Office.
Introduction de la CPC, classification technique commune entre l’office états-unien des brevets, USPTO, et l’OEB, sur la base de la Classification Européenne (EC) que l’Office, qui la développa et la maintint à ses frais, fit don à l’USPTO, à ses dépens, car perdant par là même ce qu’il avait seul construit pour atteindre l’excellence jusqu’à peu reconnue internationalement.
Introduction of the CPC, a common classification scheme for the USPTO and the EPO, which is based…
Fast-forwarding a bit we have:
Alors, que faire ?
English: “Then, what is to be done?”
Over a year has passed and quite a lot has changed. Since then, for example, Battistelli got reprimanded and his team is falling apart, with imminent top-level departures. Even French politicians are lashing out at Battistelli; several of them openly call him an embarrassment to France.
The point about ENA and omnipotence is familiar to us. To repeat a text about ENA, which we translated a year ago, the first sentence in the introduction says “In 2007, for France to survive, we need to free us from the omnipotence of the ENA.” █
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Posted in Site News at 9:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
TECHRIGHTS turned 10 earlier this year (only to experience DDOS attack on the day, so planned celebrations got delayed). It also reached a milestone of 20,000 blog posts back in February.
“Nokia, being a European company, represents the growing threat of patent trolls in Europe — a threat which the UPC threatened to make ever more real and concrete.”Aside from that, in 2016 we got the EPO‘s management on the defensive. They are losing the battle (Brexit pretty much axed the UPC’s prospects, too) and in 2017 we hope to get the EPO (the one people respected) back on track.
Joe Mullin, a good journalist who has been writing a lot about patent trolls for nearly a decade, has just listed “most dramatic patent and copyright cases of 2016″, ending the list with the news that came in just before Christmas. He writes that “Nokia has backed out of the smartphone business, but is still licensing its patents, so the two companies are back at war. Nokia has sued Apple over patents in 11 different countries. Meanwhile, Apple has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Nokia, accusing the Finnish firm of working together with “patent-assertion entities”—a.k.a. patent trolls—to “maximize the royalties that can be extracted from product companies.””
“Combative attitude against us, including routine DDOS attacks, certainly toughened us and we are prepared to do whatever it takes to get truth out.”Nokia, being a European company, represents the growing threat of patent trolls in Europe — a threat which the UPC threatened to make ever more real and concrete.
In 2017 we intend to continue to write about the EPO, highlight the woes associated with patent trolls, combat software patents, and highlight patent attacks on Free/Open Source software. 2017 will be a continuation of this past year. We intend to leak more and to escalate the tone where necessary. Combative attitude against us, including routine DDOS attacks, certainly toughened us and we are prepared to do whatever it takes to get truth out. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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As we prepare to bid 2016 a more than deserved farewell, it is a time to make our New Year’s resolutions. Regardless of your experience level as a Linux system administrator, we think it is worthy and well to set goals for growth for the next 12 months.
In case you are out of ideas, in this post we will share 10 simple professional resolutions that you may want to consider for 2017.
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Big Blue expanded its analytics, disaster recovery and security capabilities in 2016 through a series of strategic acquisitions.
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Kernel Space
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With systemd having the most commits ever in 2015 for this project, I was curious to see how the statistics for 2016 compared… To some surprise, the number of commits to systemd fell sharply and the code churn is also down to a point not seen in a few years.
In 2015 there were 5,528 commits to systemd while this year there have been 3,768 commits — a low not seen since 2012 when there were 2554 commits. But then when it comes to new code, this year were 156,491 added (and 94,288 lines removed), a low since 2011. Last year in comparison there were more than double that for lines added: 333k vs. 156k, though last year they also removed a lot of code too.
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Today (28-Dec) is Linus Torvald, Linux creator’s birthday and I wanted to share with you an easter egg hidden in the Linux reboot() system call.
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Benchmarks
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With having out a Core i7 “Broadwell” ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop for the MoCA 2.0 network tests, I decided to run some end-of-year graphics tests on this Core i7 5600U system with OpenGL and Vulkan.
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Applications
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Happy holidays and happy new year!
I am proud to announce the new release of fortune-mod – version 1.99.3 – by a new upstream (mostly me for now). fortune-mod is a program to display a random quotation on the console.
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nmon stands for Nigel’s performance Monitor for Linux & AIX, developed by IBM employee Nigel Griffiths. Initially, it was developed for IBM AIX operating system, later a version written for Linux too and released as a open source under GPL on 2009.
nmon is a another nifty tool to monitor various system resources such as CPU, memory, network, disks, file systems, NFS, top processes, Power micro-partition and resources (Linux version & processors) on Linux terminal.
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Proprietary
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For users in search of a commercially supported encryption tool for Linux with a backdoor-free guarantee, Jetico recommends its recently updated BestCrypt Container Encryption for Linux 3.0. Jetico’s BestCrypt Container Encryption automatically encrypts any selected files or folders on an active computer, shared workstation or network storage in Linux, Windows and Mac OS environments so that nobody can gain access without the right password or keys.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Alexandre Julliard had been issuing weekly release candidates of Wine 2.0 but given the holidays, he’s skipping this week but has provided a status update.
Julliard plans to resume the weekly release candidates next Friday and is anticipating still having “a couple more” release candidates. Thus he says he is anticipating to officially release Wine 2.0.0 in the second half of January, per this mailing list post.
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Games
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In this bi-weekly open gaming roundup, we take a look at the upcoming Nintendo console, System76′s joint effort with NVIDIA to fix driver bugs, and more.
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The Little Acre, an interesting cartoon-like adventure game was recently released for Linux. I gave it a go to see if it’s worth your money.
Disclosure: Key provided for me by my contacts at GOG.
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Zombie apocalypse be damned, Project Zomboid [Steam, GOG, Official Site] has a new major stable version available and it’s quite a massive update.
The game is still in Early Access, as they are working on more major upgrades for future versions.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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December, is near to its end and 2017 is finally coming. The last month was hectic though. I had my semester exams in the first half of the month and I didn’t get much time in between to concentrate on my project. But the later half was quite productive. Half time has already passed by and this month was important as I made couple of changes to my UI and code which were important and required for long-term benefits. Another important news for this month is that GCompris had its 0.70 version release this month and we have finally replaced the GTK+ version in Windows with the Qt version. 
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This is not the place to present an opinion on all the other things that have happened in 2016, but when it comes to Krita, 2016 was perhaps the most intense year ever for the project. Let’s step back for a moment and do a bit of review!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Cinnamon is a DE(Desktop Environment). DE is a collection of software, which collectively provide you a seamless Desktop experience. They are the reason, normal people who have no knowledge about the internal working of computer are able to use computers for a wide variety of purposes. Cinnamon is one such collection which is different. Different how? We will see, But for now, let’s just say that Cinnamon played a decisive role in making Linux mint, the most popular distro in the Linux world.
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When I decided to write a list of Linux distributions 2017 will see grow and improve, I didn’t realise what a task I’d set!
For while our name has Ubuntu in it, Ubuntu is not the only Linux distro we like to keep an eye on.
Over the past few weeks we’ve been asking you to tell us which Linux distributions you are excited by, and the ones you think/hope will do well in 2017.
Now it’s our turn.
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We are happy to announce the first release of Brisk Menu, our implementation of a clean, efficient, and modern menu for the MATE Desktop. Brisk Menu 0.1.0 enables quick launching of applications, as well as access to session controls (such as logout, suspend, hibernate) and the system’s Control Center.
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Today in Linux news The Document Foundation offered a 2017 wall calendar to print off and hang on your wall. Elsewhere, OMG!Ubuntu! shared their picks for distros to watch in 2017 and Fedora has 17 image viewers for 2017. Sourceforge and TecMint have resolutions for administrators and developers as Google heads to Linux.conf.au 2017.
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It is time for the final vote. I have already given you my opinion on the finest performers when it comes to individual desktop environments – Plasma, Xfce and even Gnome, but now, following in the best of our annual traditions, we need to vote on the most complete, most successful distribution of the year.
Unlike the desktop environment votes, it will not be purely based on the final score. I will also incorporate other elements – how deeply has a particular distro charmed me, whether I have continued using it after the initial review, how it has evolved, and of course, the critical stability, support and friendliness parameters. And then, there’s your vote, too. So let’s run through the coveted shortlist. To wit, the 2016 elite.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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We’re proud to wish you a good luck in new 2017 year.
We’ll try our best to continue developing our linux distributions even much better in new 2017 year.
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Gentoo Family
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Today, December 30, 2016, Alexander Tratsevskiy had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of Calculate Linux 17, a Russian desktop-oriented computer operating system based on Gentoo.
Calculate Linux 17 comes seven months after the Calculate Linux 15.17 release and promises great new features, including the latest KDE Plasma 5.8.5 LTS, MATE 1.16, and Xfce 4.12 desktop environments, along with the long-term supported Linux 4.4.39 kernel.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Is the Raspberry Pi destined to be coming to your datacenter? If not the Pi, then something like it — maybe Arduino or a single board computer we haven’t seen yet, perhaps developed by one of the OEMs? Unless I miss my guess, a Pi-like device is soon going to make up the guts in a new breed of server.
Back in November, SUSE announced that it has ported SLES, its flagship Linux operating system, to run on the Raspberry Pi 3, and has released it under the somewhat predictable name SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Raspberry Pi. According to the announcement, as well as an accompanying blog post by jayk, this is no big deal. It was done mainly just for the fun of it, with its only practical application being “that it would be really a cool way for our field team to demonstrate SLES at trade shows.”
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The Rolling spins of GeckoLinux have been updated to a newer openSUSE Tumbleweed base system, together with some configuration improvements. Additionally, the GeckoLinux Static spins have also been updated with similar improvements.
GeckoLinux offers live installable Rolling spins based on openSUSE Tumbleweed, and live installable Static spins based on openSUSE Leap 42.2. GeckoLinux currently offers customized spins for the Cinnamon, XFCE, Gnome, Plasma, Mate, and LXQt desktop environments.
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Red Hat Family
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Finance
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Fedora
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Another awesome Fedora release, and another awesome Release Party in Novi Sad!
The party took place, like last time, on the Faculty of Science, University of Novi Sad in the Department of Mathematics and Informatics. To be even more precise, it’s about three minutes away from our Fedora-powered computer lab! About forty people (among who was a Fedora ambassador from Uruguay) attended! We had four talks about different topics regarding Fedora, security, and hackerspaces.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Tux is the official mascot of Linux. He is named so because the penguin looks as if he is wearing a tuxedo. Tux isn’t much visible on various distributions that borrow the Linux kernel as their base. Tux4Ubuntu is a project aimed at bringing Tux to the never before places in the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
“We want to bring Tux, the Linux penguin, to Ubuntu! From boot to desktop we’ve created themes that include Tux in all the right places,” says the team behind the Tux4Ubuntu project.
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Ubuntu 16.04 Unity 8 current state
qt5, gtk3 native on mir, snaps, ubuntu snap store, system settings etc
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Phones
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Tizen
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Samsung has reached South Asia and Southeast Asia, but the Korean giant is not done with its Tizen OS expansion plans. Now, the company has its sights set on Iran and the Middle East (West Asia), where it intends to set up a Tizen development centre in Iran and push toward its goal of 100 million users of the company’s mobile platform by the end of next year.
Samsung’s goal in establishing its Tizen development centre in Tehran is to ensure that its results lead to localized software, services, and applications that utilize the Persian language so as to appeal to local users. A special team will keep an eye on the trend of the IT industry in Iran so as to know how to meet the needs of local users.
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Android
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Android is in a very different place than it was when 2016 began. While the last 12 months were filled with much of the usual pomp and circumstance surrounding the release of new handsets, connected gadgets, and OS refreshes, the state of Android has never been more promising or less predictable. Google stepped out from behind the curtain and into the spotlight. Headsets took over smartwatches as the trend of the moment. And Samsung’s phablet woes opened the door for smaller players to make big gains.
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As the most popular OS on Earth, Android finds itself on a lot of different form factors. Sure, there are smartphones in countless different flavors, and Google has expanded the OS to cover tablets, watches, and TVs. But there’s way more to the Android world than that.
Remember, the core Android platform is open source, which means all sorts of companies want it for things other than the typical Google-suggested use cases. Android is becoming the OS of choice for everything with a screen. So that’s what we’re diving into—the weird world of Android devices.
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Depending on where you stand, 2016 was either the best year ever for open-source software, or it was a year of controversy and danger. While it’s undeniable that 2016 saw more contributors to open source and more open-source projects than any prior year, it’s also true that this was a year of strife for communities, developers and users alike.
Chief among those problems would have to be the Dirty COW local privilege escalation attack, a major vulnerability that seems to have been hiding inside the Linux kernel for the past nine years. The discovery of this exploit isn’t necessarily a knock against open-source software as a whole: The bug might never have been found if the sources weren’t also available.
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It seems like only yesterday that 2016 begun and we were just about to see great changes happening with SourceForge. Now we’re at the end of it, readying ourselves for yet another year.
As fond as we are of the year that was, now is not just a time for remembering “Auld Lang Syne”, but also a time to prepare for what comes next. For open source project developers that means not only reflecting upon decisions and actions made, but also coming up with new resolutions that will define the future of open source projects.
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Any analytic report about who writes the code in open and collaborative environments will reflect how corporations involvement is increasing in Open Source software development at every level. More and more companies are transitioning from becoming FLOSS consumers to producers and almost every new software company out there has Open Source as a core strategy or even as part of their DNA.
But who is sustaining the development of that key piece of software that will be a core part of your future product? Who pays those developers? Why? How does the key stakeholders benefit from the outcome of the ecosystem and the software they produce? How much do they invest in the production of that software? For how long? How do they get their income? What is the relevance of the software produced by the ecosystem they feed in their business models?
These and similar basic questions need to be fully understood before a specific software becomes part of your key product or business. Knowing the answers to the above questions might not prevent you from surprises in the future but at least can prepare you for the potential consequences. What it is clear to me is that these answers are becoming more complicated to find and understand over time, specially for those companies who do not have a strong background on Open Source.
Choosing a specific piece of software based on purely technical variables or even present healthiness of the community around the project/organization, expectations of the number of contributors or impact in general might not be enough any more. A specific community or project will become “your provider” so the business model behind it is equally important.
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Events
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It’s a new year and open source enthusiasts from around the globe are preparing to gather at the edge of the world for Linux.conf.au 2017. Among those preparing are Googlers, including some of us from the Open Source Programs Office.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla engineers have added a mechanism to Firefox 52 that prevents websites from fingerprinting users using system fonts.
The user privacy protection system was borrowed from the Tor Browser, where a similar mechanism blocks websites from identifying users based on the fonts installed on their computers.
The feature has been active in the Tor Browser for some time and will become active in the stable branch of Firefox 52, scheduled for release on March 7, 2017.
The font fingerprinting protection is already active in Firefox 52 Beta.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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2017 is just around the corner, so here’s a shiny calendar from The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice community. Print it out, hang it on your wall, and here’s to a great 12 months ahead!
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Hungary has decided to withdraw its membership from the OGP, following a disagreement with the OGP Steering Committee on a report.
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Scotland published its first Open Government National Action Plan since it has been selected by the Open Government Partnership (OGP) as one of the fifteen “Pioneer” governments in April 2016.
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During the Paris OGP Summit 2017, Germany and Luxembourg were among the European countries that announced their intent to join the Open Government Partnership. Portugal said it will “soon” become a member of the institution.
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The countries participating in the Open Government Partnership (OGP) are shifting their attention from “getting the basics right” to innovative measures and reforms that translate into actions capable of generating real change. After ‘public service delivery’, the areas ‘fiscal openness’ and ‘access to information’ are the most prevailing in the commitments for 2015-2016.
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The Paris Declaration, which was presented at the OGP Paris Summit in December, will encourage cooperation between countries and civil societies to promote open government on a global scale. The Declaration lists twenty-one collective actions in which governments can take part and share experiences. “Actions are concrete cooperation, output-orientated and will produce tangible results”, the text of the Declaration states.
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Open Data
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Etalab, the French agency in charge of Open Data in France, and INSEE (Institut National de la Statistiques et des Etudes Economiques) – the French national agency for statistics, organised in November a hackathon to test and use the data of the SIRENE (Système informatique pour le répertoire des entreprises et des établissements) database which will be published as open data in January.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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The year 2016 opened the door to a new phase of highly automated driving, moving the discussion away from “wouldn’t it be nice-to-have-a-robo-car” to a more immediate “to-do list” with which regulators, car OEMs and technology companies must grapple if they hope to make self-driving cars commercially viable and safe.
Gone are days of early-adapter giddiness over the Google car, or an “Autopilot” Tesla with over-the-air software upgrades.
Reality sank in 2016. The industry is now aware Autopilot’s limitations. The automotive engineering community is taking a crash course in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that’s far beyond today’s computer vision. Engineers are taking note of challenges in machine learning (how do you certify the safety of AI-driven cars?). Many automakers are scrambling for a holistic approach toward cybersecurity.
So, what’s in the auto industry 2017 agenda that could change the course of robotic car development?
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If you’re like most people, you wake up to an alarm ringing on your smartphone. Then you probably roll over and check your work email.
That’s a dangerous way to start the day, according to a woman who studies happiness for a living.
Reading just one negative email could lead you to report having a bad day hours later, says Michelle Gielan, former national CBS News anchor turned psychology researcher and best-selling author.
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This year’s Deathwatch was meticulously curated. After an ad-hoc process for candidate selection—including pleas for input from our secret cabal of Ars readers, editors, and covert operators—our Deathwatch electoral college scientifically assessed each nominated candidate. There was some heavy ballot stuffing for candidates like “the Environmental Protection Agency” and “the United States of America” in this year’s reader balloting. We suspected voter fraud, so we threw all that out and just went with our gut.
This year, we’ve picked a magnificent seven companies for the Deathwatch. 2017′s list includes two (well, three, sort of) returning champions and a whole bunch of new contenders. Let’s kick things off by noting that it’s a bad year for companies whose names start with “Y.”
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Health/Nutrition
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Flint can’t turn the calendar on 2016 fast enough.
But will 2017 be any better?
If history is any indicator, Flint’s situation may only get worse if those guiding the water crisis recovery are not very careful.
It was nearly a year ago that the Flint water crisis exploded on the national scene.
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A judge has appointed a mediator in a federal case that could dramatically change how the state of Michigan responds to the Flint water crisis.
Last month, U.S. District Judge David Lawson ordered the state to immediately begin delivering safe bottled water to Flint residents. Right now the state provides water and filters but residents have to pick it up or call a hotline to get it delivered.
Flint officials argue in court documents the city simply cannot afford to deliver supplies to everyone. The state filed documents saying water tests show Flint’s water is meeting federal standards. The state is asking Judge Lawson to dissolve this order.
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Security
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A story published by The Washington Post Friday claims Russia hacked the electrical grid in Vermont. This caused hysteria on social media but has been denied by a spokesman for a Vermont utility company.
The Post story was titled, “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say.”
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The 2016 U.S. presidential election was preceded by unprecedented cyberattacks and produced a result that surprised many people in the U.S. and abroad. Was it hacked? To find out, we teamed up with scientists and lawyers from around the country—and a presidential candidate—to initiate the first presidential election recounts motivated primarily by e-voting security concerns. In this talk, we will explain how the recounts took place, what we learned about the integrity of the election, and what needs to change to ensure that future U.S. elections are secure.
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Fun stuff ahead for some website owners, thanks to a breakdown in the registration process. A Swiss security researcher has spotted bogus ICANN blacklist removal emails being sent to site owners containing a Word document that acts as a trigger for ransomware.
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Defence/Aggression
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In an extraordinary development Thursday, the Obama administration announced a series of sanctions against Russia. Thirty-five Russian nationals will be expelled from the country. President Obama issued a terse statement seeming to blame Russia for the hack of the Democratic National Committee emails.
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The bloody Syrian war got bloodier when President Obama allowed U.S. Mideast allies and hawkish U.S. officials to supply weapons to Sunni jihadists including those fighting alongside Al Qaeda’s affiliate, reports Gareth Porter.
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President-elect Donald Trump exploded a half-century of U.S. nuclear-arms policy in a single tweet last week: “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” With that one vague message, Donald Trump, who hasn’t even taken office yet, may have started a new arms race.
Trump’s statement set off alarms around the world, necessitating a cadre of his inner circle to flood the airwaves with now-routine attempts to explain what their boss “really meant.” On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow confronted former Trump campaign manager and newly appointed Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway about the shocking tweet:
Maddow: “He’s saying we’re going to expand our nuclear capability.”
Conway: “He’s not necessarily saying that—”
Maddow: “… He did literally say we need to expand our nuclear capability—”
Conway: “…What he’s saying is…we need to expand our nuclear capability, really our nuclear readiness, our capability to be ready for those who also have nuclear weapons.”
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I am an atheist, but I have been reading in and about Islam since 9/11, and I see that it is not like other religions. It is a violent, totalitarian system masquerading as a religion. And because the Quran is said to be the word of Allah — handed down from Allah through the Angel Gabriel to Mohammed — it is supposed to be unquestionable and unchangeable. This likely means there is no reforming Islam.
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The court said that the boys would have been ‘hit very hard’ by deportation because of the security situation in Afghanistan.
Four of the defendants received jail terms of 15 months while the fifth was given 13 months, Expressen reports.
Prosecutors had claimed that one of the attackers filmed parts of the assault, overnight on October 24 and 25, and posted the footage on social media.
The victim, also from Afghanistan, went to police before five suspects were detained on child rape charges, it has been reported in Sweden.
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The 36-year-old Ramzan smiles, eager to please, as he uses his fingers to count out her age when they married. One, two, three . . . until 13, and then he stops and looks at her, points and nods several times.
The girl’s father, Wazir Ahmed, says she was 14, not 13, but her age was beside the point. It mattered only that she had reached puberty when he arranged her marriage as an exchange: his daughter for Ramzan’s sister, whom he wanted to take as a second wife.
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In Kuria, public ceremonies celebrating the illegal season of female genital cutting have been allowed to take place unchallenged
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It has been reported that hundreds of girls in Kenya will spend the holiday season in schools instead of going home to avoid being subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) by their parents.
BBC News has revealed that although many schools should have closed over a month ago, they have remained open to shelter the girls, while some churches are doing the same.
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Of course Russian hackers exist. They attack this blog pretty well continually – as do hackers from the USA and many other countries. Of course there have been attempted Russian hacks of the DNC. But the report gives no evidence at all of the alleged successful hack that transmitted these particular emails, nor any evidence of the connection between the hackers and the Russian government, let alone Putin.
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As Official Washington rages over alleged Russian hacking of Democratic emails, a forgotten back story is how the U.S. government pioneered the tactics of cyber-war and attacked unsuspecting countries, recalls Michael Brenner.
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The Obama administration’s final moves on the Israeli-Palestinian issue — a symbolic resolution allowing the United Nations Security Council to condemn Israeli settlements and a speech by Secretary of State John Kerry warning that the settlement project could permanently end the two-state solution — has sparked a critical backlash from the country’s supporters.
These reactions range from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling the resolution “shameful” to right-wing members of Congress threatening to defund the United Nations.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Two of the nation’s foremost FOIA enthusiasts — Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro — are suing a variety of federal agencies for their failure to respond to requests for documents related to the 2016 election.
The first lawsuit, filed a couple of weeks ago, concerns records pertaining to FBI director James Comey’s actions in the last few weeks before Election Day. Most of the documents sought relate to the FBI’s on-again, off-again investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. The pair also seeks a variety of communications between Comey and the rest of the FBI, as well as any internal FBI discussions about the number of leaks that accompanied Comey’s last-minute dive back into the email investigation.
Shapiro and Leopold are also seeking unredacted copies of Clinton email investigation documents previously released by the FBI. They also would like to see what the FBI has on hand that references a variety of right-wing news sites, including Breitbart News and alternativeright.com.
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Leopold had requested FBI Director James Comey’s talking points for a variety of subjects, including “going dark,” the terrorist attacks in Paris, the “Ferguson Effect,” and encryption. The FBI responded with two things, both of which add up to nothing.
The letter Leopold received noted that the FBI had found 487 pages responsive to his request. Of those, the agency will be releasing a grand total of zero pages. All 487 have been withheld under FOIA exemptions b(5) through b(7)(E).
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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China will ban all domestic ivory trade and processing by the end of 2017, state media reported on Friday, in a move hailed by activists as a gamechanger for Africa’s elephants.
African ivory is highly sought after in China where it is seen as a status symbol and prices for a kilo (2.2 pounds) can reach as much as $1,100 (£890).
“China will gradually stop the processing and sales of ivories for commercial purposes by the end of 2017,” the official Xinhua news agency said, citing a government statement.
The announcement follows Beijing’s move in March to widen a ban on imports of all ivory and ivory products acquired before 1975 after pressure to restrict a trade that sees thousands of elephants slaughtered every year.
Xinhua said the complete ban would affect “34 processing enterprises and 143 designated trading venues, with dozens to be closed by the end of March 2017”.
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Several years back, some conservative columnists wrote pieces that accused a prominent climate researcher of having fraudulently manipulated data, phrasing it in a way that made comparisons with a convicted child molester. The researcher demanded the columns be removed; when the publishers refused, he turned to the courts. His suit, filed in the District of Columbia’s Superior Court, has been kicking around ever since, as motions to get it dismissed have ended up languishing amidst more filings and an appeal.
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Buoyed by the success of Indigenous resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a coalition of Canadian First Nation chiefs have launched legal action against the Trudeau government for its recent approval of the Enbridge Line 3 expansion.
Derek Nepinak, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, wrote on Facebook Wednesday that the group’s legal team filed an appeal in federal court challenging the approval, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced late last month in tandem with the expansion of Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline.
Condemnation of both projects was swift, with First Nations vowing to fight back. “Just as Indigenous Peoples are showing unwavering strength down at Standing Rock, our peoples are not afraid and are ready to do what needs to be done to stop the pipelines and protect our water and our next generations,” Nepinak said at the time.
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Finance
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The first assault of the new Trump administration and Republican Congress upon Social Security has been launched. It comes in the form of release of a new report by the Congressional Budget Office, which of course these days is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Congressional Caucus.
Using some financial sleight-of-hand, this CBO report pushes forward by two years the date at which its ideologically driven experts claim Social Security benefits will exhaust the Trust Fund, and since the Social Security program is required to be self-financing, the date at which, barring adjustments by Congress in the program’s funding and/or benefit payment levels, promised benefits would have to be cut by what the CBO claims will have to be 31%.
Such a cut would clearly be a staggering blow to the finances and livelihoods of nation’s retirees, dependents and the disabled.
This end-of-the-year CBO report is at odds with a report issued earlier this year by the Trustees of the Social Security Administration, which projected that the Trust Fund, barring any changes in taxes or benefit payments, would be tapped out in 2033, and that at that point benefits, barring some fixes in Social Security financing, would have to be cut by an also horrific but far lower 21% (with the remaining 79% of benefit payments being covered by current employee FICA taxes being paid into the system).
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Washington Post, quickly followed by the New York Times and NPR and many others, headlined a story that Trump’s transition team asked the State Department for a list of programs and jobs aimed at promoting gender equality.
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On this week’s program, we hear a speech by Ralph Nader, recorded in Berkeley CA this past October, and hosted by Mickey Huff. Nader spoke on some of the themes of his latest book, “Breaking Through Power,” and explained his proposal for a public-interest lobbying organization with a presence in all 435 Congressional districts.
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Another member of a group selected to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration is protesting.
Jan Chamberlin, a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, is quitting the group and saying that she could never sing for Trump.
She sent a resignation letter to the choir president this week.
“I’ve tried to tell myself that it will be all right and that I can continue in good conscience before God and man,” Chamberlin wrote in a Facebook post. “I only know I could never ‘throw roses to Hitler.’ And I certainly could never sing for him.”
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How badly did those who survived worshipping Adolf Hitler in the early days must have felt when they learned the truth, that just about everything the “fuhrer” told them was a lie… How badly will a performer feel when this great adventure turns out badly? How badly will those foolish voters feel in a few years when the economy is in the tank and the world hates what USA is doing even more than they do now?
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It would be nice if we weren’t remind daily just how petty politicians can be (on all sides of the aisle… so don’t go making this about one party or the other). Over the summer, we wrote about a situations in which House Democrats tried to stage a protest on the House floor — and House Republicans responded by gavelling the House out of session and turning off the live feed on C-SPAN so that the protest could not be easily seen (again, this isn’t partisan: the House Dems did the same to House Repubs eight years ago). In response, some of those participating in the protest started using Periscope and Facebook Live to livestream online from the floor.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Roskomnadzor, the Kremlin’s federal censorship agency, is responsible for regulating the Internet in Russia, which includes enforcing police orders and court decisions to ban websites and online services deemed “harmful” or “illicit.”
According to figures released in April 2016, Roskomnadzor has blocked more than 25,000 websites, though the actual number of sites affected by these bans is more than 600,000, say activists at RosKomSvoboda, because they share the same IP addresses as sites blacklisted officially.
Today, the number of banned websites in Russia is still rising steadily. As 2016 comes to a close, RuNet Echo looks back at the five most controversial, infamous, and even ironic actions this year by Russia’s federal censors.
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As internet access becomes more prevalent around the world, so too do attempts to suppress it. According to digital rights organization Access Now, there were more than 50 attempts by governments to shut down the internet during 2016.
Access to internet was cut for a variety of reasons throughout the year, including several attempts to stifle dissent and affect outcomes of the democratic process.
Deji Olukotun, the senior global advocacy manager at Access Now, told the Inter Press Service an internet shutdown was imposed in Uganda by President Yoweri Museveni–including a blackout of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter —on the morning of election day.
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A journalist was temporarily banned from Facebook after a post in which he called Trump supporters “a nasty fascistic lot”, in the latest example of the social media platform’s censorship of journalists.
Facebook “reviewed and restored” the post by Kevin Sessums after being contacted by the Guardian and dropped the posting ban.
“We’re very sorry about this mistake,” a spokesman said. “The post was removed in error and restored as soon as we were able to investigate. Our team processes millions of reports each week, and we sometimes get things wrong.”
Sessums, who is well known for his celebrity profiles for Vanity Fair and two best-selling memoirs, says that he shared a Facebook post from ABC political analyst Matthew Dowd that read: “In the last few hours I have been called by lovely ‘christian’ Trump fans: a jew, faggot, retard. To set record straight: divorced Catholic.”
[...]
“It’s chilling. It’s arbitrary censorship,” Sessums said. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, do I have to be careful about what I say about Trump now?’”
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Google removed over 900 million pirate site URLs from its search results in 2016. The staggering number is an increase of nearly 100% compared to the year before. While Google has taken some steps to make pirate sites less visible, it continues to disagree with rightsholders on how to move forward.
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Chief among those opposing ideas they want silenced are Donald Trump’s. His remarks — from the silly, labeled unpresidential, to the more extreme labeled racist/sexist/misogynist/hateful — have attracted a surprising group of otherwise intelligent people demanding he be shut up.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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It begins: Amazon’s constantly-listening robotic home assistant was near a domestic murder case, and now the Police wants access to anything it might have heard. There have been similar cases in the past, but this is where it starts getting discussed: There are now dozens of sensors in our house. Do we still have an expectation of privacy in our home?
A recurring theme in the dystopic fiction of the 1950s was an everpresent government watching everything you did, as witnessed in the infamous Nineteen Eighty-Four and many others. Adding to the dystopia, starting in the 1970s with movies such as Colossus, computers are typically added to the mix of watching everything all the time.
However, these fictional dystopias all got one critical thing wrong in predicting the future: the government never installed cameras and microphones in everybody’s home. We did. We did it ourselves. And we paid good money for them, too. A smart television set — with infrared cameras built in, watching the people watching the television set as well as listening to them — costs good money that we happily paid.
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We’ve previously documented that the hacking evidence against Russia is extremely weak, and the new report on Russian hacking doesn’t say much.
Indeed – if Russia hacked the Democratic party emails (from the DNC and top Clinton aide John Podesta) – the NSA would have all of the records showing exactly who did it.
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Over in the UK, we’ve highlighted many of the problems of massively expanding surveillance through the (most likely illegal) “DRIPA” (Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill) and the new Snooper’s Charter. And yet, the government there keeps insisting that such powers would never be abused. But, that’s ridiculous. As we’ve seen in the past, it’s difficult to find examples of surveillance powers not being expanded and abused over time. And, now the UK is realizing exactly how that works. The Guardian, via Freedom of Information requests, has discovered that local British councils were given the ability to use surveillance powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to spy on all sorts of people for what appear to be minor infractions…
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Open Whisper Systems, the company that makes the Signal encrypted messaging app and that contributed to the encryption in Facebook-owned WhatsApp, today updated its Signal app for Android with the ability to avoid being censored in two more countries: Cuba and Oman.
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Last week it was Egypt, and now users in Cuba and Oman can send messages without fear of them being intercepted and altered by lawmakers.
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Signal Private Messenger has been simplifying the encryption of voice and text messages for several years now. Not only is it a drop-in replacement for existing Android and iOS contract and messaging apps, but its handling of encryption handshakes is invisible to the user, making encrypted messages no harder from the end-user’s perspective than non-encrypted ones. That is an accomplishment in itself, but Signal has gone one step further, releasing a beta version of Signal Desktop for Android, allowing users to text and play calls from a laptop or workstation synced to a phone.
Signal has come in for some criticism, which I should probably answer before going further. First, the rumor persists that its server code is proprietary. According to Open Whisper Systems, the non-profit that develops Signal, that was true until June 2016 because restrictions on the Apple store were incompatible with the GNU General Public License. However, changes in those restrictions now make it possible to license Signal’s server code under the Affero General Public License, which the Free Software Foundation recommends for on-line services.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Despite ongoing national scrutiny of police tactics, the number of fatal shootings by officers in 2016 remained virtually unchanged from last year when nearly 1,000 people were killed by police.
Through Thursday, law enforcement officers fatally shot 957 people in 2016 — close to three each day — down slightly from 2015 when 991 people were shot to death by officers, according to an ongoing project by The Washington Post to track the number of fatal shootings by police.
The Post, for two years in a row, has documented more than twice the number of fatal shootings recorded by the FBI annually on average.
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A Saudi man has been jailed for a year after he called for an end to the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom’s male guardianship system.
The unnamed man was also fined 30,000 riyals (£6,500) after being convicted of “inciting to end guardianship of women”, the daily Okaz newspaper reported.
He was arrested while putting up posters inside mosques which called for the government to abolish strict rules giving men control over women.
The man admitted to pinning up posters in several mosques and said he solely launched an “awareness campaign” after finding some “female relatives were facing injustice at the hands of their families,” the daily newspaper said, according to the AFP news agency.
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If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.
Mr. Trump made his animus toward the news media clear during the presidential campaign, often expressing his disgust with coverage through Twitter or in diatribes at rallies. So if his campaign is any guide, Mr. Trump seems likely to enthusiastically embrace the aggressive crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers that is an important yet little understood component of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy.
Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.
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A new law forcing French companies to give their workers the right to ignore their smartphones outside of work hours takes effect Sunday.
The measure — introduced as part of a controversial overhaul of the French labor code earlier this year that is the first of its kind in the world — will oblige companies that employ more than 50 people to negotiate a set of rights with their staff about when they have to work outside of contracted work hours.
In 2015, Labor Minister Myriam El Khomri commissioned a study that warned about the dangers of “info-obesity,” suggesting that using a smartphone to check work emails at all hours of the day can cause burnout, sleeplessness and relationship problems.
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Today, there is nothing stopping the American republic, which has already devolved into a plutocracy and is recognized as such by even some mainstream political science scholars, from disintegrating further. For certain, after first sparking a democratic revolt (which seems to be happening right now) but later descending into a chaotic political order, the American republic will eventually degenerate into a dictatorship – or “rule by the criminal” – where US society would be guided by those exhibiting only the basest of human emotions.
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Poor poor Drumpf. Turns out he is unbeloved not just by the Rockettes, most Americans and almost every other country – see China’s shiny new Trump rooster and an international cascade of horrified, belittling images – but by many Mormons. Despite a long tradition of political neutrality and conservatism, many Mormons are reportedly upset at the planned appearance of their iconic Mormon Tabernacle Choir at the inauguration of a sexist, racist, intolerant, moronic alleged president-elect who “DOES NOT reflect the values of Mormonism and does not represent its diverse 15+ million members worldwide.” Charging that Trump betrays the church’s principles and values, almost 30,000 Mormons have signed a petition to protest the scheduled performance and demand it be cancelled.
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In September, after months of organizing via smuggled cellphones and outside go-betweens, prisoners across the country launched a nationwide strike to demand better working conditions at the numerous facilities that employ inmate labor for little or no pay.
The strike, which spread to dozens of institutions in 22 states, briefly called attention to a fact about prison labor that is well-understood in America’s penal institutions but scarcely known to the general public: Inmates in America’s state prisons — who make everything from license plates to college diploma covers — are not only excluded from the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on slave labor, but also exist largely outside the reach of federal safety regulations meant to ensure that Americans are not injured or killed on the job. Excluded from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s mandate of protecting American workers, these inmates lack some of the most basic labor protections other workers take for granted.
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Corruption remains Ukraine’s biggest problem. According to polls conducted in December 2016, 89% of the country’s population considers the current government’s battle against corruption to be a failure. As Petro Poroshenko reaches the halfway mark of his first term as president, these figures don’t bode well.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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We’ve talked a lot about how the FCC’s refusal to outright ban “zero rating” here in the States opened the door to all manner of net neutrality violations and anti-competitive behavior. Thanks to this omission, we’ve now got gatekeepers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all exempting their streaming content from usage caps, while penalizing competing services. Consumers also now face T-Mobile and Sprint plans that throttle video, music and games by default — unless users pony up an additional monthly fee. Some folks, like VC Fred Wilson, saw this coming a long way off.
And while the FCC only this month acknowledged this kind of behavior is anti-competitive and problematic, the “enforcement” (which is a pretty generous term for the weak-kneed letters the agency is sending out) comes too late as the FCC appears poised to be scheduled for a defunding and defanging under the incoming Trump administration.
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DRM
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Imagine a world where your Internet-connected car locks you in at the behest of its manufacturer—or the police. Where your media devices only let you consume mass media, not remix it to publish a counter-narrative or viral meme. Where your phone is designed to report on your movements and communications. Where your kid’s toy tells them it’s their friend, then talks about how much it loves sponsored products and transmits everything it hears in your home back to its manufacturer. Where your phone stops working if the police or the manufacturer ask it to. Where these backdoors are vulnerable to hacking, so anyone with the right resources can take advantage of them.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The wheels of justice have turned to the point where Team Prenda copyright trolling efforts have netted John Steele and Paul Hansmeier federal indictments. The list of charges the pair face is ugly: mail fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and suborning perjury.
After Prenda’s many copyright lawsuits fell apart, Paul Hansmeier decided to start trolling small, local businesses with ADA lawsuits, hoping to turn what little legal expertise he has into profitable settlements. During this time, Hansmeier was also facing the dismantling of an attempted bankruptcy filing — one that very much looked like an attempt to avoid paying judgments resulting from Prenda’s years of bullshit. To avoid having his assets turned over to creditors, Hansmeier engaged in some creative accounting, like handing off money to a newly-formed trust and… dumping cash into a cardboard box.
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We’ve written quite a few times about EU Commissioner Gunther Oettinger, a bigoted luddite, who bizarrely was put in charge of internet regulations for no clear reason at all. His main focus seemed to be on putting in place policies whose sole goal was to harm the internet because many key internet companies are American. Oettinger, who seems to be magnetically connected to all sorts of scandals has failed upward to a new job as the EU’s budget chief, but as EU Parliament Member Julia Reda notes, he’s still leaving a trail of internet destruction in his wake. In particular, she highlights ten everyday internet activities that would be outlawed if Oettinger’s copyright and internet proposals become law. It’s a pretty eye-opening list, and should raise serious questions about why Oettinger was ever put in charge of anything having to do with the internet.
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12.30.16
Posted in America, Asia, Patents at 2:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
South Korea typically finds a healthy balance on patents, from which the country benefits (economy and innovation)
Seoul Plaza, South Korea
Summary: An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population’s interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
THE NEW YEAR IS ABOUT to start and we are eager to see governments all across the world recognising that patents have gone too far if examiners are granting millions of them. Techrights was never an anti-patent site; rather, it was pro-patent quality. We need to limit patent scope so as to ensure that the practical (or economic) impact of patents benefits society at large. The former Chief Economist of the EPO spoke about it earlier this winter.
“We need to limit patent scope so as to ensure that the practical (or economic) impact of patents benefits society at large.”Florian Müller has this new article about a Korean antitrust ruling. We have been writing about rulings of this kind for nearly a decade (going back to the Korean ruling on monopolistic Intel) and 3 months ago we wrote about Microsoft's latest patents controversy in Korea. We remind readers that Korea’s official position is that software is not patentable (different from Japan’s and China’s policy).
“I wish to point out,” Müller wrote, “that ACT is generally very IPR owner-friendly, but when it comes to FRAND licensing of standard-essential patents, its positions are pretty consistent with mine. An organization that takes similar positions on FRAND (and of which Google is a member) is the Brussels-based Fair Standards Alliance. Presumably the reason the FSA hasn’t spoken out on the Korean ruling yet is simply that people in Brussels tend to be on vacation this week (to a far greater extent than in the U.S.).”
“For the record, Florian Müller assured me he had been in no way associated with (or paid by) Microsoft for several years now.”As we noted earlier this year, the Fair Standards Alliance is rather mysterious, but the same cannot be said about ACT. I politely told Müller it’s worth pointing out that Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) is a Microsoft front group with decades of history (going back to the nineties, under another name and acronym). We have exchanged some messages about that [1, 2, 3, 4]. For the record, Florian Müller assured me he had been in no way associated with (or paid by) Microsoft for several years now. A lot of what we wrote about Florian Müller is no longer relevant/applicable as he left behind his Microsoft work and has no intention to do that again. Some people will never forgive him for that, but I have. I believe that he’s not “up for sale” now that he leads a team of “app” developers, hence not dependent on contracts from companies like Oracle, either.
“Just updated post on antitrust ruling against Qualcomm with link to unofficial translation of KFTC press release,” he added, after he mostly focused on ACT’s message. Here is a report we found about the news earlier this week:
A South Korean regulator said it would fine Qualcomm Inc. about $853 million for alleged antitrust violations, the highest such penalty handed to an individual company here, as the U.S. chip maker faces global scrutiny over its patent-licensing business.
A lot of people later discussed the relevance of this to the situation in China, where Qualcomm’s shakedown efforts have only met very limited success.
The Reinhold Cohn Group, writing this new article (“China may become more liberal towards business method and software related patents”), reminds us that China has gone bonkers with patent scope. SIPO now copies/emulates the mistakes of the USPTO and it already becomes a patent trolls’ heaven. It’s beneficial to nobody. “On 27 October 2016,” as the law firm put it, “the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) published, for comments by the public, proposed draft revisions to its current Examination Guidelines for examining software-related inventions. In the draft revised Guidelines SIPO goes one step further, as, in addition to granting patents on software-related inventions that solve a technical problem, is willing to allow patents for data carriers, and, in some cases, even for business methods.”
“SIPO now copies/emulates the mistakes of the USPTO and it already becomes a patent trolls’ heaven.”So basically they want to be the garbage dump of failed patent applications, or the equivalent of scholarly journals that almost blindly accept every submitted paper (and are hence worthless and have no following). We are gratified to see the USPTO departing from this lunacy left (having been accentuated) by David Kappos. Incidentally, some LLC (usually trolls) turns out to have sued the USPTO for last year’s long outage; it has just lost the case*.
Jasper L. Tran, writing in the Iowa Law Review, has just published “Abstracting About “Abstract Idea”” — a short paper in which he tackles the classification of some patents as “abstract”. Also today, an article titled “Software patent eligibility in Canada: IP year in review” was published but then deleted, maybe by accident. █
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* To quote Pharma Patents Blog: “On December 2, 2016, Judge O’Grady of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted the USPTO’s motion to dismiss the complaint brought by Elm 3DS Innovations, LLC over the “holidays” declared December 22-24, 2015 when the USPTO experienced a power outage that impacted its electronic filing systems. The decision may leave other stakeholders wondering whether Elm was not the best party to challenge the USPTO’s action, or whether the action is simply unreviewable under the APA.”
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 1:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
IT wasn’t too long ago that we mentioned Heiko Maas in relation to his complicity, by inaction, in EPO scandals. He has received so many letters (and copies of letters) about the situation, yet he seems to be deaf in both ears and blind in both eyes. It’s like everything about the EPO goes right into his shredder as a matter of policy.
Suffice to say, Germany has plenty to gain from the UPC because it cements Germany’s near-monopoly on EU-wide patents. It does to prosecution what was already done examination- and appeals-wise.
“We are now starting to suspect that Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas ignores EPO abuses (crimes by national laws) out of convenience.”Found today via Christine Robben from Team UPC is this blog post from her employer, which said just before Christmas that a “draft bill for the implementation of the UPCA was published on 9 December 2016 by Justice Minister Heiko Maas. Together with the UK, Germany is one of the two countries that still have to ratify the UPCA before the Unitary Patent system can start functioning.”
We are now starting to suspect that Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas ignores EPO abuses (crimes by national laws) out of convenience. Moreover, he pushes Battistelli’s agenda forward with the UPC. Is he complicit then? Or just a bystander-type enabler? One who refuses to intervene because he has something to gain (or to fear)? How does that relate to Germany's media blackout regarding EPO abuses as of late? It’s almost as though large publishers/editors receive instructions not to ‘meddle’. The EPO wastes a lot of money trying to accomplish just that.
Let it be clear that for Germany to oppose the UPC would make no sense. “Entering into force of provisional [UPC] phase (early opt-outs) is still unclear,” Alexander Esslinger wrote about it, but Germany’s main barriers at the moment are Spain and the UK. WIPR gives a platform to those who promote the UPC in the UK, but the UPC has no future here; even Lucy has just been sacked (or resigned), only a few weeks after she promised the impossible.
The UPC would be utterly disastrous to European businesses. We wrote many articles about this in the past. The UPC would also be very damaging to EPO staff, notably judges. Things are already being pushed to the brink of planned failure, as Battistelli understaffs the boards of appeal (BoA) and limits access to them. Battistelli does to the appeal boards the same thing Tories do to the NHS, as a preparatory step preceding replacement.
Ricardo Ontañón of Clarke Modet & Co has just published this article about the weirdness of EPO oppositions in the Battistelli era. To quote the first paragraph:
Analysis of the lack of clarity in opposition proceedings before the EPO
The European Patent Office (EPO) confirmed in recently issued Decision G3/14 the practice highlighted in earlier decisions (T301/87), whereby establishing that during opposition proceedings of a European patent the Opposition Division of the EPO can only analyze the lack of clarity of the amended claims when the amendments made may introduce an alleged lack of clarity.
Ultimately, considering how eagerly Battistelli seems to be following China's footsteps, all these steps that helped assure patent quality may be phased out/deprecated, leaving both plaintiffs and defendants spending a fortune in ‘unitary’ courts that don’t speak their language and handle patents whose legitimacy ought to have been questioned/scrutinised at the European Patent Office/BoA, not in the courtroom (high costs associated with flights, lawyers, interpreters etc.).
Now that we know Heiko Maas is a wilful enabler of the UPC we are going to approach his utterly reckless attitude towards the EPO’s management as part of the problem. █
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