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02.15.16

La Oficina Europea de Patentes, Por Encima/Apatética a los Inventores y los Derechos Humanos, Simplemente NO Puede Ser Confíada con la Patente Unitaria (UPC)

Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Original/English

Publicado en Sitio News at 6:08 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

¿Más poder legal, pero para quién?

Trojan horse

Sumario: La Oficina Europea de Patentes (OEP) alguna vez fuente de orgullo para los Europeos cada vez más unificaods, no sólo quiere disfrutar immunidad pero también obtener nuevos poderes, a pesar de demostrar que sus intereses son cualquier cosa pero Europeos y son frecuentemente detrimentales a Europeos, no simplemente inventores Europeos.

LA image de la OEP fue manchada hace tiempo por las protestas de sus empleados, articulos de prensa y lo demás. Estas protestas y articulos de prensa fueron el resultado de algo, no la causa de algo. No son escándalos inventados (como la OEP frecuentemente trata de presentarlos con la ayuda de sus camaradas en los medios de comunicación alemanes, notablemente Süddeutsche Zeitung); es mucho más que merecido, y la OEP merece toda la culpa. Nunca antes la OEP fue un paria ante los ojos de Europa. La OEP fue alguna vez internacionalmente considerada de lo mejor; y ahora es considerada (notoriamente) como uno de los más grandes violadores de los derechos humanos, más aún que la SIPO (la Oficina Estatal de Propiedad Intelectual en Croatia y China).

Las cosas tomaron un giro por lo peor cuando Pinocho Battistelli, quién trata de mejorar duramente su imagen este mes, asumió el poder y trajo consigo a sus camaradas. ¿No esperó algún escándalo en su contra? La gerencia de la OEP se ha convertido en un cliché. Es tribalismo. La gente generalmente sabe que la OEP es tán escándalosa como la FIFA, aunque todavía no hay medidas disciplinarias contra su gerencia. Ayer el presidente de la FFII dijo a la OEP ¨es tiempo para que el Parlamento Europeo intervenga para impedir el máximalismo de patentes. Serán impotentes contra una no-UE Corte Unitaria de Patentes.¨

“Las cosas tomaron un giro por lo peor cuando Pinocho Battistelli, quién trata de mejorar duramente su imagen este mes, asumió el poder y trajo consigo a sus camaradas.”El término ¨máximalismo de patentes¨ = un término que creemos fue concebido aquí – esta ganando mayor uso. La persona de arriba ahora escribe acerca de BARRERAS DE LENGUAGE (obstrucciones a la UPC) así como – una materia cubierta aquí un montón reciéntemente, en su mayoría en relación a España y Suecia. Glyn Moody, quién escribió un articulo detallado acerca de la OEP al principio de este mes (criticando ambas la OEP y a la UPC), respondió al preguntar, ¨¿Tiénes una link para eso? Creo que esto va a convertirse en una materia de enorme importancia para la UPC…¨

“En my historia de twitter,” el presidente de la FFII. “Ya mencioné el hecho que la Corte estará trabajando sólo en Inglés. Déjenme investigar”

Ya cubrimos esta materia frecuentemente profundamente aquí, tanto así como más de un lustro (cuando la UPC no era conocida o referida como la ¨UPC¨).

Amablemente recordamos a nuestros lectores que los eventos financiados por la OEP pro-UPC van a tener lugar (incluyendo uno en los Estados Unidos más tarde este mes). La OEP quiere hacerlo internacional. Deseamos que nuestros lectores presten atención y consideren quién promueve la UPC. Un sitio llamado de ´noticias´ que ayudó a la OEP con propaganda a favor de la UPC (reciéntemente con preguntas preparadas de antemano para una ¨entrevista¨ a Pinocho Battistelli) ahora promueve los llamados tratados de ¨libre¨ ¨comercio¨, de nuevo con tales ¨entrevistas¨. Presencia de los medios no es difícil de realizar; SIEMPRE HAY AQUELLOS INGENUES O CORRUPTIBLES CON UN SITIO WEB OPERACIONAL Y ALGÚN PRESUPUESTO.

“¿Está la OEP sirviendo a los inventores o esta cuidando a los abogados de patentes?”Recuerden que los gerentes de la OEP separaron un presupuesto masivo para propaganda en los medios. Incluso contrataron a una firma estadounidense (si, US!) de Relaciones Públicas para manejarla. Lo que hace que uno se pregunte ¿quién esta tán ansioso por la UPC de todas maneras? Tal vez A LOS TROLLES DE PATENTES SE LES HACE AGUA LA BOCA…

“Guarde esta información,” la OEP escribió ayer acerca de la presencia/posición de la OEP en la CeBIT, uniéndo a una página cuyos contenidos son más que un cabildeo por patentes de software. Tal vez a LOS PROPONENTES DE PATENTES DE SOFTWARE SE LES HACE AGUA LA BOCA TAMBIÉN…

También republicada ayer por la OEP fue esta fotografía mostrando a abogados de patentes compartiendo un cuarto con empleados de la OEP. ¿Está la OEP sirviendo a los inventores o esta cuidando a los abogados de patentes. Sospechamos lo último, ambos están en la camita, sin mencionar el trío con las largas corporaciones que son la mayor fuente de ganancias de estos abogados (así como de la OEP). La OEP sólo necesita mantener la ilusión/percepción de que esto no es el caso, pero tal multi-polinización (LARGAS CORPORACIONES, ABOGADOS DE PATENTES Y BURÓCRATAS DE LA OEP) sirve para reforzar la idea de que todos ellos están COLUDIDOS por DINERO y PODER. Es proteccionismo. Ellos quieren más para ellos y menos para todos los demás. Para citar este interesante nuevo comentario de ayer:

A propósito la decisión en riesgo es T 339/13:

http://www.epo.org/law-practice/case-law-appeals/recent/t130339eu1.html

Es interesante notar que el jurado de apelaciones encuentra inventivo imitar el ronroneo de un gato. Hubiera pensado que es notorio que gatos ronroneen, especialmente cuando son golpeados.

Es dificil ver que puede ser inventivo en mover el cursor en un gato virtual y en respuesta recibir un gentil ronroneo.

En otras noticias acerca de la OEP, miren como las medicinas genéricas están bajo ataque por las patentes de la OEP. Para citar noticias de ayer: ¨En el último cuarteto de 2015, un competidor genérico retiró su apelación acerca de la validez del régimen de vitaminas Alimta ante el Jurado Tecnico de Apelaciones de la Oficina Europea de Patentes (OEP). En vista del retiro de la apelación, la decisión de la División de Oposición de la OEP encontrándo la validez de la patente es final, y no puede haber futuros desafíos legales a regimen de patentes por Vitamin Alimta ante la OEP.¨

“Consideren lo que la Coalición Europea de Pacientes de Cancer escribió hace dos años a Battistelli.”¿Cuál sería el efecto de esta decisión en la población general Europea? Consideren lo que la Coalición Europea de Pacientes de Cancer escribió hace dos años a Battistelli.

IP Watch también publicó este articulo ayer, cubriendo lo que los ayayeros de la OEP hicieron para sembrar PR (cubrimiento positivo) acerca de semillas de plantas. Para citar IP Watch: ¨El asunto de juego interno entre patentes y derechos de variedad de plantas alcanzó su climax el año pasado cuando el Amplio Jurado de Apelaciones de la OEP mantuvo patentes por plantas o semillas obtenidas a traves de metodos convensionales, poniendo la posición de criadores de plantas en duda.

“Antes de que mayores poderes sean traspasados a la OEP (e.g. la UPC) tiene que haber la aseguranza de que la OEP no es simplemente un CABALLO DE TROYA SIRVIENDO A CORPORACIONES EXTRANJERAS bajo un dominio .org y el ENGAÑOSO título ¨Europeo.”¨Las resolusiones obligaron al Parlamenteo Europeo a solicitar a la Comisión Europea a investigar el asunto, y los Países Bajos, quienes obtendrán la Presidencia de la UE desde el Primero de Enero – 30 de Junio de 2016, a prometer corregir el desequilibrio entre los dos sistemas (IPW, Biodiversity/Genetic Resources/Biotech, 19 Enero 2016). La OEP y CPVO dijeron que ellos quieren incrementar su intercambio de información en la materia.¨

Juzgando por como las cosas han progresado hasta ahora último, no pasará mucho ante la OEP sea tán cabildeadora de Mosanto como la USPTO lo es ya. Antes de que mayores poderes sean traspasados a la OEP (e.g. la UPC) tiene que haber la aseguranza de que la OEP no es simplemente un CABALLO DE TROYA SIRVIENDO A CORPORACIONES EXTRANJERAS bajo un dominio .org y el ENGAÑOSO título ¨Europeo. Uno tiene que asegurarse que la OEP actualmente obedezca la ley. Al presente obviamente no lo hace. █

“El problema de luchar por la libertad humana es que una mayor parte de su tiempo se gasta defendiendo sinverguenzas. Porque es contra los canallas que las leyes opresivas están dirigidas en primer lugar, y la opresión deben detenerse al principio si es que va a ser detenida en absoluto.”

–Henry Mencken

Última Propaganda de la Gerencia de la OEP un Esfuerzo para hacer de ella la Herramienta de las Grandes Corporaciones

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 6:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

English/Original

Publicado in Decepción, Europe, Patents at 9:25 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Guerras de grass: Las grandes corporaciones generalmente buscan mayor proteccionismo para sus posiciones dominantes

Private

Sumario: Un rápido repaso de alguno de lo último en propaganda y cubrimiento (comprado) que ayuda a introducir un distorsionado sistema de patentes cuyos beneficiarios no són Europeos (o incluso gente)

La OEP esta comenzando a enfocarse más y más en propaganda y mentiras [1, 2], como notamos en nuestro pasado post. La verdad no apya las acciones de la OEP, tanto que distorsión de la realidad se hace imperativo. Vamos a pasar mucho tiempo del día respondiendo a las mentiras diseminadas por la gerencia de la OEP y de su no ético equipo de relaciones públicas.

“Las reglas estan siendo cambiadas en favor de los grandes clientes de abogados y de los trolles de patentes, para el detrimento de los Europeos que no son abogados de patentes.”Hubo un recordatorio en un Domingo (inusual para IAM) de un evento de propaganda para la UPC financiado por la OEP. Esto es un giro de angulo declaratorio. La OEP se esta ALIANDO CON ABOGADOS DE PATENTES PARA CAMBIAR LAS REGLAS. Las reglas estan siendo cambiadas en favor de los grandes clientes de abogados y de los trolles de patentes, para el detrimento de los Europeos que no son abogados de patentes.

El equipo de PR de la OEP finalmente se decidió públicar sólo en Aleman es desagradable (se lo mencionamos), así que ahora hay una versión del articulo originalmente publicado sólo en Aleman (advertencia: epo.org link), llevando a cuestas a un maximalista de patentes a ayudar a tirar flores a la OEP, notamos al momento (maximalistas de patentes sirven para reenforzar la narrativa/mitología que a más patentes, más innovación). Aquí esta el equipo PR de la OEP de nuevo tomando ventaja del cancer en el Dia Mundial del Cancer a pesar de sus actividades en contra de los pacientes del mal.

“La subida de precios no son para la examinación de patentes pero para esenciales negocios de la OEP como espiar a sus empleados y miembros del público, comprar favorables reportajes de prensa, organizar eventos del inventor del año, proveer ayuda ¨técnica¨ a estados miembros obedientes, subvencionar compañías privadas como Control Risks o FTI Consulting. Para beneficio de la sociedad Europea.”Hace algunos días escribimos acerca de la subida de precios en la OEP que perjudican a las PYMEs. Poco después, como un comentador graciosamente lo puso: ¨La subida de precios no son para la examinación de patentes pero para esenciales negocios de la OEP como espiar a sus empleados y miembros del público, comprar favorables reportajes de prensa, organizar eventos del inventor del año, proveer ayuda ¨técnica¨ a estados miembros obedientes, subvencionar compañías privadas como Control Risks o FTI Consulting. Para beneficio de la sociedad Europea.

¿Alguién piensa que es acceptable para la OEP desperdiciar casi $1 millon de dólares (en sólo un año) en una compañía de Relaciones Públicas (PR) de los Estados Unidos? ¿Qué acerca de los llamados económistas para ayudar a generar propaganda acerca de la economía de patentes?

¨Acerca de examinar o no,¨ escribió una persona, ¨hay muchos sistemas de patentes disponibles, cada uno con sus ventajas y desventajas. Pero mientras la EPC requiere que la examinación sea llevada a cabo y mientras que la OEP saca provecho de matricula de los aplicantes por hacerlas, no está dentro la competencia de Battistelli, no dentro d la AC, a ¨llevarnos¨ a un sistema diferente, sin embargo tan moderno que sea.¨

Battistelli esta ahora cabildeando por la UPC, que en NINGUNA MANERA AYUDA a las PYMEs Europeas. Por eso que FTI Consulting, que es PAGADA POR LA OEP, publica propaganda pro-UPC. Como otro comentador lo puso hoy:

“¿No son los ahorros, modernidad y eficiencia a lo que vamos? ¿No es allí donde BB nos esta llevando?”

Eso bien pueda ser.
Es abundantemente claro que su intento es traerse abajo al Jurado de Apelaciones de la OEP.
Más o menos lo ha dicho públicamente on unas pocas ocasiones o al menos puede ser leído entre lineas de su propaganda.

Pero la pregunta en la cabeza de muchas personas es ¿DE DÓNDE SU MANDATO VIENE: PARIS, BRUSELAS, WASHINGTON?

BB [Battistelli] no es un visionario¨. Es un tecnócrata. El está implementado la visión de alguién más. Pero ¿Quié o quienes son ls marioneteros jalando sus cuerdas?

Basado en documentos expuestos, Battistelli PRIORITIZA LARGAS CORPORACIONES, INCLUSO EXTRANJERAS. Emanando de nuestro trabajo aquí incluyendo algunas traducciones al Español, hay algun cubrimiento en los medios en Google News y hace unos días atrás Juve publicó otro artículo titulado: “Kommentar: Warnschuss für EPA-Präsidenten Battistelli” (amablementle pedimos a nuestros lectores a ayudarnos a publicar una traducción al Inglés). Battistelli y sus chacales tratan de ¨revolucionar¨ el sistema a favor de las grandes corporaciones multinacionales, a costo del pueblo Europeo. ¿Deberían ser permitidos de salirse con la suya? ¿Porqué no interviene el Parlamento? En este contexto el silencio es complicidad. █

“Cuando la multitud gana el día, deja de ser multitud. Entonces pasa a ser llamada la nación.”

–Napoleon

Links 15/2/2016: Zorin OS 11 Lite and Business, Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 6:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Windows 10 calls home a lot; Russia hikes tech tax and intends to switch to Linux

    When it comes to high tech, American companies dominate the Russian market and, perhaps not surprisingly, that doesn’t site well with the Russian government which would prefer to see homegrown offerings such as Yandex and Mail.ru get more market traction. The consequence, according to Bloomberg, is a plan by the Russian government to increase the taxes the American tech giants by 18 percent.

  • Unixstickers sent me a package!

    There’s an old, popular saying, beware geeks bearing gifts. But in this case, I was pleased to see an email in my inbox, from unixstickers.com, asking me if I was interested in reviewing their products. I said ye, and a quick few days later, there was a surprise courier-delivered envelope waiting for me in the post. Coincidentally – or not – the whole thing happened close enough to the 2015 end-of-the-year holidays to classify as poetic justice.

    On a slightly more serious note, Unixstickers is a company shipping T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, posters, pins, and stickers to UNIX and Linux aficionados worldwide. Having been identified one and acquired on the company’s PR radar, I am now doing a first-of-a-kind Dedoimedo non-technical technical review of merchandise related to our favorite software. So not sure how it’s gonna work out, but let’s see.

  • Linux goes to Washington: How the White House/Linux Foundation collaboration will work

    No doubt by now you’ve heard about the Obama Administration’s newly announced Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP). You can read more about it on CIO.com here and here.

    But what you may not know is that the White House is actively working with the Linux and open source community for CNAP. In a blog post Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation said, “In the proposal, the White House announced collaboration with The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) to better secure Internet ‘utilities’ such as open-source software, protocols and standards.”

  • Why Linux?

    Linux may inspire you to think of coders hunched over their desks (that are littered with Mountain Dew cans) while looking at lines of codes, faintly lit by the yellow glow of old CRT monitors. Maybe Linux sounds like some kind of a wild cat and you have never heard the term before. Maybe you have use it every day. It is an operating system loved by a few and misrepresented to many.

  • These 3 things are trying to kill Linux containers

    For nearly two years, Linux containers have dominated the world of enterprise IT, and for good reason — among others, they take on issues that virtualization simply cannot within application development and computing at scale and allow for the enterprise world to truly embrace concepts like devops and microservices (the Service Oriented Architecture dream from years gone by). That sound you hear is IT vendors stampeding towards the container bandwagon, but, as with every emerging tech trend, this isn’t always a good thing, as not everyone is walking the walk, regardless of what the business might actually say.

  • Desktop

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux kernel bug delivers corrupt TCP/IP data to Mesos, Kubernetes, Docker containers

      The Linux Kernel has a bug that causes containers that use veth devices for network routing (such as Docker on IPv6, Kubernetes, Google Container Engine, and Mesos) to not check TCP checksums. This results in applications incorrectly receiving corrupt data in a number of situations, such as with bad networking hardware. The bug dates back at least three years and is present in kernels as far back as we’ve tested. Our patch has been reviewed and accepted into the kernel, and is currently being backported to -stable releases back to 3.14 in different distributions (such as Suse, and Canonical). If you use containers in your setup, I recommend you apply this patch or deploy a kernel with this patch when it becomes available. Note: Docker’s default NAT networking is not affected and, in practice, Google Container Engine is likely protected from hardware errors by its virtualized network.

    • Performance problems

      Just over a year ago I implemented an optimization to the SPI core code in Linux that avoids some needless context switches to a worker thread in the main data path that most clients use. This was really nice, it was simple to do but saved a bunch of work for most drivers using SPI and made things noticeably faster. The code got merged in v4.0 and that was that, I kept on kicking a few more ideas for optimizations in this area around but that was that until the past month.

    • Linux 4.5-rc4

      It’s Valentine’s day, so here I am, making a valentine for everybody in the form of the usual rc release.

      Things look fairly normal – there’s some pending and yet unexplained problem with some of the VM changes in this release cycle (the transparent huge-page cleanups in particular), but at least for now it seems to be s390-specific, so it shouldn’t hold up testing for anybody else.

    • Linus Torvalds Announces a Valentine’s Day Linux Kernel 4.5 Release Candidate 4

      Another week has passed and it’s once again Sunday afternoon here in the US, which means that Linus Torvalds has prepared yet another RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel.

    • Linux 4.5-rc4 Is A Valentine’s Day Kernel

      Linus Torvalds has announced the release today of the Linux 4.5-rc4 kernel.

      Linux 4.5-rc4 remains rather a normal release and comes with a number of AMDGPU DRM fixes, Btrfs fixes, audio tweaks, and more.

    • Linux Kernel 3.2.77 LTS Has Crypto, x86, and CIFS Improvements, Updated Drivers

      Linux kernel maintainer and developer Ben Hutchings was happy to announce this past weekend the release and immediate availability for download and update of the seventy-seventh maintenance build of the long-term supported Linux 3.2 kernel.

    • New FD.io Open Source Project Offers IO Services Framework for Network and Storage Software

      The newly launched FD.io (“Fido”) initiative is an open source project to provide an IO services framework for the next wave of network and storage software. The project is also announcing the availability of its initial software and formation of a validation testing lab.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Compute Shader Code Begins Landing For Gallium3D

        Samuel Pitoiset began pushing his Gallium3D Mesa state tracker changes this morning for supporting compute shaders via the GL_ARB_compute_shader extension.

        Before getting too excited, the hardware drivers haven’t yet implemented the support. It was back in December that core Mesa received its treatment for compute shader support and came with Intel’s i965 driver implementing CS.

      • Libav Finally Lands VDPAU Support For Accelerated HEVC Decoding

        While FFmpeg has offered hardware-accelerated HEVC decoding using NVIDIA’s VDPAU API since last summer, this support for the FFmpeg-forked libav landed just today.

        In June was when FFmpeg added support to its libavcodec for handling HEVC/H.265 video decoding via NVIDIA’s Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix interface. Around that same time, developer Philip Langdale who had done the FFmpeg patch, also submitted the patch for Libav for decoding HEVC content through VDPAU where supported.

      • More Nouveau GL4 Feature Patches Published
      • It Looks Like AMD Will Support FreeSync With Their New Linux Display Stack

        While NVIDIA has long supported G-SYNC on Linux as their adaptive sync technology for eliminating screen tearing, AMD hasn’t supported their FreeSync tech via their open or closed-source Linux drivers. Fortunately, it’s looking like that will change.

      • Got tearing with proprietary NVIDIA? Try this.

        If you’re using a reasonably modern NVIDIA graphics card on your Linux box with the proprietary driver, there’s a fair chance you may encounter that nasty thing called ‘screen tearing’. There is a little setting worth trying in NVIDIA’s blob driver called ‘ForceCompositionPipeline’ that can severely reduce tearing to a minimum, perhaps even completely. Here’s how to do it.

      • R600g+SI Dota 2 Benchmarks With Mesa 11.2, Linux 4.5 Show Open Driver Progress

        With now having a workaround for Dota 2 for my benchmarking needs, here are some benchmarks finally of this popular multiplayer online battle arena under Linux when using the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers with the latest Linux 4.5 and Mesa 11.2 components.

      • Prevent Horizontal Tearing for NVidia GPUs on KDE Plasma
      • AMDGPU’s xf86-video-amdgpu vs. Mode-Setting DDX Performance
      • VIA OpenChrome X.Org Driver Getting Ready For First Release In Over Two Years

        With a new developer stepping up to the plate, it’s looking like the OpenChrome DDX driver will see its first release in more than two and a half years.

        For those still relying upon the OpenChrome X.Org driver for VIA x86 graphics hardware support, Kevin Brace is hoping to soon release a new version. Kevin started a new mailing list thread to encourage interested VIA hardware enthusiasts to begin testing the latest driver code and reporting their feedback.

    • Benchmarks

      • Radeon vs. Nouveau Gallium3D Driver Performance On Mesa 11.2-dev, Linux 4.5

        Here are some fresh comparison benchmarks on Linux 4.5 and Mesa 11.2 when comparing the Radeon and Nouveau (NVIDIA) open-source Linux driver performance.

        Following on from the Nouveau vs. NVIDIA comparison using the latest code and the AMDGPU/Radeon vs. Proprietary Driver benchmarks on the latest code, here are some Radeon vs. Nouveau results using the Linux 4.5 kernel with Mesa 11.2 Git code for a bleeding-edge experience. The NVIDIA hardware tested for this article included the GeForce GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 650, GTX 680, and GTX 780 Ti. With all of the NVIDIA GeForce 600/700 Kepler graphics cards, they were re-clocked to their highest power-state manually prior to testing. Unfortunately, there still isn’t any working GeForce 400/500 Fermi re-clocking support with this open-source driver.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME: Maps shaping up for 3.20

        So, we’re soon approaching the UI freeze for GNOME 3.20. It’s looking quite good when it comes to OpenStreetMap editing in Maps (among other things).

        But first I thought I was going to show-case another improvement, namely the expanded place bubbles (show information about places you search for on the map).

      • GNOME Maps Is Looking Better In GNOME 3.20

        While not yet as versatile as say Google Maps, GNOME Maps for GNOME 3.20. is looking to be a nice upgrade.

        Maps in GNOME 3.20 is making progress with OpenStreetMap editing, expanded place bubbles, adding new places to OSM, support for printing routes, and more.

      • GNOME Maps 3.20 to Allow for OpenStreetMap Editing

        GNOME 20 is almost upon us, and it’s going to be a really impressive release, especially since many of its components are getting important upgrades, like GNOME Maps, for example.

      • My Updated 3.18 Packages for GNOME Extensions

        I started releasing extension updates in 2014 due to a lot of extensions being unmaintained and seemingly break every time GNOME releases a new version of the Desktop Environment (DE). This is my third batch release post for GNOME extensions and these extension packages are for GNOME 3.18.

  • Distributions

    • Distro Wars: It’s All Linux

      This is likely a topic covered plenty of times, and as such I won’t make this a too in-depth article, but I feel it’s something always worth reiterating and remembering that no matter what distribution of Linux (or GNU/Linux if you prefer) you use… it’s all Linux.

      You only have to whiz around the internet in message boards, YouTube comments and the like in regards to any Linux topic and you’ll probably come across a “distro war” often enough. It can happen easy enough – someone mentions their distro of choice, someone else then mentions theirs and then comparisons start. From there, with personal experiences being shared, which quite frankly can differ quite a bit depending on one’s hardware, software choices (or sometimes even luck) a discussion can quite quickly descend into a flame war over ‘my distro is better than your distro’.

    • Reviews

      • RebeccaBlackOS 2016-02-08 Review. Why? Because it’s Friday.

        These are the types of problems found in an independent distro build from scratch. I cannot understand how a system built on Debian could be this buggy and apparently have zero VM support which Debian comes with by default. I can take some solace in the fact that it was built by one person and that one person is a Rebecca Black fan but as far as a Linux Distribution is concerned there is not much here. Some could say “Well its not supposed to be taken as a serious Distribution.” True except it is listed and kept up with on DistroWatch therefor it should be held as a system ready distribution especially when it was not released as a beta or an RC. If this distribution is ever going to be considered a real platform it has a long way to go. I give it about as many thumbs down as the Rebecca Black Friday video.

    • New Releases

      • Welcome to Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5r0 Release Notes

        Parsix GNU/Linux is a live and installation DVD based on Debian. Our goal is to provide a ready to use and easy to install desktop and laptop optimized operating system based on Debian’s stable branch and the latest stable release of GNOME desktop environment. Users can easily install extra software packages from Parsix APT repositories. Our annual release cycle consists of two major and four minor versions. We have our own software repositories and build servers to build and provide all the necessary updates and missing features in Debian stable branch.

      • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 (Atticus) Officially Released, Based on Debian 8 “Jessie”

        The development team of the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux computer operating system has announced today, February 14, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5r0.

      • 4MParted 16.0 Distrolette Ships with GParted 0.25.0, Now Ready for Beta Testing

        Zbigniew Konojacki, the developer of the 4MLinux project, has sent us an email earlier today, February 14, 2016, informing Softpedia about the availability for download and testing of his 4MParted 16.0 Beta Live CD.

      • Zorin OS 11 Lite & Business Get Valentine’s Day Release for Windows Refugees

        Only ten days after the release of the Zorin OS 11 Core and Ultimate editions, the development team of the Windows lookalike Linux-based operating system are proud to announce the release of the Lite and Business flavors.

        While the Zorin OS 11 Lite Edition is based on the Lubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system and built around the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, Zorin OS 11 Business is pretty much the same as the Ultimate Edition, but with more advanced tools and improved hardware support.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Sound problems in Mageia 5

        Long time ago, I experienced a problem with the sound in Mageia 5. Some videos would play without sound after I applied an update.

        Back then, I discovered the problem was caused because ffmpeg had been updated but, I never found out why, the tainted repository did not pick up the correct package, so I was using the common ffmpeg package, not the tainted version that allows me to play sound for the videos.

    • Arch Family

    • Slackware Family

      • LibreOffice 5.1.0 for slackware-current

        The Document Foundation statement about this release: “LibreOffice 5.1 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For enterprise class deployments, TDF maintains the more mature 5.0.x branch (soon at 5.0.5)“.

      • taper.alienbase.nl mirror will lose rsync access

        For the sixth time in just 5 days I had do a system_reset on my virtual machine which runs “taper.alienbase.nl” as well as “docs.slackware.com“. The virtual machine is crashing under the load that is put on it by demanding rsync processes. According to my pal who donated the use of this VM to me for free, the rsync download rate is at a continuous 100 Mbit/sec for most of the time. This is apparently too much for the server, as well as for my pal who had not anticipated this kind of bandwidth consumption. He has been paying quite a bit of extra money for the excess bandwidth during the past months.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Position Raised by Chevy Chase Trust Holdings

        Chevy Chase Trust Holdings raised its stake in shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) by 4.9% during the fourth quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the SEC. The fund owned 407,946 shares of the open-source software company’s stock after buying an additional 19,132 shares during the period. Chevy Chase Trust Holdings’ holdings in Red Hat were worth $33,782,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

      • Market View On Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

        Few brokerages covering Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) have recently released its earnings and stock price target. As per the experts, the stock can touch 89.63 in the coming twelve months. The company’s earnings in the past one year was recorded at 1.03 per share. Now, in the coming quarter, First Call anticipates the company to deliver EPS of 0.50. The EPS estimates for the ongoing fiscal and the next year is reported to come at 1.86 and 2.19 respectively.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian LTS Work January 2016

        This was my ninth month as a Freexian sponsored LTS contributor. I was assigned 8 hours for the month of January.

        My time this month was spent preparing updates for clamav and the associated libclamunrar for squeeze and wheezy. For wheezy, I’ve only helped a little, mostly I worked on squeeze.

      • Reproducible builds: week 42 in Stretch cycle

        What happened in the reproducible builds effort between February 7th and February 13th 2016:

      • Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2016

        Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

      • I love Free Software Day 2016: Show your love for Free Software

        Today February 14th, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) celebrates the “I Love Free Software” day. I Love Free Software day is a day for Free Software users to appreciate and thank the contributors of their favourite software applications, projects and organisations.

      • Derivatives

        • Tails 2.0 Debian-Based Linux OS Will Keep You Anonymous Online

          Tails, a Live operating system that is built for the declared purpose of keeping users safe and anonymous while going online, is now at version 2.0.1 and is ready for download.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Early Ubuntu 14.04 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Intel Xeon E5 Benchmarks

            This morning I posted some Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 LTS Radeon graphics benchmarks while if open-source AMD graphics driver evolution doesn’t get you excited, in this article are results from other non-graphics benchmarks in comparing the Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 performance for these long-term support releases in their current form.

            For getting an idea how the overall Ubuntu Linux performance has evolved over the past two years for those solely riding Long-Term Support releases, I compared the performance of Ubuntu 14.04.0 to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in its current daily ISO form. The tests were done on the same Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 (Haswell) system with MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard, 16GB of RAM, and AMD FirePro V7900 graphics.

          • ‘Android OEMs Will Ship Ubuntu Phones This Year’, Say Canonical

            Several Android phone makers will release Ubuntu phones this year, Canonical’s CEO has revealed.

          • Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu prospect for February 22 launch

            In September last year Meizu officially introduced the Pro 5 flagship, an Android smartphone running the 5.1 Lollipop-based Flyme OS 5.0. Although Android and iOS are the dominant operating platforms there are always those who want to try something different. Now there’s a Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu prospect for a February 22 launch.

          • Meizu teases new Ubuntu device for MWC 2016

            Chinese smartphone manufacture Meizu will likely unveil a new Ubuntu-powered phone at the Mobile World Congress next week. The company recently released a teaser that suggests the same, although it doesn’t reveal anything specific about the device.

          • Meizu Might Unveil a New Ubuntu Phone Device at MWC 2016

            Meizu, the popular Chinese consumer electronics company, which most Ubuntu users better know for its awesome Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition smartphone, has teased us earlier on Twitter with what it would appear to be the launch of a new device.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • A Selection of Talks from FOSDEM 2016

      It’s that time of the year where I go to FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting). The keynotes and the maintracks are very good, with good presentations and contents.

    • Tech experts guide workshop on open source software

      “The potential of open-source software is huge. For instance, a lot of people in our country cannot afford to purchase MS Office because they are very expensive. OSS can be a boon to people in software development and even in the field of education in general,” said Lalit Kathpalia, director of Symbiosis Institute of Computer Science and Research (SICSR), which organised the seminar along with the Pune Linux Users Group.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

  • Education

    • Open source is now ready to compete with Mathematica for use in the classroom

      When I think about what makes SageMath different, one of the most fundamental things is that it was created by people who use it every day. It was created by people doing research math, by people teaching math at universities, and by computer programmers and engineers using it for research. It was created by people who really understand computational problems because we live them. We understand the needs of math research, teaching courses, and managing an open source project that users can contribute to and customize to work for their own unique needs.

    • The scarcity of college graduates with FOSS experience

      In the education track at SCALE 14x in Pasadena, Gina Likins spoke about the surprisingly difficult task of getting information about open-source development practices into undergraduate college classrooms. That scarcity makes it hard to find new college graduates who have experience with open source. Although the conventional wisdom is that open source “is everywhere,” the college computer-science (CS) or software-engineering (SE) classroom has proven to be a tough nut to crack—and may remain so for quite some time.

      Likins works on Red Hat’s University Outreach team—a group that does not do recruiting, she emphasized. Rather, the team travels to campuses around the United States and engages with teachers, administrators, and students about open source in the classroom. The surprise is how little open source one finds, at least in CS and SE degrees. Employers expect graduates to be familiar with open-source projects and tools (e.g., using Git, bug trackers, and so forth), she said, and incoming students report expecting to find it in the curriculum, but it remains a rarity.

  • BSD

    • Our 2016 Fundraising Campaign

      The OpenBSD Foundation needs your help to achieve our fundraising goal of $250,000 for 2016.

      Reaching this goal will ensure the continued health of the projects we support, will enable us to help them do more, and will avoid the distraction of financial emergencies that could spell the end of the projects.

      2015 was a good year for the foundation financially, with funding coming almost equally from corporate and community donations. While the total was down significantly after 2014′s blockbuster year, we again exceeded our goal.

      [...]

      If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Winning the copyleft fight

      Bradley Kuhn started off his linux.conf.au 2016 talk by stating a goal that, he hoped, he shared with the audience: a world where more (or most) software is free software. The community has one key strategy toward that goal: copyleft licensing. He was there to talk about whether that strategy is working, and what can be done to make it more effective; the picture he painted was not entirely rosy, but there is hope if software developers are willing to make some changes.

      Copyleft licensing is still an effective strategy, he said; that can be seen because we’ve had the chance to run a real-world parallel experiment — an opportunity that doesn’t come often. A lot of non-copyleft software has been written over the years; if proprietary forks of that software don’t exist, then it seems clear that there is no need for copyleft; we just have to look to see whether proprietary versions of non-copyleft software exist. But, he said, he has yet to find a non-trivial non-copyleft program that lacks proprietary forks; without copyleft, companies will indeed take free software and make it proprietary.

    • The Trouble With the TPP, Day 27: Source Code Disclosure Confusion

      Another Trouble with the TPP is its foray into the software industry. One of the more surprising provisions in the TPP’s e-commerce chapter was the inclusion of a restriction on mandated source code disclosure. Article 14.17 states:

      No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such software, in its territory.

    • I love Free Software Day 2016

      In the Free Software society we exchange a lot of criticism. We write bug reports, tell others how they can improve the software, ask them for new features, and generally are not shy about criticising others. There is nothing wrong about that. It helps us to constantly improve. But sometimes we forget to show the hardworking people behind the software our appreciation. We should not underestimate the power of a simple “thank you” to motivate Free Software contributors in their important work for society. The 14th of February (a Sunday this year) is the ideal day to do that.

  • Programming

    • Why I am not touching node.js [Ed: from Ferrari]

      Dear node.js/node-webkit people, what’s the matter with you?

      I wanted to try out some stuff that requires node-webkit. So I try to use npm to download, build and install it, like CPAN would do.

      But then I see that the nodewebkit package is just a stub that downloads a 37MB file (using HTTP without TLS) containing pre-compiled binaries. Are you guys out of your minds?

      This is enough for me to never again get close to node.js and friends. I had already heard some awful stories, but this is just insane.

    • The next Generation of Code Hosting Platforms

      The last few weeks there has been a lot of rumors about GitHub. GitHub is a code hosting platform which tries to make it as easy as possible to develop software and collaborate with people. The main achievement from GitHub is probably to moved the social part of software development to a complete new level. As more and more Free Software initiatives started using GitHub it became really easy to contribute a bug fix or a new feature to the 3rd party library or application you use. With a few clicks you can create a fork, add your changes and send them back to the original project as a pull request. You don’t need to create a new account, don’t need to learn the tools used by the project, etc. Everybody is on the same platform and you can contribute immediately. In many cases this improves the collaboration between projects a lot. Also the ability to mention the developer of other projects easily in your pull request or issue improved the social interactions between developers and makes collaboration across different projects the default.

    • Choose GitLab for your next open source project

      GitLab.com is a competitor of GIthub. It’s a service provider for git-based source code repositories that offers much more than it’s bigger brother. In this post I will try to convince you to try it out for your next project.

      GitLab is not only a simple git hosting; its features impact the whole development process, the way of contributing to a project, executing and running tests, protecting source code from changes, more and more.

    • Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend.

      Every line of code written comes at a price: maintenance. To avoid paying for a lot of code, we build reusable software. The problem with code re-use is that it gets in the way of changing your mind later on.

      The more consumers of an API you have, the more code you must rewrite to introduce changes. Similarly, the more you rely on an third-party api, the more you suffer when it changes. Managing how the code fits together, or which parts depend on others, is a significant problem in large scale systems, and it gets harder as your project grows older.

Leftovers

  • Billion-dollar mistake: How inferior IT killed Target Canada

    Additionally, the idea of trying to open an entire nation of stores, rather than opening them incrementally, was bound to fail. Scaling everything at once doesn’t allow for flaws to be discovered and mediated, but instead leads to cascading failures like the ones that overtook Target Canada’s supply chain.

  • Science

  • Data Loss

    • Vellum: UK’s last producer of calf-skin parchment fights on after losing Parliament’s business

      In the company’s original office, with its 1855 safe, overlooked by a photograph of the firm’s founding father, the general manager of parchment and vellum makers William Cowley receives a steady stream of phone calls from sympathisers and customers.

      Paul Wright tells them how parchment and vellum are “the earliest writing materials, in use since man stepped out of a cave, wrapped some skins round a few sticks to make a tepee, and started scribbling on his tent walls”. He added: “All of humankind’s history is on parchment and vellum. Magna Carta was written on parchment. The Dead Sea Scrolls: parchment, in 435BC.”

    • Google is shutting down Picasa in favor of Photos

      The Picasa desktop app will continue to function, but after March 15th, you shouldn’t expect any more updates. It also sounds like the download link will be going away, so you might want to also keep the install file stashed somewhere safe.

    • Google Is Shutting Down Picasa On May 1, 2016

      Google has finally decided to kill Picasa Web albums on May 1, 2016. This step was expected by many as it doesn’t make sense investing time and resources in a product similar to Google Photos.

    • Changing your iPhone settings to this date will kill it

      Don’t try this at home. Changing the date on recent models of the iPhone to January 1 1970 will render it completely useless and unable to reboot.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Jeremy Hunt ‘misrepresenting’ data on weekend death rates at NHS hospitals, says research surgeon

      A doctor who was part of a study on links between staffing and deaths in the NHS has accused the Government of “continually misrepresenting” the findings to support its push to change junior contracts.

      Dr Peter Holt, a vascular surgeon at St George’s University of London, said he had written to Jeremy Hunt, the Health Select Committee and shadow Health Secretary Heidi Alexander raising his objection.

      In a post on the Junior Doctors contract forum Facebook group, he wrote that the research published in December “could never have shown that higher staffing on weekends reduced mortality”.

    • The “tough nerd” owns this calamity: Rick Snyder’s anti-government, authoritarian ideology has been nothing but bad news for Flint

      Snyder has since won two general elections. As the world now knows, turning our state government over to a business executive who never held public office before hasn’t turned out so well. The “tough nerd” is the man who presided over a colossal, avoidable and entirely man-made public health disaster. For more than a year, more than 100,000 citizens of Flint have been exposed to a toxic water supply, laced with lead and other contaminants.

      Eight thousand children under the age of 5 who live in the city are most at risk; even at low levels, exposure to lead can cause irreversible damage to their brains. That translates, over time, into reduced intellectual capacity and higher incidence of multiple problems: attention deficit disorder, hypertension, aggressive and impulsive behavior – eventually, according to some researchers, higher rates of violent crime.

      Lead poisoning is no picnic for adults. The substance is a neurotoxin, linked to anemia, brain damage, kidney failure and reproductive disorders for both genders.

      This scandal has bodies, too. There’s been a spike in cases of Legionnaires’ disease – including 10 deaths – in and around Flint since the city’s water troubles began, nearly two years ago. The syndrome can be transmitted through mist or vapor from a contaminated water supply. High-ranking state officials knew about the outbreak in March of 2015, but Snyder didn’t say anything publicly until January 2016. “We can’t conclude the increase is related to the water switch in Flint,” said a state health department spokesperson on Feb. 3, “nor can we rule out a possible association.”

      Trust me: Nobody in Flint now trusts a word state officials have to say about water quality.

    • Flint water crisis: governor’s aides knew of issues within weeks, records suggest

      Among 21,000 documents released by Michigan’s governor one shows officials due to discuss Flint ‘water issues’ in June 2014, within weeks of supply switch

    • Flint: The Legionnaires Will Be What Brings Criminal Charges

      In my discussions about Flint’s water crisis, I keep pointing out that Rick Snyder was largely just making a show of responding until the US Attorney revealed it had started an investigation on January 5.

      The Detroit News has an utterly damning report today about the part of the story that gets less national attention: local and state officials started discussing an outbreak of Legionnaires disease back in October 2014, and national experts offered help as early as March 2015, but the state did not accept assistance offered by both the EPA and CDC until January.

    • Detroit has highest number of abandoned homes, Flint second, website reports

      Flint, the Michigan city that is struggling with a public health crisis involving its water supply, has another issue that is threatening its future: abandoned homes, the Huffington Post reports.

      Flint had the highest rate of vacancy in February at 7.5 percent, according to a report released by RealtyTrac.

      “The real estate data company broke down the data by individual city for The Huffington Post, revealing a more extreme picture of abandonment: 9,800 homes are empty in Flint, 16.5 percent of all residential properties. At the city level, Detroit had the highest vacancy rate, with 53,000 empty houses, nearly one in five. Nationally, close to one of every 63 residential properties that RealtyTrac analyzed are vacant.”

    • Flint’s problems didn’t start with water

      A third of the property in the city of Flint is vacant.

      That’s according to the Genesee County Land Bank, the organization charged with pushing back against the encroaching wave of blight that touches nearly every neighborhood in this struggling city — of 56,000 parcels in Flint, about 20,000 are empty or blighted.

      And it’s going to get worse.

  • Security

    • Fysbis: The Linux Backdoor Used by Russian Hackers

      Fysbis (or Linux.BackDoor.Fysbis) is a new malware family that targets Linux machines, on which it sets up a backdoor that allows the malware’s author to spy on victims and carry out further attacks.

    • Russian Hackers Spying On Your Linux PC Using Sophisticated Malware “Fysbis”

      A new malware family known as Fysbis (or Linux.BackDoor.Fysbis) is aiming Linux machines by setting up a backdoor that allows the malware’s author to snoop on victims and perform further attacks.

    • Warning: Bug in Adobe Creative Cloud deletes Mac user data without warning

      Adobe Systems has stopped distributing a recently issued update to its Creative Cloud graphics service amid reports a Mac version can delete important user data without warning or permission.

      The deletions happen whenever Mac users log in to the Adobe service after the update has been installed, according to officials from Backblaze, a data backup service whose users are being disproportionately inconvenienced by the bug. Upon sign in, a script activated by Creative Cloud deletes the contents in the alphabetically first folder in a Mac’s root directory. Backblaze users are being especially hit by the bug because the backup service relies on data stored in a hidden root folder called .bzvol. Because the folder is the alphabetically top-most hidden folder at the root of so many users’ drives, they are affected more than users of many other software packages.

      “This caused a lot of our customers to freak out,” Backblaze Marketing Manager Yev Pusin wrote in an e-mail. “The reason we saw a huge uptick from our customers is because Backblaze’s .bzvol is higher up the alphabet. We tested it again by creating a hidden file with an ‘.a’ name, and the files inside were removed as well.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • U.S. Supported Shia Militias in Iraq Lead Ethnic Cleansing

      Oh, yes, and also civil war. Here’s a preview of what to expect in Iraq after ISIS is mostly run out of the country.

      Set the scene: the country formerly known as Iraq was basically an steaming pile of ethnic/religious tension in 2003 when the U.S. invaded. It was divided among three broad groups we didn’t seem to know much about then, but damn well do now: Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. The Kurds, who always wanted to be independent, like from nearly the time of the dinosaurs always, saw their opportunity and broke away and are now essentially their own country. The Sunnis and Shia both wanted the same land and resources and freaking hate each other, and so have been fighting one another since 2003 when the post-U.S. invasion chaos unleashed them.

    • “Where to Invade Next” Is the Most Subversive Movie Michael Moore Has Ever Made

      I CAN’T CLAIM this is a neutral review of Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore’s latest movie. Beyond the fact that I worked for Moore for six years, including on his previous documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, I may literally owe my life to the high-quality, zero-deductible health insurance he provides employees.

      What I’ve lost in objectivity, I’ve gained in knowledge of Moore’s career. I even know his darkest, most closely guarded secret: the original name of the 1970s alternative newspaper he started in Flint, Michigan. So I can say this for sure: Where to Invade Next is the most profoundly subversive thing he’s ever done. It’s so sneaky that you may not even notice exactly what it’s subverting.

    • Deconstructing America’s ‘Deep State’

      Americans perceive what has happened to their democratic Republic only dimly, tricked by rightists who call all collective government actions bad and by neoliberals who make “markets” a new-age god. But ex-congressional budget official Mike Lofgren shows how this “Deep State” really works, writes Chuck Spinney.

    • Long live Empire!

      Indians don’t care whether the statue of Queen Victoria stays put or is consigned to a junkyard. Many agree with Ferguson that the British Empire had some plus points.

    • Hillary’s Admission Diplomacy Couldn’t Get Pakistan To Hand Over Bin Laden

      In last night’s debate, Sanders responded — after talking about what good friends he is with the woman who just claimed he had supported regime change — that he had supported more democracy in Libya, not regime change.

    • The anti-US military base struggle in Okinawa, Japan

      Kamoshita and Aihara at their talk in London on 1 February jointly organised and hosted by Voices for Creative Non-Violence UK (VCNV), Nipponzan Myohoji and SOAS CND Society. Native Nomad Pictures Ltd./ Jason Verney. All rights reserved.Not many people outside Japan have even heard of the place called Okinawa, a semi-tropical archipelago of numerous islands with unique and invaluable biodiversity situated in the East China Sea – let alone have any knowledge of its modern history, dominated by the sequence of invasion, colonisation, war and militarisation.

    • ‘ISIS militants shave beards, dress as women to escape Ramadi’

      has arrested a group of ISIS fighters when they tried to escape from the fallen city of Ramadi after shaving their beards and dressing up as women.

      “The terrorists had shaved their beards and dressed as women in a bid to fool our forces and escape the liberated city of Ramadi. However, they were all arrested before escaping the city,” the Iraqi security command was quoted as saying by ARA News.

      The Iraqi army announced on Tuesday the “full liberation” of Ramadi city, capital of Anbar province, from ISIS militants.

    • The Neoconservatives Are Brewing A Wider War In Syria

      Their invasion plan frustrated, the neoconservatives sent the jihadists they had used to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya to overthrow Assad. Initially known as ISIS, then ISIL, then the Islamist State, and now Daesh, a term that can be interpreted as an insult. Perhaps the intention of the name changes is to keep the Western public thoroughly confused about who is who and what is what.

    • Democrats Use Debate To Embrace History’s Warmongers

      With some important exceptions, such as the issue of regime change, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s foreign policies were largely on the same page, as they have been throughout the campaign. Sanders joined in with the prevailing fear of Russia, praising NATO’s recent provocative amassing of troops along Russia’s border, its largest deployment since the Cold War. The candidates then went on to separately embrace two of history’s worst war mongers.

      Clinton went first. After Sanders criticized her earlier embrace of her predecessor Henry Kissinger, calling him “one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country,” Clinton doubled down, arguing that whatever complaints one may have of Kissinger, “his opening up of China and his ongoing relationships with the leaders of China is an incredibly useful relationship.”

      Clinton’s earlier mention of Kissinger wasn’t just name-dropping. She appears to genuinely view him as a role model while serving as Secretary of State.

    • The 10 most ghoulish quotes of Henry Kissinger’s gruesome career

      Henry Kissinger’s quote released by Wikileaks, “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer,” likely brought a smile to his legions of elite media, government, corporate and high society admirers. Oh that Henry! That rapier wit! That trademark insouciance! It is unlikely, however, that the descendants of his more than 6 million victims in Indochina, and Americans of conscience appalled by his murder of non-Americans, will share in the amusement. His illegal and unconstitutional actions had real-world consequences: the ruined lives of millions of Indochinese innocents in a new form of secret, automated U.S. executive warfare. (Read Branfman’s extended related essay on Kissinger.)

    • Sanders proudly declaring “Kissinger is not my friend” totally destroys notion that Clinton’s better on foreign policy

      “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger,” Bernie Sanders declared in the Milwaukee presidential debate Thursday night.

      “Where the secretary and I have a very profound difference,” Sanders explained, “in her book and in this last debate, she talked about getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger. Now, I find it rather amazing, because I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.”

      These are some of the most important words Sanders has ever uttered about foreign policy. And they show he is appreciably better on the issue than Hillary Clinton, in all the ways that matter.

      The historical facts make it clear that Sanders is absolutely correct; Kissinger was, hands down, one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of the U.S.

    • Should Henry Kissinger Mentor a Presidential Candidate?

      At the February 11 Democratic Debate, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had a spirited exchange about an unlikely topic: the 92-year old former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Sanders berated Clinton for saying that she appreciated the foreign policy mentoring she got from Henry Kissinger. “I happen to believe,” said Sanders, “that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.”

      In one of Sanders’ rare outbursts of enmity, he added, “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. And in fact, Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some three million innocent people, was one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Coal mining has flattened Appalachia by 40%: Scientists reveal dramatic extent of damage done by mountaintop removal

      For more than forty years, mining companies have been destroying entire mountain peaks in West Virginia, Kentucky and other areas of Central Appalachia.

      The technique, known as mountaintop mining, practice provides much-needed jobs and the steady supply of coal that America relies on for more than half of its electricity needs.

      But residents say they are paying a high price, with the practice destroying forests, polluting streams and flooding communities – and now a new study has backed up their claims.

      Scientists have found mountaintop coal mining has made parts of Central Appalachia 40 per cent flatter than they were before excavation.

  • Finance

    • Watch Carrier Workers Find Out Their Jobs Are Moving to Mexico

      Workers at a Carrier Air Conditioner plant in Indianapolis were summoned to a group assembly this week to be told their jobs would soon be moving to Monterrey, Mexico. In all, 1,400 jobs are expected to be lost.

      [...]

      “Now the promise of America has always been you work hard, you do your job, you help your company be profitable and then in return, you hope to have a decent retirement,” he said. “So how do we tell workers who have put their whole heart and soul into a company, who have provided them with over $6.1 billion in sales, that it is not enough? I mean, the reason folks are here is because there has always been a promise: If you work hard, the company in return will stand up and do right by you. So, how is doing right having $6.1 billion in earnings and shipping 2,100 Indiana jobs off to Mexico?”

      Yellen, who has come under fire for rate hikes many fear will undermine the unemployment situation, replied: “This is a miserable and burdensome situation that many households have faced.”

    • Hillary Is a High-Ranking Member of the DC Power Elite — and That’s Why She Can’t Comprehend Bernie’s Revolution

      Let me figure this out. Last year, the Clintons couldn’t believe their good fortune. They were going to face a “democratic socialist” from the marginal state of Vermont and cruise to victory. It would be a romp, with Hillary winning the primaries and then going full mainstream against a reactionary, out of touch Republican opponent on the way to the White House.

      As many commentators are saying now, a serious miscalculation was at the heart of Hillary’s plan. Clinton, Cruz, Bush, Rubio and others are all part of the wealthy elite. Although Trump is as well, he is channeling the anger of the working class American. Bernie Sanders also gets it. He knows what happened to the American dream.

      Hillary Clinton thinks, in her gut, that America is a prosperous country, and that the policies that led to our prosperity should simply be continued, that they work. But this hasn’t been true since the 1970’s, back when America was the world’s economic powerhouse, with a manufacturing base that was the envy of the world, highly paid unionized workers and a booming housing market.

    • John Kasich and the Clintons Collaborated on Law That Helped Double Extreme Poverty

      Republican presidential candidate John Kasich has promoted himself both as a friend of the working poor and as a foe of Hillary Clinton, but as House Budget Committee chairman in the 1990s, he worked with the Clintons to roll back welfare programs, helping double extreme poverty in America.

      In 1996, the Clinton administration and congressional Republicans worked hand in hand to pass what they called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, colloquially known as “welfare reform.”

      The legislation famously “ended welfare as we know it,” replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The newly-created TANF placed a time limit on how long the federal government would extend financial assistance to poor families.

    • 7 Reasons I’m Not On Board With Uber

      It’s common practice in the tech world to rush your product to market, picking up the pieces as you go. This works fine when you’re in the business of selling ideas, or soft-serve ice cream delivery (somebody do this, please), or artisanal organic laundry service. Get it out there, apologize in advance that nothing’s perfect, do better next time. No harm done.

      Then there’s a product like Uber. Uber, if you’re just joining the conversation, is supposed to change the way city dwellers think about transportation. It’s supposed to put taxis out of business, or at least make them change their wicked ways.

    • Taxes on trial

      Demands for tax justice have resounded worldwide, with inequality at historic and unsustainable levels and increased attention towards the tax practices of major multinational corporations from Google to Starbucks.

      Governments must be able to change their tax systems to ensure multinationals pay their fair share and to ensure that critical public services are well funded. States must also be able to reconsider and withdraw tax breaks previously granted to multinationals if they no longer fit with national priorities.

      But their ability to do so, to change tax laws and pursue progressive tax policies, is limited, thanks to trade and investments agreements. In rapidly developing ‘corporate courts’, formally known as investor-state dispute settlement system (or ISDS), foreign investors can sue states directly at international tribunals.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Donald Trump Blames George W. Bush for 9/11

      “I lost hundreds of friends, the World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush,” Trump said, while the crowd’s boos nearly drowned him out. “That is not safe, Marco, that is not safe,”

      Trump has made this claim before, but this time Bush’s brother Jeb pushed back. “This is a man who insults his way to the nomination,” he said. “I am sick and tired of him going after my family.”

    • Hillary Clinton’s Congressional Black Caucus PAC Endorsement Approved By Board Awash in Lobbyists

      Ben Branch, the executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC told The Intercept that his group made the decision after a vote from its 20-member board. The board includes 11 lobbyists, seven elected officials, and two officials who work for the PAC. Branch confirmed that the lobbyists were involved in the endorsement, but would not go into detail about the process.

      Members of the CBC PAC board include Daron Watts, a lobbyist for Purdue Pharma, the makers of highly addictive opioid OxyContin; Mike Mckay and Chaka Burgess, both lobbyists for Navient, the student loan giant that was spun off of Sallie Mae; former Rep. Al Wynn, D-Md., a lobbyist who represents a range of clients, including work last year on behalf of Lorillard Tobacco, the makers of Newport cigarettes; and William A. Kirk, who lobbies for a cigar industry trade group on a range of tobacco regulations.

      And a significant percentage of the $7,000 raised this cycle by the CBC PAC was donated by white lobbyists, including Vic Fazio, who represents Philip Morris and served for years as a lobbyist to Corrections Corporation of America, and David Adams, a former Clinton aide who now lobbies for Wal-Mart, the largest gun distributor in America.

    • Why Brother Bernie Is Better for Black People Than Sister Hillary
    • Bernie Sanders is a Candidate for, Not of, Today’s Movements

      Yesterday, The Atlantic’s Eric Liu asked what it would take to move presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s ambitious proposals from “we’re gonna” to “we’ve done it,” outlining seven steps to bridge the gap. First among Liu’s recommendations is a call for a “Bernie’s 30” of progressive congressional Democrats to oust Republican incumbents, throwing the weight of the Sanders campaign’s small donor base into strategic races around the country.

    • ‘Bomb the Sh*t out of ‘Em’: Inside the Madness of a Donald Trump Rally

      After Roy Wood Jr., skipped out on a Donald Trump rally on Wednesday night’s “Daily Show,” I felt as if I had an itch left unscratched. So you can imagine how excited I was when another correspondent, Jordan Klepper, made the “the circus that is Donald Trump” the centerpiece of his profile on last night’s “Daily Show.” (And by some divine stroke of luck, Klepper ended up at the now-infamous rally at which Trump almost-kinda-sorta called Ted Cruz a “pussy.”)
      To build a contextual foundation, Klepper spoke to a Adam Realman (not to be confused with John Q. Sample), a Coney Island sideshow performer about the proper elements of a compelling circus act.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Why I don’t like smartphones

      They have led to massive centralization. Part of the “cloud” movement is probably driven by the fact that while smartphones have substantial computational resources, you can’t actually use them because of battery life. So instead the computation is done in the cloud, creating a dependency on a centralized entity.

      How many of these smartphone applications being sold would still work if their makers went bust? By comparison, there is much PC software no longer sold but which is still cherished and used.

    • For Analysts, Loving LinkedIn Was Wrong

      LinkedIn is unlikely to be the last company hit by a pitch, says Sanwal. Investors in private companies often base their valuations on publicly traded stocks like LinkedIn. With even Apple and Amazon.com being punished mightily for their recent quarterly disappointments, companies in the spotlight can’t afford many missteps, says SunTrust’s Peck. As for his own line of work, he says: “At the end of the day analysts need to rely on their research, not what the company says.”

    • How Google Searches Pretty Much Nailed the New Hampshire Primary

      Google’s ability to look into the future of political contests just notched another win: New Hampshire.

      Searches of presidential candidates conducted by Google users in New Hampshire on Feb. 9 corresponded closely with the voting results of the state’s primary. The top-searched Democratic candidate was Bernie Sanders, who won with 60 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, according to the Associated Press. He got 72 percent of the searches, according to Google, while Hillary Clinton got 28 percent of the queries and 38 percent of the vote.

    • Google isn’t your diary – stop trusting it with your secrets

      If you have a problem in the 21st century, the typical first port of call is Google. It doesn’t matter if it’s about your health or your embarrassing crush – the search engine will be there to answer your questions.

      My recent search history varies from ‘my iPhone won’t charge abroad’ to ‘do I have cystitis’? But that’s nothing compared to what I’d pour out to Google as a teenager. Back then, the search engine wasn’t just a substitute for rubbish PSHE lessons at school – it was the big sister I never had.

    • Four men—including a pair of pastors—sue Tacoma police over stingray documents

      The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state has sued the Tacoma Police Department (TPD) on behalf of four community leaders, claiming that TPD has not adequately responded to their public records requests concerning the use of cell-site simulators, or stingrays.

      The Thursday lawsuit comes nine months after Washington imposed a new warrant requirement for stingray use in the state and about 15 months after local Pierce County judges imposed stricter guidelines for their use.

      Stingrays are in use by both local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide. The devices determine a target phone’s location by spoofing or simulating a cell tower. Mobile phones in range of the stingray then connect to it and exchange data with the device as they would with a real cell tower. Once deployed, stingrays intercept data from the target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity—up to and including full calls and text messages. At times, police have falsely claimed that information gathered from a stingray has instead come from a confidential informant.

    • Austrians Need Constitutional Right to Pay in Cash, Mahrer Says

      Austrians should have the constitutional right to use cash to protect their privacy, Deputy Economy Minister Harald Mahrer said, as the European Union considers curbing the use of banknotes and coins.

      “We don’t want someone to be able to track digitally what we buy, eat and drink, what books we read and what movies we watch,” Mahrer said on Austrian public radio station Oe1. “We will fight everywhere against rules” including caps on cash purchases, he said.

    • New York Police Have Used Stingrays Widely, New Documents Show

      The NYPD has used cell-site simulators, commonly known as Stingrays, more than 1,000 times since 2008, according to documents turned over to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The documents represent the first time the department has acknowledged using the devices.

      The NYPD also disclosed that it does not get a warrant before using a Stingray, which sweeps up massive amounts of data. Instead, the police obtain a “pen register order” from a court, more typically used to collect call data for a specific phone. Those orders do not require the police to establish probable cause. Additionally, the NYPD has no written policy guidelines on the use of Stingrays.

    • Lawyers Speak Out About Massive Hack of Prisoners’ Phone Records

      Last fall, Bukowsky received an unexpected phone call related to McKim’s case. The call came from The Intercept, following our November 11, 2015, report on a massive hack of Securus Technologies, a Texas-based prison telecommunications company that does business with the Missouri Department of Corrections. As we reported at the time, The Intercept received a massive database of more than 70 million call records belonging to Securus and coming from prison facilities that used the company’s so-called Secure Call Platform. Leaked via SecureDrop by a hacker who was concerned that Securus might be violating prisoners’ rights, the call records span a 2 1/2-year period beginning in late 2011 (the year Securus won its contract with the Missouri DOC) and ending in the spring of 2014.

    • Apple: Dear judge, please tell us if gov’t can compel us to unlock an iPhone

      In a new letter, Apple has asked a judge to finally rule in a case where the government is trying to force the company to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7. Currently, United States Magistrate Judge James Orenstein has been sitting on the case for nearly three months.

      In the Friday letter, Apple attorney Marc Zwillinger says that ruling now is important, as the government plans to make similar requests of Apple in the future. Prosecutors have invoked the All Writs Act, an 18th-century federal law that simply allows courts to issue a writ (or order) that compels a person or company to do something. For some time now, prosecutors have turned to courts to try to force companies to help in situations where authorities are otherwise stymied.

    • At Berkeley, students learn ins and outs of NSA surveillance

      This spring, computer science lecturer Nicholas Weaver will give a class of UC Berkeley undergraduates a novel yet practical assignment: build a National Security Agency-style surveillance system.

    • House bill would kill state, local bills that aim to weaken smartphone crypto

      On Wednesday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) introduced a new bill in Congress that attempts to halt state-level efforts that would weaken encryption.

      The federal bill comes just weeks after two nearly identical state bills in New York state and California proposed to ban the sale of modern smartphones equipped with strong crypto that cannot be unlocked by the manufacturer. If the state bills are signed into law, current iPhone and Android phones would need to be substantially redesigned for those two states.

    • UK Privacy Campaigners Lose Hacking Case Against GCHQ

      Handed down by the Investigative Powers Tribunal (IPT), the ruling dismissed complaints from campaign group Privacy International. The group had teamed up with seven internet service providers to challenge GCHQ’s surveillance of phones and other electronic devices both within the U.K. and internationally.

      Privacy International said it was “disappointed” with the ruling, but said the case had raised public debate on some of the GCHQ’s most controversial practices.

    • GCHQ hacking does not violate the UK’s human rights laws, rules tribunal

      Hacking of smartphone, computer and network by the British security and intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is legal, says a security tribunal. The investigatory power tribunal (IPT) has recently ruled the computer network exploitation (CNE) technique, which might include remotely activating microphones and cameras on electronic devices without the owner’s knowledge, is legal.

  • Civil Rights

    • Justice Antonin Scalia dead

      There is likely to be significant pressure on the Senate, which is in Republican hands, to hold off on confirming anyone nominated by President Obama, who is in his last year in office.

    • Justice Scalia Unexpectedly Dies, Scrambling Balance Of U.S. Supreme Court

      Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at a West Texas ranch on Saturday. He was 79 years old. Scalia died in his sleep during a hunting trip, apparently of natural causes.

      The sudden death of Scalia, one of the Court’s most outspoken conservatives, potentially shifts the balance of the Supreme Court, currently 5-4 in favor of conservatives, setting up an enormous battle in the Republican-controlled Senate that will play out simultaneously with the presidential campaign.

    • Conservatives: GOP Senate Should Block Any Obama Selection For Supreme Court

      Scalia was part of a conservative bloc on the Supreme Court that regularly overturned progressive legislation and precedent, making any replacement a contested issue in both the Senate and the 2016 presidential election with major national implications.

    • Why Scalia’s Death Is a Huge Blow to the Right-Wing Agenda in Washington

      Justice Antonin Scalia is dead, and his passing is nothing less than a legal and political earthquake. It will have a huge impact, not only on the court’s present term but on the course of constitutional law.

      Beginning with his appointment to the high court in 1986, Scalia was the intellectual leader of what I and many other legal commentators have termed a conservative “judicial counterrevolution,” aimed at wresting control of the nation’s most powerful legal body from the legacy of the liberal jurists who rose to power in the 1950s and ’60s under the leadership of then-Chief Justice Earl Warren.

    • CNN Analyst: Potential SCOTUS Nominees “Have Impeccable Qualifications,” But GOP Doesn’t Want To Vote For “An Obama Nominee”
    • Iran says it is cracking down on Valentine’s Day celebrations and shops engaging in them will be guilty of a crime

      Iran says it is cracking down on Valentine’s Day celebrations and shops engaging in them will be guilty of a crime.

      Iranian news outlets reported the police directive Friday warning retailers against promoting “decadent Western culture through Valentine’s Day rituals.” Police informed Tehran’s coffee and ice cream shops trade union to avoid any gatherings in which boys and girls exchange Valentine’s Day gifts.

      The annual Feb. 14 homage to romance, which tradition says is named after an early Christian martyr, has become popular in recent years in Iran and other Middle East countries.

    • Amid Anti-Semitism Controversy, NRA’s Nugent Attacks His “Mentally Challenged” “Devil” Critics

      National Rifle Association (NRA) board member Ted Nugent participated in a softball interview to attack his critics as “mentally challenged” and “the devil” following outrage over his promotion of an anti-Semitic image.

      On February 8, Nugent posted an anti-Semitic image to his Facebook page alleging that Jews were behind a conspiracy to enact gun regulations. After being condemned by civil rights organization the Anti-Defamation League, Nugent doubled down by posting more inflammatory content, including an image of Jews being rounded up by Nazis alongside his comment “Soulless sheep to slaughter. Not me.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Republican Anti-Net Neutrality Crusade Advances in Congress

      The Republican crusade to sabotage federal net neutrality protections took a significant step forward on Thursday when a key House subcommittee approved a bill that could severely limit the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to police the nation’s largest cable and phone companies.

      Under the guise of prohibiting the FCC from regulating broadband internet prices, the legislation could ultimately kneecap the FCC’s authority over a variety of potentially abusive industry practices, according to open internet advocates.

      The bill, innocuously titled the “No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act,” is just the latest effort in a multi-pronged Republican campaign to undermine the FCC’s ability to protect net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • 82-Year-Old Great-Grandmother is a Pirate, Trolls Say

        People who’ve managed to live for more than eight decades should be enjoying a peaceful and uncomplicated existence but for UK-based Sky customer Sheila Drew things are not so straightforward. She’s being accused of being an Internet pirate – and has two letters and a £600 bill to prove it.

02.14.16

Patents Roundup: Software Patents, Patenting Loopholes, PTAB, Patent Trolls, and Software Patents Propagandists

Posted in Patents at 5:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

One of the few things we remember Justice Scalia for…

Justice Scalia

Summary: A digest of recent news about (primarily) software patents and people who oppose or promote them in the United States

THE laws of the land are dynamic; it’s an ever-changing thing. They adapt to new societal standards and humanitarian perspectives, as well as emerging trends (such as airplanes, computing, and atomic science). Patent law landscape, like many other legal landscapes, constantly changes in lieu with court rulings, including those that come from SCOTUS. Incidentally, Justice Scalia, who has just died, once told Microsoft: “You can’t patent, you know, on-off, on-off code in the abstract, can you?” (we covered that nearly a decade ago as we interpreted that as nuanced opposition to software patents).

Software Patents Rot

“Patent law landscape, like many other legal landscapes, constantly changes in lieu with court rulings, including those that come from SCOTUS.”Today’s long article deals with some of the latest developments in the United States, where software patents — quite notably in fact (more so than the rest) — are a dying business area. The same cannot be said about hardware patents. Earlier this month, for example, we once again learned how “Nvidia claimed that Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets containing Qualcomm’s Adreno, ARM’s Mali, or Imagination’s PowerVR graphics architectures all infringed its patents on core GPU technologies.”

Samsung, which has a large trove of patents of its own, launched a counterstrike and lost. Compare this to the OpenTV case which we recently covered. It showed patents on software falling flat on their face. Here is another new article about the OpenTV case. It describes the patent in question as follows: “The ‘081 patent focuses on expediting program-to-program accessibility for programs that require credentials for access. Accordingly, the 081 patent discloses storing additional permissions in an interactive TV application that can access other applications. An example embodiment included an application for processing a credit card transaction used in the context of a shopping application.”

Software Patents Disguised as Hardware

“Some companies get away with patenting software by misleading examiners and courts, characterising software as hardware, or a combination thereof.”The above is quite clearly too abstract a patent. This is a software patent. Courts wouldn’t tolerate it. Some companies get away with patenting software by misleading examiners and courts, characterising software as hardware, or a combination thereof. Microsoft even bragged about doing this. Apple is now being sued with such patents. To quote a new article, “Apple rolled out 3D Touch last year for the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus after introducing a similar Force Touch feature with the Apple Watch. However, one firm claims it’s been working on the same technology for 20 years and has the patents to back it up. Now it’s taking Apple to court.” Consider this new press release titled “PacStar® Receives Hardware and Software Patent Awards”. When technical employees of a company are unable to do their work because of software patents and liability everywhere (impossible to keep track of patents in one’s area because of their vast number) one has to wonder if software patents ever do any good to innovation. Irrespective of the domain, patents provide a sort of protection, but in some domains the patents do a lot more damage (overall) than good.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)

PTAB has been getting a lot of press recently. IAM, for example, noted in relation to what it dubbed dark IPRs: “Those rates have dropped off since the early talk of “patent death squads” at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), but there’s no doubt that the new review procedures have re-shaped the litigation dynamic for patent owners and alleged infringers in a way that few expected.”

From patent maximalists such as IAM it should not be surprising to see those who treat patents harshly characterised as “patent death squads”. We mentioned this before.

“Apple is the top petitioner at the PTAB,” Patent Buddy noted the other day, “with 228, 111 of which were filed in 2015.”

“This is an example of patents when used for protectionism, price fixing, etc.”Here is another very recent article which mentioned PTAB as follows: “A federal court has upheld a previous ruling by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, declaring Stan’s NoTubes’ U.S. Patent Number 7,334,846 to be valid. The patent protects technology used in Stan’s rims ZTR rims, sales of which exceeded 350,000 between 2004 and 2011.”

“You just wonder how Stan could get a patent over such rim design,” Benjamin Henrion wrote before he asked them for more information (they apparently provided none). There’s some new evidence in Dennis Crouch’s blog that patent ‘fraud’ can cost dozens of millions of dollars in damages. A lot of patents at the USPTO are utter nonsense (we’ll get to that later). “How crazy patent law is,” wrote Pranesh Prakash, “especially in the USA,” is illustrated by this news he highlighted. It’s about Lexmark, which Dennis Crouch’s blog covered as well. This is an example of patents when used for protectionism, price fixing, etc.

“In the UK,” this recent analysis stated, “a party who receives unjustified threats that they will be sued for infringement of a patent, trade mark or design right has a statutory right of redress.” Would the EPO guard such rights? What about the UPC?

“It is rather revealing that patent lawyers are rather afraid of the PTAB, which they compare to a “death squad”. The negative connotation serves as somewhat of an insult to PTAB’s role.”Returning to PTAB and the US, MIP recently published an article (behind paywall) which was summarised as follows: “Scott A McKeown discusses three important Patent Trial and Appeal Board cases that addressed the important issue of estoppel, and looks ahead to this year with the Federal Circuit continuing to work through appeals and the Supreme Court set to rule on Cuozzo”

Dennis Crouch’s blog wrote a couple more posts about PTAB [1, 2]. In the first one Michelle Lee’s role is mentioned as follows: “The Patent Act includes a number of roles of the USPTO Director, including issuing and rejecting patents[3], making copies of patent documents, classifying patents, etc. The Director does not personally make these decisions, but delegates them to the Commissioner for Patents and other PTO employees. That structure is usual for administrative agencies and also highlighted by the statutory structure.[4] Both the commissioner and the “other employees” are – by statute – placed into the role of general management and duties.”

“This isn’t a system optimised for progress but for lack of change.”Jason Rantanen later wrote on “Strategic Decision Making in Dual PTAB and District Court Proceedings”.

It is rather revealing that patent lawyers are rather afraid of the PTAB, which they compare to a “death squad”. The negative connotation serves as somewhat of an insult to PTAB’s role.

Who Benefits?

In the US, especially nowadays, people fret and small business feel paranoid about patent trolls (these can and sometimes do cause bankruptcies) whilst large companies bicker over software patents to manage and secure monopolies in their field/s of operation. This isn’t a system optimised for progress but for lack of change. Patents throttle or pace it down. Who benefits other than patent lawyers and big businesses with full-time patent lawyers (among their regular staff)?

“I’ll pause here to suggest that Adobe got away with something here,” another post from Dennis Crouch’s blog stated. “It is unbelievable to me that Adobe’s counsel did not know of the published application – the sole child application of the patent that was the subject of an infringement lawsuit.”

“Who benefits other than patent lawyers and big businesses with full-time patent lawyers (among their regular staff)?”Adobe is one of those large corporations which hoard software patents and guard their area of operation using patents (to keep Free/Open Source software away or at bay).

Patent Trolls

Only one kind of entity other than large corporations can benefit from software patents. This entity is parasitic. “Patent Trolls Target Nearly 50 Connecticut Businesses, Filing Suits in Friendly Texas Court” was the title of a recent article. “Over 50 MO businesses have been sued by patent trolls in the Eastern District of TX,” this one person said. The article quotes a victim as follows: “I know firsthand how detrimental patent trolls can be to small businesses, as my Connecticut small business was recently the victim of abusive patent litigation in which bad patents were used as weapons of financial intimidation against my small business. $100,000 in legal fees and ten months of litigation later, we successfully defended against these frivolous lawsuits, explained Michael Skelps, General Manager of Middlefield-based Capstone Photography recently in a published report.”

It is worth remembering and making a mental note of the fact that software patents are only truly enjoyed by patent trolls, large corporations, and their patent lawyers. It’s a tax on everything and it leaves about 99% of society just passing money to that (less than) 1% which is patent trolls, CEOs (or other high management, including shareholders), and lawyers specialising in patents.

A Case Apart: Software Patents Propagandists

The patent maximalists of IP Watchdog talk about ‘consumerism’ with patents, or the sales of patents as though they are physical products. Well, they typically defend patent trolls, so in a way it makes sense. Patent trolls in the United States typically use software patents. The impact of these practices don’t matter to patent maximalists, except as they pertain to their income as mediators or middlemen. Based on my conversations with the founder, Quinn, who keeps promoting software patents, he has very poor comprehension of how computers work (cannot tell the difference between code and data for instance), but nonetheless wants more patents on computer programs.

“It’s a tax on everything and it leaves about 99% of society just passing money to that (less than) 1% which is patent trolls, CEOs (or other high management, including shareholders), and lawyers specialising in patents.”To quote the above post from these guys: “We have been tracking the market since 2009 and have a database of nearly $7 billion of available patents, and we have tracked about $2 billion in patent sales.”

Now they’re meeting personally with the head of the USPTO (Michelle Lee), as reported here recently, thus becoming somewhat of a mouthpiece for the USPTO and its self-serving agenda. It’s sad to say that the USPTO has no incentive to address and resolve such issues.

The Donald’s Trump ‘logic’ of blaming China for everything is further amplified by Quinn, who links to the lobbyists’ press. A similar angle is being used by IAM, which has just written to say: “Over the course of the dispute, the ITC has slapped import bans on four models of BMC face mask, while a German court has also ordered several of the Chinese company’s models off the market.”

“Looking at the type of people who write for IP Watchdog these days, it clearly became some sort of biased cesspool of patent lawyers — people without a clue when it comes to technology.”Quinn and patent maximalists don’t like Sanders because rather than knock China for “knockoffs” he has been quite consistent with his patents-hostile rhetoric, especially when it comes to medicine.

Looking at the type of people who write for IP Watchdog these days, it clearly became some sort of biased cesspool of patent lawyers — people without a clue when it comes to technology. The other day they published a piece by Louis Hoffman, who describes himself as “a patent attorney licensed to practice law [...] Louis J. Hoffman, P.C., now known as the Hoffman Patent Firm.”

Hoffman is bemoaning and chastising SCOTUS for its decision on Alice. Watch how propagandists for software patents shamelessly spin the strength as a weakness. Even the headline says “The USPTO harms the economy with over-aggressive, haphazard Alice-based 101 rejections” (actually, these rejections are good news, except for patent lawyers).

“At this stage, more so than ever before, patent lawyers are just desperate to convince people (especially clients that give them money) that software patents are not dead/dying in the USPTO (or in various US courts that issue judgments).”The patent quality recalibration is good news for businesses in the US as it’s actually serving to restore some quality control, after the number of patents granted (per year!) nearly doubled because of declining examination standards. The USPTO only reluctantly changed its practices; watch how, over at Twitter, it sort of spread lies with its joke about obviousness; everything you send USPTO with a wad of cash is “non-obvious” nowadays. This ought to change, starting with software patents (which at the current pace may one day occupy the lion’s share of granted patents, unless they’re stopped at a categorical level). As Henrion put it, “you miss the subject matter test. On purpose?”

At this stage, more so than ever before, patent lawyers are just desperate to convince people (especially clients that give them money) that software patents are not dead/dying in the USPTO (or in various US courts that issue judgments). They are, in essence, misleading their clients. They give them poor advice, maybe willfully. Watch this new article titled “Still Alice: Not all software patents are being invalidated under Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l” (well, the large majority of them are being invalidated).

“We now have a new example where patent lawyers are reaching out to patents that are not software patents to make software patents look legit.”It doesn’t matter if a few (maybe a handful of) patents survived the Alice test in a court of law. Many are being invalidated (here are some statistics which suggest well over 80% get invalidated) and that’s enough to devalue them, discourage applications, deter against litigation, etc.

We now have a new example where patent lawyers are reaching out to patents that are not software patents to make software patents look legit. Here is one new example where a proponent of software patents (a patent attorney of course) uses an example which he even admits isn’t a software patents.”The invention considered by this US decision,” he admitted, “relates to signal transmission rather than software, as such. It does, however, require the application of a mathematical concept just as many software patents do, and so is highly relevant to software patents.”

Well, but it’s not a software patent, is it?

The EPO-Funded IAM ‘Magazine’

“IAM is funded by patent trolls in the sense that it organises pro-trolls events, with funding that comes from some of the world’s most notorious patent trolls.”Going back to IAM, here they are gloating or bragging about rise in patent litigation. When patent lawyers celebrate litigation (it is undeniably on the rise in patent cases, hence more income for the lawyers) one should remember their vested interests. This one particular site, IAM, is now being paid to promote the UPC as well (more lawsuits with higher damages). Even the EPO pays for this bias. “If you work at an NPE,” another new IAM article stated, “please click here to complete your survey.”

“NPE” meant patent troll. IAM is funded by patent trolls in the sense that it organises pro-trolls events, with funding that comes from some of the world’s most notorious patent trolls. Here we see the EPO-funded blogger pretending that SMEs should worry about lack of EPO advice. The EPO-funded IAM speaking about EPO is always a good laugh. There are much worse issues for European SMEs to worry about and the EPO is not their friend, not by a long shot. In some of their other articles, IAM bloggers mention patent thickets on devices (many of which use Linux, some BSD) and rank companies in terms of the number of patents they have (a misguided yardstick). To quote the latest such example: “South Korea’s conglomerates own some of the world’s largest patent portfolios. MDB Capital research published in issue 72 of IAM ranks Samsung Electronics’ portfolio in 1st place in terms of active US assets, with fellow Korean entities LG Electronics, SK Hynix, LG Display and ETRI also featuring among the top 100. Hyundai Motor’s portfolio comes in at 137th place and is also marked out as one of the top 20 fastest-growing portfolios, with a year-on-year compound annual growth rate in application filings of 24%.”

“Companies that spend much of their time (and budget) chasing patents will achieve little and pass a lot of wealth to patent lawyers, not R&D.”The gold rush for patents misses the point. As litigation against Samsung continues to show (see the example above), having many patents of ones own does not guard against bans imposed by the ITC, for instance. Companies that spend much of their time (and budget) chasing patents will achieve little and pass a lot of wealth to patent lawyers, not R&D.

Patent Lawyers and Maximalists: A Trojan Horse in Europe

IAM isn’t the only culprit here. Marks & Clerk, a contributor to the EPO-funded, pro-UPC propaganda in the US this month (paying the likes of IAM, which is similarly UK-based), serves as EPO megaphone and says: “Oppositions at the EPO provide an effective way of mitigating disadvantageous patent grants. However, although effort should primarily be spent focusing on argumentation, it is also important to avoid clerical errors before submission. One error that can occur, particularly when an opposing party has multiple divisions and/or subsidiaries, is inconsistency between documents with regards to the name of the opposing party.”

“We sure hope that Europe won’t follow the footsteps of the US when it comes to patents.”John Alty (UK-IPO) has expressed his interest in Google patents that cover little more than driving a truck (but by a computer). It’s quite telling that some people in the UK wish to emulate the US system, but these people are in the patent ‘business’. The London-based IP Kat has just promoted a book whose title contains the misleading propaganda term “intellectual property” (comparing patents to objects) and the Switzerland-based (but English-speaking) IP Watch published this article which was titled “Year Ahead In Biotech IP: Patents On Plants Under Fire, Biopharma Introspection, Plant Treaty Fund” and now (after a rewrite) is titled “The Year Ahead In Biotechnology And Intellectual Property”. It alludes to EPO patents on plants, which are not popular in Europe. This serves to demonstrate Europe’s growing trend of patent maximalism (to game the numbers and show expansion where there’s none that’s actually concrete).

We sure hope that Europe won’t follow the footsteps of the US when it comes to patents. The US seems to be withdrawing or moving away from software patents. It all boils down to a SCOTUS ruling. █

02.13.16

Links 13/2/2016: Debian 6.0 EOL

Posted in News Roundup at 12:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Pinterest open-sources its Teletraan tool for deploying code

    As promised last year when the company introduced it, Pinterest today announced that it has released its Teletraan tool for deploying source code on GitHub under an open source Apache license.

    “Teletraan is designed to do one thing, deploy code,” Pinterest software engineer Baogang Song wrote in a blog post. “Not only does it support critical features such as zero downtime deploy, rollback, staging and continuous deploy, but it also has convenient features, such as displaying commit details, comparing different deploys, notifying deploy state changes through either email or chat room, displaying OpenTSDB metrics and more.”

  • Split Emerges in Open Source MANO Efforts

    A broad attempt to create a single open source effort around managing and orchestrating NFV is now bifurcating into two separate groups, based on irreconcilable views of how to best standardize the MANO going forward.

  • Events

    • Share your love for free software

      Yes, we love Free Software and this readily means that we love technology, people, social equanimity, and the various meanings one may take on for the word “freedom”. We care about it and we all want to bear witness of the growth and consolidation of new projects, and the progress of elder ones into full-fledged solutions driven by healthy and thriving communities. Free Software communities are inherently diverse and put together people with different motivations, expectations, and interests. Some are there to make friends and advance their technical and social skills, while others want to pursue the dream of an open world or even have Free Software as their daily paid job. In spite of such a diversity, one thing unite all of us in this Free Software odyssey: we love what we do.

    • Encryption: probably better than a box of chocolates

      This is a fun activity, but it can also make a difference. The right to encrypt is endangered around the world, with governments threatening our security and freedom by demanding legal or technological crippling of encryption. Resist with the power of love — encrypt with your valentine, and tell the world!

      And as we’ve discussed at length, free software is necessary for privacy online. Because nonfree software’s code can’t be audited publicly, we can never trust it to be free of back doors inserted by accident or by design. We’re thankful to all the hardworking free software developers who give us a fighting chance at digital privacy. It goes without saying, but we do love FS.

    • Sharing the free software love #ilovefs

      I like to think of every day on Opensource.com as I love Free Software Day, but we couldn’t miss celebrating the official I love Free Software Day 2016, too. Granted, the official day to say “thank you” is on February 14th, so we’re showing our love a little early to make sure you don’t miss it.

    • OpenStack Summit Austin 2016 Presentation Votes (ends Feb. 17th, 2016)

      Open voting is available for all session submissions until Wednesday, Feb 17, 2016 at 11:59PM PST. This is a great way for the community to decide what they want to hear.

      I have submitted a handful of sessions which I hope will be voted for. Below are some short summary’s and links to their voting pages.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 44.0.2 Arrives for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X

        Mozilla launched a second update for the Firefox 44.0 branch, but this is a smaller release with just a couple of smaller fixes, albeit the security issue is quite important.

      • Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 to Finally Bring GTK3 Integration for Linux, Sort Of

        Earlier today, Mozilla has come out with the sixth point release of the stable 38.0 branch of its Thunderbird e-mail, news, and chat client, fixing a few minor issues reported by users since the 38.5.x series.

      • Make your own Firefox OS TV

        Mozilla may not be actively developing Firefox OS for smartphones anymore… but the company is still pushing the operating system as an option for smart TVs and Internet-of Things products.

        Don’t want to spend money on a TV that comes with Firefox OS? You can build your own Firefox-based smart TV device… sort of.

      • Mozilla refocuses Firefox OS on connected devices

        One by one, the promising new smartphone operating systems, which hoped to chip away at the Android/iOS duopoly, are admitting defeat and refocusing on the less entrenched world of wearables and the Internet of Things. Mozilla has joined that sad procession, in the wake of Samsung Tizen, webOS and Baidu Cloud OS, and perhaps just ahead of Windows Phone, to judge by that platform’s increasingly tiny showing in Microsoft’s results.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • Feedback on teaching open source usability

      I was pleased that ten students signed up for the elective. This may seem small, but it is a significant number for a campus of some 1,900 students and a small computer science department. The same number of students also signed up for other electives that semester, including a course on databases. I organized the class similarly to the usability projects I mentor for Outreachy. Over thirteen weeks, students learned about open source software and usability testing. Most weeks included two assignments: summarizing several assigned articles, and exercising their knowledge of that week’s topic. Later in the semester, students moderated two in-person usability tests; the second was their final project.

      At the end of each semester, students responded to a course evaluation, called the Student Rating of Teaching. The evaluation is totally anonymous. I don’t know which students made which comments, or indeed which students chose to respond to the survey.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Swift’s Benchmarking Suite is Now Open Source [Ed: to help Apple lock-in]

      Apple has open sourced Swift’s benchmarking suite, a key piece in tracking Swift performance and catching performance regressions when adding new features to the language.

      Swift’s benchmarking suite is a collection of Swift source files that implement test suites and benchmarking helper functions, plus a number of Python scripts that implement a test harness and facilities for metrics comparison.

  • Funding

    • Faking Open, Debian Influence, Da Linux

      Matt Asay today said that there is no money in Open Source software because the “open source companies” that get rich don’t do it with Open Source software. The big story today must be the Russian government’s plan to dump Windows for Linux. Debian 6.0 will reach its end-of-life at the end of the month and Tecmint.com recently looked at the influence Debian has had on the Linux community. A new website helps you decide what you can do for Fedora and I Love Free Software day approacheth. New openSUSE Board member Bryan Lunduke sees some problems in KDE Neonland and Swapnil Bhartiya shared his picks for best distros of 2016.

    • Face it: There’s no money in open source [Ed: says Asay from Adobe]

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Open-Source Textbooks Gain Support to Improve College Affordability

        Universities and state governments are supporting open-source textbooks as a way to make college more affordable.

        The open textbooks are produced with publicly available material. They are issued to students for free or a small fraction of the hundreds of dollars they typically spend annually on books.

      • OUR VIEW: Making college texts — if not college — affordable

        We’re all familiar with the high cost of a college education: estimated expenses for a year at the University of Connecticut, including on-campus housing, is, according to the school’s website, $25,802. So that’s a little over $100,000 for a four-year education. And that’s only the beginning.

        If a student takes four courses each semester and each requires one or more textbooks, the annual cost for books and supplies could be as much as $1,200, according to the College Board. Of course, if more than one book is required or if the student selects one of the high-cost majors, it could be far more. The standard textbook for Fundamentals of General Chemistry I at the University of Connecticut has a list price of $303.

      • Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge

        A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles – almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published – freely available online. And she’s now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world’s biggest publishers.

        For those of you who aren’t already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it’s sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn’t afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it’s since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court – a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

      • WHO Full Speed On Zika R&D, Two Candidate Vaccines Emerging; Funders, Journals Commit To Sharing Of Data

    • Open Hardware

      • $99 CowTech Ciclop Open Source 3D Scanner Hits Kickstarter (video)

        So if you think CowTech Ciclop 3D scanner is something you could benefit from, visit the Kickstarter website now to make a pledge and help this awesome $99 open soruce 3D scanner become a reality.

      • Faircap Project: Open source 3D printed water filter aims to solve global crisis for just $1

        The Faircap Project is a collaborative, clean water initiative, whose aim is to create an affordable open source 3D printed water filtration device that could provide clean, safe, drinkable water to those in need. The startup has already created a working prototype, but is now calling on engineers, designers, microbiologists, or anyone interested in helping to pitch their own open source ideas and make the Faircap filter as low cost and accessible as possible.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Is the vinyl LP an open music format?

      This is my first article for a new column here on Opensource.com about music from an open point of view. Some things I won’t be doing: I won’t be concentrating solely on music released under an open license. I won’t be writing (much) about making one’s own music. I won’t be writing (much) about music theory or professional matters, or probably really very much of anything of interest to professional musicians.

      I will write about music I encounter that interests me for one reason or another. I’ll tell you about how to enjoy music in an open environment, like on a Linux-based laptop, desktop, or server. I’ll share hardware I’ve purchased or tried out that works well, and some that doesn’t, in an open environment. I promise to write about good places to buy music that are Linux-friendly (that is, those that don’t require installing downloaders that only run on other operating systems). And I will point out some other websites, and occasionally print media, that increases my enjoyment of music.

Leftovers

The European Patent Office, Aloof/Apathetic to Inventors and Human Rights, Simply Cannot be Trusted With the Unitary Patent (UPC)

Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

More legal power, but whose?

Trojan horse

Summary: The European Patent Office (EPO), once a source of great pride for increasingly-unified Europeans, not only wants to enjoy impunity but also wants to attain new powers, despite demonstrating that its interests are anything but European and are often detrimental to Europeans, not just to European inventors

THE image of the EPO was tarnished a long time ago because of staff protests, press articles, and so on. These protests and press articles were the outcome of something, not the cause of that something. It’s not a made-up scandalisation (as EPO management so often tries to frame it with help from its buddies in the German media, notably Süddeutsche Zeitung); it’s very much deserved, and EPO management deserves all the blame. Never before was the EPO a Pariah in the eyes of Europe. The EPO was once internationally regarded as one of the best; now it’s renowned (or notorious) as the biggest human rights violator, more so than SIPO (both the State Intellectual Property Office in Croatia and in China).

Things took a turn for the worse when Battistelli, who tries hard to improve his image this month, took over and brought his mates. Did he not expect any backlash? EPO management basically became a clique. It’s tribalism. People generally know that the EPO is as scandalous an entity as FIFA, even if there are not (yet) disciplinary measures taken against management. Yesterday the President of the FFII told the EPO it’s “time for the European Parliament to step in to stop patent maximalism. They will be powerless with the non-EU Unitary Patent Court.”

“Things took a turn for the worse when Battistelli, who tries hard to improve his image this month, took over and brought his mates.”The term “patent maximalism” — a term that we believe we sort of coined here — is gaining widespread use. The above person now writes regarding language barriers (obstructions to UPC) as well — a subject we covered here a lot recently, mostly in relation to Spain and to Sweden. Glyn Moody, who wrote a detailed article about the EPO at the beginning of this month (criticising both the EPO and the UPC), responded by asking, “do you have a link for that? I think this is going to become a hugely important issue for UPC…”

“In my twitter history,” the President of the FFII. “I already mentioned about the fact that the Court will be running in English only. Let me dig.”

We already covered this subject quite frequently and heavily here, as far back as more than half a decade ago (when UPC wasn’t yet known as or referred to as “UPC”).

We kindly remind readers that EPO-funded pro-UPC events are to take place (including one in the US later this month). The EPO wants to take it international. We also wish readers would pay attention and consider who promotes the UPC. A so-called ‘news’ site that helped the EPO with pro-UPC propaganda (recently with a softball questions Battistelli ‘interview’) now promotes so-called ‘free’ ‘trade’ deals, again with other such ‘interviews’. Media presence isn’t hard to accomplish; there are always those who are gullible or corruptible, some with an operational Web site and a budget.

“Is the EPO serving inventors or is it looking after patent lawyers?”Remember that EPO managers allocated a massive budget for media positioning. They even hired a US (yes, US!) PR firm to handle the task, which makes one wonder who’s so crazy about the UPC anyway. Maybe the patent trolls lick their lips….

“Save this info,” the EPO wrote yesterday about presence/positioning of EPO at CeBIT, liking to a page whose contents is little more than software patents lobbying. Maybe the proponents of software patents lick their lips too….

Also (re)posted yesterday by the EPO was this photograph showing patent lawyers sharing a room with EPO staff. Is the EPO serving inventors or is it looking after patent lawyers? We suspect the latter, not to mention large corporations that are the main source of these lawyers’ income (and EPO revenue). The EPO only needs to maintain the illusion/perception that this isn’t the case, but any such cross-pollination (large corporations, patent lawyers, and EPO bureaucrats) serves to reinforce the idea that they’re all colluding for money and power. It’s protectionism. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. To quote an interesting new comment from yesterday:

By the way it the decision at stake is T 339/13:
http://www.epo.org/law-practice/case-law-appeals/recent/t130339eu1.html

It is interesting to note that the Board of Appeal finds it inventive to mimic the purring of a cat. I would have thought that it is notorious that cats purr, especially when being stroked.

It is difficult to see what can be inventive in moving a cursor on a virtual cat and in response thereto receiving a gentle purr.

In other news about the EPO, watch how generic medicine comes under attack by EPO patents. To quote yesterday’s news: “In the fourth quarter of 2015, a generic competitor unilaterally withdrew its appeal in the case regarding the validity of the Alimta vitamin regimen patent before the Technical Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO). In view of the withdrawal of the appeal, the decision of the Opposition Division of the EPO finding the patents valid is final, and there cannot be further validity challenges to the vitamin regimen patents for Alimta centrally before the EPO.”

“Consider what the European Cancer Patient Coalition wrote two years ago to Battistelli.”What would be the effect of this decision on the general European population? Consider what the European Cancer Patient Coalition wrote two years ago to Battistelli.

IP Watch also published this article yesterday, covering what the EPO’s spinners did to seed PR (positive coverage) about seeds and plants. To quote IP Watch: “The issue of the interplay between patents and plant variety rights heated up last year when the EPO Enlarged Board of Appeal upheld patents for plants or seeds obtained through conventional breeding methods, throwing plant breeders’ position into question.

“Before any more powers are passed to the EPO (e.g. the UPC) there needs to be assurance that the EPO isn’t just a Trojan horse serving foreign corporations under a .org domain and the misleading “European” label.”“The rulings prompted the European Parliament to ask the European Commission to investigate the matter, and the Netherlands, which holds the EU Presidency from 1 January – 30 June 2016, to promise to address the imbalance between the two systems (IPW, Biodiversity/Genetic Resources/Biotech, 19 January 2016). The EPO and CPVO said they wanted to increase their exchange of information on the subject.”

Judging by how things have progressed as of late, it won’t be long before the EPO is as much a lobbyist of Monsanto as the USPTO already is. Before any more powers are passed to the EPO (e.g. the UPC) there needs to be assurance that the EPO isn’t just a Trojan horse serving foreign corporations under a .org domain and the misleading “European” label. One needs to also ensure that the EPO actually obeys the law. At present, it obviously does not. █

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one`s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

–Henry Mencken

Feedback About Battistelli’s ‘Meet the President’ Event in Rijswijk (4th of February, 2016)

Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

And it’s a thoughtcrime to not wish to attend

EPO thoughtcrime

Summary: President of the EPO, the self-absorbed Battistelli, as described by those who attended his self-glorification event earlier this month

OVER A week ago we learned or became aware of an EPO propaganda event in Rijswijk. We then (very shortly afterwards) posted some details about it (this can be found in a previous article) and would like to post more information for the record.

“In several units, staff members took leave beforehand to avoid being on the list of available candidates for the “volunteer” selection process carried out by the line managers.”
      –AnonymousAs we received feedback from a person who participated in the “Meet the President” event and many people were often even forced to attend, there’s low risk of identities becoming known to the ‘gestapo’ [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

The “Meet the President” event in Rijswijk was described by an anonymous source as follows:

Many staff tried to escape from being selected as “volunteers” to meet the president. In several units, staff members took leave beforehand to avoid being on the list of available candidates for the “volunteer” selection process carried out by the line managers. That’s why the administration selected many “volunteers” amongst the probationers: they could not easily refuse the offer.

A “volunteer” to meet the President made the following observations:

I went to the Shell building as I was “volunteered” to attend. I saw a ‘white crowd’ [a group of colleagues in white solidarity T-shirts] gathering in the cafeteria as I went through the check point with two security personnel.

“I went to the Shell building as I was “volunteered” to attend.”
      –AnonymousAfter a while the reception area in front of the Auditorium was very full of other “volunteers”. Then I heard whistling and noise coming from outside the entrance. The president had arrived.

A bit later I noticed the president asking the servant for a cup of coffee or tea and waiting at the counter in the front area, since hot drinks were apparently all finished. I had come without any expectation and was drinking my coffee (to stay awake in the presentation) somewhere in the crowd but had no interest at all to go talk to the president, and apparently nobody else had either. People were chatting all around but all backs turned to him. He looked extremely alone, almost like a leper and maybe he also felt so. His body language showed enough: hunchbacked and looking down, avoiding eye contact with his staff. This must have lasted not even a minute but it seemed much longer. It was very different from other occasions some years ago when he was mingling with staff and talking to us with panache and confidence.

“[Battistelli] looked extremely alone, almost like a leper and maybe he also felt so. His body language showed enough: hunchbacked and looking down, avoiding eye contact with his staff.”
      –AnonymousFinally he got his cup and a girl politely said something to him and he looked happy for a moment. Then Mr. Philpott [a Principal Director] went to say something to him, and a bit later an accompanying person came along, and they went away. We were asked to enter the Auditorium and I went in quickly to find some inconspicuous seat in the middle. The whole speech was EPO-televised so that all staff could see it [on their computer screens]. I noticed a security guard upstairs in the back next to the control room, just like in the flier cartoon [No. 7 "Meet the President"]. But worse was that, when it was over and we were leaving the Auditorium, there were at least 10 security people standing outside, two guarding each exit door. It was bad enough that this whole exercise was just propaganda, but this in particular I found distressing and sad.

The previous report we got on the subject was rather revealing as it also mentioned the propagandistic content of the ‘speech’, which showed an irritated Battistelli. Based on the above text, we find it curious that Battistelli and Philpott may be relatively close (it just says he was among the few who personally approached Battistelli). We find it curious because legal strongarming against Techrights came to a large degree through Philpott. █

Microsoft Continua Usando Patentes de Software para Extorsionar/Chantajear Incluso Más Compañías que Usan Linux, Forzandolas/Coerciendoles a PreInstallar Basura de Microsoft

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 3:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

English/Original

Publicado in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 9:05 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

El ¨nuevo¨ Microsoft es como la nueva MAFIA, aunque con mucho mejor mercadeopor secretos arreglos de patentes

Patent deal spin
Como Microsof t anuncia sus tratados de patentes actualmente (cubriendo Android y Linux), usando ambiguedad y eufemismos (¨Acuerdos¨ realmente son secretos asentamientos de patentes)

Sumario: Acer es el último gran OEM que se ha convertido en la caza de brujas por parte de Microsoft contra preinstalladores de Android/Linux, a quienes esta coerciendo en convertirse en transportistas de Microsoft (o enfrentarse a litigaciones sobre patentes de software, con altos costos legales sino bloqueos con altísimos costos por arreglos secretos).

Este artílo cubre una materia sobre la que he estado escribiendo por lo menos una década, frecuentemente de manera dedicada (especialmente el ´arreglo´ de Novell con Microsoft, que puso en riesgo a todo GNU/Linux).

“La frecuentemente repetida (por lo general por los sitios promueven a Microsoft) afirma que “Microsoft ama a Linux “son tonterías de golf. Todos los que han seguido las noticias por más de un año o dos seguramente ya lo saben.”Este artílo sin duda enojará algunas personas en Microsoft, quienes han estado tratando de silenciare este sitio de varias maneras (incluso ellos contactaron my empleador). En este artílo no pretendo ser alarmista pero simplemente explicar su ultima estrategia de ABRAZA, EXTIENDE Y EXTINGUE (E.E.E), especialmente en contra del lider de mercado (excediendo a Windows en el mercado), Android. Todo tiene que ver con patentes, o para ser más específico, patentes de software. Las dubias prácticas de la OEP promovidas por Microsoft (al presionar a sus oficiales) se han convertido en la norma [http://techrights.org/2015/10/16/genesis-of-epo-microsoft-ties/], pero dejaremos eso para otro día, ya hemos escrito un montón acerca de la OEP, no sólo acerca de patentes de software en Europa).

Más extorsiónes de patentes por parte de Microsoft han sido reveladas, TODAVÍA CONTINUA LUCHANDO CONTRA LINUX (que actualmente esta encarnado en relativamente sistemas cerrados tales como Android) usando PATENTES COMO ARMAS por las cuales imponer SPYWARE en todo el mundo. Una vez más, patentes de software o MONOPOLIOS EN ALGORITMOS DE SOFTWARE estan siendo usados por extraordinario apalancamiento y Microsoft pone un ENGAÑOSA etiqueta en arreglos de patentes, tal como las corporaciones sobornan políticos pero disfrazan sus arreglos bajo la mesa como compromisos de discurso o contribuciones de campaña, entre otros hoyos semánticos. La frecuentemente repetida (por lo general por los sitios promueven a Microsoft) afirma que “Microsoft ama a Linux “son tonterías de golf. Todos los que han seguido las noticias por más de un año o dos seguramente ya lo saben. Hemos escrito algunos artílos acerca de esto el año pasado por ejemplo:

“Básicamente él es un sucesor como Joachim Kempin quién no sólo disparó contra animales ilegalmente (y fue arrestado por ello) pero también famosamente dijo ¨Estoy pensando en golpear más duramente a las OEMs que en le pasado con Anti-Linux. [...] para que ellos bailen delicadamente”.”Lo de arriba discute y une a artículos acerca de cinco grandes compañías a quienes Microsoft CHANTAJEÓ (frecuentemente explícitamente) usando patentes en la misma manera que lo hace en contra de Acer, un relativamente promotor de GNU/Linux, incluso en some desktops. ¿Está Microsoft amenazando con enjuciarlos? SI, vean lo que hizo a Samsung. Acordaron un arreglo hace casi un año, sobre el cual Samsung acordó convertirse en su VASALLO (esto fué confirmado más tarde). No es difícil ver lo que pasa aquí; incluso la tristemente célebre ayayera de Microsoft Mary Jo Foley reconoce el rol del chantaje de patentes, usando nonombradas patentes de software por las que Microsoft ha estado usando para derribar/destruir OEMs en todo el mundo, incluso donde las patentes de software no són válidas. La ayayera de Microsoft escribió esto hace unas horas, citando Nick Parker (Vice presidente Corporativo, Equipo Original Manufacturador de Microsoft). Básicamente él es un sucesor como Joachim Kempin quién no sólo disparó contra animales ilegalmente (y fue arrestado por ello) pero también famosamente dijo ¨Estoy pensando en golpear más duramente a las OEMs que en le pasado con Anti-Linux. [...] para que ellos bailen delicadamente¨. Basado en el presente OEM jefe de Microsoft, en palabras de Mary Jo Foley:

De Mayo pasado, hubieron 31 OEMs que acordaron preinstallare aplicaciones y servicios de Microsoft en sus tabletas y teléfonos. Algunos de otros nombres grandes incluyen Samsung, Dell y Pegatron. Hoy en día hay 74 socios de hardware en 25 países en la lista (solicité a Microsoft por una lista al día de los fabricantes de Android que son partes del grupo.)

Aunque los oficialess de Microsoft no dirán explícitamente que los arreglos de preinstallación están atados a su contínua campaña con la que esta persiguiendo más pagos por regalías de patentes por parte de los fabricantes de Android. El blog post de hoy menciona que ¨alineamiento de PI (propiedad intelectual) es una figura importante¨ en esos acuerdos.

En Octubre pasado el arreglo de Microsoft con Asus combinó su licencia de Office app con un arreeglo de patentes sobre Android.

Esto no es inclusión de Microsoft sofware en esos aparatos. Microsoft no hace software ultimamente, sólo hace MALWARE/SPYWARE como Vista 10 (el SUEÑO DE LA NSA HECHO REALIDAD constantemente esta grabando lo que escribes) o Skype (siempre grabandote), con su inabilidad de salirse de los ´updates´ secretos [1] e incluso bloquear la vigilancia masiva en sus ordenadores [2], basado en nuevos artículos (vean abajo).

“La última estrategia de Microsoft contra Linux – como preveí que allá por los días de Novell – es HAGA LO QUE LE DECIMOS O LO VAMOS A DEMANDAR CON PATENTES “”.Recuérden que distribuidores de Android no incluyen MALWARE de Microsoft por antonomasia/fuera de la caja porque lo quieran. Microsoft AMENAZA CON ENJUICIARLOS. La última estrategia de Microsoft contra Linux – como preveí que allá por los días de Novell – es HAGA LO QUE LE DECIMOS O LO VAMOS A DEMANDAR CON PATENTES.”

¿Donde está la RICO Act cuando actualmente necesita ser enforzada?

El amor de Microsoft por Linux es el amor de una serpiente Pitón por corderos. Simplemente le gusta tragarlas. Es delicioso. Es acerca de devorar. Cuando dije esto en Twitter una persona respondió diciendo: ¨Esta industria tiene poca memoria, estamos en el estado de ¨ABRAZA¨ en el ABRAZA, EXTIENDE Y EXTINGUE¨ (E.E.E). █

Contenido relacionado de las noticias:

  1. Microsoft renuncia dándonos el tratamiento silencioso en los Updates de Windows 10

    Despues de efectivamente dar a todo el mundo el tratamiento silecioso en cambios a los updates en su ´os´, Microsoft ha creado una página para brevemente enlistar sus updates cuando son emitidos. NO se rinden a la presión pública de los usuarios al tirar una bola sobre el muelle y esperar que tu vayas tras ella entonces todo el ruido se irá.

    ¨Despues de escuchar al público acerca del nivel de comunicación para los updates de Windows 10, decidimos implementar un nuevo sistema de comunicar los updates al sistema operativo,¨ dijo un vocero de Redmon tempran¨Despues de escuchar al público acerca del nivel de comunicación para los updates de Windows 10, decidimos implementar un nuevo sistema de comunicar los updates al sistema operativo,¨ dijo un vocero de Redmon temprano.

  2. Windows 10 te Espía a pesar de que ´bloqueess’ las opciones de rastreo o installes anty-spyware aplicaciones.

    Analista revela que Window 10 esta amasando un enorme datos de usuario a pesar de bloquear las tres opciones de rastreo

    Todos sabemos que Windows 10 espía a los usuarios. Lo hemos reportado incluso cuando ellos publicaron us Prevision Técnica de Windows 10 en Agosto de 2014. Después de un año que la versión final Windows 10 fue entregada al público, Microsoft confirmó que Windows 10 espíaba a los usuarios en Noviembre de 2015. Añadió en ese momento que no pudo evitar su telemétrico programa para espíar a sus usuarios.

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