11.24.16
Posted in Asia, Patents at 1:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
With a combined population greater than a third of the world’s population
Summary: India and China are moving in somewhat opposite directions when it comes to patents, as one realises their impact on people whereas the other chooses to repeat the mistake made by the United States (patent maximalism for corporate gains)
TECHRIGHTS spent over a decade writing about the USPTO and about as long writing about the EPO, especially when President Brimelow made mistakes “as such”. Patent scope is a crucial decision which impacts many sectors in a country; it’s simply misguided to believe or to think that more patents would translate into more innovation and commonwealth. It doesn’t work that way.
The latest IAM Weekly newspaper says in the “Editor’s round-up” that “we wondered whether one of India’s leading IT companies has all but abandoned software patents, looked at a patent-driven rapprochement between InterDigital and Huawei, and explained why Asian investors are sinking their money into IP management businesses.”
“Patent scope is a crucial decision which impacts many sectors in a country; it’s simply misguided to believe or to think that more patents would translate into more innovation and commonwealth.”We covered all of these (in recent days) and IAM has just published this “international report” about India, where software patents continue to be disallowed (excellent policy, which is routinely under fire from foreign multinationals, not domestic giants).
India got its balance right on patents (also when it comes to medicine, not just software), so why is China going the other way? This is already harming some of its own industry and attracts a great deal of trolls (making nothing and trying to extort everyone for money).
According to this new article from IAM, “IP analytics start-up PatSnap has closed its Series C funding with investments from Sequoia Capital’s China arm and Beijing’s Shunwei Capital Partners. The deal further underlines Asia-Pacific investors’ growing interest in IP management and strategy services.”
“Lack of quality control at SIPO leads to a false sense of growth, as is the case at the EPO under Battistelli where old files are pulled out and rubber-stamped for fake growth or illusion of growing demand, clout, etc.”This shows yet more of that obsession with patents, even in domains that require none of them. Companies that produce nothing want to make money and they are essentially a kind of trolling industry — like that which threatens to expand in Europe if the UPC ever becomes a reality.
Based on IP Kat‘s Tian Lu, there was some UPC propaganda in the EU-China IP Forum earlier this month [1, 2]. To quote a portion from the second part: “This panel on specialist IP courts also saw some optimism from Pierre Veron (member of the Drafting Committee of the Rules of Procedure of the Unified Patent Court and now a member of the group of experts advising the Preparatory Committee of the UPC), who expressed the view that even without UK participation post-Brexit, the other participating Member States of the EU would press ahead with the UPC project in the long term and would seek to ensure that the UPC will be a success.”
We are going to deal with UPC in a separate post, but let’s just say that it’s troubling to see these overlaps between China and Europe and it’s not because of fear of China (Chinophobia) but because of SIPO.
“China is fast becoming a hotbed of litigation and it already ‘exports’ such litigation to other countries (many reports on that these days).”Lack of quality control at SIPO leads to a false sense of growth, as is the case at the EPO under Battistelli where old files are pulled out and rubber-stamped for fake growth or illusion of growing demand, clout, etc. The SIPO examiners, as many professionals out there will agree/can attest to, just grant a lot of patents composed in Mandarin right and left. There are two new reports, one from MIP and another from IP Watch, which amplify SIPO’s propaganda, citing a WIPO report. Some Chinese patents that are counted at the EPO are not even translated into a European language, let alone examined/validated for their quality, yet here we have another repetition of the misleading claim that China ‘leads’ by having a crappy patent office that accepts crap applications. If one was to judge the USPTO similarly (over 10 million patents and counting), the EPO would look rather bad.
If only China adopted a saner approach to patenting (like in India), the world’s high-tech industries would be better off. China is fast becoming a hotbed of litigation and it already ‘exports’ such litigation to other countries (many reports on that these days). This problem is likely to become more apparent in the coming years. █
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Posted in Audio/Video, Europe, Patents at 12:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photos:
Videos:
Summary: An outline and translations of press coverage regarding today’s protest, which ended four hours ago
As expected, people who work for the EPO marched in protest at midday. This action was, notably, supported by FNV. “Strong Solidarity Message From FNV,” SUEPO wrote today/yesterday, “The Biggest Dutch Union (1 million members!).”
“The FNV published on 23 November 2016 an article entitled “Medewerkers European Patent Office in actie tegen angstcultuur” [and] Translation is available in English” (local copy)
“Omroep West feedback about EPO demo 24-11-2016,” one reader told us about early coverage from today’s protest, as early as a few hours after it (there is certainly more on the way). Petra Kramer has translated this for us and noted that “[t]he video is the only newsworthy part imo [in my opinion], the rest is yesterday’s press statement again.” (regarding FNV, as posted here yesterday in English along with other coverage)
Here is Kramer’s translation:
Hundreds of European Patent Office workers take action against ‘tyranny’ director
THE HAGUE – More than four hundred employees of the European Patent Office (EPO) in Rijswijk demonstrated against their director Benoît Battistelli at Square 1813 in The Hague on Thursday. The reason for the demonstration is the poor relationship between the staff and the director.
According to the employees the have been suffering under “the yoke” of their director. ““Battistelli rules with an iron fist and tolerates no participation or contradiction. He dismisses people at will, demotes them, and unilaterally implements changes to working conditions and demotivates if the entire organization,” said union FNV.
The demonstration on Square 1813 call employees Secretary Martijn van Dam (Economic Affairs) to take action against Battistelli.
Source: Honderden werknemers Europees Octrooibureau in actie tegen ‘tirannie’ directeur
Video: Honderden werknemers Europees Octrooibureau in actie tegen ‘tirannie’ directeur
WIPR, which is based in the UK, wrote about this as well and it gave background as follows:
Staff members at the European Patent Office (EPO) are holding a demonstration today in the centre of The Hague in support of dismissed workers.
According to a statement from the Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO), the demonstration is being held to show solidarity with “dismissed, downgraded and targeted staff representatives and SUEPO officials”.
A source close to SUEPO said that they would “truly prefer not to have to hit the streets again to publicly complain” about the EPO management.
Earlier this month, Laurent Prunier, elected member of the central staff committee and secretary of SUEPO in The Hague, was sacked.
No coverage from IAM (as usual) and only a mere tweet from MIP about it.
We intend to monitor press coverage about this. The Dutch Parliament too is increasingly interested in the subject, so there is an opportunity for reprieve. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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From the revelations of Edward Snowden to the potential problems with the Internet of Things and the latest malware, security and privacy are constantly in the news. The trouble is, while everyone is concerned about security and privacy, few know what to what to do about them. Fortunately, Linux has endless tools to address these problems without requiring that everyone become an expert.
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Desktop
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When it comes to Linux distributions you generally don’t hear a lot about Lubuntu. However, this Ubuntu spin can be a great help to users with older computers who need a light-weight distribution that requires minimal hardware resources.
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Server
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Cumulus Networks recently announced the availability of its Cumulus Linux Network Command Line Utility (NCLU) to help network engineers access the benefits of Linux, using software similar to Command Line Interface (CLI) that they’re accustomed to.
This all may seem counterintuitive to Cumulus’ stated goal of making switches behave more like servers. By creating its NCLU, it seems to be adjusting its own operating system to behave more like a Cisco switch.
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Back on October 15th 2016, Helm celebrated its one year birthday. It was first demonstrated ahead of the inaugural KubeCon conference in San Francisco in 2015. What is Helm? Helm aims to be the default package manager for Kubernetes.
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At Skippbox, we developed kompose a tool to automatically transform your Docker Compose application into Kubernetes manifests. Allowing you to start a Compose application on a Kubernetes cluster with a single kompose up command. We’re extremely happy to have donated kompose to the Kubernetes Incubator. So here’s a quick introduction about it and some motivating factors that got us to develop it.
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Docker Inc, the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Docker application container technology, is working hard trying to help all of its DevOps constituents, including both developers and enterprises, that use Docker in production.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux-Hardware-Guide tests and rates all types of hardware for their Linux compatibility for the knowledge base. A test report is created for each investigated hardware component and, if necessary, additional Linux configuration help is provided. Furthermore, Linux users can add their own hardware to the database and transmit hardware details and test results with a dedicated scan software. This allows creating a broad data basis and semi-automatic filling of the knowledge base. The Linux-Hardware-Guide is not limited to a single Linux distribution but instead tries to support all distributions and as many Linux users as possible. Currently, it supports 27 different Linux distributions. Additionally, the Linux-Hardware-Guide facilitates the knowledge transfer between Linux users who have exactly the same hardware under operation, because problem finding and solving often is much easier if someone else with exactly the same hardware is available.
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Graphics Stack
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With Croteam recently having released an updated Talos Principle with better Vulkan performance and the NVIDIA 375.20 and AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 both having come out recently, here is a fresh OpenGL and Vulkan graphics API performance comparison when using Valve’s Dota 2 and The Talos Principle, both of which games on Linux offer both graphics API renderers.
This article is a look at the latest NVIDIA vs. AMDGPU-PRO performance with the newest drivers for both OpenGL and Vulkan. A follow-up article will include results when testing the RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan driver code too. A fresh Windows vs. Linux OpenGL/Vulkan performance comparison is also being worked on as thanks to our readers this holiday season. This is all thanks to those that support Phoronix via viewing the site without ads, making a holiday tip, or joining our premium program, such as through this week’s Thanksgiving event. Plus a number of other exciting unrelated Linux graphics articles coming out in the days ahead.
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One of our readers informs us about the general availability of the Intel Graphics Update Tool 2.0.3 for Linux-based operating systems, which finally brings support for the latest Ubuntu and Fedora releases.
Previously known as Intel Graphics Installer for Linux, the Intel Graphics Update Tool is designed to let users install the latest graphics drivers for their Intel HD GPUs. It’s specifically made for Ubuntu and Fedora distributions, and the latest version finally adds support for Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) and Fedora 24, though Fedora 25 is out.
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Last month AMD sent out their big feature pull to DRM-Next for staging ahead of Linux 4.10 while now a secondary feature pull request has been sent in of more material for this next kernel development series.
Last month’s Radeon/AMDGPU DRM-Next 4.10 code had support for multiple virtual displays, a new VM manager, support for UVD power-gating on more hardware, power management improvements, more fixes, and other fun.
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Applications
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Shotwell developer Jens Georg announced the immediate availability of the first point release for the Shotwell 0.25 unstable series of the open-source image viewer and organizer for GNU/Linux distributions.
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Proprietary
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Windows isn’t going anywhere, but with Citrix’s Linux Virtual Desktop, VDI admins who want to work with open source desktops can actually do so.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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As expected, Valve’s Steam Autumn Sale 2016 kicked off today, just in time for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, bringing great deals for over 6,800 games across all platforms and over 12,000 titles across all categories.
Steam Autumn Sale 2016 starts now, November 23, 2016, and ends Tuesday, November 29, at 10am Pacific Time (PT) or 6pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). If you’re a Linux gamer, then you should get your wallet ready because there are over 1,800 titles on sale, including the recently ported Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
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The Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) platform is now supported officially by Steam, which means you can use the alternative headset to play all sorts of games and experiences there. It also gives OSVR its own category, so if you’re looking to buy compatible titles, you can search for them alone.
The idea behind the OSVR is to make virtual reality as hardware agnostic as possible. It is designed with a modular build, so you can upgrade it over time and offers a visual experience comparable to that of the currently available commercial VR headsets. Its tracking solution is an Oculus-like camera system and it doesn’t have motion controls yet, but the developers are getting there.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Yesterday, we reported on the availability of the second development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, and we promised we’d cover the most important application updates pushed as part of this unstable branch.
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Today we’re continuing our reports on the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment with what landed for the GNOME Shell user interface and Mutter window and composite manager as part of the GNOME 3.23.2 development release.
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They missed Tuesday’s GNOME 3.23.2 release, but available as of Wednesday evening is Mutter 3.23.2 and GNOME Shell 3.23.2.
Mutter 3.23.2 now stacks docks below other windows on full-screen windows, supports touchpad pinch gestures with more than two fingers, implements drawing tablet support on X11, fixes some Wine games starting minimized, fixed switching between scrolling modes on Wayland, support for EGLStream/EGLDevice, and other bug fixes and improvements. The EGLStream/EGLDevice support is what allows the mainline NVIDIA Wayland on GNOME support.
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In this exact moment, I’m packing up my stuff to attend the Core Apps Hackfest organized by Carlos Soriano and kindly hosted by Kinvolk. It’ll happen in Berlin, German.
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Like I wrote before, we at Collabora have been working on improving WebKitGTK+ performance for customer projects, such as Apertis. We took the opportunity brought by recent improvements to WebKitGTK+ and GTK+ itself to make the final leg of drawing contents to screen as efficient as possible. And then we went on investigating why so much CPU was still being used in some of our test cases.
The first weird thing we noticed is performance was actually degraded on Wayland compared to running under X11. After some investigation we found a lot of time was being spent inside GTK+, painting the window’s background.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling distribution should be happy to hear that the repositories were flooded this week with hundreds of updated packages.
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SUSE has released the first official 64-bit Linux-based operating system for Raspberry Pi 3. This release is basically a version of Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 that supports Raspberry Pi 3. The users need to visit SUSE’s website, make an account, and download the OS image.
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As promised in previous posts, we want to share with you our experience and views from this year annual Ruby conference Euruko. Maybe “our” is too much to say, since we only sent one developer there. So to be precise, these are Josef Reidinger’s experience and views on the conference.
This year Euruko took place in Sofia, capital of Bulgaria. It turned out to be a great conference place. Public transport works very well, everyone speak English and even when it uses Cyrilic alphabet, almost everything is written also in Latin one.
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Red Hat Family
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Unified storage has long been talked about in the storage industry, but different vendors have offered their own interpretations of what it means. Unified storage can range from the basic claim where all protocols are supported but each has its own internal storage silo, to a truly unified system where storage is shared across multiple protocols, and storage and compute can be assigned to each protocol as needed. A truly unified storage system allows for dynamic allocation of storage and system resources to incoming workloads, resulting in better resource utilization and performance and delivering the maximum cost and operational benefits.
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Finance
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Fedora
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After a long trip through Venice, Dubai and Saigon I finally arrived to Phnom Penh and the first thought I had was: wow, so hot and humid, that will be fun! At the exit of the airport a Tuk Tuk driver was waiting for me with a nice Fedora banner. He took my luggage and ten seconds later were in the middle of Phnom Penh’s rush hour. I think there is not really a word for it, you need to see the traffic with your eyes to understand that. Although I’m italian and I was several times to Naples and other cities of South Italy, it is nothing compared to Phnom Penh.
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Work continues on Factory 2.0…
Recall that we have 1000 different problems we’re trying to solve, but we’re attempting to focus on an isolated subset for now: problems we’ve picked so that their solutions can enable higher-level problem solving in the coming months.
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Fedora used to be the leading, bleeding edge Linux distribution. Then its release cadence slowed down. Today, with its second release of 2016, Fedora 25, Fedora is back to exploring the newest Linux releases and programs.
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The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 25, the next big step our journey into the containerized, modular future!
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Of note for developers, Fedora 25 includes the Go 1.7 programming language compiler as well as support for Unicode 9.0. The open-source Rust language, which is developed by Mozilla, also makes its debut in Fedora 25.
“Fedora 25 provides the Rust compiler and its Cargo package management tool,” the release notes state. “Rust is a fast-compiled programming language that prevents segmentation faults, ensures thread safety, and supports both functional and imperative-procedural paradigms.”
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Debian Family
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The last couple of days, I worked on getting Debian to run on the Raspberry Pi 3.
Thanks to the work of many talented people, the Linux kernel in version 4.8 is _almost_ ready to run on the Raspberry Pi 3. The only missing thing is the bcm2835 MMC driver, which is required to read the root file system from the SD card. I’ve asked our maintainers to include the patch for the time being.
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I spent a few days in Cambridge for a minidebconf. This is a tiny version of the full annual Debconf. We had a couple of days for hacking, and another two days for talks.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Today, November 24, 2016, Debian developer and Ubuntu member Julian Andres Klode announced that he plans on turning off SHA1 support for APT repositories starting January 1, 2017.
As you might know, or not, the long-awaited deprecation of the SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) encryption, which is used to verify digital content, CRLs (certificate revocation lists), and digital certificates, is set for the first day of January 2017 worldwide, which might affect your Internet browser.
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Flavours and Variants
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We reported the other day on the official availability of the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment, which you can now install on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Ubuntu 16.10 machines, and it looks like the second point release is already out.
That’s right, we’re talking about Cinnamon 3.2.2, which arrived a few hours ago with lots of improvements and bug fixes, such as the ability to show a separator on applets’ context menus and a new mechanism for highlighting applets that have open menus, as well as better keyboard navigation for the Menu applet with some specific keys.
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Phones
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I am a incorrigibly in picking non-mainstream, open smartphones, and then struggling hard. Back then in 2008, I tried to use the OpenMoko FreeRunner, but eventually gave up because of hardware glitches and reverted to my good old Siemens S35. It was not that I would not be willing to put up with inconveniences, but as soon as it makes live more difficult for the people I communicate with, it becomes hard to sustain.
Two years ago I tried again, and got myself a Jolla phone, running Sailfish OS. Things are much nicer now: The hardware is mature, battery live is good, and the Android compatibility layer enables me to run many important apps that are hard to replace, especially the Deutsche Bahn Navigator and various messengers, namely Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Threema and GroupMe.
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We have passed a significant milestone for the planet’s digital connectivity. As of last quarter, we passed the tipping point where now there are more smartphones in use, than dumbphones (aka ‘featurephones’). The new sales of smartphones has been more than dumphones for three years but with the installed base, worldwide, it takes this long for the trends to catch up. And as smartphones now sell more than 4 out of every 5 new phones, this trend will go to its logical conclusion. In five years we’re at the point where all new phones sold are smartphones; and by middle of the next decade, the last dumbphones will quietly disconnect from their networks for the last time.
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Tizen
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A couple of the most wanted apps by Tizen users is a photo editor app has been added to the Tizen store last month. The apps named Instatags and Monograph are created by Arrie Affanto. Both apps are easy to use, have some good features, and don’t take much storage space.
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As part of it’s Black Friday offerings Samsung has some great discounts on quite a bit of its latest Tizen tech. So if you’re looking for a fridge that has Family hub Integrated in it, the latest smartwatch, or a Tizen smart TV then they might have something that will sway you to part company with your hard earned cash.
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For the first time we have a Tizen Developer Conference for Smart TV Russia 2016, taking place from November 30 – December 1, 2016. The event will be held in Moscow at the “Marriott Hotel Novy Arbat”.
As the name suggests this will be a Tizen Developer Conference for Smart TV that will Introduce app developers to the exciting world of TV apps and educate them to the Tizen TV platform and architecture. You will be able to learn all the features and possibilities of SmartTV including multitasking, instantOn, preview, checkout on TV, etc.
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Android
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If you have one of the devices that’s eligible for this developer preview and you have been signed up for the Android Beta Program, then Google will automatically send an over-the-air (OTA) update to your device. The update will be over the coming week, according to Dave Burke, Google vice president of engineering. You can still sign up for the Android Beta Program if you want to test this latest OS release before it becomes available to everyone. And if you’d like, you can download images and flash them onto supported devices.
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New details of the upcoming Nokia Android phone, expected to be unveiled at the MWC 2017 in Barcelona, have surfaced online. According to a tipster based in China, the upcoming Nokia Android phone will feature a 5.2-inch or 5.5-inch screen size. The rumours claim that the smartphone will sport 2K (QHD) display, which means that the handset may belong to the high-end category.
Additionally, the Nokia Android phone is said to be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC which may seem slightly dated considering all new smartphones are now featuring Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 under the hood. One of the highlight feature of the upcoming Nokia Android phone is said to be the Zeiss lens for the primary camera, something that has been seen on earlier Nokia devices.
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Startup phone maker OnePlus has a new flagship Android smartphone. Well, tweaked phone might be more accurate.
Less than six months after it released the $400 OnePlus 3 to critical acclaim (Mashable’s included), OnePlus is back with the OnePlus 3T — a faster and longer-lasting OnePlus 3.
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OnePlus has always been a people pleaser. It’s an impulse grown, in part, from the hardware startups close connection to a tight-knit fanbase. As other new entrants like Le Eco on the smartphone scene push to be the biggest and flashiest, the company has been producing excellent handsets from the very beginning, devices capable of taking on the top flagships at a fraction of the price.
But the 3T is a bit of conundrum. It’s certainly in keeping with OnePlus’s focus on quality, but for those who went all in with the company’s last flagship a few months back, the phone may feel like a small-scale betrayal, upping the specs and entirely replacing the phone half-a-year after its introduction.
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One of the advantages of choosing a shiny new Android phone over those Apple handsets is the extra scope for home screen customization. If you’re stuck for inspiration or wondering how to get started, here are 10 ways of tricking out your home screen and other parts of the Android OS.
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The explosive woes of Samsung’s defective Galaxy Note 7 franchise have helped catapult China’s Huawei past the South Korean conglomerate as the most profitable Android smartphone manufacturer in the world. Apple aapl continues to remain the most profitable of all smartphone makers with a staggering 91% operating profit market share.
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A couple of days ago we told you about the possibility of a “Glossy Black” Galaxy S7 Edge in the works. Just 48 hours later and the first images of that upcoming device have now appeared on Chinese microblogging site, Weibo. The photos show a very shiny, very sexy S7 Edge that’s quite similar to the Olympics Games edition, but without the accents.
The baby blue version of the Galaxy S7 Edge is now available across all U.S. carriers, but the new shiny black version is expected to arrive in December sometime. We would expect it to arrive as early as possible though, to give it the best chance of being snapped up in time for the holiday buying frenzy.
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If open source is not already an integral part of your IT strategy, then it’s time for a re-think. Today’s open source solutions are just as secure and feature rich as the proprietary offerings in the market and come with many added benefits.
Of course some might espouse the cost efficiencies of open source but for many organisations, the decision to adopt open source technologies has more to do with capability and community. For starters, open source is inherently flexible, removing vendor lock-in and providing code which can be customised or extended to meet a particular need. This flexibility is essential for rapid innovation and also adding new capabilities within already complex IT environments.
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Nextcloud is a cloud software alternative that gives you full control over your data. It’s designed for both individuals and organizations with many users. It’s a relatively young project, being a fork of the similar ownCloud project, which is also worth checking out and comparing.
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Open source software is on the up and up. More companies, software development houses and individual developers are making use of it. But, isn’t the very concept of open source inimical to security? It could be argued both ways, but the reality is that if it is being used – and it is – then companies had better have a good understanding of the implications for their system, and how to secure it.
First of all, some basics of the open source world. It is important to understand the difference between free and open source software. Free software is software that can be used without paying a licence fee – think of Adobe Acrobat Reader or Winzip – whereas open source software allows users to access the source code itself.
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About a year ago, Fujitsu created the Open Service Catalog Manager (OSCM), their first full software project contribution to the open source space. Ries describes this a “winding road” where they moved through several different steps to ultimately release the OSCM as an open source project. They started with “Consensus Ridge” to decide whether Fujitsu should even do this as an open source project, which was easily answered because so many of their customers and the industry are demanding open source solutions.
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Humans are driven quite a bit by emotions. You may be a rational human being, but your emotions will still drive many of your choices. You can be excited, angry, interested, or sad about things—it doesn’t matter—you’ll react to those emotions and you’ll very often leak that into your communications.
You’ll likely leak your emotions, and so will other members of the community. If you think humans should suck it up and act like nothing is happening, I’m afraid you are living in a bubble. That is not how humans operate. That’s not how humans interact.
Some humans know this and these humans should make sure other humans know this as well: Emotions matter and they affect our daily tasks. Emotions take control over us many times during our day and they determine how our day will go. Being thick skinned doesn’t really matter. It just means you can control your emotions a bit more than others, but you still react to them. You react in a different, perhaps more controlled, way but you still react to your emotions.
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In March 2015, the leadership of Berlin-based Zalando gathered the company’s entire tech team in a hip underground techno club (it’s Berlin, after all) and announced a new way of working—something called “Radical Agility.” Inspired by Daniel Pink’s Drive, Brian Robertson’s Holacracy system and the agile movement, Radical Agility emphasizes Drive’s call for autonomy, mastery and purpose as the pillars of the company’s tech strategy and culture.
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Blockchain technology matured a lot this year. Sure, it’s still unclear why banks should use it — needs vary by company. But it is clear blockchains provide more value if they can interact with each other.
Competing blockchain vendors have worked hard to differentiate their products and sell them to banks. In the process some players have begun open-sourcing their software — following the same path as operating-system programmers and architects of the internet.
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Fast forward a few dozen years and here we are, Open Source is now an ecosystem, not a user group that you and five friends attend, or a magazine to which you subscribe. The problem is that most of us have stopped talking about the different types of open source, we just assume it is both. Most of the projects in our corner of the world – PHP – actually is both. The PHP license – a derivative of the BSD license – is very open about giving you freedom with very few responsibilities. Other projects use GPL, MIT, Apache, and other licenses. Each developer or group has the right to select whatever license they feel most comfortable with for their code. If you use their code, it is your responsibility to abide by the restrictions and responsibilities of their license.
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Events
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This week I was delighted to see that we could take the wraps off a new event that I am running in conjunction with my friends at the Linux Foundation called the Community Leadership Conference. The event will be part of the Open Source Summit which was previously known as LinuxCon and I will be running it in Los Angeles from 11th – 13th Sep 2017 and Prague from 23rd – 25th Oct 2017.
Now, some of you may be wondering if this replaces or is different to the Community Leadership Summit in Portland/Austin. Let me add some clarity.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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Funding
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Thanks to a single staff member, ten volunteer board members, and dozens of interns, volunteers, and members, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) protects and promotes open source software, development and communities, championing software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition, and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement. Although primarily known for our role in certifying open source licenses, today OSI’s mandate includes, fiscal sponsorships for emerging projects, hosting of open source working groups, and cross-discipline community building, all in an effort to extend the reach of open source in education, government, nonprofits, and business. In order to move forward with our work, we are asking members and open source contributors and enthusiasts to take the next step and donate to the OSI. Join us in our work for the next year by donating to the OSI today!
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BSD
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Things happened, stuff changed.
X550 support among other ix changes and cleanup.
Ongoing switch work. Better OpenFlow compat. You know it’s serious when tcpdump gets an update.
Loongson 3A support.
[...]
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The day of November 23, 2016, brought us the second Beta development release of the upcoming FreeNAS 10 open-source storage NAS (Network Attached Storage) operating system based on FreeBSD, just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday.
FreeNAS 10 Beta 2 comes almost three months after the first Beta milestone, and the devs are proud to say that the upcoming operating system, which will be a total rewrite, is now feature complete, and there are many GUI enhancements for the Dashboard, Volume UI, Accounts, System, Services, Networking, Calendar, Console, and Peering. Also, it looks like feature-parity with the FreeNAS 9.10 is in place now.
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Today’s big news comes from the OpenBSD Foundation, via director Ken Westerback.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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“In five years, France has progressed from an “empty chair” policy to that of an observer and to then become a member of OGP and its vice-president”, declared Axelle Lemaire, France’s Secretary of State in charge of Digital Affairs, at the Paris Open Source Summit, speaking about the country’s Open Government policy.
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Open Data
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This month, the eu.us.opendata library was published on GitHub. The software provides developers in the statistical programming language R with a universal way to access economic data from the EU and the USA.
The library was developed as part of the EU-US Transatlantic Open Data Partnership, a collaboration between the US Department of Commerce and its Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on the one hand, and the EC’s DG Connect and Eurostat on the other.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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[drtorq] promises more hacking on the printer in the future, so this is just step one. We expect the mods will be a lot like a typical 3D printer, except the heated bed is absolutely necessary on this model. The printer is more like a CNC engraver than a 3D printer since it is basically an XY carriage with a nozzle that flows batter instead of polymer.
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Programming/Development
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In recent years, JavaScript has seen a staggering number of libraries and frameworks come and go. In can be difficult to make important decisions about which software to use in your projects, as there is always the risk of depending on a library that the maintainer will not be able to support and, at worst, may end up abandoning.
To try and tackle some of the issues surrounding the support and development of the JavaScript ecosystem, the well-known jQuery Foundation and the Dojo Foundation have decided to join forces and fuse into the JS Foundation, a project backed by the Linux Foundation (if only I had a cent for every time someone says “Foundation”!).
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JavaScript has become increasingly more popular, especially with the introduction of Node.js, which has allowed full-stack JavaScript development. As this 20-year development language continues to rise, a group of individuals began to notice something: Math in V8 (a JavaScript engine) is broken.
In advance of Node.js Interactive, to be held Nov. 29 through Dec. 2 in Austin, we talked with Athan Reines, software engineer at Fourier, about the importance that JavaScript Math library has to the overall community; how they discovered underlying implementations were not accurate; and why a group of individuals are working to fix this.
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If you want to be successful (whether as a leader or a senior engineer), you need to be someone who can look at the big picture, assess how to move forward, and then get everyone working on the same page again. That is true leadership and what most managers value in great employees.
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This is the script for a talk that I gave at BarCamp Philly. The talk is a “live committing” exercise, and this post contains all the information needed to follow along, as well as some links to relevant source material and minus my pauses, typos, and attempts at humor.
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While not essential, a repository for real-life tasks or issues in a club can be a helpful planning tool. It also makes it easy for people to see what the club or group is working on. This promotes the idea of transparent and open leadership. You can use labels to tag issues for specific types of work or committees. Milestones are useful for deadlines or goals the group is working towards. The new Projects feature may also be useful in a repository for real-life task management.
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It’s been a while since last covering Zapcc as a new, super-fast C/C++ compiler yet it has evolved and now the latest beta is reporting to show even more impressive performance gains.
Zapcc is a compiler based on LLVM/Clang that has routinely strived for maximum performance not just for compile-time performance but also the resulting performance of the compiled binaries.
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Supporters of a plan for California to secede from the union took their first formal step Monday morning, submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general’s office in the hopes of a statewide vote as soon as 2018.
Marcus Ruiz Evans, the vice president and co-founder of Yes California, said his group had been planning to wait for a later election, but the presidential election of Donald Trump sped up the timeline.
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Science
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On Tuesday, President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to several luminaries in the arts, sports, and sciences.
Of those, the class of 2016 included two women who played crucial roles in American computer science in the 20th century: Margaret H. Hamilton and Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who was given the award posthumously.
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Security
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It appears that the office supply giant, Office Depot, isn’t adverse to tarnishing its reputation if there’s a buck or two to be made in the process.
KIRO TV in Seattle reported on November 15 that it had taken brand new out-of-the-box computers that had never been connected to the Internet to Office Depot stores, both in Washington state and Portland, Oregon, and told the repair desk staff that “it’s running a little slow.” In four out of six cases they were told the computer was infected with viruses and would require an up to $180 fix.
After declining the “fix,” they took the “virus laden” machines to a Seattle security outfit, IOActive, which reexamined the machines. “We found no symptoms of malware when we operated them,” an employee with the firm, Will Longman, said. “Nor did we find any actual malware.”
In the two cases where undercover reporters weren’t told that their computers showed evidence of an infection, they were advised to install antivirus software. In one of the two stores, a technician evidently noticed that the machine was new and told the reporter to “ignore the test results.”
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On the episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Dell EMC CTO Idit Levine, an EMC chief technology officer at the cloud management division and office of the CTO, discussed how unikernels are poised to offer all of the developer flexibility afforded to containers, while striving for better security and integrations with many of today’s top container platforms. She spoke with SolarWinds Cloud Technology Lead Lee Calcote at KubeCon 2016:
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If you’re a Linux administrator, then you’re likely aware that even being fully up to date on all of the patches for your Linux distribution of choice is no guarantee that you’re free from vulnerabilities. Linux is made up of numerous components, any of which can open up an installation to one exploit or another.
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The FBI hacked into more than 8,000 computers in 120 different countries with just a single warrant during an investigation into a dark web child pornography website, according to a newly published court filings.
This FBI’s mass hacking campaign is related to the high-profile child pornography Playpen case and represents the largest law enforcement hacking campaign known to date.
The warrant was initially issued in February 2015 when the FBI seized the Playpen site and set up a sting operation on the dark web site, in which the agency deployed malware to obtain IP addresses from alleged site’s visitors.
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In January, Motherboard reported on the FBI’s “unprecedented” hacking operation, in which the agency, using a single warrant, deployed malware to over one thousand alleged visitors of a dark web child pornography site. Now, it has emerged that the campaign was actually an order of magnitude larger.
In all, the FBI obtained over 8,000 IP addresses, and hacked computers in 120 different countries, according to a transcript from a recent evidentiary hearing in a related case.
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I asked for, and we were granted a security audit of curl from the Mozilla Secure Open Source program a while ago. This was done by Mozilla getting a 3rd party company involved to do the job and footing the bill for it. The auditing company is called Cure53.
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The Navy was notified in October by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services that a computer supporting a Navy contract was “compromised,” and that the names and social security numbers of 134,386 current and former sailors were accessed by unknown persons, the service said in a news release.
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JUST WHEN you thought you couldn’t possibly be carrying any more tracking devices, it looks like you can add another one to the mix.
A team of researchers in Israel have discovered that with a little hardware hackery, your headphones can be used to listen in on you when plugged into your computer.
It’s been known for a long time that if you plug a microphone into a speaker jack, it can sometimes make a tinny speaker (if you blast the volume). But what about the other way around?
Ben Gurion University researchers have discovered that with a simple malware program which they’ve christened SPEAKE(a)R, Realtek codecs, which provide the built in sound on most motherboards, can be reassigned to turn the headphone jack into a microphone.
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Defence/Aggression
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However, the impression that the fires were deliberately set as acts of terrorism was reinforced by a report by the NRG news site, which presented dozens of social media posts in Arabic that expressed happiness over the fires. On one forum discussing the proposed law to prevent mosques from broadcasting their call to prayer in the early morning hours, one post said that the Israelis “tried to prevent the mosques from conducting prayers, now they are burning up.” Another post said that “this is our land, and Israel will continue to burn until we return free to it.” A social media tag in Arabic, “Israel is burning,” was trending on Thursday.
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Security forces are dealing with a wave of fires breaking out all over the country. According to official estimates, terror squads are igniting the fires in various areas, and efforts are being made to locate these squads.
Firefighters are working to subdue four fires around the city of Haifa.
Police have ordered the residents of 11 neighborhoods in Haifa, constituting thousands of people, to evacuate their homes and reach the Bat Galim Community Center or the old Qiryat Eliezer soccer stadium.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Bolivia is deep in the middle of a punishing drought, likely caused by the El Niño system in the Pacific last winter. It’s gotten so bad that taps have dried up, and the president has declared a national emergency.
The El Niño, a system of unusually warm water in the Pacific, significantly alters weather patterns over the fall and winter when it hits land, causing drier conditions in Central America and wetter conditions in North America and parts of South America.
“We have to be prepared for the worst,” Morales said at a press conference, the Guardian reported. He also told press the country will use this drought as an opportunity to invest in strategies to adapt to climate change impacts.
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Iraq and Iran, shaking off shackles of sanctions and war, have raised oil output to record highs and are asserting themselves within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Together they produce more than 8 million barrels of oil a day, almost a quarter of the oil pumped by the group, and both want to boost their output further.
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Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.
Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.
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Finance
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I have recently reported in ‘The Indicter’ and ‘Global Research’ of a payment made by Swedish giant corporation Ericsson, to the Clinton foundation. I have also reported separately the intervention of this company in Haiti – which had disastrous consequences for that country’s economy, as reported in a US Embassy cable from Port-au-Prince to the State Department [see document-excerpt below].
The revelations regarding unethical transactions in a variety of corruption investigations around Ericsson indicate, in my judgement, that this Swedish flag company might have pursued systematic bribery, internationally.
The new exposures are in relation to previous Costa Rica President Miguel Angel Rodriguez over the tendering process for a major telecommunications contract in that nation. The revelations are partly based on the testimony of a former employee at the company, Liss Olof Nenzell, who was in charge of “sensitive payments”. The report adds that government ministers as well as executives of Telecom companies received Ericsson’s payments.
Reports of the exact sum allegedly sent by Ericsson to Miguel Angel Rodriguez vary in the Swedish media. While ‘Swedish Radio’ puts it at $750,000 [See graphic above], ‘The Local’ (Carl Bildt’s megaphone) mentions the significantly lower amount of $271,245. Rodriguez denies the existence of bribes; he admits, nevertheless, “having links” to the mentioned bank account in Panama. Former Costa Rica’s president Rodriguez was a staunch supporter of the UN invasion in Haiti. Following that invasion, Ericsson obtained extended credits in Haiti; that, according to a document declassified by the US State Department, contributed significantly to the decline of the economy of that country.
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The death of TPP has now been confirmed by Donald Trump himself in a short video posted to YouTube. As Mike wrote recently, the other huge trade deal, TTIP, is now in limbo, probably dying, and there are rumors that even the low-profile Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) has been put on ice pending instructions from the new President. Doubtless attempts will be made to revivify them, and if those fail, there will certainly be further so-called “trade” deals — which actually go way beyond trade — that seek to bring in all the bad things that Techdirt has been warning about for years.
But alongside TPP, TTIP and TISA, there is one deal that is teetering on the brink of success. CETA is a smaller-scale agreement between the EU and Canada, but it’s more important than it looks. It allows US companies with subsidiaries in Canada to use the agreement’s corporate sovereignty provisions to sue the EU — and there are 42,000 such companies according to one analysis (pdf). As a result, CETA has been called “TTIP by the backdoor,” since it would provide a handy way for US companies to put pressure on EU nations even if TTIP suffers the same fate as TPP.
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Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s Twitter feed has come alive these past two weeks. From a roadside egg-seller in Bhopal to a soda hawker in Bangalore, the founder of Paytm has posted snapshots of the unusual array of merchants who ply the teeming streets of India — and are now turning to his digital payments startup for help.
Those fishmongers, vegetable vendors and rickshaw drivers count among the thousands who’ve signed onto India’s largest digital payments service since Prime Minister Narendra Modi triggered a nationwide cash crunch when he scrapped the country’s two largest note denominations. While the aim was to vanquish “black money,” it could end up being the best thing to happen to its nascent online finance industry and haul its antiquated economy into the 21st century by making digital payments mainstream.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Donald Trump’s grandfather was kicked out of his native Germany for failing to do his mandatory military service there, a historian has claimed.
A local council letter from 1905 informed Friedrich Trump — who had become a United States citizen — that he would not be granted his German citizenship back and that he had eight weeks to leave the country or be deported, German historian Roland Paul told CNN Tuesday.
He also claimed that Trump had illegally left Germany, failing to notify authorities of his plan to immigrate.
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Citing the dangers of hacked voting machines, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said on Wednesday that she intends to raise more than $2 million by Friday to initiate vote recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
“After a divisive and painful presidential race, reported hacks into voter and party databases and individual e-mail accounts are causing many Americans to wonder if our election results are reliable,” Stein said. “These concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified. We deserve elections we can trust.”
In her statement, Stein claims that some election machines used in Wisconsin were banned in California because they were “highly vulnerable to hacking and malicious reprogramming.”
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You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical states. That article, which includes somebody else’s description of my views, incorrectly describes the reasons manually checking ballots is an essential security safeguard (and includes some incorrect numbers, to boot). Let me set the record straight about what I and other leading election security experts have actually been saying to the campaign and everyone else who’s willing to listen.
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So lots of people have been discussing the story claiming that some e-voting experts believe the Clinton campaign should be asking for a recount in certain battleground states, where it’s possible there were some e-voting irregularities. As we noted in our post, the story would barely be worth mentioning if one of the people involved wasn’t Alex Halderman, a computer science professor we’ve been talking about for nearly a decade and a half, going back to when he was a student. Halderman is basically the expert on e-voting security — so when he says something, it’s worth paying attention.
Halderman has now posted something of a follow-up to the NY Magazine article clarifying his views and what he’s suggesting. He’s not saying there’s evidence of a hack, but basically saying that no one knows if there was a hack or not, and because of that, there should be a recount as a way to audit the results to see if there were any irregularities.
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After an election marred by hacker intrusions that breached the Democratic National Committee and the email account of one of Hillary Clinton’s top staffers, Americans are all too ready to believe that their actual votes have been hacked, too. Now those fears have been stoked by a team of security experts, who argue that voting machine vulnerabilities mean Clinton should demand recounts in key states.
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Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote is growing. She is roughly 30,000 votes behind Donald J. Trump in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin — a combined gap that is narrowing. Her impassioned supporters are now urging her to challenge the results in those two states and Pennsylvania, grasping at the last straws to reverse Mr. Trump’s decisive majority in the Electoral College.
In recent days, they have seized on a report by a respected computer scientist and other experts suggesting that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the keys to Mr. Trump’s Electoral College victory, need to manually review paper ballots to assure the election was not hacked.
“Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack?” J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who has studied the vulnerabilities of election systems at length, wrote on Medium on Wednesday as the calls based on his conclusions mounted. “Probably not.”
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Jill Stein, the Green party’s presidential candidate, is prepared to request recounts of the election result in several key battleground states, her campaign said on Wednesday.
Stein launched an online fundraising page seeking donations toward a $2.5m fund she said was needed to request reviews of the results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
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Failed Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on Wednesday announced plans to force a recount of votes in three crucial swing states — a longshot move that could help vanquished Democrat Hillary Clinton, who remained mum on the subject.
Stein, who garnered a dismal 1 percent of the national vote, said challenging the tallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was needed to answer questions about a possible cyber-attack on electronic-voting machines.
She appealed for $2 million-plus in donations to pay for the effort, which would have to be started by Friday, the deadline for filing papers in Wisconsin.
An online counter showed just over $285,000 in donations by late Wednesday afternoon, and a Stein campaign lawyer notified the Wisconsin Elections Commission it intended to seek a statewide recount, a commission spokesman said.
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Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.
Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.
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Hours after scolding TV-news executives in a meeting, president-elect Donald Trump decided to make a brief address Monday on YouTube updating the nation on where his transition efforts stand.
In one of the few appearances he has made in the two weeks since he defeated Hillary Clinton for the U.S. presidency, Trump devoted the two-and-a-half-minute clip to an overview of his priorities, from interviewing cabinet members to his policy plans in the first 100 days.
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It is quite sad to see so many well-meaning and otherwise intelligent Americans embarrassing and deluding themselves that Hillary Clinton didn’t lose the election held over two weeks ago.
I hear many using words like mourning, markers of the kind of feelings that follow an actual death. If that is the case, then it is time to move on into some form of acceptance.
In addition to the clueless bleating about the electoral vote not matching the popular vote (you win at baseball with more runs, not more hits), Hillary Clinton is now being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump. The story, somehow, despite the scientists not speaking on record and only to the Clinton team in private, has gone viral across the same media (HuffPo, Vox, you know them) that never saw the flaws in Candidate Clinton and still doesn’t.
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Last week, the first election in 50 years without the full protection of the federal Voting Rights Act propelled Donald Trump to the White House.
Trump will assume the presidency because of the Electoral College’s influence — nearly a million more people cast ballots for Hillary Clinton as of November 15. The election was also marked by low turnout, with tens of millions of eligible voters choosing not to participate at all. Yet there has been relatively little discussion about the millions of people who were eligible to vote but could not do so because they faced an array of newly-enacted barriers to the ballot box.
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If you thought fake online news was a problem for impressionable adults, it’s even worse for the younger crowd. A Stanford study of 7,804 middle school, high school and college students has found that most of them couldn’t identify fake news on their own. Their susceptibility varied with age, but even a large number of the older students fell prey to bogus reports. Over two thirds of middle school kids didn’t see why they shouldn’t trust a bank executive’s post claiming that young adults need financial help, while nearly 40 percent of high schoolers didn’t question the link between an unsourced photo and the claims attached to it.
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Donald Trump said lots (and lots) of eyebrow-raising things during his sitdown with the New York Times on Tuesday. On climate change. On prosecuting (or not) Hillary Clinton. But one statement – in response to a question about the various conflicts of interest between his eponymous company and his status as the soon-to-be president of the United States – was truly eye-popping.
Trump’s statement carried considerable echoes of Richard Nixon’s famous/infamous line to interview David Frost three decades ago: “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Times adds that the tool may never be used and that it’s just one of the ideas Facebook is throwing around to get into China. The report also notes that if the tool is eventually used in the country, Facebook itself probably wouldn’t be suppressing posts; rather the tool would be given to a third party in charge of censorship.
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Islamic State’s presence on social media is here to stay even as it loses ground in Iraq and Syria and after a serious crackdown by Twitter. The terrorist entity has published a guide on how to outfox Twitter’s efforts, according to an advance copy of a report by the Jihadi Websites Monitoring Group of IDC’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism obtained by The Jerusalem Post.
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For years, online hate speech and cyber-bullying have been on the political agenda in Sweden. Now there will be some new laws, covering a wide range of actions and statements.
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The Opera web browser feature ‘Turbo Mode’ is designed to speed up browsing. As a side effect, it also bypasses website blocks, something popular with pirates. However, it appears that the company has been in talks to integrate a blacklist which could stop access to blocked domains.
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Facebook worked on special software so it could potentially accommodate censorship demands in China, according to a report in the New York Times.
The social network refused to confirm or deny the software’s existence, but said in a statement it was “spending time understanding and learning more” about China.
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For those who woke a week ago to discover the First Amendment is under attack, I lost my job at the Obama/Clinton State Department in 2012 for writing We Meant Well, a book the government did not like, and needed the help of lawyer Jesselyn Radack and the ACLU to push back the threat of jail.
My book was critical of actions in Iraq under both the Obama and Bush administrations. One helped protect the other.
Braver people than me, like Thomas Drake, Morris Davis, and Robert MacLean, risked imprisonment and lost their government jobs for talking to the press about government crimes and malfeasance. John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, and Jeff Sterling went to jail for speaking to/informing the press. The Obama administration tried to prosecute reporters from Fox and the New York Times for stories on government wrongdoing.
Ray Maxwell at the State Department went public with information about Clinton’s email malfeasance before you had even heard of her private server. The media called him a liar, an opportunist, and a political hack and he was pressed into retirement.
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Well, I guess it’s time to complete the circle. Last week, we were warning that the rush to demonize Facebook for allowing “fake news” to be distributed and shared via its platform would lead to calls to suppress and censor certain view points. And then, this week came the news that China is strategically and opportunistically using the hubbub over “fake news” to push for greater censorship of the internet — claiming it’s necessary to stop fake news and keep people “better” informed (rather than the opposite).
And to top all of that off, comes a story from the NY Times about how Facebook has been working on a tool to allow the Chinese government to censor stories on Facebook as a condition of entering the market. It’s no secret that Facebook has been trying for a really long time to figure out a way to get into China. There are over a billion potential users there that Facebook really wants on its platform. And that’s not a bad thing. But, of course, China has a heavily censored internet. And while Facebook has been mostly blocked in China, there have already been reports from last year of stories being suppressed to appease the Chinese government.
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FACEBOOK HAS REPORTEDLY developed software that will stop certain posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, namely China.
The social network has been banned in China since 2009, not because the country was sick of baby pictures and mundane gossip, but because of the government’s strict censorship rules.
Like many other US technology firms, Facebook would like to reenter the market, which is home to more than 1.4 billion potential pocket-liners for Facebook.
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Facebook has developed censorship software in an effort to get China to lift its seven-year ban on the world’s largest social network, according to reports.
The social network developed the software to suppress posts from appearing in users’ news feeds in specific geographies with the support of the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, according to the New York Times. The posts themselves will not be suppressed, only their visibility.
A Facebook spokesperson said: “We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country.
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A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.
We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Google is warning prominent journalists and professors that nation-sponsored hackers have recently targeted their accounts, according to reports delivered in the past 24 hours over social media.
The people reportedly receiving the warnings include Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Stanford University professor and former US diplomat Michael McFaul, GQ correspondent Keith Olbermann, and according to this tweet, Politico, Highline, and Foreign Policy contributor/columnist Julia Ioffe; New York Magazine reporter Jonathan Chait; and Atlantic magazine writer Jon Lovett. Reports of others receiving the warnings are here and here. Many of the reports included banners that Google displayed when account holders logged in. Ars spoke to someone who works for a well-known security company who also produced an image of a warning he received. The person said he was aware of a fellow security-industry professional receiving the same warning.
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While the agency said that it had no reason to update Finland’s current terror threat assessment, it did say that the relatively high number of Finnish nationals joining Isis is concerning.
According to the agency more than 300 people currently under Supo surveillance because of suspected ties to jihadist extremism, the papers write.
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Plans to keep a record of UK citizens’ online activities face a challenge from tech firms seeking to offer ways to hide people’s browser histories.
Internet providers will soon be required to record which services their customers’ devices connect to – including websites and messaging apps.
The Home Office says it will help combat terrorism, but critics have described it as a “snoopers’ charter”.
Critics of the law have said hackers could get access to the records.
“It only takes one bad actor to go in there and get the entire database,” said James Blessing, chairman of the Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa), which represents BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and others.
“You can try every conceivable thing in the entire world to [protect it] but somebody will still outsmart you.
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Many have walked by and wondered what purpose this vast, windowless skyscraper in the heart of Manhattan serves. 33 Thomas Street, also known as the “Long Lines Building” (LLB), is an impenetrable monolithic fortress amid canyons of glass and steel. Ostensibly an AT&T telecoms building, the New York Times have recently reported (based on investigative work by The Intercept) that this “blank face[d] monument to privacy” may in fact be a NSA (National Security Agency) listening post, hidden in plain sight.
Designed by San Franciscan John Carl Warnecke—an architect who worked closely with the Kennedy administration, and designer of the late President’s mausoleum—the Brutalist tower was completed in 1974. Built to withstand a nuclear attack on New York or, at the very least, a devastating loss of power to the city, the 550 foot-tall (169 meters) structure is supported by systems that allow it to provide enough food, water and fuel to sustain 1,500 people for two weeks completely removed from public infrastructure.
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The UK has just passed the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, at the third attempt, and it will become law by the end of the year. The bill was instigated by the then home secretary, Theresa May, in 2012. It is better known as the snooper’s charter.
Jim Killock, the director of Open Rights Group, described it as the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”. It more or less removes your right to online privacy.
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The long-awaited SHA-1 deprecation deadline of Jan. 1, 2017, is almost here. At that point, we’ll all be expected to use SHA-2 instead. So the question is: What is your browser going to do when it encounters a SHA-1 signed digital certificate?
We’ll delve into the answers in a minute. But first, let’s review what the move from SHA-1 to SHA-2 is all about.
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Last week, whilst most of us were busy watching the comings and goings at Trump Tower and Ed Balls on Strictly, Parliament quietly passed the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (a.k.a. the Snoopers’ Charter). It’s been described as the most intrusive system of any democracy in history and a privacy disaster waiting to happen.
The Act makes broad provisions to track what you do online. Amongst a raft of new surveillance and hacking powers, it introduces the concept of an internet connection record: a log of which internet services – such as websites and instant messaging apps – you have accessed. Your internet provider must keep these logs in bulk and hand them over to the government on request, whether you want them to or not.
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Seminar: The consequences of the commercial use of consumer data
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President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers want him to take on government bureaucracy the same way he approached his reality show: cut the fat and fire more federal employees.
Civil service laws were written to prevent freewheeling firing sprees and to protect federal employees’ rights, though many complain it prevents speedy removal of ineffective workers, creating the “forever” government bureaucrat. However, large segments of the intelligence community, including DIA, CIA, NSA, and most of the FBI are not entitled to these same protections, and some attorneys who represent those employees are particularly concerned.
“[Intelligence community] employees have little protection,” wrote Mark Zaid, an attorney who often represents members of the national security and intelligence spheres, in a tweet. He noted that some clients, blowing off steam and making dark jokes, threatened to leave the U.S. to hand over secrets to agents of foreign powers “because of mistreatment.”
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In a climate of global instability, one of the world’s most renowned whistleblowers has put the onus on tech companies to step in when people’s basic human rights are not upheld by governments or the law.
Shortly after Donald Trump added the United States presidency to his portfolio, Startpage.com hosted a live interview with Edward Snowden, who believes Trump’s election is a “dark moment” in US history.
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Critics of Edward Snowden have long maintained that the young whistleblower could have legally and safely worked within the system to reform the NSA, but instead recklessly went rogue.
This simply is not true.
Snowden’s actions can only fairly be judged when considered against a backdrop of Washington power plays, diminishing rights for intelligence community contractors like Snowden, and retaliation against those who did speak up through institutional channels.
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President Barack Obama has never taken kindly to whistleblowers, and it seems he hasn’t changed his stance even in the twilight of his administration.
Asked about the possibility of pardoning Edward Snowden, the American who leaked thousands of documents from the National Security Agency, Obama said it’s not going to happen.
“I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves, so that’s not something that I would comment on at this point,” Obama told Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper.
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On Nov. 18, Der Spiegel, a German weekly magazine which is one of Europe’s largest publications of its kind, interviewed President Obama. On the question of whether he would pardon Edward Snowden, Obama replied “I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves …”
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Despite Edward Snowden and his lawyers presenting a case for Barack Obama to free Edward Snowden of his charges for espionage, the House Select Committee has issued a letter to the President saying he should not be pardoned.
13 Republicans and nine Democrats argued that the crimes Snowden had committed were inexcusable and he should not be let off.
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The federal government’s long-hidden authority to sweep up records of all phone calls made in the U.S. was repealed last year in a bipartisan vote of Congress. But President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the CIA has called for reinstatement of the data haul and said its elimination was part of “Edward Snowden’s vision of America.”
Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, revealed in 2013 that the NSA had been collecting bulk data on U.S. phone calls without a warrant for more than a decade. President George W. Bush’s administration had ordered the collection unilaterally after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, then obtained approval from a secret intelligence court in 2006.
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Despite President Obama‘s (incorrect) claim that he is unable to pardon Edward Snowden because the whistleblower hasn’t gone before a court, that hasn’t stopped Snowden from continuing to troll the NSA and Obama Administration.
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The campaign to have President Barack Obama pardon NSA leaker Edward Snowden has run aground.
Not only has the entire membership of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, 13 Republicans and nine Democrats, sent a letter to President Barack Obama urging against a pardon. “He is a criminal.” Obama himself has said it is impossible.
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Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden on Monday downplayed the importance of President-elect Donald Trump and again defended his decision to leak documents showing massive surveillance of US citizens’ communications.
“Donald Trump is just the president. It’s an important position. But it’s one of many,” Snowden told an internet conference in Stockholm, speaking via a video link from Russia, where he has been living as a fugitive.
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Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden made light of Republican Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election on Monday during an internet conference in Stockholm.
“Donald Trump is just the president. It’s an important position. But it’s one of many,” Snowden reportedly said at the conference speaking via a video link from Moscow where the 33-year-old fugitive has been living since 2013.
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Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden on Monday downplayed the importance of President-elect Donald Trump and again defended his decision to leak documents showing massive surveillance of US citizens’ communications.
“Donald Trump is just the president. It’s an important position. But it’s one of many,” Snowden told an internet conference in Stockholm, speaking via a video link from Russia, where he has been living as a fugitive.
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The possibility of ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden being brought to Berlin to give evidence before a parliamentary committee has risen after a top appeals court ruled the German government cannot block him.
The committee investigating US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance in Germany has wanted to call Snowden as a witness to detail what he knows but the government has said it cannot guarantee his safety.
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The possibility of ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden being brought to Berlin to testify before a Parliamentary committee has risen after a top appeals court ruled the government cannot block him.
The committee investigating NSA surveillance in Germany has wanted to call Snowden as a witness to detail what he knows but the government has said it can’t guarantee his safety. Snowden is wanted by the U.S. on espionage charges.
But in a ruling announced Monday, the Federal Court of Justice said the government needs to “establish the preconditions” including “effective protection of the witness.”
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The German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has ruled that the German government must make plans to bring former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to Berlin to answer questions from a parliamentary committee looking into US intelligence agency spying.
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A top German appeals court has ruled that the government must “establish preconditions” for US whistleblower Edward Snowden to come to Berlin, in order for him to testify before a parliamentary committee investigating NSA surveillance in Germany.
The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) ruling, made on November 11 but only announced on Monday, came after the Greens and the Left Party requested that the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor be questioned by German MPs. Snowden is wanted by the US on espionage charges.
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The decision by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice in favor of parliamentary minority rights – specifically in the Edward Snowden whistleblower case – is a good, solid verdict, writes Marcel Fürstenau.
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Germany’s government has been told that it should make suitable arrangements for that to happen. It has been refusing to invite Snowden to give evidence personally since it would need to guarantee that he would not be handed over to the US—a promise the German authorities say would risk damaging the political relations between the two countries.
Instead, it has called for him to give evidence via a video link, or for German officials to interview him in Moscow, both of which Snowden turned down.
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The Federal court of Justice (BGH) has ruled that the government must bring US whistleblower Edward Snowden to Berlin to answer parliamentary questions on the NSA, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Propaganda, psychological warfare, and real-time surveillance were all on the agenda at the Sixth Annual Conference on Social Media Within the Defence and Military Sector.
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The journalist spoke about how a Bosnian soldier offered a bounty on his social media account for anyone who would sexually assault her.
She said: “He publicly called for my rape offering money to anyone who is willing to rape me.”
A Ministry of Defence investigation has stalled despite nearly two months of investigating the incident.
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And Iran was not alone. In the 1990s Saudi economic aid to Bosnia had a religious agenda. Their money was almost exclusively devoted to building (and rebuilding) mosques and madrassas. According to their own claims the Saudis spent $1 billion (US) on “Islamic activities” in Bosnia between 1992-1998. When Alija Izetbegovic was once asked why Saudi monies were not used to bolster the economy, he replied that the Saudis “would not give money for building factories . . . They would only support building mosques.”[ii] Saudi officials now claim that they gave more than $6 billion (US) to Bosnia over the past twenty years.[iii]
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President-elect Donald Trump registered eight companies during his presidential campaign that appear to be tied to hotel interests in Saudi Arabia, according to a report in The Washington Post.
Trump registered the companies in August 2015, shortly after launching his presidential bid, according to The Post.
The companies were registered under names such as THC Jeddah Hotel and DT Jeddah Technical Services, according to financial disclosure filings.
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Sunday night’s no-holds-barred offensive by police from multiple agencies against unarmed water protectors opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline on Highway 1806’s Backwater Bridge — in which at least 167 suffered injuries — sent two elders into cardiac arrest, left a 13-year-old girl injured by a rubber bullet to the head, and now, one woman will almost certainly lose her arm.
Sophia Wilansky stood among the crowd of around 400 water protectors as the police launched an all-out assault, firing ‘nonlethal’ projectiles, tear gas, mace, LRAD sound cannons, and concussion grenades — one of which reportedly exploded on her left arm, tearing through flesh and exposing bone, and leaving her facing possible amputation.
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A German court has ruled that a group of Islamists did not break the law in forming “sharia police” street patrols and telling people to stop drinking, gambling and listening to music.
The ultra-conservative Muslim group around the German Salafist convert Sven Lau sparked public outrage with their vigilante patrols in the western city of Wuppertal in 2014, but prosecutors have struggled to build a case against them.
The city’s district court ruled that the seven accused members of the group did not breach a ban on political uniforms when they approached people while wearing orange vests bearing the words “Sharia Police”.
Judges said there could only be a violation of the law – originally aimed against street movements such as the early Nazi party – if the uniforms were “suggestively militant or intimidating”, a court spokesman said.
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As leading lawyers we obviously play an important role in ensuring that racism and some kind of white-nationalism does not again become acceptable and normal. One of my friends who is openly gay here in Missouri was leaving his house last week and a passenger in a passing vehicle yelled-out “faggot” and targeted him with an open soda bottle. As with Bill Lee, Tracy noted that he had not experienced this type of open vitriol for decades. These incidents are These incidents are not supposed to happen here, but they are happening. As Dan Rather writes “now is a time when none of us can afford to remain seated or silent. We must all stand up to be counted. . . . I believe there is a vast majority who wants to see this nation continue in tolerance and freedom. But it will require speaking.”
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If Kazakh politicians get their wish, the capital city will be renamed to honour the country’s first and only president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
The suggestion to rename Astana was buried in a declaration unanimously passed by both chambers of parliament on Wednesday.
On the surface, the declaration was to mark the forthcoming 25th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s independence. But reading past the tributes to Nazarbayev’s “outstanding service”, the declaration’s final paragraph calls for renaming the capital and other important facilities across the country after theleader of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
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The posters in support of the An‘Nour mosque were seen around town on Tuesday but promptly removed by Winterthur authorities, who said they had not been pre-informed of the posters, reported news agencies on Wednesday.
Associations and communities are allowed to use free publicity sites around the town but must inform the authorities and have their posters checked beforehand, they said.
According to the newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the posters called for donations aiming at saving a mosque and referenced a bank account belonging to An‘Nour.
The mosque in question is an increasingly controversial presence in Winterthur.
It is currently suspended by the Zurich Federation of Islamic Organizations (Vioz) after its imam and three others were arrested in a police raid at the beginning of November.
The raid followed a tip off about a sermon given by the imam in late October in which he “called for the murder of Muslims who refuse to participate in communal prayer”.
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Powerful testimony from Muslim women has been published by MPs on the Home Affairs Committee as part of their investigation into sharia, while activists have warned that its approach so far has favoured those who support sharia councils.
Submissions received from Muslim women on their experiences of sharia ‘law’ have now been published by the Committee. The evidence was gathered by One Law For All, who sent the personal testimonies to the committee for their investigation into sharia ‘law’ in the UK.
One woman whose evidence was included for the Select Committee’s consideration is Habiba Jan who was trapped in an abusive Islamic ‘marriage’ and was unable to escape without a sharia ‘divorce’. Jan ended up being referred to Anjem Choudary for a ‘divorce’, without knowing who he was.
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We refer to recent emails from the Home Affairs Select Committee to Southall Black Sisters and the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation requesting us to help find Muslim women who have ‘used’ Sharia Councils, to attend an event in Whitechapel, East London, on 24 November 2016 in connection with your inquiry.
We are a coalition of organisations who have an immense track record in providing front line services and in campaigning for the human rights of black and minority women. Our coalition includes Southall Black Sisters, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, Centre for Secular Space, One Law for All, British Muslims for Secular Democracy and the Culture Project: we represent some of the most marginalised groups in our society. Between us, we have over 100 years of combined experience of working with women from all faith backgrounds, the majority of whom come from a Muslim background.
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Outside a triage tent at the foot of the Oceti Sakowin Camp, frantic chatter and whirring generators fused with the familiar drone of police surveilling in the night sky.
“We have seen four gunshot wounds, three of them to the face and head,” said Leland Brenholt, a volunteer medic.
By gunshots, he insinuated that rubber bullets had been used on hundreds of people clashing with police. Conflict erupted again over the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, Sunday night.
“This is still not on mainstream media,” Brenholt sighed. “I’d like to know why,” he sang in a facetious sing-song voice.
The video account of Brentholt was one of dozens posted on Facebook. They helped to piece together the night’s events, an evolving scene repeatedly described as a war zone by many testifying via livestream.
Tensions flared when police say around 400 protesters, or ‘water protectors,’ attempted to dismantle a police-enforced barricade on State Highway 1806. Around 6 p.m., demonstrators say they used a semi-truck to remove burnt military vehicles that had been chained to concrete barriers. Since October 27th, traffic has been blocked at the center of the Backwater Bridge, a crossing not far from the encampments where thousands of pipeline resisters have occupied since April.
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Police said a 15-year-old male was arrested at the scene on suspicion of actual bodily harm and has since been bailed to a date in mid-December.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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President-elect Donald Trump has appointed two outspoken opponents of net neutrality rules to oversee the Federal Communications Commission’s transition from Democratic to Republican control.
The appointees announced yesterday are Jeffrey Eisenach and Mark Jamison. Eisenach is director of the Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), while Jamison is a visiting fellow at the same institution. Eisenach previously worked on behalf of Verizon and other telecoms as a consultant, and Jamison used to manage regulatory policy at Sprint.
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Fake news, online banking thefts and data breaches: It’s no wonder that trust in the internet is at an all-time low. But don’t worry: The Internet Society has a five-step plan for restoring faith in the network of networks.
The first step is to put users first, according to ISOC, which published its 2016 Global Internet Report on Thursday. That involves being more transparent (step two) about risk and the incidence of data breaches and prioritizing data security (step three) to ensure breaches don’t happen.
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In Nov. 16 testimony before a joint subcommittee meeting of the House of Representatives, cybersecurity experts debated whether the internet of things should be regulated by government.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz’s must-read new book The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy (read an excerpt) is not for sale in the Apple ebook store, and won’t be until they agree to change their text to refer to Apple’s ebooks as “iBooks” rather than “iBook.”
The petty editorial dictate is a little-known aspect of the agreement that publishers must sign onto in order to put their products in Apple’s bookstore, which demands that Apple trademarks be used as “adjectives, not nouns.” But even this injunction doesn’t actually cover the sin that Perzanowski and Schultz committed in their book.
Rather, Apple is objecting to the authors’ use of iBook (the name of a discontinued line of Apple laptops) to refer to the ebooks sold in Apple’s store, which they do three times in the text — Apple wants these items referred to as “ebooks from the iBooks store.”
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Copyrights
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In India, a court has gone to extreme lengths to protect a new movie distributed by Viacom 18. A so-called John Doe order filed against at least 40 ISPs instructs them to block a minimum of 1,250 websites that might make the newly released Force 2 available to the public.
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Popular file-hosting service 4shared is a true piracy haven, according to some copyright holders. Following numerous complaints the site has had more than 50 million of its URLs removed from Google’s search index. However, according to 4shared many of these are the result of abusive takedown requests.
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11.23.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Union Syndicale Fédérale, which stands for and defends unions across Europe, has become growingly vocal against the management of the EPO
THE FOLKS from Union Syndicale Fédérale (USF) are not new/beginners when it comes to EPO scandals. As a matter of fact, we wrote about them before, both this year and last year [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. USF does not tolerate the yellow union of Battistelli.
USF maintains its commitment to SUEPO in light of the recent events and developments. In fact, it recently just spat out a bunch of self-explanatory hashtags: #Battistelliout! #incompetence #asocial #fired #battistelligohome Français plus bas…. DISMISSAL OF UNION… http://fb.me/8lyDx7rDa
Union Syndicale Fédérale wrote letters to the EPO’s management, including several so far this month (as revealed by this slice/search). Here is one new document:
“Dismissal of union officials at EPO,” a sort of open letter/statement from Union Syndicale Fédérale [PDF] states, bemoaning lack of involvement from politicians in the face of union-busting. This document was issued this week.
Also, bemoaning lack of oversight at the EPO (and lack of worry/care/concern over the staining of the EPO’s and Europe’s reputation), USF wrote this:
In the middle of this month it wrote [PDF] that “Union Syndicale Fédérale (USF) is again deeply shocked hearing about the latest, disproportionate dismissal of a trade union official at the European Patent Office (EPO) in November 2016.”
Back in January of this year Union Syndicale Fédérale sent a letter to Kongstad [PDF], the Chinchilla man of the Administrative Council (they call him “President of the EPO Council”). Here is the letter as images again:
“Union Syndicale Federale (USF) is deeply shocked to hear about the latest, disproportionate measures against trade union officials taken at the European Patent Office (EPO),” they wrote.
It is worth noting that Mr. Kongstad never responded to Transparency International (TI), as we noted way back in 2014. He’s usually too arrogant to respond to anyone but his master’s voice and the Danish media, where he only shoots the messenger without disputing the message at all.
Transparency International is itself in urgent need of transparency that exposes corruption. An article from Correctiv covered this several days ago.
“It is worth noting that Mr. Kongstad never responded to Transparency International (TI), as we noted way back in 2014.”“A juicy detail (I found this yesterday),” told us a source, comes from a handy source, the “GERMAN wikipedia page (The English page does not have this juicy detail), [notably] Section Aufbau und Finanzierung, 3rd paragraph…”
It says: “…David Schraven leitet das Recherchebüro Correctiv als inhaltlicher Geschäftsführer, der kaufmännische Bereich wird von Christian Humborg (zuvor Geschäftsführer von Transparency International Deutschland) verantwortet, als Chefredakteur fungiert…”
“So,” our reader explained, “there is also a juicy link between TI and CORRECTIV!!! I did not know this before, and I have no further information or source for this statement.”
Lots of things turn out to be connected. Oversight is so deficient in Germany and unless this issue is tackled, Germany’s image too will be stained. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Translation of the article “Werknemers Europees Octrooibureau voeren actie tegen ‘tirannie’ directeur,” which was published earlier today ahead of tomorrow’s protest
ARTICLES are beginning to surface ahead of tomorrow’s EPO protest. Managing IP (MIP), for instance, wrote just over 8 hours ago that “EPO staff will be demonstrating in The Hague from 12 noon tomorrow in solidarity with staff who have been dismissed/downgraded…”
We could use a Luxembourgian translation into English of this additional new article, but in the mean time all we have is this article‘s translation into English, courtesy of Petra Kramer [PK]:
European Patent Office workers take action against ‘tyranny’ director
THE HAGUE – Employees of the European Patent Office (EPO) in Rijswijk will go campaigning against their director Benoît Battistelli on Thursday. Reported that the FNV. The demonstration is to start at 12:00 on Square 1813 in The Hague.
The reason for the action is the poor relationship between the staff and director Battistelli. The situation at the EPO has long been troubled. Hundreds of people already made known their displeasure over the working atmosphere in April and January. The immediate reason for one of the demonstrations was then the dismissal of two colleagues and the demotion of a third.
Again, the staff speaks of “tyranny” of the director. “Battistelli rules with an iron fist and tolerates no participation or contradiction. He dismisses people at will, demotes them, and unilaterally implements changes to working conditions and demotivates if the entire organization,” the FNV said.
Dutch government
FNV director Marieke Manschot, does not understand why the Dutch government does not intervene. “Surely it can not mean that the Dutch government allows such abuses on its own territory? If this had occurred at a Dutch employer, the world would have been too small ["to contain all the outrage, there's that expression again" ~PK].”
“Battistelli cannot be allowed to hide behind immunity” says Manschot. “It is high time that Van Dam State acts and stands up for the employees of the EPO. The FNV strongly supports these employees.”
Reorganization and dialogue
A spokesman for the EPO said in January that Battistelli is engaged in a major reorganization to modernize the organization. “That of course leads to a reaction by the staff. Everyone has difficulty with change. ” He denied that there is a culture of fear.
The protesters want Martijn van Dam State Secretary for Economic Affairs action against Battistelli. The State Secretary said in April that they “engaged in a dialogue” at the insistence of the Member States of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) between the top of the EPO and the unions. Van Dam had to admit then that the dialogue was difficult. ["An understatement as we all know Battistelli stormed out of that meeting" ~PK.]
We have a lot more coverage coming tonight and tomorrow. We shall focus on the EPO until the weekend. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Do a web search for “Linux radio station”, and the pickings are slim indeed, with most sites promoting instead ham radio software or streaming audio players, and a handful devoted to setting up a streaming web radio station—including one such optimistic article in Linux Journal some 15 years ago (see “Running a Net Radio Station with Open-Source Software”, January 2001).
Unfortunately, much of this documented interest took place a decade or more in the past via domains like opensourceradio.com that are no longer with us. A few projects persevere, but a good number of postings are similarly dated. The fact is, there are more Linux-based ways to stream and listen to radio stations than there actually are the means to broadcast and control them.
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Thanksgiving is in a few days, and talking about “things I am thankful for” is pretty traditional this time of year.
So, here we go. Here’s my list of Linux-y (and free software-y) things I am thankful for in 2016. (At least the ones I could remember when I sat down to write this list.)
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Desktop
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Laptops preloaded with Linux aren’t as rare as they used to be. In fact, big name hardware companies like Dell have whole lines of laptops that ship with Ubuntu installed, and if you want to stretch things a bit you could argue that a Chromebook is a kind of Linux machine (though it takes a bit of tinkering to get actual Linux installed). Still, there’s no question the Linux user of today has a wealth of options compared with the dark ages of just a few years ago when “I use Linux” was code for “I spend all my time looking for hardware drivers.”
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Server
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What does developer advocate Burr Sutter have to do with “DevOps king” Gene Kim and his book, The Phoenix Project?
As Sutter explained in his five-minute lightning talk at All Things Open 2016, they share a passion for hands-on technologists—the developers that craft awesome code and the operators who spin out the infrastructure to run it.
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Could it be that GNU/Linux and Apache/NGINX etc. are less expensive and more reliable??? Yes.
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Outweighing the existing major vendors, LiteSpeed demonstrated the largest hostname growth after it gained more than 40 million sites – a remarkable 740% increase. LiteSpeed’s growth included 38 million existing sites that were hosted by OVH, and previously using Taobao’s Tengine web server, which consequently suffered the largest loss of sites this month. The sites involved in this movement—nearly all of which make use of the .science TLD—are now hosted by Amazon Web Services. As a result of these changes, LiteSpeed’s market share of sites has leapt from 0.39% to 3.29%, taking it from 10th to 4th place – while Tengine has been displaced to 5th.
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Using the less-volatile web-facing computers metric, Apache showed the largest growth this month with an increase of 39,900 computers, while nginx was not too far behind with net growth of 32,881. Despite LiteSpeed’s large hostname growth, it gained only a modest sum of 312 computers (+3.4%), making it the 7th largest vendor by this metric.
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Interest in open source network operating systems based on Linux running on a bare-metal switch is high. But not many networking professionals are familiar with platforms based on Linux. To make it simpler to make the switch, Cumulus Networks has created a Network Command Line Utility (NCLU) that provides a central location from which they can manually manage the Cumulus Linux environment using a command-line interface most network administrators would easily recognize.
Cumulus Networks CTO JR Rivers says the goal is to provide network managers with a means of making the switch to an open source networking environment using a tool that resembles the ones most of them currently use to manage proprietary networks.
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Kernel Space
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During the keynote, technical engineer Ildiko Vancsa made a cell phone call to OPNFV Director Heather Kirksey, using a set of 5G equipment on stage, running OPNFV (An open source implementation of NFV) on top of OpenStack. The call remained intact even though OpenStack Chief Operating Officer Mark Collier, also on-stage, started randomly cutting cables to the 5G gear, “Chaos Monkey” style.
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Graphics Stack
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David Airlie has pulled the newest DRM/KMS driver into DRM-Next for merging in the Linux 4.10 kernel.
This new driver is the Hisilicon Hibmc driver. As explained earlier this year when the patches first appeared, This new Hisilicon DRM driver is for supporting the Hibmc baseboard management controller and these initial patches just provide basic display subsystem support for their display engine and VDAC (Video Digital-to-Analog Converter).
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It’s been a busy week for Intel’s open-source developers working on their Vulkan “ANV” Linux driver with a number of the recent patch series having been merged a short time ago into mainline Mesa Git.
As a quick update to More Intel ANV Vulkan Code Hits Mesa Git, Other Patches Pending and Intel Vulkan Linux Driver Now Has Patches For Fast Clears, that work is now in mainline Mesa.
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After a number of commits landed in mainline Mesa Git in the early hours of this morning, cull and clip distance support has been enabled for the open-source Intel Vulkan “ANV” Linux driver.
After work on NIR and ANV, clip and cull distance support was enabled. Following that ANV driver work was also an i965 driver change to use the NIR-based clip/cull lowering for their OpenGL driver too to benefit from using the same code-path for both drivers.
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While many in our forums and other Linux communities want to see “AMDGPU-PRO die” or for AMD to stop supporting the hybrid/proprietary driver given the pace of RadeonSI development for OpenGL and the emerging RADV for (unofficial) Vulkan support, OpenCL remains one of AMDGPU-PRO’s strongholds. AMD has been working on opening up their proprietary compute stack, but for now it’s there. Here are some fresh AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 benchmarks versus NVIDIA in LuxMark, one of the real-world OpenCL workloads where the AMD blob does very well.
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David Airlie’s latest hacking on the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver code has led to basic PRIME support for this unofficial driver.
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Applications
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While not to everyone’s tastes, such tools are often a lot quicker and surfacing what you need when you need it, rather than you having to point and click you way through apps like i-Nex or CPU-g.
That garble is why I was stoked to find a link to Neofetch in my tips inbox recently (our recent call for content has done wonders). Neofetch is now my favourite CLI system information tool.
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We’re getting closer and closer to the final release of the LibreOffice 5.3 open-source and cross-platform office suite, and now The Document Foundation, through Italo Vignoli, informs us about the next bug hunting session, for the LibreOffice 5.3 Beta.
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Oracle announced the release of yet another stable maintenance update to the VirtualBox 5.1 series of the popular, cross-platform, and open-source virtualization software.
VirtualBox 5.1.10 is here exactly two months after the previous point release, namely VirtualBox 5.1.8, and we have some good news for Linux users, as Oracle added initial support for the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel, which will be released in the second week of December 2016. It also fixes the Linux kernel module override rule in Linux Additions.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Fantastic news for strategy fans, as Cossacks 3 [Steam, Official Site] will be on Linux soon. A little later than planned, but we’ve been told the finishing touches are being done.
This is one time I haven’t been too bothered by the delay, even though I wanted to play it badly. The game at release was quite buggy, but they have rolled out patch after patch to fix it up.
The reviews overall are “Mostly Positive”, so I am still looking forward to it.
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A new maintenance update has arrived for users of the cross-platform and commercial Vendetta Online massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), versioned 1.8.397.
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A few moments ago, Feral Interactive officially announced the release of the Total War: WARHAMMER addictive turn-based strategy video game for Linux and SteamOS operating systems.
Developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega, Total War: WARHAMMER launched on Valve’s Steam digital gaming distribution platform earlier this summer, on the 24th of May 2016, but only those with a Microsoft Windows PC were able to install and play it.
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Total War: WARHAMMER [Steam, Feral Store] is the latest big Linux port from Feral Interactive. As someone who has only recently become a fan of Warhammer, it was fun to see this game arrive on Linux.
Note: My copy was provided by Feral Interactive.
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Right on schedule, Feral Interactive has released Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux.
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Shortly after Total War: WARHAMMER was released for Linux by Feral Interactive we had out NVIDIA Linux WARHAMMER benchmarks. Now having more time since that OpenGL Linux game port release on Tuesday, here are benchmarks when using the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack with various AMD GCN graphics cards.
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With Feral Interactive releasing Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux this morning, you are probably curious how well this Linux OpenGL game port will perform with your graphics card prior to spending $60 USD for the game. Up now are my NVIDIA GeForce benchmarks for Total War: WARHAMMER on Ubuntu Linux with nine different graphics cards. In the hours ahead will be the relevant AMD tests with this newest AAA Linux game as soon as I finish up that testing.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today, November 22, 2016, KDE announced the release of the fourth maintenance update to the long-term supported KDE Plasma 5.8 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME Project’s Michael Catanzaro sent us an email earlier today to inform us about the general availability of the second development snapshot of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.
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As part of today’s GNOME 3.23.2 development snapshot towards the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, several core components and apps from the GNOME Stack received many improvements and new features.
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We reported earlier on the release of the GNOME 3.23.2 desktop environment, which is an early development snapshot of the upcoming major GNOME 3.24 release, and we told you that we’d be covering the most important parts of this milestone.
Now, we’ve told you what’s new in the Epiphany 3.23.2 web browser, and, in this article, we’d like to tell you about some of the changes implemented in the GNOME Music application, which is the default music playback utility distributed as part of the GNOME Stack.
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We reported the other day that the GNOME 3.23.2 desktop is out, which is the second development snapshot towards the GNOME 3.24 release, bringing many updated components and applications.
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Earlier this month, we were among the first to report on the availability of the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment, which we’ll be able to fully enjoy on the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” operating system, due for release in December 2016.
Later, we were also the first to report on the first point release of the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment, but now everything is official. “On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 3.2,” said Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, in the official release announcement.
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New Releases
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Today, November 22, 2016, Clonezilla Live and GParted Live developer Steven Shiau has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of a new stable build of his popular disk cloning and imaging live system.
Clonezilla Live 2.5.0-5 is now the most advanced version of the open-source and free disk cloning solution based on the Clonezilla partition or disk clone tool. It’s the first release to use a kernel from the Linux 4.8 series, namely 4.8.7, and includes all the latest package versions from the Debian Sid repository as of November 22, 2016.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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For those curious how openSUSE Leap 42.2, which was released last week, compares performance-wise to Leap 42.1 and the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are some benchmarks today for your viewing pleasure. Also included with this openSUSE performance comparison was Intel’s Clear Linux distribution as an independent metric of a distribution that’s generally among the fastest thanks to the aggressive optimizations by default.
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Mentors for this year’s Google Summer of Code blog about their experience being a mentor, the Mentor Summit at Google and the collaborative effort start an openSUSE mentoring page, 101.opensuse.org. View the blow here or read it below.
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Back in 2014~2015 was talk of an Ubuntu Tablet inspired by the failed Ubuntu Edge smartphone campaign and the company would just send along prototype pictures and specifications along with some pricing goals. That tablet never materialized but now that same group of folks is trying a crowdfunding campaign for an openSUSE tablet.
Coming as a surprise to us today is that MJ Technology, the basically unheard of company trying for the earlier Ubuntu Tablet, is now pushing out an openSUSE Tablet. “MJ Technology, a leader in affordable cutting edge tech, is pleased to introduce the MJ Technology Warrior series tablets powered by openSUSE,” MJ Tech’s CEO told OpenSUSE.org. Affordable cutting edge tech? Their only other apparent product has been a “MJ7HDTV” Android HDTV Tuner Tablet.
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It’s official; the Warrior Tablet made by MJ Technology and powered by openSUSE is ready for the world; now it just needs funding through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign.
Avid Linux users can reap the benefits of four 10.1” Linux tablets offered by MJ Techology. The specifications of the four tablets vary in power and cost, but all come with the power of Linux and openSUSE at the core.
“MJ Technology, a leader in affordable cutting edge tech, is pleased to introduce the MJ Technology Warrior series tablets powered by openSUSE,” said Mark Jun, CEO for MJ Technology.
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Missouri-based technology firm MJ Technology has begun a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo to raise US$100,000 to build the first tablets that run GNU/Linux.
The eight developers/engineers, who make up the firm, aim to make a tablet that runs the 64-bit version of the community Linux distribution, openSUSE.
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News of Linux releases are getting most of the headlines during November while snapshots of openSUSE Tumbleweed have subtly been flying under the radar.
Other than Nov. 3 and Nov. 6, openSUSE Tumbleweed had updated software snapshots released every day this month.
The last update on news.opensuse.org included snapshot 20161108 and the 13 snapshots that have followed that have included hundreds of new packages.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat generates $2 billion in annual revenue but, by its CEO’s own admission, that’s not nearly as much value as it gives away. In a recent interview, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst likened his company to a machine tool manufacturer in the Industrial Revolution—a company that does well, but not nearly as well as the companies that put those machine tools to use to build, for example, cars.
And yet Red Hat—on a “mission from God” of sorts—seems perfectly happy with its role as enabler of other multi-billion-dollar enterprises.
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Finance
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Fedora
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The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 25, the next big step our journey into the containerized, modular future!
Fedora is a global community that works together to lead the advancement of free and open source software. As part of the community’s mission the project delivers three editions, each one a free, Linux-based operating system tailored to meet specific use cases: Fedora 25 Atomic Host, Fedora 25 Server, and Fedora 25 Workstation.
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Fedora 25 was just officially released. You’ll likely want to upgrade your system to the latest version of Fedora. Fedora offers a command-line method for upgrading Fedora 24 to Fedora 25. The Fedora 24 Workstation also has a graphical method.
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Fedora 25 arrived on November 22, 2016, as reported right here on Softpedia, and it ships with lots of modern GNU/Linux technologies and the latest open source software releases.
We bet that many of you would like to upgrade their Fedora 24 installations to Fedora 25, so Fedora Ambassador Justin W. Flory published a nice tutorial on how to achieve that, no matter the method used, via GNOME Software or command-line using the powerful DNF package manager.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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You’re looking at a proposed new 3D dock that, its creator hopes, will help bring Ubuntu convergence to more people.
The device is called the ‘Station Dock’ and it’s the brainchild of Marius Gripsgård, the chief developer behind the community-based Ubports project.
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Canonical is betting that LXD, which it calls the “pure-container hypervisor,” can beat VMware, KVM and other traditional hypervisors. To see for myself, I recently gave it a whirl. Here’s what I found.
By “pure-container hypervisor,” Canonical means it is a hypervisor that works by creating containers running on top of the host system, just like Docker. There is no hardware emulation evolved. Because LXD containers have much less overhead than traditional virtual machines, they theoretically can support many more guest operating systems than traditional hypervisors, while also delivering better performance.
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The “RabbitMax Flex” is a RPi HAT board for IoT with an IR transceiver, relays, 5x cable slots for I2C sensors, and optional dev kits with LCDs and sensors.
A growing number of Internet of Things add-ons are available for the Raspberry Pi SBC, including HAT add-on boards and other development kits, but most are aimed at more experienced developers. An Indiegogo project from Bulgaria called RabbitMax Flex is targeting the more casual DIY prototyper with a completely open source HAT board that doesn’t require soldering. As the name suggests, the board relies on flexi cables.
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SUSE released the first 64-bit distribution for the Raspberry Pi 3 with its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Fedora and Ubuntu should be there soon.
When we reported on the potential for 64-bit Linux distributions supporting the Raspberry Pi 3 earlier this year, the server focused SUSE Linux was not even on the radar. This week, however SUSE and the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) would be the first 64-bit distro for the quad-core, Cortex-A53 based RPi 3, supporting its ARM A64 instruction set and ARMv8-A architecture.
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Then, 6 years later, Raspberry Pi came. As any project that is bound to change the world, it began as a little initiative by Eben Upton, growing over time from the very first 50 alpha boards to over 10 million units sold.
One year later and you can find UDOO on Kickstarter: a quad core computer and an Arduino, all in one board. Take into account that at time the alternative, in the Mini PC space, was Raspberry Pi, a single core computer. The idea of Arduino and a quad core computer in one board created an instant sensation: after all, for most projects you need both an Arduino and Raspberry Pi (and some shields) and having all this stuff in one board takes less space and just makes things easier.
Read more
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The tiny, open source “EspoTek Labrador” board combines an oscilloscope, waveform generator, power supply, logic analyzer, and multimeter.
We’ve seen several open source projects that have slashed the price and complexity of digital acquisition (DAQ), testing and measurement, and other lab gear, such as the Red Pitaya, which is now selling kits under the STEMlab name starting at $199. Now, Melbourne, Australia startup Espotek has gone to Crowd Supply to launch an “EspoTek Labrador” board with somewhat similar electronics lab functions for only $29, with worldwide shipments due Jan. 31, 2017.
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Phones
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Android
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OnePlus started its existence by hyping up the Android community to a completely irresponsible degree in advance of the release of the OnePlus One. Lucky for them the OPO was a pretty good phone. However, the breakdown of OnePlus’ relationship with Cyanogen Inc. made the OnePlus 2 a less appealing device. It was lacking in a few hardware areas and the software was very barebones. The OnePlus 3 was a clear improvement, but just a few months later OnePlus has given it the boot in favor of the OnePlus 3T.
As the name implies, this phone is very similar to the OnePlus 3. In fact, the OnePlus 3T has the same chassis as the OP3 and shares most of the same specs. The big additions here are the Snapdragon 821 (up from 820) and 3400mAh battery (previously 3000mAh). With the spec bump also comes a price bump—the OnePlus 3T starts at $440 instead of $400. I don’t know that the additions are going to change the experience, but the OnePlus 3T is still a good deal. OnePlus knows its niche.
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The Tor Project recently announced the release of its prototype for a Tor-enabled smartphone—an Android phone beefed up with privacy and security in mind, and intended as equal parts opsec kung fu and a gauntlet to Google.
The new phone, designed by Tor developer Mike Perry, is based on Copperhead OS, the hardened Android distribution profiled first by Ars earlier this year.
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We’ve seen all sorts of Android smartphones released over the years, from the ones that ship with Google’s stock Android or a third-party skin, to the ones that sport two displays, are curved or have heavy security features. There are tons of different smartphones available out there, and a number of different OS’ available for those smartphones, and that’s the true beauty of Android. Now, some of you have probably heard of a Tor-enabled smartphone by Tor Project. This smartphone put a huge emphasis on security and privacy, and those of you who are very concerned about such issues should be interested, though do keep in mind that the Tor-enabled smartphone actually references software that can be installed on a smartphone, not the actual hardware smartphone that will be available for sale, just to make that clear.
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Newer Apple smartphones and tablets are less reliable than their Android counterparts, according to a recent report by mobile diagnostics firm Blancco Technology Group. Blancco’s Q3 ‘State of Mobile Device Performance Health Report’ suggests that iPhone and iPad devices are twice as prone to crash, with a 62 per cent failure rate compared to Android devices at 47 per cent.
Blancco’s report attributed the failure of iOS devices driven by the bugs that were introduced with the iOS 10 update. Apple iPhone 6 was the worst hit device with a 13 per cent failure rate, followed by the iPhone 5S and iPhone 6S at 9 per cent; and the iPad Air 2 at 2 per cent.
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Very few, if any, OEMS do budget flagships better than OnePlus, and the new 3T continues the company’s trend of offering a lot of powerful hardware for not a lot of money. Ryan recently reviewed the 3T and found it to be a small improvement over the 3, which was already a fantastic phone. Now, if you live in North America, you can order one of your very own.
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So, you want to share your thoughts on social media, but you’re tired of the way apps like Facebook and Twitter monopolize your posts and feed. It might be time to try an entirely new alternative: Mastodon.
Mastodon bills itself as a free, open-source social media server. Like Twitter, it’s a microblogging platform. Unlike Twitter, it’s non-commercial and not centrally owned, so you don’t have to worry about what will happen to your account or your posts if it gets acquired by another company.
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CSS frameworks are among the most actively used tools in web design and development. If you’ve been involved in the industry, at some point you would have heard, seen or used a CSS framework or library before. What many developers do not realise is that these frameworks flourish thanks to the open source movement.
Frameworks like Bootstrap and ZURB’s Foundation offer a platform for rapid prototyping, getting your site up and running by providing all of the common building blocks. Bootstrap and Foundation are just two popular examples, there are hundreds if not thousands of great frameworks out there that aim to make your job easier and speed up your development work.
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Open source is the antithesis of proprietary software. It’s the free lovin’ hippie amid a sea of corporate profiteers. Defined as software for which the source code is freely available to view, modify, and redistribute, open source software has benefited hardened coders and layman consumers alike. But just because it’s free doesn’t mean profit-driven companies can’t use open source to their advantage.
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Open Source is much more than making something available to the public. It is not only about your code, it is also about licenses, understanding participation and herding cats a.k.a. dealing with community issues. In this article we will briefly look at the benefits of open sourcing your code and the pitfalls to avoid.
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While most people associate Disney with Mickey Mouse, animation, and amusement parks, the company is forging a path in the open source software realm, encouraging contributions from its developers and releasing software of its own.
Not surprising, several projects involve images, such as the OpenEXR high-dynamic-range image file format developed by Disney subsidiary Industrial Light and Magic. Others are less image-focused, including Munki, a set of tools to help MacOS X admins manage software installs and removals.
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Thus far, we’ve discussed the importance of setting goals to guide the metrics process, avoiding vanity metrics, and outlined the general types of metrics that are useful for studying your community. With a solid set of goals in place, we are now ready to discuss some of the technical details of gathering and analyzing your community metrics that align with those goals.
The tools you use and the way in which you collect metrics depend heavily on the processes you have in place for your community. Think about all of the ways in which your community members interact with each other and where collaboration happens. Where is code being committed? Where are discussions happening? More importantly than the where, what is the how? Do you have documented processes for community members to contribute? If you have a solid understanding of what your community is doing and how it is doing it, you’ll be much more successful at extracting meaningful data to support your goals.
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Nowadays, open source efforts are going on not only at big technology companies, but at big companies that leverage technology. Two prime examples exist in the entertaintment industry: Both Netflix and Disney have robust open source programs and have contributed mighty tools to the community. Here is a peek at what they have contributed.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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If you’ve used incognito browsing features, or even the Tor anonymity tool, you’re already familiar with the concept of avoiding online trackers. Now, Mozilla has launched a browser for iOS users that offers security features that block unwanted trackers.
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SaaS/Back End
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CMS
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In case you missed it, open source content management systems (CMS) have come of age. With free CMS tools, you can manage a blog, manage content in the cloud and much more You’re probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including Drupal (which Ostatic is based on) and Joomla. As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue.
The good news is that free, sophisticated guides for evaluating CMS systems have flourished, as well. We’ve covered many of the best guides for getting going with a good CMS system. Here, in this newly updated post, you’ll find several additional, good resources.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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“I am really disappointed that The Linux Foundation accepted Microsoft as a member in the Linux ecosystem, especially considering its own mission to promote, protect and advance Linux,” added another. Rather than expanding its membership to include established commercial vendors, the contributor said the group should be focused on “standardization, stable programming API’s, more use of inherent safe programming languages and less fragmentation of developer effort.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, is working on a law to reduce government dependence on IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. According to Bloomberg, Russian government agencies will be restricted in buying proprietary software, and will have to prefer open source software instead.
This step further pushes proprietary vendors out of Russia. Russian companies are increasingly buying software from domestic providers like Diasoft and New Cloud technologies, or deploying open source packages like PostgreSQL and Linux, instead of purchasing licensed packages from companies like Oracle, Autodesk and Siemens.
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Whatever the motivations, the end result will be the same, a ramping up of utilization of FLOSS in Russia, a good thing. It’s too bad Russia did not make these moves a decade or longer ago which would have caused the move to be completed by now. Too bad Putin isn’t as reasonable in his other dealings with the West.
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Licensing/Legal
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The open-source community behind the MIPS processor is working with the US regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the area of software controlled radio technology for IoT.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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It is human nature to want to share the enthusiasm you have for a subject or project with others. Wikipedia is a great place for that, where you can record your expertise and create a fact-based touchpoint for your interest. The site’s mission is altruistic, and it has been my experience that Wikipedia administrators zealously guard against content that has an obvious agenda, is not relevant to today’s Zeitgeist, or does not provide the references and citations needed to prove accuracy.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Open Source software has been around for decades. Over these decades, Open Source software has been the driving force behind most of the Internet, and all of the top-500 supercomputers. The product of the Open Source software movement is perhaps more important than Gutenberg’s press. But hardware has not yet fully embraced this super-charging effect of openness. Being able to simply buy an open source CPU, free of all proprietary bits and NDAs is impossible.
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Four years ago, Alicia Gibb was trying to unite a fragmented open-source hardware community to join together to create innovative products.
So was born the Open Source Hardware Association, which Gibb hoped would foster a community of hardware “hackers” sharing, tweaking, and updating hardware designs. It shared the ethics and ethos of open-source software and encouraged the release of hardware designs — be it for it processors, machines, or devices — for public reuse.
Since then, OSHWA has gained strength, with Intel, Raspberry Pi, and Sparkfun endorsing the organization. Its growth has coincided with the skyrocketing popularity of Arduino and Raspberry Pi-like developer boards — many of them open source — to create gadgets and IoT devices.
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Programming/Development
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We are excited to announce the v0.6 release of Pyston, our high performance Python JIT.
In this release our main goal was to reduce the overall memory footprint. It also contains a lot of additional smaller changes for improving compatibility and fixing bugs.
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For those interested in greater Python performance, the Dropbox team responsible for the Pyston project that’s interpreting Python using JIT techniques with LLVM, has announced a new release.
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Health/Nutrition
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United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today issued a message praising the “milestone” report of a High-Level Panel on access to medicines he set up a year ago to address the continuing problem of medicines prices being too high for many in the world to afford, and the lack of access to quality medicines for many. In his message, he called on governments to review the report and its recommendations, and to chart a way forward to address the problem of lack of access to medicines and health technologies.
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Candidates from around the world vying to be the next director general of the World Health Organization in recent weeks have presented their views to member states on a range of public health issues. Two of the six candidates answered a question put to them by Intellectual Property Watch relating to medicines prices, innovation and intellectual property. Here are their answers.
The question by IP-Watch to candidates was: For a long time, WHO has worked without success on addressing alternative models of financing for R&D and more affordability/accessibility of medicines for poor populations. Recently, the issue has become a mainstream concern with high prices in developed countries too, while questions of incentivizing innovation come into play. What would be your vision of how to address this problem?
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The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations today announced that its Director General is stepping down, but will stay at the helm of the organisation until the end of January.
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Security
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Recently released exploit code makes people running fully patched versions of Fedora and other Linux distributions vulnerable to drive-by attacks that can install keyloggers, backdoors, and other types of malware, a security researcher says.
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If you’re a Linux administrator, then you’re likely aware that even being fully up to date on all of the patches for your Linux distribution of choice is no guarantee that you’re free from vulnerabilities. Linux is made up of numerous components, any of which can open up an installation to one exploit or another.
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Defence/Aggression
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Over the past two days, President-elect Donald Trump has put together a national security team that will move US foreign policy far to the right. The most shocking appointment, announced Thursday, was retired Army General Michael Flynn, a fanatical opponent of radical Islam, as his national security adviser. On Friday, Trump named Kansas GOP Representative Mike Pompeo to run the CIA. Pompeo is a member of the House Intelligence Committee who strongly opposed the Iran nuclear deal as well as the post-Snowden “reforms” of US intelligence.
But so far, little attention has been paid to a retired Army lieutenant general, Joseph “Keith” Kellogg, one of Trump’s closest military and foreign-policy advisers. Kellogg is a former contracting executive who is considered a front-runner for a senior position at the Pentagon. He has been among the small group of advisers seen entering and leaving Trump Tower this week.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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So, you think Assange is a prick? Well tough shit. History-making rebels aren’t meant to be sweethearts.
What, the world’s most ardent defenders of freedom want to know, has happened to Julian Assange? Just a few years ago, he was such an earnest fellow, who spoke all truth to power. Well-known liberals gave him airtime, centrist trade organisations gave him membership and middle-brow humourists gave him plaudits and harbour. Now, all that the honourable can offer him is their disgust. He’s a Russian collaborator, a spiteful traitor, a pussy-grabbing narcissist whose leaks on Clinton place him in precisely the same deplorable basket that emits the stink of Trump.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Forest managers have never seen anything like it. Across California, an astounding 102 million trees have died over the past six years from drought and disease — including 62 million trees in 2016 alone, the US Forest Service estimates. Once-mighty oaks and pines have faded into ghastly hues of brown and gray.
The biggest worry is that these dead, dry forests will become highly combustible when California’s annual fire season rolls around next summer. The south and central Sierra Nevada regions, where most of the dead trees are located, are at particular risk of severe wildfires…
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Finance
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Support for the EU has risen across Europe, including in the UK, since the British people voted to leave.
Pro-EU sentiment has grown in five of the six largest member states, according to a survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation. These were the UK, France, Germany, Poland and Italy. The only large state to see a fall in support for the EU was Spain.
“The looming Brexit seems to have been the best advertisement for the EU,” said Aart De Geus, of the Bertelsmann Foundation, Germany’s largest NGO.
In the UK referendum on 23 June, the country narrowly voted to leave the EU, with 52% voting leave while 48% supported remain.
But the Bertelsmann survey, completed in August against a backdrop of confusion about the British government’s Brexit strategy, showed that 56% of British citizens wanted to stay in the EU, compared with 49% when a similar survey was conducted in March.
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With relations between the EU and Turkey already deeply strained, a broad coalition of members of the European Parliament Tuesday called for ending EU membership talks with Ankara as punishment for a trampling of democratic freedoms and human rights by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan following a failed coup attempt last July.
The fraying of ties comes at a particularly sensitive time for Brussels, with the EU relying on Turkey to keep up its end of an agreement on the return of migrants who have sought refuge in Europe.
While an unraveling of that deal could create acute political problems in capitals across the Continent, many members of Parliament called for ending the arrangement, saying Erdoğan was using it as a tool of “blackmail.” Leaders of the biggest factions in the Parliament also called for ending the discussions with Turkey about EU membership.
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I have recently reported in The Indicter and Global Research on the payment done by the Swedish giant corporation Ericsson to the Clinton foundation, and also on the intervention of the company in Haiti – which resulted in disastrous consequences for the Haiti economy, as reported in a cable from the US Embassy in Port Au Prince to the State Department.
New exposures referring unethical transactions of the Swedish company, indicates that Ericsson would have even bribed the then Costa Rica’s President Miguel Angel Rodriguez while competing for a major telecom contract.
The exposures are partly based on a testimony by a former employee at the company, Liss Olof Nenzell, which was in charge of “sensitive payments”. The report adds that also ministers in the government as well as executives of the Telecom companies have received the Ericsson’s payments. Reports regarding the exact sum allegedly sent by Ericsson to Miguel Angel Rodriguez vaies in the Swedish media. While the graphic in Swedish Radio names $750,000, The Local (Carl Bildt’s megaphone) reduced it to $271,245.
Former Costa Rica’s president Rodriguez was staunch supporter of the UN invasion in Haiti. Later, Ericsson obtained extended credits in Haiti, which according to a document declassified by the US State Department would have caused a deterioration in the economy of Haiti.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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President-elect Donald Trump won’t subject Hillary Clinton to a criminal inquiry — instead, he’ll help her heal, his spokeswoman said Tuesday.
“I think when the president-elect who’s also the head of your party … tells you before he’s even inaugurated he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content, to the members,” Kellyanne Conway told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” who first reported that the president-elect would not pursue his campaign pledge to “lock up” Clinton, his Democratic opponent.
“Look, I think, he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign are not among them,” Conway, who is now on the Trump transition team, said in her interview.
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President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tempered some of his most extreme campaign promises, dropping his vow to jail Hillary Clinton, expressing doubt about the value of torturing terrorism suspects and pledging to have an open mind about climate change.
But in a wide-ranging, hourlong interview with reporters and editors at The New York Times — which was scheduled, canceled and then reinstated after a dispute over the ground rules — Mr. Trump was fiercely unapologetic about repeatedly flouting the traditional ethical and political conventions that have long shaped the American presidency.
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This is a powerful moment in U.S. history. Disappointment in Donald Trump’s victory has brought thousands of people onto the streets, chanting “Not my president!” Trump and Clinton were not the only people who ran for president; the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson, the Green Party’s Jill Stein and 27 other people were also on the ballot. Johnson won 3.3% of the vote, while Stein took 1% (1.3 million votes). Neither Johnson nor Stein made as great an impact as the polls suggested or as they had hoped. If they had attained the 5% threshold, their parties would qualify for public campaign funding.
As the results of the election began to sink in, I spoke to Jill Stein about the election and about what might come from a Trump presidency.
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New York Times reporter David Sanger worked extensively with former deputy CIA director Michael Morell during the reporting of his book Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power—even arranging to provide Morell with access to an entire unpublished chapter for his review—according to documents obtained by Gizmodo.
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Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book — its ranking soared on Amazon and by day’s end it was no longer available. (Harvard University Press is reprinting the book for the first time since 2010, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.)
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Young doesn’t necessarily equal web savvy, at least according to a recent Stanford study. More than 80 percent of students were unable to tell an advertisement — labeled as sponsored content — from a news story.
The study attempted to judge news literacy among students and examine how they might respond and evaluate to stories gathered from Facebook and Twitter feeds, photographs, reader comments on news sites, and blog posts. All told, researchers collected some 7,804 responses from students in 12 US states.
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Almost $600,000 per hour.
That’s the fee Donald Trump’s charity got for recording a video on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch.
It’s a payment that could be in violation of tax laws, legal experts told The Daily Beast. When Hillary Clinton’s foundation received money from the very same billionaire, Donald Trump blasted her as “crooked.”
Ukrainian steel magnate Victor Pinchuk’s foundation was the single largest outside donor to Donald Trump’s private charity in 2015, according to new IRS filings filed by the organization. The $150,000 gift amounted to 20 percent of the foundation’s total donations during that time, the documents showed. The filings also affirmed Trump violated tax laws by using his private foundation to self-deal, or enrich himself and his businesses instead of fulfilling a charitable mission.
Pinchuk’s gift was given in conjunction with a short video Trump made for the Yalta European Strategy annual meeting, held in Kiev in September of 2015, according to The Washington Post.
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A Ukrainian steel magnate who was one of the largest donors to the Clinton Foundation has surfaced on newly filed tax records for Donald Trump’s charitable foundation, raising alarms from some of the Clinton’s most vocal critics.
“I think is troubling,” said Peter Schweizer, author of the book Clinton Cash, which documented the blending of the Clinton’s charitable and political interests. “He’s somebody that donated to the Clinton Foundation, and this is a problem…I think there’s no other way to read it other than they are hoping to get some favor in return.”
Pinchuk’s $150,000 donation, first reported by The Washington Post, was to the Trumps’ family-run charity, far smaller and more intimate than the vast Clinton Foundation. In total, the Trump non profit took in $780,000 in contributions last year.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The fantasy of the normalization of Donald Trump—the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation after his Election Day victory—should now be a distant memory, an illusion shattered.
First came the obsessive Twitter rants directed at “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.” Then came Monday’s astonishing aria of invective and resentment aimed at the media, delivered in a conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. In the presence of television executives and anchors, Trump whined about everything from NBC News reporter Katy Tur’s coverage of him to a photograph the news network has used that shows him with a double chin. Why didn’t they use “nicer” pictures?
For more than twenty minutes, Trump railed about “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage. When he was asked about the sort of “fake news” that now clogs social media, Trump replied that it was the networks that were guilty of spreading fake news. The “worst,” he said, were CNN (“liars!”) and NBC.
This is where we are. The President-elect does not care who knows how unforgiving or vain or distracted he is. This is who he is, and this is who will be running the executive branch of the United States government for four years.
The over-all impression of the meeting from the attendees I spoke with was that Trump showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country’s highest office. Rather, said one, “He is the same kind of blustering, bluffing blowhard as he was during the campaign.”
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Christians in Ireland feel unable to express their opinions on same-sex marriage, the CEO of free speech group Index on Censorship has said.
Jodie Ginsberg, speaking in a debate on religious freedom, emphasised the need for tolerance of those with non-mainstream views, and their freedom to express those views.
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Web users in the UK will be banned from accessing websites portraying a range of non-conventional sexual acts, under a little discussed clause to a government bill currently going through parliament.
The proposal, part of the digital economy bill, would force internet service providers to block sites hosting content that would not be certified for commercial DVD sale by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).
It is contained within provisions of the bill designed to enforce strict age verification checks to stop children accessing adult websites. After pressure from MPs, the culture secretary, Caroline Bradley, announced on Saturday that the government would amend the bill to include powers to block non-compliant websites.
In order to comply with the censorship rules, many mainstream adult websites would have to render whole sections inaccessible to UK audiences. That is despite the acts shown being legal for consenting over-16s to perform and for adults in almost all other liberal countries to film, distribute and watch.
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Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has cultivated relationships with China’s leaders, including President Xi Jinping. He has paid multiple visits to the country to meet its top internet executives. He has made an effort to learn Mandarin.
Inside Facebook, the work to enter China runs far deeper.
The social network has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, according to three current and former Facebook employees, who asked for anonymity because the tool is confidential. The feature was created to help Facebook get into China, a market where the social network has been blocked, these people said. Mr. Zuckerberg has supported and defended the effort, the people added.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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On January 20, President Obama will hand Donald Trump the keys to the surveillance state. Not only will Trump have the NSA’s incredibly powerful technological tools at his disposal, but he’ll also have the benefit of the overbroad and unconstitutional surveillance authorities embraced by the Obama administration — authorities that give tremendous discretion to executive branch officials.
These spying powers have long been cause for concern because they violate our core rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. But when wielded by a man who invited Russia to hack his political opponent, who reportedly eavesdropped on his own hotel guests, and who has called for expanded surveillance of Americans and especially American Muslims, they are all the more frightening. Fortunately, there are several ways to fight back against the surveillance state, including concrete steps you can take to protect yourself and your communications.
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The legislation in question is called the Investigatory Powers Bill. It’s been cleared by politicians and awaits only the formality of royal assent before it becomes law. The bill will legalize the UK’s global surveillance program, which scoops up communications data from around the world, but it will also introduce new domestic powers, including a government database that stores the web history of every citizen in the country. UK spies will be empowered to hack individuals, internet infrastructure, and even whole towns — if the government deems it necessary.
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The Washington Post reported on 19 November that Defence Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper Jr made the recommendations to President Obama, now serving out the final days of his term.
Clapper and Carter, Rogers’ two bosses, reportedly have problems with Rogers’ performance in the role. There have have apparently been “persistent complaints from NSA personnel that Rogers is aloof, frequently absent and does not listen to staff input”. His tenure as NSA director has been marked by several significant security breaches. The most recent example was the arrest of NSA contractor Harold T. Martin III, whose garage was found filled with terabytes of classified data on removable storage devices.
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There is a global siege on privacy. Governments all over the world have introduced legislation (sometimes secret) which forces email, internet or data storage providers to track what you do and make that data available to their governments. This, of course, also means third parties who gain access to the storage systems can see and abuse it. And because so many of us have put so much of our data at just a few providers, we’re at great risk as events like last week’s shutdown of hundreds of Google accounts did show.
While Google, Dropbox and others lure customers in with ‘free’ data storage and great online services, governments benefit from centralized data storages as it makes it easy for them to hack in or demand data from these companies.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The Albuquerque Police Department is coming under fire after former records supervisor, Reynaldo Chavez, gave a sworn affidavit claiming officers altered and deleted body camera videos.
According to New Mexico In Depth, after at least two police shootings, videos were deleted or edited so they didn’t show the incident.
In the case of 19-year-old suspected car thief Mary Hawkes in April 2014, the videos were partially deleted in spots or altered. In a separate incident, surveillance camera video from a nearby salon showed APD officers shooting law enforcement informant, Jeremy Robertson. That video too was altered. Chavez explained the June 2014 video had “the tell-tale signs that it has been altered and images that had been captured are now deleted. One of the deleted images captured the officers shooting Jeremy Robertson.”
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Thirty-one authors have signed an open letter to President Obama, urging him to pardon Edward Snowden, the former U.S. government contractor charged with violating the Espionage Act for leaking National Security Agency documents to journalists.
Writers who signed the letter include Michael Chabon, Ursula K. LeGuin, Cheryl Strayed, Neil Gaiman, Teju Cole and Joyce Carol Oates.
“Throughout American history, the pardonable offense and the pardon privilege itself have functioned together as a uniquely direct system of check-and-balance between the individual citizen and the executive branch,” the letter reads. “Both can be understood as extreme actions undertaken to mitigate the harm caused by judicial and legislative insufficiency; by courts that would rule unfairly, and by laws — like the Espionage Act — whose vagaries and datedness would make their application too severe or too broad.”
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President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday expressed reservations about the use of torture. But he did not disavow the practice, or his promise to bring it back. And if he does, C.I.A. doctors may be America’s last defense against a return to savagery. But they’ll need to break sharply with what they did the last time around.
Buried in a trove of documents released last summer is the revelation that C.I.A. physicians played a central role in designing the agency’s post-Sept. 11 torture program. The documents, declassified in response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, show in chilling detail how C.I.A. medicine lost its moral moorings. It’s long been known that doctors attended torture as monitors. What’s new is their role as its engineers.
The documents include previously redacted language from a directive by the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services telling physicians at clandestine interrogation sites to flout medical ethics by lying to detainees and collaborating in abuse. This language also reveals that doctors helped to design a waterboarding method more brutal than what even lawyers for the George W. Bush administration allowed.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Trump this week formally selected two staunch opponents of net neutrality to oversee the incoming President’s FCC transition team. Economist Jeff Eisenach and former Sprint Corp lobbyist Mark Jamison both have deep-rooted ties to the broadband sector, and both played major roles in helping the industry fight passage of the U.S.’s net neutrality rules last year. We had already noted that incumbent ISPs like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have been getting excited by the possibility of a hamstrung FCC and the roll back of numerous consumer-friendly policies made under the tenure of outgoing FCC boss Tom Wheeler.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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You don’t often see the FBI’s website targeted by a DMCA takedown notice, but when you do, you can be sure there’s someone with a criminal record behind it. The last time we saw this happening, it was convicted fraudster Sean Gjerde, who thought he could perform his own reputation management by copy-pasting the FBI’s press release onto his own website as part of a “book” he was “writing,” and then begin issuing bogus takedown notices targeting content he didn’t create. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for all the reasons he was NEVER GOING TO GET AWAY WITH IT.
Enter Anthony Lewis Jerdine, someone with a bit of reputation to clean up. Over the past decade, Jerdine has been imprisoned for bank fraud, made the US Marshals fugitive list, been sanctioned for unauthorized practice of law, been called a vexatious litigant by the Ohio court system, and, lest we forget, formed a trust in his own name.
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Copyrights
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When visual artists sell their work, they usually perceive a price for that work. If it is resold at a much higher price, some countries provide for a resale right, providing artists with resale royalties. In other countries, such a right does not exist, putting visual artists in a disadvantageous situation, particularly indigenous artists, whose work can become very valuable on the international art markets.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A translation of the article “Medewerkers European Patent Office in actie tegen angstcultuur,” courtesy of Petra Kramer
We are expecting Dutch press coverage to come soon, especially because Parliament is stepping in.
In the mean time, press releases are being issued and as we mentioned this morning, there are less than 24 hours before the EPO protest at The Hague commences.
Here is one new example of new coverage, translated for us by Petra Kramer:
Employees of European Patent Office take action against culture of fear
Tomorrow afternoon, Thursday, November 24th, employees of the European Patent Office (EPO) will rally against its Director, Mr Battistelli. They are supported in by the FNV (The largest Dutch union, with over a million members. PK). The employees have been suffering under the yoke of this director for years. Under the slogan “Enough is enough ‘employees will demonstrate tomorrow at Square 1813, the Independence Square, in The Hague.
With this demonstration they call Secretary Martijn van Dam (Economic Affairs) to take action against Benoît Battistelli, which governs the EPO with an iron fist, and the fear culture he has created.
Date: Thursday, November 24
Time: 12:00
Location: Plein 1813, The Hague
The European Patent Office staff, a European organization located in Rijswijk, it was to live and work under the director. Battistelli rules with an iron fist and tolerates no participation or contradiction. He dismisses people at will, placing them back in office press unilaterally implements changes to working conditions and demotivates if the entire organization.
FNV supports the employees.
“Surely it cannot be so that the Dutch government allows such abuses on its own territory? If this type of abuse had occurred at a Dutch employer, the world had been too small (a Dutch exprssion meaning there would be outrage PK). Battistelli can not be allowed to hide behind immunity ‘says Marieke Manschot, director FNV Government. “It is high time that Sate Secretary Van Dam State acts and stands up for the employees of the EPO. The FNV strongly supports these employees.”
Court ruling
February last year, the Court in The Hague ruled Battistelli must abide by the rules and regulations as they are listed in the European Convention on Human Rights and the conventions of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Battistelli, however, argues that the verdict is not enforceable on the basis of immunity. He has the support of the Dutch state. This indicates that the Dutch legal system can not interve. “The Dutch government has a system of fear and arbitrariness on its home soil. This must stop, and as soon as possible, ” concludes Manschot.
Source: Medewerkers European Patent Office in actie tegen angstcultuur
Morgenmiddag, donderdag 24 november, komen medewerkers van het European Patent Office (EPO) in actie tegen hun directeur, de heer Battistelli. Zij worden hierin gesteund door de FNV. De medewerkers gaan al jaren gebukt onder het juk van deze directeur. Onder het motto ‘Genoeg is genoeg’ demonstreren de medewerkers morgen op Plein 1813, hét onafhankelijkheidsplein, in Den Haag.
[...]
Please send us any more material related to this so we can properly document it and keep a permanent record. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“I am afraid (and very sorry) to say that even among the EPO’s top officials, the principle of the Rule of Law does not seem to be respected very much. Where are you, Administrative Council?“ (source: Kluwer Patent Blog)
Summary: An anonymous message from EPO insiders who are concerned about the state of the Office under Battistelli’s misguided and reckless leadership
As staff, we have been asking ourselves the same question for the past 3½ years. In the last few sessions of the AC, the delegations seemed to realise that they need to act. But acting goes beyond voting on and writing down statements of intent.
What more is needed to make the Council do the right thing?
Staff still gets its bearings right, though.
We have observed the structural erosion of quality, legal and professional standards in the Office. We can clearly see how a sequence of actions was targeted at dismantling all elements in the chain of due process. Staff and all interested observers now understand how utterly unashamed the EPO’s senior management are of their despicable acts.
When the only way to deal with difficult union officials is to fire them and when so many staff members feel underappreciated and ill-used, it is clear that something is badly wrong. … The impression given by recent events is not one of firm, balanced management, but of management by intimidation. That is no way to run a patent office.
How deep do we still need to sink? When will we cry outrage and put an end to it?
The unfair dismissal of staff representatives – first Ion and Elizabeth, and now Laurent – is merely the most perverse expression of exercising limitless power. What works for staff representatives will most certainly work when used against average staff members. And why does it work? Because management is getting away with abusing the Privileges and Immunities awarded to the Organisation for the purpose of exercising its duties free of obstruction.
The madness has to stop. We cannot be seen any longer as being just as half-hearted as the Council in our claims and acts. Our claims are few and clear:
Managers must stand to account for their acts!
Their irresponsible behaviour, including “harassment … by exclusion, isolation and intimidation” and ignoring the Council’s March resolution justifies dismissal1.
This week’s demonstration of EPO staff at The Hague must be the biggest ever. We all need to show our determination:
Mr Battistelli, Mr Topić and Ms Bergot must go.
Our dismissed staff representatives Ion, Elisabeth and Laurent must be reinstated.
The downgradings of Malika, Michael and Aurélien must be reversed, and the house ban on the DG3 judge must be lifted. █
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