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08.20.15

Black Duck Still Destroying, Lying, Rewriting History

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, FUD, Microsoft at 7:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Manchester crane

Summary: Black Duck is still carrying water for Microsoft and pretends to be working for ‘Open Source’, despite doing it much harm and doing nothing that is actually Open Source

AN ARTICLE titled “The channel’s role in improving open source security” cites a FUD ‘study’ from Black Duck, the firm which, by its very own admission (high level), was created to spread FUD against GPL and discourage its use/adoption.

“Don’t forget that Ohloh, just like Black Duck, was created by people from Microsoft. “The day beforehand we saw gross revisionism that said the firm “set up in 2002 not as an anti-malware tool or a security outfit, but as a ‘curator’” (that’s a lie). All that Black Duck has become is a parasite and a back stabber, wielding software patents and proprietary software.

Another thing that Black Duck turns out to have killed, based on this new post, is Open HUB. It’s said to be “dead” now, maybe because it doesn’t serve the agenda of Black Duck anymore. To quote:

Some may recall it as Ohloh, then it was taken over by Black Duck Software and now runs under the name of Open HUB, the open source network to “Discover, Track and Compare Open Source”. What a laugh. Since Black Duck took over things continuously have gotten worse, spinning repository updates became infrequent, and now OpenHUB simply can’t catch up with all projects, their engine for months was months behind with updating source code, and now completely fails on big repositories.

Don’t forget that Ohloh, just like Black Duck, was created by people from Microsoft. They both should be treated as such. █

Ashley Madison Disaster Apparently the Fault of Microsoft Windows

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 6:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

What kind of company uses Windows for security?!

Hilton Manchester

Summary: New reports serve to show that Ashley Madison’s data which got leaked includes complete dump of corporate Windows passwords

TWO months ago we wrote about the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) breach and Microsoft Windows. It’s quite unusual for large, high-profile breaches to involve anything but Microsoft, but the media rarely call out Windows, not even when Stuxnet is clearly all about Windows (not surprisingly because Microsoft aids the NSA and the NSA developed Stuxnet) and the Sony were reportedly the fault of a leaky Window server, irrespective of who infiltrated it (an entirely separate question).

Another day, another crack. Because OPM contains the personal details of many rich and powerful people. OPM still dominates the news to some degree (although Windows is rarely mentioned) and now it’s Ashley Madison [1,2]. A lot of people, including very high-profile people, can now be publicly shamed and/or blackmailed.

“Well done, Microsoft. Instead of helping just the NSA (and by extension Five Eyes) hoard weapons of blackmail against billions of people the company has now got weapons of blackmail scattered all around the Web, targeting many millions of people.”According to this report, the leak “included a full domain dump of corporate passwords (NTLM hashes) of the Windows domain of the company” (hello Microsoft!).

“According to security experts, including Krebs,” wrote Gordon in IRC, “it’s definitely a legit dump” and there are articles that explain why. “The database dump,” to quote this one report, “appears to be legitimate and contains usernames, passwords, credit card data (last four), street addresses, full names, and much much more. It also contains an extensive amount of internal data which looks like the hackers had maintained access to their environment for a long period of time.”

Ashley Madison’s owners are in panic because a lot of lawsuits may be imminent. They are trying to DMCA sites that share the data, but history teaches that this is a futile effort. They now pay the price of using Windows and many people (perhaps dozens of millions) pay the price of relying on a company that uses Windows.

Well done, Microsoft. Instead of helping just the NSA (and by extension Five Eyes) hoard weapons of blackmail against billions of people the company has now got weapons of blackmail scattered all around the Web, targeting many millions of people. Microsoft leads to a form of global anarchy by making its software flawed by design and leaky by intention. It’s that same dumb mentality that leads some politicians to demands of back doors only for the “Good Guys” (them). █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Remember How The DMCA ‘Stopped’ The Release Of Ashley Madison Cheaters Data? About That…

    And… it took longer than expected, but less than a month later, the data file has leaked online, and you can bet that lots of people — journalists, security researchers, blackmailers and just generally curious folks — have been downloading it and checking it out.

    Maybe, next time, rather than claiming copyright, the company will do a better job of protecting its systems.

  2. Data from hack of Ashley Madison cheater site dumped online [Updated]

    Gigabytes worth of data taken during last month’s hack of the Ashley Madison dating website for cheaters has been published online—an act that could be highly embarrassing for the men and women who have used the service over the years.

    A 10-gigabyte file containing e-mails, member profiles, credit-card transactions and other sensitive Ashley Madison information became available as a BitTorrent download in the past few hours. Ars downloaded the massive file and it appeared to contain a trove of details taken from a clandestine dating site, but so far there is nothing definitively linking it to Ashley Madison. User data included e-mail addresses, profile descriptions, addresses provided by users, weight, and height. A separate file containing credit card transaction data didn’t include full payment card numbers or billing addresses.

    [...]

    “We have now learned that the individual or individuals responsible for this attack claim to have released more of the stolen data,” they wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “We are actively monitoring and investigating this situation to determine the validity of any information posted online and will continue to devote significant resources to this effort. Furthermore, we will continue to put forth substantial efforts into removing any information unlawfully released to the public, as well as continuing to operate our business.”

“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”

–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive

After OOXML Propaganda, New Assocham Propaganda Calls for Back Doors, Spyware and Other Malicious, Self-defeating Traps Inside Government of India

Posted in Asia, Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 6:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Assocham (or ASSOCHAM) has been fronting for Microsoft’s interests for nearly a decade (if not much longer)

Assocham logo

Summary: Assocham is showing its true colours yet again, lobbying for the interests of foreign companies and endorsing serious abuse or compromise of India’s national sovereignty

MICROSOFT, which suffers big financial losses, layoffs, and cancelled products, must be rather nervous right now. It even appointed a new CEO with Indian roots, as part of its desperate, shallow effort to change the company’s image. More than seven years ago we showed how Assocham had become somewhat of a lobbyist for Microsoft's interests in India (effectively aiding Microsoft corruption of international scale). Now that India is moving towards Free software we see a lot of lobbying from Microsoft again. Microsoft still exercises far too much influence against the interests on India, often relying on proxies and front groups that it is closely connected to. We covered it earlier this year in articles such as:

In lobbying for Microsoft et al. Assocham now uses the same propaganda as for software patents, using almost exactly the same words, mainly “fair” and “non-discriminatory” (remember what FRAND and RAND stand for, uttering in quite an Orwellian fashion the very opposite of what they are). Microsoft’s India lobby wants back doors, spying, and strong foreign lock-in in India. Anything else would be “unfair” and “discriminatory”, or so Microsoft would have us believe.

“Given Assocham’s past actions it would be hard for it to deny rogue play.”India’s corporate media and paid-for press wires are now clogged up by at least a dozen English language bits of propaganda from Assocham, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. It’s pure nonsense and it is consistent with what Microsoft has been doing in recent months, both directly and indirectly, e.g. through NASSCOM, which is connected not only to Microsoft but also the Gates Foundation.

Given Assocham’s past actions it would be hard for it to deny rogue play. It’s easy to see why propaganda is needed here. Assocham should be asked by our Indian readers, “are you that corrupt?” We urge for action, perhaps some petition, questioning the integrity of this 95-year-old body, which was either corrupted or was always inherently corrupt.

Vista 10 is totally unacceptable for use by any government. It is definitely unacceptable for use in Munich, which is now under attack by Microsoft boosters yet again (report from CBS), amid many reports about NSA espionage inside Germany (vindicating Munich). Microsoft is a spyware company and no nation in Europe, especially a nation’s government, should let Microsoft possess any data, yet in Italy, based to Microsoft boosting sites [1, 2], there is a retreat to the huge costs of lock-in and OOXML. They say it’s done “to Save Money” as if selling citizens’ data without their consent to some foreign company that cooperates with the NSA more than any other software company is some kind of achievement.

India ought to fight for its digital sovereignty. It has many talented software engineers who can build and maintain the country’s infrastructure using Free software. Assocham may continue to prove itself to be a parasite, a mole, and a sellout. It’s time to shut it up. █

08.19.15

Links 19/8/2015: LinuxCon Everywhere

Posted in News Roundup at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • News Corp.’s Amplify education experiment: What went wrong?

    That write-down comes nearly five years after it purchased Wireless Generation for $360 million in 2010 and renamed it Amplify. At the time, News Corp. was going to bet about $500 million on Amplify to dominate the market. Amplify was led by Joel Klein, the former head of the New York City Department of Education.

  • Avoiding Amazon? The 5 best alternatives to the online bookseller giants
  • You probably don’t want to work for Amazon

    ‘Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.’

  • The Missing ‘Leadership Principle’ at Amazon
  • Amazon’s 24/7 Hell Is the Future of Work

    Working at Amazon may be hell, but so is working everywhere else. Or at least it will be soon. The blockbuster New York Times report documenting Amazon’s “bruising” white collar culture is a fine piece of labor reporting, yet its revelations shouldn’t be too surprising. Amazon is revealed to be a more efficient and more unpleasant formulation of the standard modern workplace; one shaped by globalization, digitalization, and increasingly limitless expectations placed on the plugged-in worker.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Security updates for Monday
    • Security advisories for Tuesday
    • DDoS attacks on the rise as Akamai warns that ‘mega attacks’ are coming

      THIS IS THE DAWN of the mega denial-of-service (DoS) attack, according to security firm Akamai and its second quarter threat report.

      We wait every three months for the Akamai State of the Internet report, and we are never disappointed. Its content is pretty good too, and allows for a summary of the past quarter and a reminder about things like Shellshock and web perennials like Flash, WordPress themes and application attacks.

    • Ransomware goes open source

      Turkish security bod Utku Sen has published what seems to be the first open source ransomware that anyone can download and spread. The ‘Hidden Tear’ ransomware, available at GitHub, is a working version of the malware the world has come to hate. It uses AES encryption to lock down files and could display a scare warning or ransom message to get users to pay.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Julian Assange and the Value of WikiLeaks: Subverting Illusions

      Above and beyond Assange’s personal freedom, what’s at stake includes the impunity of the United States and its allies to relegate transparency to a mythical concept, with democracy more rhetoric than reality. From the Vietnam War era to today — from aerial bombing and torture to ecological disasters and financial scams moving billions of dollars into private pockets — the high-up secrecy hiding key realities from the public has done vast damage. No wonder economic and political elites despise WikiLeaks for its disclosures.

  • Finance

    • Richard D. Wolff | Déjà Vu: Germany Tightens Its Economic Power Over Europe

      Germany’s leaders herded their European counterparts into imposing harsh austerity on Greece. It was the price, they insisted, that Greece had to pay to receive bailout credits from the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Europeans required those bailout credits to be used mostly to pay back loans the Greek government had gotten earlier from private banks (chiefly German, French and Greek). Those credits could not be used to get Greece out of the 2008 crash that afflicted all of Europe.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Scott Walker’s False Promise of Racial Unity

      When asked about race relations on the first anniversary of Michael Brown’s killing at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Walker replied:

      “I think in general if anyone focuses on racial discord we’re going to get more,” he said. “If we focus on unity we’re going to get more of that.”

      In other words, acknowledging systemic problems like the documented wave of police killings of unarmed black men, or the racial wealth gap, or disparities in sentencing and incarceration, creates “discord.” During the GOP debate, he similarly dodged a question about the Black Lives Matter movement, which even Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly called “the biggest civil rights issue of our time.”

    • 70 Awful Displays Of Sexism On Fox News

      On the 95th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, Media Matters looks back at Fox News’ many displays of sexism, ranging from hosts suggesting young women should not exercise civic duties like participating in jury duty because they “don’t get it,” to Erick Erickson’s claim that “the male typically is the dominant role.”

    • Who Is Intimidating Who?

      The cheerful cheddarheads who showed up at the Iowa State Fair “Soapbox” to razz Scott Walker got a rude reception. The Soapbox is a Des Moines Register tradition and peaceful protesters have long been a part of this exercise in free speech. But after Walker was punked by two young people with a fake $900 million Koch check weeks ago, Team Walker seems a bit tense. At the Soapbox, Walker supporters ripped a sign out of one protester’s hand which read “WARNING Don’t let him do to America what he did to Wisconsin.” Another protester told CNN ”I got pushed into a disabled woman. I fell on her wheelchair. She started screaming at me.”

    • Donald Trump Praises Bill O’Reilly For His Focus On Immigrant “Crime Wave”

  • Censorship

    • MPAA Ducks Censorship Battle With Google, Twitter and Facebook

      The MPAA has dropped its request for a preliminary injunction that would require search engines, ISPs and hosting companies to stop linking or offering services to MovieTube. The decision comes a few days after prominent tech firms including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Yahoo branded the request as a broad censorship attempt.

    • U.S. Government Grabbed Dotcom’s Millions “As a Last Resort”

      The U.S. Government has informed the Court of Appeals that the civil forfeiture case against Megaupload and Kim Dotcom was launched as a last resort. The authorities feared that Dotcom and his colleagues would regain possession of the millions in seized assets and argue that they are properly labeled as “fugitives.”

  • Privacy

    • Warrantless airport laptop search dooms Iran arms sales prosecution

      Federal prosecutors asked a federal judge in Washington on Tuesday to dismiss the government’s prosecution of a South Korean businessman accused of illegally selling technology used in aircraft and missiles to Iran.

      The move comes three months after a judge ruled that the government unlawfully seized and searched the suspect’s computer at Los Angeles International Airport as Jae Shik Kim was to catch a flight home in 2012. The government decided not to appeal and said it was “unable to continue prosecuting this matter.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Desperate Rightscorp Burns Through More Piracy Millions

        Piracy monetization company Rightscorp has published its results for Q2 2015 and it’s yet another three months of misery for the company. At the same time as paying out just $117K to its copyright holder clients, Rightscorp managed to run up $1.95m in expenses, leaving the company with operating losses in excess of $1.72m.

      • Universal Music and Kim Dotcom Prepared a Deal to Tax Google

        A recording of Kim Dotcom and several Universal Music executives captured two days before the Megaupload raids has revealed the label planning to do a deal with the entrepreneur. Amid discussion of ‘taxing’ Google by diverting its ad revenue to the label, the execs offered to downgrade Dotcom from “evil” to “neutral” in return for dropping legal action over the “Mega Song”.

      • Hollywood Keeps Breaking Box Office Records… While Still Insisting That The Internet Is Killing Movies

        Hollywood is still 100% focused on trying to blame the internet for any of its woes, mostly with bogus attacks on internet companies it doesn’t like. And yet… it seems to keep on setting box office records. The latest is that Universal Pictures has broken a new record in bringing in $2 billion in box office revenue faster than any other studio in history, pushed over the top by the successful opening weekend of “Straight Outta Compton” (a movie that seems to have some big fans in Silicon Valley).

08.18.15

Links 18/8/2015: Linux 4.2 RC7, IBM’s LinuxOne

Posted in News Roundup at 6:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Ransomware goes OPEN SOURCE in the name of education

    Turkish security bod Utku Sen has published what appears to be the first open source ransomware that anyone can download and spread.

    The “Hidden Tear” ransomware, available to GitHub, is a functional version of the malware the world has come to hate; it uses AES encryption to lock down files and can display a scare warning or ransom message to get users to pay up.

  • Chinese, Russian, tech giants join global open source efforts

    Alibaba and Yandex joining these open source efforts confounds their home nations’ occasionally-expressed intentions to build technology ecosystems less dependent on US companies. Both China and Russia have cited post-Snowden security concerns as the reason they’re keen to rely on indigenous technologies. With their tech giants now participating in global efforts alongside US entities, technological isolation looks rather harder to achieve.

  • Keen IO open-sources its Data Explorer tool for making quick queries

    Keen IO, a startup with a cloud-based data analytics tool, is announcing today that it’s releasing one of its tools for customers, the Data Explorer, under an open-source license.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla tests a true stealth mode for Firefox

        Mozilla wants to make private browsing truly private.

        The company is testing enhancements to private browsing in Firefox designed to block website elements that could be used by third parties to track browsing behavior across sites. Most major browsers, Firefox included, have a “Do Not Track” option, though many companies do not honor it.

      • Mozilla defaults Tracking Protection for Firefox developer builds, but only for private browsing

        Pre-beta versions of Firefox will block domains known to track users by default when a private browser window is opened.

      • Rust in 2016

        This week marks three months since Rust 1.0 was released. As we’re starting to hit our post-1.0 stride, we’d like to talk about what 1.0 meant in hindsight, and where we see Rust going in the next year.

      • Rust Language Focusing On Infrastructure Improvements, Features & More
      • Firefox Security Exploit Targets Linux Users and Web Developers

        Through the years, Firefox has enjoyed a reputation as one of the most secure Web browsers on any platform, and it’s the default browser for many Linux distros. However, a security exploit appeared this week that has shown users they can’t afford to be complacent about security. Mozilla has rushed to patch the flaw, and a new release has closed the hole (39.0.3). But, plenty of users still haven’t updated their browsers.

      • Mozilla Experiments with True Private Browsing

        Mozilla has a long history of experimenting with new features in pre-beta and developer versions of the Firefox browser, and one of the current experiments could shake up notions about private browsing. The company is experimenting with an approach to private browsing where Firefox could block any and all website elements used by third parties to track browsing behavior. Effectively, the new approach would defy the many organizations that don’t honor “Do Not Track” features in browsers.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • LinkedIn Open Sources Highly Useful Hadoop Tools

      LinkedIn has already adopted Gradle as itsprimary build system. “With Gradle, developers can easily extend the build system by defining their own plugins,” the company claims. “We developed the Hadoop Plugin to help our Hadoop application developers more effectively build, test and deploy Hadoop applications. The Plugin includes the Hadoop DSL, a domain-specific language for specifying jobs and workflows for Hadoop workflow managers like Azkaban and Apache Oozie.”

  • Databases

    • Open Source First Starting to Converge with Cloud First

      Of course, PostgeSQL is only one instance where open source and the cloud are starting to converge. The same argument could also be applied to everything from Node.js to Docker containers. The point is that as the critical mass of open source software in the cloud continues to build, it’s only a matter of time before that same software starts showing up on premise in much greater numbers than it already has.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • First LibreOffice 5.0 Maintenance Release on Its Way to Fix Middle-Click Paste on X11

      After releasing the huge LibreOffice 5.0 update, The Document Foundation announced that the hard team of developers behind the most powerful open-source office suite in the world is hard at work on the first maintenance release of LibreOffice 5.0.0.

    • An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

      So I realize that the Apache Foundation took a lot of pride in and has invested a lot of effort trying to create an Apache Licensed Office suite based on the old OpenOffice codebase, but I hope that now that it is clear that this effort has failed that you would be willing to re-direct people who go to the openoffice.org website to the LibreOffice website instead. Letting users believe that OpenOffice is still alive and evolving is only damaging the general reputation of open source Office software among non-technical users and thus I truly believe that it would be in everyones interest to help the remaining OpenOffice users over to LibreOffice.

  • CMS

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Focal Camera: An Open Source Modular Camera

      Over the past year, Dutch artist Mathijs van Oosterhoudt has been developing a new camera system. No, it’s not a high-tech digital system that’s intended to go up against the major camera companies. Instead, it’s an open-modular camera system that’s intended to teach people how to build complex cameras. Its name is The Focal Camera.

  • Programming

    • Perl Weekly

      Yesterday was CPAN day: the 20th(!) anniversary of the day CPAN appeared online. A few articles of this week’s edition celebrate the event, and promote the kind of interaction that keeps it alive.

Leftovers

  • Former Executive Pleads Guilty to Conspiring to Bribe Panamanian Officials

    A former regional director of SAP International Inc. pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by participating in a scheme to bribe Panamanian officials to secure the award of government technology contracts for SAP.

    Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag of the Northern District of California, Special Agent in Charge George L. Piro of the FBI’s Miami Division and Acting Special Agent in Charge Thomas McMahon of the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) made the announcement.

  • Author shows off the real Jamaica through Bob Marley shooting

    Marlon James is the first Jamaican-born novelist nominated for the Man Booker prize. A Brief History of Seven Killings uses the true story of an attempt on the life of Bob Marley to explore the turbulent politics of Jamaica in the 1970s.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Jeb’s New Iraq Stance: My Brother’s ‘Mission Was Accomplished’

      In the early months of his candidacy, Jeb Bush fumbled whenever he faced extremely predictable questions about his brother’s foreign policy. When asked about Iraq again at last week’s debate, he said that, knowing what we know now, “it was a mistake,” then inelegantly pivoted from praising veterans to blaming Obama for the current situation in the Middle East. This week Bush debuted a new stance: Whatever mistakes President George W. Bush made along the way, the Iraq War ultimately turned out for the best (at least until President Obama and Hillary Clinton messed it all up).

    • AP EXCLUSIVE: Top secret Clinton emails include drone talk
    • New Generation of Cuban-Americans Want Embargo Lifted – Former CIA Officer

      Former CIA counterterrorism officer John Kiriacou claims that a new generation of Cuban Americans is willing to lift the trade embargo on Cuba and end the half-century-long boycott of the island nation.

    • ‘We Wanted to Cut Off Che Guevara’s Head’ – Ex-CIA Agent

      He said that he told the General he could not do it because, being the country’s military chief of staff, Candia just wouldn’t be able to present a severed human head as material proof.

    • Point Person: Our Q&A with Michael Hayden

      Twenty-nine scientists with nuclear specialties signed a letter this month supporting the accord. Are they to be completely dismissed?

    • The Iran Gambit II

      Gambit I was the start of false accusations by the then Bush Administration in 2007 that Iran was preparing a nuclear weapon, when in fact Iran had no such ambitions at all, but a plan to open an Iranian Oil Bourse (IOB) in Teheran, an international hydrocarbon exchange, where all countries, hydrocarbon producers or not, could trade this (still) principal energy source in euros, as an alternative to the US dollar. This would have devastated the dollar as a hegemonic fiat currency – still used on false trust as the main world reserve currency.

    • Neocons to Americans: Trust Us Again

      Marching in lockstep with Israeli hardliners, American neocons are aiming their heavy media artillery at the Iran nuclear deal as a necessary first step toward another “regime change” war in the Mideast – and they are furious when anyone mentions the Iraq War disaster and the deceptions that surrounded it, writes Robert Parry.

      America’s neocons insist that their only mistake was falling for some false intelligence about Iraq’s WMD and that they shouldn’t be stripped of their powerful positions of influence for just one little boo-boo. That’s the point of view taken by Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt as he whines about the unfairness of applying “a single-interest litmus test,” i.e., the Iraq War debacle, to judge him and his fellow war boosters.

      After noting that many other important people were on the same pro-war bandwagon with him, Hiatt criticizes President Barack Obama for citing the Iraq War as an argument not to listen to many of the same neocons who now are trying to sabotage the Iran nuclear agreement. Hiatt thinks it’s the height of unfairness for Obama or anyone else to suggest that people who want to kill the Iran deal — and thus keep alive the option to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran — “are lusting for another war.”

    • Iran carpet industry set for revival after deal
    • Iran Gives UN Information About Past Nuclear Activities

      But Iran and the United Nations agency agreed last month to wrap up the investigation by December, when the IAEA plans to issue a final assessment on the allegations.

      On the sidelines of the deal between Iran and the world powers in the Austrian capital of Vienna on July 14, Tehran and the UN nuclear watchdog signed an agreement to resolve outstanding issue about PMD of its past nuclear activities.

    • Guest commentary: Should get own house in order before bullying others

      Our unelected military ruler, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, tried to stem the backlash, asking Thais to stop blaming the U.S. government for awarding Thailand a low ranking in its annual report.

      But as an American columnist living in Thailand, I have the same question many Thais have, namely: Shouldn’t the U.S. get its own moral house in order before policing the rest of the world?

    • Havana Sells US Diplomatic Ties as Victory
    • US Raises Flag in Cuba After 54 Years (Video)

      The United States and Cuba are taking the next step in restoring diplomatic relations with each other as Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Havana Friday to attend a ceremony marking the reopening of the U.S. Embassy there. This comes after former Cuban President Fidel Castro wrote in a newspaper column that the U.S. owes the island country “millions of dollars” as reparations for its decades-long embargo.

    • The US-Cuba thaw

      Secretary of State John Kerry had the honor of reopening the US embassy in Cuba 54 years after it was closed. But it was the pair of presidents, Barack Obama and Raul Castro, who made it happen, and each in his own way.

    • Cold War thaw: Re-establishing diplomatic ties with Cuba was the right move

      In the 54 years since the United States ended diplomatic ties with Cuba, we’ve learned a lot about our Caribbean adversaries.

    • The Crisis In Ukraine: War Or Rumors Of War?

      The early reports of the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the communist threat now appear at best, to have been greatly exaggerated, or at worst, an intentional deception. Although the intelligence service of the Soviet Era, the KGB, was renamed the Federal Security Service (FSB), it facilitated the rise of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, proving the security service is still very much in power within the “new” Russia.

    • Neocons Falsify Iraq War ‘Lessons’

      Having escaped accountability for the Iraq War disaster, U.S. neocons are urging the use of more military force in the Mideast, in line with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand to block the Iran nuclear deal. From their important perches of power, these war hawks also twist the history of their catastrophic misjudgments, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Analysts concerned over possible civilian casualties from US airstrikes from Turkey

      Speaking to Sunday’s Zaman, Professor Celalettin Yavuz, an expert on foreign policy and security, mentioned the likelihood that US armed drones known as Predators, which have been deployed to İncirlik Air Base, will mistakenly kill civilians in Syria and Iraq as the US-led collation steps up operations against ISIL.

    • Washington Threatens Ecuadorian Democracy

      Rule by powerful monied interests is longstanding US policy.

    • Montagnards: Green Beret’s secret weapon during Vietnam War

      Smokey Stover Theater, onboard the retired USS Yorktown in Charleston Harbor, filled up quickly last night with aging veterans, their spouses, and civilians curious to know more about secret weapons, specifically those employed by U.S. Special Forces Soldiers. That “secret weapon” for the Vietnam-era Green Berets was the indigenous mountain people of Southeast Asia; the Montagnards.

    • AP Interview: Jordan says Syria militants try to sneak in

      Militants have tried to sneak into Jordan from Syria by blending in with Syrian refugees, and attempts to smuggle weapons and drugs into Jordan have increased, the commander of Jordan’s Border Guard said in an interview Sunday.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Why A Democrat Is Now Blocking An Obama Nominee

      Sen. Sherrod Brown has a new tactic in the fight to access secretive trade deal documents.

    • Count finds 40 percent increase in Marin homeless population

      A one-day count of Marin County’s homeless population in January found 1,309 homeless people ­— a 40 percent increase from the 933 homeless reported in 2013.

    • Show Me a Hero: Fear and Loathing in Yonkers

      Show Me a Hero concentrates on the most volatile five years of the clash between Yonkers and U.S. District Court Judge Leonard B. Sand. In 1987, the judge, weary of the city’s stalling in the face of his order to build 200 units of public housing on its predominantly white and middle-class west side, ordered the Yonkers City Council to get the project under way or face escalating fines that would quickly reach $1 million a day and bankrupt the city within three weeks. Making it clear that the case had gone beyond politics or policy wonkery, the judge also fined any council member who voted against the housing.

    • Why is Bitcoin forking?

      So this is it. Here we are. The community is divided and Bitcoin is forking: both the software and, perhaps, the block chain too. The two sides of the split are Bitcoin Core and a slight variant of the same program, called Bitcoin XT. As of August 15th, there is now a full release available.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Jeremy Corbyn and the SNP

      I was impressed by Jeremy’s talk and by the energy in the room. Jeremy was at his strongest when referring to the need for basic human decency and respect in our treatment of those in need for aid from the state, including the homeless and refugees. His basic human empathy and compassion really shone through. He was contemptuous of austerity, marketisation and the neoliberal consensus. His denunciation of Iraq and of Trident galvanised the room. He can talk with a genuine moral authority. He is certainly not a great orator, but sincere and fluent.

    • Kezia Dugdale Got Just 5,217 Votes

      The Labour Party is being remarkably coy about releasing the actual result of its Scottish accounting unit leadership election, giving only a percentage. The entirely complacent unionist media is complicit in what amounts to a deception.

    • Fox Nation Promotes Absurd Conspiracy Theory That EPA “Foul[ed] Up” Animas River “On Purpose”

      On August 12, FoxNation.com republished portions of a post by The Gateway Pundit headlined, “Letter to Editor PREDICTED COLORADO EPA SPILL One Week Before Catastrophe So EPA Could Secure Control of Area.” Fox Nation highlighted the portion of the Gateway Pundit post in which author Jim Hoft wrote: “The letter detailed verbatim, how EPA officials would foul up the Animas River on purpose in order to secure superfund money. If the Gold King mine was declared a superfund site it would essentially kill future development for the mining industry in the area. The Obama EPA is vehemently opposed to mining and development.”

    • Investigative Journalist Slams The Big Media Tycoons’ Public Mind Control

      This has been obvious since Operation Mockingbird, a CIA-based initiative to manage the media came into operation. Most people feel that almost everything we see in the media is just “brainwashing”. A lot of blatant lies are splashing over the TV screen, especially on issues related to “health, food, war (“terrorism”), poverty and more”.

    • ‘Hitler was an Anglo-American stooge’: the tall tales in a Moscow bookshop

      Adolf Hitler was installed in power in Germany as part of an Anglo-American plot, the CIA is planning a full-scale land invasion of Russia from Ukrainian territory within the next five years, and the world has become so dominated by women that they have evolved to be capable of reproducing without the need for male sperm.

    • ABC’s Martha Raddatz Debunks Ben Carson’s Claim That Planned Parenthood Targets Black Communities For Abortion

      ABC’s Martha Raddatz debunked GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson’s claim that Planned Parenthood engages in racist population control by targeting black communities.

  • Censorship

    • Scott DeSmit: Willingly surrendering our freedom

      Put away the tinfoil hats.

      The government spies on us and we can do nothing about it.

      They know. Everything.

      This may be a revelation to most people because it was not reported by most major media outlets, but the government now has access to almost everything we do.

      They know what we ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

      Going to a movie? They know which one and at what time.

      The government has photographs of almost every person in America and photographs of your children, too.

      Your cat? Yes, they have photographs of your pets.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Why Did the FBI Spy on James Baldwin?

      James Baldwin’s FBI file contains 1,884 pages of documents, collected from 1960 until the early 1970s. During that era of illegal surveillance of American writers, the FBI accumulated 276 pages on Richard Wright, 110 pages on Truman Capote, and just nine pages on Henry Miller. Baldwin’s file was closer in size to activists and radicals of the day — for example, it’s nearly half as thick as Malcolm X’s.

    • The FBI Agent Who Hunted N.W.A

      In the late ’80s, the bureau targeted the hip-hop group for their incendiary anthem ‘Fuck tha Police,’ and transformed the rappers into First Amendment crusaders.

    • [Old] Texas Bill to take on NDAA Indefinite Detention Passes House Committee, 4-2

      A Texas bill that would make indefinite detention, as purportedly authorized by the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a criminal act – passed through a state House committee last week.

    • [Old] Anonymous Launches #Gitmo2Chicago to Shut Down NDAA Style Secret Detention Center By Chicago Police

      Various activist groups and concerned citizens are coming together to oppose the Chicago Police’s secret torture detention center also known as Homan Square.

    • Bush torture comments worry human rights groups over possible resurgence

      Activists lament political culture ‘where tolerating torture is the norm’ and fear potential of Republican successor to Barack Obama overturning his torture ban

    • Republican Presidential candidate Jeb Bush leaves door open for use of torture by government

      The former Florida governor on Thursday said that in general, he believes torture is inappropriate, and that he was glad his brother, former President George W Bush, largely ended the CIA’s use of the techniques before he left office. The CIA used water boarding, slapping, nudity, sleep deprivation, humiliation and other methods to coerce Al-Qaeda detainees, methods the military would be prohibited from using on prisoners of war. “I don’t want to make a definitive, blanket kind of statement,” Bush told an audience of Iowa Republicans, when asked whether he would keep in place or repeal President Barack Obama’s executive order banning so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the CIA.

    • CIA Mistakenly Releases Apology Letter It Wrote to Senate For Illegally Spying On It

      The documents of the US government that were expected to remain out of reach in the coming years have been got hold of by Jason Leopold of FOIA staffers. The CIA would have definitely thought that one of the documents would remain its little secret for the coming years.

    • Where psychologists went wrong

      Too late for Omar Khadr and thousands of other political prisoners tortured at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other CIA “black hole” sites where some APA psychologists may still be “interrogating” with CIA psychologists and psychiatrists.

    • Righting Governance Gone Rogue in the American Psychological Association: The Torture Scandal

      By a nearly unanimous vote and standing ovation, the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Council of Representatives voted August 7th, 2015, at their annual convention to adopt a new policy barring psychologists from participating in national security interrogations and torture, including non-coercive interrogations now conducted by the Obama administration. The resolution states “psychologists shall not conduct, supervise or be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities.” The resolution places the APA on the side of international law by “barring psychologists from working at Guantánamo, CIA black sites, and other settings deemed illegal under the Geneva Conventions or the U.N. Convention Against Torture, unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.”1

    • Psychologists contrite on ‘torture’ collusion

      Aside from the personal vindication, Reisner said, the resolution would help repair the APA’s badly damaged image.

      “The public is legitimately wary of the American Psychological Association as the representative of professional psychology,” he said. “And if it is the representative of professional psychology, the public will be wary of professional psychology.”

    • Pre-crime: DHS admits that it puts people on the no-fly list based on “predictive assessment”

      A DoJ filing in an ACLU lawsuit in Oregon admits that you can be put on a no-fly list based on “predictive assessments about potential threats,” as opposed to threatening or dangerous things you’ve actually said or done.

      It’s the first case in which a court is being asked to “review the basis for the government’s predictive model for blacklisting people who have never even been charged, let alone convicted, of a violent crime.”

      The Obama administration is trying to prevent further disclosures about the program’s basis for denying Americans the right to travel based on secret evidence and an opaque process. FBI counter-terrorism assistant director Michael Steinbach defended the no-fly list’s dependence on security through obscurity: “If the Government were required to provide full notice of its reasons for placing an individual on the No Fly List and to turn over all evidence (both incriminating and exculpatory) supporting the No Fly determination, the No Fly redress process would place highly sensitive national security information directly in the hands of terrorist organizations and other adversaries.”

    • New York Times uses rape allegations to promote a wider war in the Middle East

      The New York Times led its Friday edition with a lengthy front-page article headlined “Enslaving Young Girls, the Islamic State Builds a Vast System of Rape.” The article, spread out over more than two pages, provides a lurid account of women and girls belonging to the Yazidi religious minority being systematically captured and sold as sex slaves by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters.

      The author, Rukmini Callimachi, cites various US academics and think tanks to argue that ISIS has devised a religious justification for rape and “developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery.” The prominence of the article, its sensationalist tone and presentation, and its timing—appearing in the midst of a US escalation of its military interventions and proxy wars in Iraq and Syria—make clear that the publication of the piece is calculated to inflame public opinion and build support for a wider war.

    • Kayla Mueller, American hostage, was raped repeatedly by ISIS leader, U.S. says

      American hostage Kayla Mueller was repeatedly forced to have sex with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria group, U.S. intelligence officials told her family in June.

    • America’s despicable, hypocritical persecution of Chelsea Manning

      Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army private who was imprisoned for giving thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, was recently threatened with torture for supposedly violating the conditions of her detention.

    • Benghazi Case Focuses Attention on US Interrogation Strategy

      The case, still in its early stages, is focusing attention on an interrogation strategy that the Obama administration has used in just a few recent terrorism investigations and prosecutions. Abu Khattala’s lawyers already have signaled a challenge to the process, setting the stage for a rare court clash over a tactic that has riled civil liberties groups but is seen by the government as a vital and appropriate tool in prosecuting suspected terrorists captured overseas.

    • Decriminalising human suffering

      Rachel Moran is a victim of the sex slave industry, who went on to become a co-founder of the Space International Anti-Sex Trade Group. She made the following comments in her tweet about the 11th Aug 2015 decision by the AI:

      “Amnesty’s decision is ‘breathtakingly disgraceful’. When I first heard this proposal, I got very emotional, I have been through a lot and I am not a woman who usually gets emotional. But this is an insult, from the most publicly recognised human rights body in the world, who is saying everything that happened to me was completely normal, above board and ought to be legal.”

      Hundreds of anti-sex slave organisations around the globe have condemned this move by the Amnesty International UK.

    • Russian Muslims Face Challenges of Demography and Migration

      …Russian Muslims have constantly been at the centre of public attention and the mass media.

    • Torture, show trials common in neocolonial Libya

      A video released last week showing the beating and torture of Saadi Gadhafi is not an anomaly in contemporary Libya where the Pentagon and NATO waged a war of regime change in 2011.

    • The myth of presidential wisdom in foreign affairs

      President George W. Bush stupidly invaded Iraq to the benefit of our arch-enemy Iran and to avenge his family embarrassment at the hands of a gloating Saddam Hussein. He continued fighting a post-9/11 purposeless war in Afghanistan hoping to summon a democracy into being from an antedeluvian political culture.

    • Judith Miller and those Weapons of Mass Destruction

      Her critics said she was grandstanding, playing the journalism martyr to recapture the luster lost during her reporting of the Iraqi war. But she retorted she was standing on journalistic principles, that her sources at first refused to waive a confidentiality agreement, forcing her to go to jail, then relented, allowing her to go free and testify.

    • US government investigated journalists 14 times during 2014

      A Justice Department report says the US government questioned, arrested or subpoenaed journalists 14 times during 2014, including the high-profile subpoena issued to New York Times reporter James Risen.

      Former US attorney general Eric Holder said in February 2014 that the department would release information on how law enforcement officials use its tool to investigate the news media.

      The four-page annual report released on Friday includes 14 incidents, including the subpoena issued to Risen, who refused to divulge his CIA source for a chapter of his book about the Iran nuclear program. The informant, Jeffrey Sterling, was convicted on nine counts in January.

    • California legislators to eye police push for use of drones

      California law enforcement agencies are looking to fly drones as an affordable and efficient way to monitor crime scenes, pursue suspects and search for lost hikers.

    • Yemen In Meltdown: Domestic And Regional Competitions And Destruction Of Nationhood – Analysis

      The national ideal in North Yemen got corroded through the 1980s because of two main reasons. First, there was the natural attrition pertaining to the first generation of leaders and the accompanying reluctance of younger educated Yemenis to return to their country to replace them. The American authority on Yemen, Asher Orkaby, has noted that in 2014 at least 30,000 educated Yemenis were working abroad. This was mainly due to the second contributory factor: the 33-year rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, first, from 1978 over North Yemen, and then from 1990 over united Yemen, after a short military campaign in which the communist forces were defeated.

    • Florida inmate serving life sentence killed in cell

      A Florida prison inmate serving a life sentence for his role in a 2011 Jacksonville murder was killed in his cell.

      The Florida Department of Corrections said 35-year-old Craig Eugene Roback died on Thursday after an altercation with his cellmate at the Columbia County Correctional Institution.

    • Emigration and war: Capitalist media suppress the obvious

      The reports about tens of thousands of desperate refugees scrambling out of the Middle East and North Africa, trying to reach some place in Europe, are excruciatingly painful. The number who have drowned along the way or died of thirst or hunger is unknown. Others survive these perilous journeys on overloaded boats only to be captured and either interned or turned back at the borders. Photographs show them to be thin, often to the point of emaciation, with few possessions other than the threadbare clothes on their backs.

      Most migrants are men searching for work. But there are women, too, and even children and infants. For every person whose story may be told, thousands remain unrecognized and anonymous. They are only statistics in one of the world’s most perilous mass migrations.

    • 2016 Candidates Must Talk Extrajudicial Drone Strikes

      As President Obama looks to legacy building during his remaining time in office, he’s leaving behind a troubling institution for the next commander in chief to inherit: A program permitting the extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens abroad. Though President Bush and his administration were responsible for establishing these practices, the Obama White House has, in some respects, expanded some of them. As the 2016 election season heats up, it is worth looking at where the possible presidents-to-be stand on the issue.

      Despite the fact that targeted killings, whether by unmanned aerial drone or cruise missile, are not a new element of the U.S. military, a new, concerning threshold was crossed in 2011. In an unprecedented move, President Obama authorized a lethal drone strike which successfully targeted Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born citizen. It is unclear if Samir Khan, a U.S. citizen also killed in the strike, was meant to be hit as well. However, the decision to target Anwar al-Awlaki for death has drawn heat from human rights critics, as has the death of his U.S.-born, 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, with good reason.

    • Letter from America: Our Messy, messy world!

      Religious extremism is on the rise all over the globe. And it is as much an Islamic problem, as it is a Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh problem. Not a single religious tradition is impervious from its deadly embrace.

      All these religious extremist groups are abusing their religion to create a world of fitnah and fasad. I have chosen these two Arabic words because of the loaded meanings that each carry. The first word in Arabic means trials/tribulations/persecutions/misguidance and the second word: anarchy/confusion/corruption/mischief.

    • Amazon: Devastating expose accuses internet retailer of oppressive and callous attitude to staff

      Working four days in a row without sleep; a woman with breast cancer being put on “performance-improvement plans” together with another who had just had a stillborn child; staff routinely bursting into tears; continual monitoring; workers encouraged to turn on each other to keep their jobs.

      Life at Amazon sounds bleak, according to a devastating, 5,900-word expose by The New York Times.

      The global internet retailer founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, which paid just £11.9m in tax in Britain last year despite UK sales of £5.3bn, has previously been accused of treating warehouse staff in the UK “like cattle” as they are driven to work harder.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

08.17.15

Patents Roundup: Patent Reform, Google’s ‘Startups’ Ploy, JDate, Fitbit, Cisco, and UPC in the UK

Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 3:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The UK silently adopts a worse patent system without even consulting the public

Manchester library

Summary: A collection of news stories about patents, accumulated over the past week or so

LAST week we observed quite a few ongoing patent cases, as well as new developments in Europe and the United States. This post summarises all the important ones.

The Economist Started a Massive Debate

In at least two articles, both of which published earlier this month, The Economist slammed the current patent system, alluding not specifically to the notorious US patent system. It’s a global problem, that’s for sure, as many systems are interconnected (more so over time, especially with so-called ‘trade’ deals afloat). It is very nice to see a respected British newspaper like The Economist (notable as the UK’s patent regime and copyright regime have historically been most overzealous) joining the opposition to it all, after all…

“In at least two articles, both of which published earlier this month, The Economist slammed the current patent system, alluding not specifically to the notorious US patent system.”Days later, citing The Economist, David Perry of Red Hat said that “more recently, it seems that the problem of patent trolls has captured the attention of a broader audience. Four years ago, NPR produced an episode of This American Life called “When Patents Attack!” And, four months ago, John Oliver devoted the bulk of his time on Last Week Tonight, to raising awareness about patent trolls. “Most of these companies don’t produce anything—they just shake down anyone who does, so calling them trolls is a little misleading—at least trolls actually do something, they control bridge access for goats and ask fun riddles,” he explained.”

Red Hat focuses on patent trolls again. “The patent troll problem is not a new one” is the headline. The Economist, however, did not focus on trolls at all. It’s regretful to see Red Hat distracting the debate again, moving us away from the core issues.

Another article, composed by Mike Masnick, offered a better response. “Once Again The Economist Thinks Patents Are Hindering Innovation And Need Reform” was the headline and citing The Economist, Jeff John Roberts of Fortune, a man who recently wrote some good articles about patents, published an article titled “Hey lawmakers, patents and innovation aren’t the same – here’s a reminder”. This too was motivated by the debate above. To quote Jeff John Roberts: “Patents mean more innovation, right? Sadly, that’s not the case as The Economist makes clear. In a terrific piece of writing in the August 8th issue, the UK magazine explains in clear language what has gone so wrong:

“Red Hat focuses on patent trolls again.”“Patents are supposed to spread knowledge, by obliging holders to lay out their innovation for all to see; they often fail, because patent-lawyers are masters of obfuscation. Instead, the system has created a parasitic ecology of trolls and defensive patent-holders, who aim to block innovation, or at least to stand in its way unless they can grab a share of the spoils […]

“Innovation fuels the abundance of modern life. From Google’s algorithms to a new treatment for cystic fibrosis, it underpins the knowledge in the “knowledge economy”. The cost of the innovation that never takes place because of the flawed patent system is incalculable.”

“The Economist editorial comes at a time when patent reform is getting bogged down yet again in the U.S. Congress. If you’re keeping score, this is the third time in five years that lawmakers have tried to fix the system but, as before, the patent lobby is swooping down with money and dire slogans to grind the process to a halt.”

It has been nice to see the public debate changing somewhat (diverted away from “trolls”), owing to articles that question the system as a whole, not just parasitic elements in it.

Sadly, discussions about patent scope are almost inexistent. That’s a due to a failure of scientists to ‘butt in’ and become involved in the debate. Maybe it’s also the fault of journalists for not approaching scientists for their views.

Lobbying for and Against Patent Reform

Reform debate has been locked down. When the political system in the US speaks of patent ‘reform’ (especially these days but also historically) it basically speaks about “trolls”. Classic “patent troll”, as per definition, is a firm looking to make financial gain not from products (they do not exist) but from extortion. Patent trolls encourage and promote a non-producing economy for parasites to thrive in, nobody can deny that. Is it any better if products exist though? Companies like Microsoft have some products, but in many areas they act like parasites, preying on companies that actually have the lion’s share of the market (Android for instance). It should be clear by now that eliminating “trolls” alone would not end the problem. It’s therefore a misguided debate, driven for the most part by corporations, their lobbyists, and patent lawyers to whom they are top clients.

“It is important that the people who actually produce (actual products, not paperwork) provide their input regarding patent law, or else they will be misrepresented and the law steered against them.”Last week we saw an occupied media lobbying on patent ‘reform’ [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. As expected, much of this comes from corporate media for corporate agenda [1,2], [3] (posted in other sites) is a “Case for Patent Reform” by Lee Cheng, the chief legal officer at Newegg, which is exceptionally proud of its fight against 'trolls', having done so for years. It receives recognition in this new piece titled “Don’t Be a Victim: Protecting Your Small Business from Patent Trolls”. [4] is a piece from the lobbyists’ media, composed by member of the “Independent Inventors of America”, who basically lobbies against the favoured reforms currently on the table. We sure wonder if this is just another lobbying piece from a front group pretending to be “inventor”. Lastly, in [5] we have greedy patent lawyers who openly call for expansion of patent scope. Where are the scientists in all this? It’s mostly lawyers again. It is important that the people who actually produce (actual products, not paperwork) provide their input regarding patent law, or else they will be misrepresented and the law steered against them.

We were rather amused to see greedy patent lawyers who openly call for expansion of patent scope trying a gross reversal of today’s reality and attempting distortion of facts, pretending that large corporations pass patents to startups (the ‘trickle-down’ nonsense), as opposed to troll-feeding by large corporations, so as to get their rivals attacked by trolls like MOSAID (renamed Conversant). Well, to be fair to patent lawyers, that’s just what they do for a living. They present a gross, biased, and often inaccurate picture of reality in order to get their way and win cases.

Patent Lawyers/Maximalists Against Patent Reform

Yet another lawyers’ firm, McCarthy Tétrault LLP, writes about what it labels “Google’s “FFF” patent plan”, noting: “These two initiatives build on Google’s effort to impact patent reform in the United States and beyond. Prior to these announcements, Google’s efforts included the launch of the Patent Purchase Promotion in April (which we discussed here). Google has not officially released any information on the outcome of the Patent Purchase Promotion but Kurt Brasch, a lawyer at Google, reported that the program was a big success. In a phone interview with Fortune.com Mr. Brasch stated that the company bought numerous patents at purchase prices ranging from $3000 to $250,000.”

“Google cannot fend off patent trolls, so its claims to be helping startups with its patents are just marketing.”Google claims that it helps startups, but this won't work. Google’s IBM-like strategy was talked about by other sites of patent lawyers (covered in brief along with expected protests against the aforementioned reports from The Economist).

Here is what IP Troll Tracker wrote about Google’s strategy when it comes to a startup it supports: “Google would rather shutter the venture than try and fend off the lawsuit, unless the Ordrx software were already pulling in mountains of money.”

Google cannot fend off patent trolls, so its claims to be helping startups with its patents are just marketing. Fortune‘s Jeff John Roberts said so too. That was just a couple of weeks ago in the corporate press.

JDate

“JDate is not a classic patent troll, but it sure acts like one.”Tackling the JDate case, which we wrote about repeatedly for weeks, TechDirt says that “The whole lawsuit is absurd, and it starts with the trademark claims that come before the patent ones.”

JDate is not a classic patent troll, but it sure acts like one. JDate will hopefully get sued in a move of retaliation, preferably to the point of bankruptcy. What the company has done here sets a very bad example to any others that are watching. Software patents on very vague concepts are the weapon.

Jawbone and Fitbit

Citing this patent maximalists’ site (which even grooms notorious patent trolls), IP Kat says that “Jawbone holds 78 utility patents and 78 design patents compared to Fitbit’s 89 utility patents and 11 design patents. Jawbone’s patents lean towards hardware and design, whereas Fitbit’s patents are more focused on hardware and software.”

Yes, Fitbit is patenting software, as we noted here several times before. Its Orwellian surveillance tendencies aside, it ought to convince people to avoid these products. A good friend of mine had purchased a Fitbit device and saw it lasting for only one week. It’s a fragile toy and a fashion accessory that tracks the owner even when the owner is asleep. Nobody needs that.

Cisco

We recently wrote about Cisco's attempt to portray itself as a trolls buster, having acted like a troll itself. Some GNU/Linux-centric sites help the former narrative. This is a good example where a massive corporation, Cisco, not some small startup, uses patents for anti-competitive purposes while claiming to be fighting trolls.

Large corporations want the population to only be obsessed with patent trolls. It helps those large corporations protect themselves and does nothing to tackle the broader issues.

EPO and UPC in the UK

The EPO is coming to the UK. It’s entering from the back door. It gets more of a presence in the UK in ways that we first covered last week, noting that no public consent was even sought! The lawyers who work for (or with) the UK-IPO must think they are above the law, as it increasindly looks a bit like government-sanctioned collusion.

“The UPC is almost guaranteed to bring patent trolls to Europe, enabling them to expand their scope of litigation (or threatening letters, demanding payments).”A maximalist of patents (including software patents), AmeriKat of IP Kat, wrote about the UPC courtroom being established before it’s even authorised. AmeriKat “interprets this as meaning that if the UPC doesn’t happen (pending a UK referendum on membership of the EU) or is somehow delayed than the IPO or, indeed another governmental body, can make use of the space.”

Another piece from the same blog speaks of a “[b]ill that is drafted by civil servants – his servants – and that is supposed to protect the interests of businesses” rather than those of citizens. The UPC is almost guaranteed to bring patent trolls to Europe, enabling them to expand their scope of litigation (or threatening letters, demanding payments).

When people return from their summer holiday we are guaranteed to hear a lot more about the EPO and the UPC. It’s truly undemocratic and often secretive, too. █

08.16.15

Vista 10 Inherently Broken, Anti-Competitive (Against GNU/Linux and Free Software), Privacy-Infringing, and Definitely Not Secure

Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Vista 10, Windows at 3:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

…but some people install it because it doesn’t cost them anything upfront

“I’m going to f—ing kill Google.”

–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO

Summary: A roundup of recent reports about Windows 10, which is akin to Windows Vista in many ways

VISTA 10 is a mess. Ask the management of Microsoft what it thinks of it (while no cameras or microphones point at the management’s direction). When Vista was released the company gloated and dubbed it the “best ever” although later E-mails (requested by subpoena) showed that internally the opposite was being said. Ask Microsoft’s engineers what they think of Vista 10 (I have). Look at how a third mega patch got released within just 2.5 weeks, essentially acting almost like a re-release of the whole operating system given its massive size (almost everything at the core gets replaced).

See “Bill Gates dumped a huge amount of Microsoft stock this year” and “Bill Gates unloads $717M in Microsoft stock in first half of 2015, tops list of U.S. insider stock sales” (composed by Microsoft’s longtime booster, Todd Bishop). This accelerated just shortly after the release of Vista 10, as we noted over a week ago. He seems to be taking his money out before it’s too late, more quickly than ever before. This is not a sign of confidence.

Attacking the Competition

Last week we wrote about how Microsoft attacked Linux on Raspberry Pi. This was first announced quite a while ago and now that it is practically happening reviewers say that Vista 10 IoT Core is a disaster on Raspberry Pi, which hardly surprises us. It’s all just branding. There is no substance and it’s technically a misfit.

A couple of weeks ago we showed how Microsoft used Vista 10 to also attack Mozilla, not just Linux dual-boot setups, as this article serves to remind us. Any of “the failed attempts [to install/configure dual-boot] had been reinstalls of once successful installations. And in all the failed attempts, the cause centered around installing the boot loader GRUB, as you’ll see from the following screenshots.”

Microsoft Tim wrote about how Microsoft uses Vista 10 to essentially delete (or remove the path to) Firefox as the default browser, just as Microsoft treats Linux partitions when one installs Vista 10.

Let this remind us that any news about Vista 10 is therefore relevant to GNU/Linux users. It cannot be ignored by GNU/Linux users because Vista 10 certainly won’t ignore, as opposed to try to screw, the competition. Remember that Google formally complained (to the authorities) about Windows Vista. It happened when Vista came out. Microsoft was deliberately trying to “f—ing kill Google,” to use Ballmer’s language. A lot people don’t remember this anymore. Microsoft plays dirty, still.

Privacy Violations in Vista 10

The Daily Fail, probably Britain’s worst newspaper, referred to Microsoft Peter as “Analysts” in this piece about Microsoft’s privacy violations that even GNU/Linux sites have covered. Well, Microsoft Peter didn’t find out about it, he just wrote about what people had been saying in some popular Web forums and what we also covered here nearly a fortnight ago. Microsoft blatantly ignores users’ settings for business reasons.

“With Windows 10 snooping on your every keystroke,” wrote SJVN, “it’s time to consider an alternative: the Linux desktop.”

Microsoft’s ‘muppet labs’ (that’s what our reader iophk calls this PR unit of Microsoft) is now being propped up by the New York Times. It is marketing disguised as an article, in which Microsoft’s attack on privacy is framed as “science”. They try to pretend that surveillance over people is somehow beneficial to ‘research’ or ‘science’. Nice spin they got there…

Microsoft Emil (Emil Protalinski, predecessor of Microsoft Peter at Ars technica) is back to Microsoft propaganda with this Vista 10 promotion. Has Microsoft recruited him or something? Maybe his loyalty from his previous job…

There are certainly still a lot of manufactured ‘articles’ in favour of Vista 10. There is a big budget behind it.

Deflecting the Outrage to Lenovo

Microsoft Peter managed to deflect criticism from Microsoft to Lenovo last week, causing some sites to call for a boycott of Lenovo rather than a boycott of Microsoft (or both). As The Register put it, “Microsoft made it possible,” so shouldn’t we discuss the role of Microsoft too?

Pushing People to Adopt Newer Versions of Windows

Some Microsoft apologists and boosters have been calling on Windows users to buy (pay for) or install newer versions of Windows, with more antifeatures. Citing “security”, as if newer is actually safer (the opposite is often true), they try to induce panic and rush people to ‘upgrade’.

Simon Sharwood of The Register has expressed concern about many out-of-date servers running an old version of Windows — one that is not even supported anymore. Back doors may therefore be exploited in many Web sites, databases etc. — back doors which not only Five Eyes espionage agencies know about.

Sharwood claims that at least 175 million such servers exist and that this “number comes from Netcraft’s regular count of the world’s web servers. The company’s August survey found 874,408,576 sites running on 5,391,301 web-facing computers.”

“The bottom line?” says Sharwood, is that “ten per cent of all web-facing computers are running old and poorly-secured web servers, at least by today’s standards.”

Well, any version of Windows has back doors, so any server which runs any version of Windows is a “poorly-secured web server,” to use Sharwood’s words.

Remember that some of these contain credit card details. Windows, which has contained NSA back doors for well over a decade, is clearly not suitable for any server anywhere in the world. Over the years we have given many high-profile examples where millions of credit card details had been snatched from Windows servers. Almost every such incident turned out to involve Windows, despite it being in a minority market share in this area.

But Hey, Microsoft Lowered the Cost to $0

Vista 10 is definitely not free, but for existing users of Windows, it can be viewed as a ‘free’ ‘upgrade’, if selling oneself to Microsoft qualifies as ‘free’ (it’s definitely not freedom).

As Susan Linton put it the other day, citing a poll from Microsoft-centric site and a Microsoft booster, “nearly 2/3 respondents say the zero price tag was the reason they chose to upgrade to Windows 10.” █

Links 16/8/2015: 18th Birthday for GNOME, Android M Name

Posted in News Roundup at 3:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Using open-source to turn tech challenges into solutions

    IBM has joined forces with the open-source movement to turn many of these challenges into solutions. “We have got to be a key part of what’s happening in open source.”

    With Linux, Thomas said, “It was about, how can we build a core technology and knowledge around Linux but then use that to help our clients solve problems. We think we’re at a similar juncture, but now on the data side.”

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • LinkedIn Makes Hadoop Tools Available as Open Source Project

      This week, LinkedIn announced that it is turning Gradle into an open source project. Alex Bain, senior software engineer for LinkedIn, says that LinkedIn has a vested interest in making Gradle, a plug-in to Hadoop, a bigger part of a rapidly growing Hadoop ecosystem. For example, as the Apache Spark in-memory computing project continues to evolve, Bain says that LinkedIn would like to see open source contributions that extended the reach of Gradle to both Hadoop and Spark.

    • How the cloud will devour open source

      Yes, we have Red Hat. But that’s all we have. Investor (and former open source executive) Peter Levine insists that “we will never have another Red Hat,” and he’s right. But this may be because the Amazons of the world are increasingly eating the Red Hats of the world — one SaaS business at a time.

  • Business

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE Announcement

      The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE. This is the third release of the stable/10 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE and introduces some new features.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • CNS 2015 Day 2 and 3
    • 7 things every new programmer should know

      As a developer, chances are you’ll spend a good deal of time working with a fancy IDE or code editor. However, also knowing how to get things done at the command line could occasionally make your life easier.

      “Sometimes you find yourself on a machine where stuff has to be done right now and tools are very limited,” one 20-year veteran programmer, who wished to remain anonymous, told me. “Know the shell like you know how to breath. Tools like find, comm, diff, vi/vim, sed, awk. How to write little scripts right on the command line to find the file that needs to change right f’ing now because production is broken and Joe who fat fingered a URL in said unknown file is on vacation in Fiji.”

      Bull, who started using Microsoft tools, then slowly moved to Linux, agreed, saying, “I would have learned the ins and outs of the command line and all of the useful utilities that are available on a *nix system. I can actually recall code that I wrote years ago, and probably spent days or weeks working on, that probably could have been done better in a grep + awk one-liner.”

Leftovers

  • Former SAP exec pleads guilty to bribery charge

    A former SAP executive has pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe Panamanian officials in an effort to secure government contracts for the software vendor.

    Vicente Eduardo Garcia was SAP’s vice president of global and strategic accounts for Latin America from February 2008 until April 2014, when he was fired. With the plea, he admitted to participating in a scheme to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits bribing foreign officials to obtain business.

    Sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 16 before Senior District Court Judge Charles Breyer of the Northern District of California.

  • For Pilots, Birds Are A Greater Threat Than Drones

    There has been a fair amount of hand-wringing over the growing number of drones in the skies—and indeed, pilots have reported a sharp rise in plane-drone encounters this year.

    But of the 650 plane-drone encounters reported to the FAA in 2015, none led to a collision. Birds, on the other hand, have been and continue to be a pilot’s worst nightmare. A Vocativ analysis shows that thousands of birds collide with airplanes every year.

  • Billionaire Wants Drone Racing To Be The Next NASCAR

    The owner of an NFL football team is throwing his support—as well as his money—behind a new sport: Drone racing.

  • Science

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • River in Colorado reopens as toxic plume reaches Lake Powell

      Water officials, however, said the plume that includes lead, arsenic and other heavy metals now presents little danger to users beyond Lake Powell – such as the city of Las Vegas – because the contaminants will further settle out and be diluted in the reservoir along the Utah-Arizona border.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security advisories
    • Research Paper: Securing Linux Containers
    • Kaspersky Antivirus accused of creating fake malware for over 10 years

      It basically worked like this: Kaspersky would inject dangerous-looking code into common pieces of software. It would then anonymously submit the files to malware aggregators such as Google-owned VirusTotal. When competitors added the malware to their detection engines, they’d mistakenly flag the original files because of the similar code.

    • Investigating the Computer Security Practices and Needs of Journalists

      Though journalists are often cited as potential users of computer security technologies, their practices and mental models have not been deeply studied by the academic computer security community. Such an understanding, however, is critical to developing technical solutions that can address the real needs of journalists and integrate into their existing practices. We seek to provide that insight in this paper, by investigating the general and computer security practices of 15 journalists in the U.S. and France via in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Among our findings is evidence that existing security tools fail not only due to usability issues but when they actively interfere with other aspects of the journalistic process; that communication methods are typically driven by sources rather than journalists; and that journalists’ organizations play an important role in influencing journalists’ behaviors. Based on these and other findings, we make recommendations to the computer security community for improvements to existing tools and future lines of research.

    • Ten scary hacks I saw at Black Hat and DEF CON

      The highlight of this year’s Black Hat conference was a remote hack of the Jeep Cherokee and other Fiat Chrysler vehicles, demonstrated by security researches Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek.

      The attack was the culmination of a year of painstaking work that involved reverse-engineering car firmware and communications protocols. It eventually allowed the two researchers to hack into the car infotainment systems over mobile data connections and take over brake, steering and other critical systems. The research forced Chrysler to recall 1.4 million automobiles so they could be patched and prompted a car cybersafety legislative proposal from the U.S. Congress.

    • How to hack a Corvette with a text message

      Researchers have demonstrated how a simple text message can be used to control a vehicle.

    • Facebook issues Internet Defense Prize for vulnerability discovery tool

      Facebook has awarded $100,000 to a pair of Ph.D students for their work in the security of C++ programs which resulted in the detection and patching of zero-day vulnerabilities.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • US Fighter Jet Crashes During Training Session in Germany

      According to a police spokesman in Upper Franconia, the American pilot managed to eject from the plane and landed with a parachute. His injuries are not believed to be life threatening.

    • Former CIA Officer:Cuba Could Play Bridge-Builder to Restore US-Russia Ties

      Former CIA officer and SFRC senior investigator John Kiriacou claims that badly strained US relations with Russia could unexpectedly benefit from revived American diplomatic ties with Cuba.

    • Tyler S. Drumheller, 63, CIA officer who disputed cause for Iraq war

      Tyler S. Drumheller, a high-level CIA officer who publicly battled agency leaders over one of the most outlandish claims in the US case for war with Iraq, died Aug. 2 at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va. He was 63.

    • Tyler Drumheller, Ex-C.I.A. Official Who Disputed Bush, Dies at 63

      Tyler S. Drumheller, a former senior American intelligence official who publicly asserted that President George W. Bush’s administration had knowingly hyped fabricated evidence of Iraq’s arsenal of biological weapons to justify the 2003 invasion, died on Aug. 2 in Falls Church, Va. He was 63.

    • Remembering Tyler Drumheller

      Tyler Drumheller was a 26-year veteran of the CIA and he exposed the faulty intelligence that was used to make the case for the Iraq War. He claimed he told his superiors at the CIA that the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction wasn’t true, that it came from a source who was not credible. Tyler Drumheller died on August 2. He was 63.

    • Panetta disputes Bush’s take on Islamic State, backs Clinton

      Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has disputed Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s charge that Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama are largely responsible for the rise of the group Islamic State, even as he expressed concern that the administration needs “a larger strategy on how to deal with the Middle East.”

    • Ex-CIA official arrested at airport with loaded gun
    • Meet ‘Moderates’ U.S. is Supporting in Syria: They’re al-Qaeda

      Increasing evidence is coming in that the groups the U.S. is trying to install into power in Syria are actually contending groups of Sunni Islamic jihadists who seem to agree on only one thing: they want to replace the secular government of the Shiite Bashar al-Assad, who is supported by Russia and by Shiite Iran. They want to replace it with a Sunni Islamic government. Some of these groups have perpetrated terrorist attacks (some including beheadings) against Americans, and one such group is even al-Qaeda, the Sunni Islamic organization that, of course, perpetrated the 9/11, 2001, attacks and others.

    • Private Intelligence Contractors as Public Relations Arm of Military Industrial Complex

      Evidence shows that “full spectrum dominance” [i] is the goal. Full spectrum dominance, as described by a U.S Department of Defense (DoD) news article, “means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.”

    • US warship pullout from Persian Gulf ‘goodwill gesture’ to Iran: Former CIA contractor

      A former CIA contractor says US President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw the USS Theodore Roosevelt from the Persian Gulf shows a goodwill gesture towards Iran in the wake of the nuclear agreement.

    • Agreement with Iran is step in the right direction

      It started when the U.S. CIA overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government of Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953, and installed a brutal dictator (the Shah) in his place.

    • Petition condemning Sen. Schumer for Iran stance tops 160,000 signatures

      The petition is from Credo Action, which bills itself as a “social change organization that supports activism and funds progressive nonprofits,” and has a goal of 200,000 signatures. However, its not exactly clear what will happen if the petition reaches that goal.

      “There’s no excuse for any Democrat to oppose the deal – least of all Senator Schumer, who is in line to take over leadership of the Senate Democrats once Senator Harry Reid retires,” the petition says.

    • Manuel Contreras, Chilean spy chief, dies at 86

      According to a CIA report released in 2000, by April 1975 it had become clear that “Contreras was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Junta.” Nevertheless, weeks later, “elements within the CIA recommended establishing a paid relationship with Contreras to obtain intelligence based on his unique position and access to Pinochet.” The suggestion was overruled, the report said, but “given miscommunications in the timing of this exchange, a one-time payment was given to Contreras.”

    • Crimes Of US-Backed Dictatorship Era Still Being Prosecuted In Chile

      Two recent developments in Chile have reignited the struggle for memory against Augusto Pinochet’s lasting culture of oblivion. On Aug. 7, Chileans on both sides of the political spectrum either lamented or celebrated the death of Manuel Contreras, former head of Pinochet’s National Intelligence Services (DINA).

      Contreras’ death ignited a fresh surge of rage and indignation, as the families of the over 3,000 disappeared still face an uphill struggle against the state and the military to uncover details regarding the murder and disappearance of their relatives.

    • Ex-Pinochet general opts for suicide over 20 years in jail

      A retired Chilean general committed suicide yesterday, choosing to end his life rather than begin a 20-year prison sentence for the 1995 killing of a former secret agent who spied on Augusto Pinochet’s regime.

      Hernán Ramírez Rurange, 76, shot himself in the head and died at a military hospital, police announced. He was one of 14 former Chilean and Uruguayan Army officers who lost an appeal on Tuesday against their convictions for the 1995 kidnapping and killing of Eugenio Berrios, whom they wanted to silence before he exposed the crimes of the Pinochet regime. The case is just one of several high-profile ones dating back to dictatorship that has come to trial recently in Chile.

    • Chile: Manuel Contreras, Head of Pinochet-era Secret Police, Dead at 86

      On September 11, 1973, the democratically-elected leftist Salvador Allende was faced with a violent coup staged by the Chilean Armed Forces, led by Augusto Pinochet (who would then rule until 1990).
      Less than three weeks prior to the overthrow, Allende appointed the lifelong military man Pinochet to the top position in the armed forces and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army repaid him by ousting him from power.

      On the day of the coup, Pinochet ordered the attack on Allende who remained inside La Moneda, the national palace, in central Santiago. Rather than surrendering or being killed by military forces, Allende committed suicide by shooting himself just minutes before the Chilean Air Force bombed the complex.

      From that day on, Pinochet led Chile with an iron fist for the duration of the dictatorship in 1990 and was facing over three hundred different possible charges of crimes against humanity when he passed away in 2006.

    • Korea plays cat-and-mouse with nukes

      It was the United States that broke our will when we tried to develop nuclear weapons. They thought we would use the weapons to invade North Korea.

    • Yemeni women stage rare protest in rebel-held capital
    • The struggle for power in Yemen continues, and Qatar is playing a key role

      But he blames the Yemen conflict on the Shia. “There’s a majority of Shia in Yemen,” he said. “That’s why they’re torturing Sunni people. They think the Islam they are following is better than the Islam we are following.”

    • Spy Sats and Subs: The U.S. Military’s Secret Deep-Sea Operations

      During and after the 1963 USS Thresher disaster, the Navy developed powerful deep-ocean search and recovery techniques. The sea service used these techniques effectively in the search for lost H-bombs in 1966 and the USS Scorpion in 1968. It also had the only subs in the world capable of diving deep enough to reach the bucket. They were pretty weird subs.

    • Mideast Glimmers of Hope

      Despite Israel’s reliance on a dominated U.S. Congress as a last line of defense for its bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran strategy, other regional and global forces are moving quickly to reshape the Middle East’s geopolitical reality in a more positive way, as ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller discerns.

    • How To Understand Those 60 Trainees In Syria – OpEd

      So said American Defense Secretary Ash Carter in testimony before an incredulous Senate Armed Services Committee on July 7, explaining that the $500 million American project, announced over a year ago, to train and arm a new Syrian rebel army to bring the Islamic State to its knees and force a political settlement on the Syrian regime simultaneously has, to date, trained just 60 fighters.

    • Pentagon’s Law of War Manual Justifies War Crimes and Press Censorship

      The major US newspapers and television networks, which have full-time Pentagon correspondents and regularly review Pentagon press releases, chose to say nothing about the Law of War Manual, for reasons that become obvious when the content of the document is explored. Nor did they comment initially on the manual’s provisions for journalists until the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) issued a statement July 31 under the headline, “In times of war, Pentagon reserves right to treat journalists like spies.”

    • Feds Must Tell More About CIA’s Role in Drone Strike

      Nearly four years after the controversial drone strike, the U.S. government must release more information about the legal rationale for killing New Mexico-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.
      .

    • “It’s not risk-free war, it’s displaced war”

      For more than a decade now, the US has been using drones in warfare. During this time, thousands of people, especially civilians, have been killed by the unmanned machines. In this interview, Chris Woods, one of the leading investigative journalists on drone warfare, explains to Emran Feroz why use of drones is on the rise and what the consequences are

    • Stop Whining and Get Cracking

      How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? It was set up in the early 1980s under President Ronald Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing the CIA had been mixed up in for years.

      The agency was getting an exceedingly bad name. Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Instead, they were shifted to a new organization with a nice-sounding name – The National Endowment for Democracy.

      The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades – and thus eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities. This is why in 1983, the NED was set up to “support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, non-governmental efforts.”

    • Ukraine’s Cold War Gets Hot as Combat Explodes in the Last 24 Hours

      According to Ukrainian reports, hundreds of Russian-backed fighters took part in an assault, supported by tanks and artillery fire, on positions near the village of Starognatovka, in the south of the Donetsk region. The attack was repelled and Ukrainian forces made their first territorial gains since February 10. Since then, heavy artillery and Grad rockets have rained down across this section of the front line.

    • Post WW2 World Order: US Planned to Wipe USSR Out by Massive Nuclear Strike

      Was the US deterrence military doctrine aimed against the Soviet Union during the Cold War era really “defensive” and who actually started the nuclear arms race paranoia?

    • Pakistan’s answer to ‘The Onion’ tackles tough topics with satire

      From a mullah who wants a military operation against women wearing jeans to “uncircumcised” Islamic State fighters, a satirical Pakistani website is using humour to shine a light on current affairs in the turbulent nation.

    • First Anniversary of the Borderfree Community Center

      Each year, when we celebrate the anniversaries of the Borderfree Nonviolence Community Centre, I hope we can celebrate such love, because, love heals, love is courage and love is action that will outlast all of us.

    • Numerous US-Trained Syrian Rebels Now Unaccounted For

      The recent capture of a handful of U.S.-trained Syrian fighters shortly after entering Syria may make it even harder to recruit reluctant volunteers for a new ground force to combat the Islamic State.

      And the Syrian Kurds in the northeast portion of the country have performed exceptionally well, according to Ryder. The Christians of Sadad have already started to flee to Damascus and other safe havens in Syria.

      India can play a lead role in mobilising APIC countries for regional cooperation on this specific issue and deny Islamic State in establishing their operational base or else it will be like repeating the same mistake that world superpowers initially committed in allowing Islamic State in consolidating their present day caliphate in Iraq-Turkey-Syria border. After a year in which signs of progress have been unreliable, they’re reluctant to sound too optimistic in public. “But they pay the jizya [a tax levied on non-Muslims] in exchange for permission to stay”, he said. After months of persuasion, Turkey finally joined the coalition of forces on their fight against Islamic State. They believed that eventually the allies would train and equip about 5,000 fighters.

      Davis also said that the military was anticipating attacks on Syrian forces before it put them into battle.

    • Submission of the ABC to Intelligence and Security Review

      The ABC wishes to express its very great disappointment with this review. We are very aware that the Review will not truly reflect opinion in this country because a great number of people who oppose the activities of both the Government Communications Security Bureau and the Security Intelligence Service have refused to take part in a process which they see as a managed charade and an attempt to legitimise the operations and existence of the two spy agencies.

      [...]

      2. Oversight

      2.1. Five Eyes. Throughout the Five Eyes collaboration there is a consistent pattern of systemic oversight failure. The CIA actually spied on the Senate Committee responsible for its oversight. In the UK, the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) itself, responsible for oversight, has recently reported that legislation is “unnecessarily complicated” and the regime “lacks transparency”. In spite of the oversight in Britain the GCHQ was illegally spying on Amnesty International and others. The documented part MI6 played in the rendition and torture of alleged terrorists was never subject to proper Parliamentary control.

      Even the UK former Home Office Minister David Davis, who played a large part in promoting the Bill that set up the British ISC, recently asserted that the ISC had been “captured by the agencies they are supposed to be overseeing” and that Malcolm Rifkind (until recently Chairperson of the ISC) acted as “spokesperson” for the spy agencies rather than a watchdog. To quote two members of the British House of Lords: “Recent events have shown that the Intelligence and Security Committee, as currently constituted, is not really effective” (Foulkes). The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which gives legislative justification for GCHQ surveillance, “… is plainly inadequate to deal with the situation caused by the advances in interception technology” (Sharkey).

    • Lightning Strikes 44 US Army Personnel During Training

      The Army Rangers were immediately taken to hospital, but 31 of the students have already begun training again.

      Forty Army Ranger students and four instructors were struck by lightning as they were undergoing a training exercise about how to protect themselves from lightning bolts during thunderstorms, said U.S. army officials Thursday.

    • White officer ends testimony in black man’s shooting death

      As prosecutors attempted to discredit him, a white Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer completed nearly six hours of testimony Friday, recounting the events of the night he shot and killed an unarmed black man nearly two years ago.

      Prosecutor Teresa Postell asked why Kerrick turned off his dashcam before reaching the home where there had been a breaking and entering call and challenged entries on his police academy application regarding whether he drank alcohol to the point that he risked being arrested if he attempted to drive a car.

    • Police murder and class rule in America

      The reign of police violence in the US claimed 16 more victims over the past week.

    • SEE IT: St. Louis teen guards police during protests

      An image of a St. Louis teen whose cop cousin died in the 9/11 terror attacks has become a pro-police symbol after she put herself in front of a row of riot gear-clad Missouri officers to protect them.

      Lexi Kozhevsky, a 19-year-old St. Louis University nursing student, was photographed joining cops Monday night in Ferguson as they stood guard during protests over Michael Brown’s death.

    • How St. Louis police added Twitter to its arsenal
    • Hundreds Gather in Ferguson to Honor Michael Brown Killed by Police
    • Protests return to Ferguson streets, state of emergency declared

      Police in riot gear contained roughly 200 protesters who had gathered in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri on Monday to mark the anniversary of the police shooting of an unarmed black teen whose death ignited a national firestorm on race relations.

    • Ferguson: State of emergency declared as black man shot

      The demonstrators, some waving flags, beating drums, and shouting anti-police slogans, marched along a street that was a flashpoint of last year’s riots which erupted after white police officer Darren Wilson shot dead the 18-year-old unarmed black teen whose death ignited a national firestorm on race relations.

    • Los Angeles Unified School District Debates Whether to Shoot Its Own Students–With Department of Defense Weapons

      On Thursday, July 30, 50 Black and Latino students wearing mock bullet proof vests with stickers that stated #StudentsAintBulletProof #End1033, from the Strategy Center’s Fight for the Soul of the Cities, once again asked the Los Angeles Unified School District to give us a list of the weapons they received from the Department of Defense 1033 Program, to return 61 M 16 assault rifles we believe are still in their possession, and to apologize for being in the program in the first place. Students said, after 3 public comment testimonies, four long letters (September 2014, November 2014, May 2015, July 2015), over 3,500 petitions, appeals, and every other method of persuasion “Why is the LAUSD trying to kill us?” This campaign is part of the Strategy Center’s No Cars in LA and the U.S., No Tanks in LA and the U.S.

    • Ukraine: In the Midst of War, Debate Swirls Around Soviet-Era Famine

      Even as the conflict with Russian-backed separatists smolders, Kiev has ratcheted up a no less ferocious public relations war. Hoping to bolster its case against Moscow, Ukraine as well as the country’s foreign Diaspora have zeroed in on the so-called Holodomor or Stalinist-induced famine of 1932-33. In an effort to force Ukrainian peasants to join collective farms, Stalin commandeered their grain and other foodstuffs. The result was disastrous as millions of Ukrainians starved and perished. In some regions, the death rate reached one-third of the population with entire villages laid waste.

    • Scorecard on U.S. Interventionism

      Completely overreacting to 9/11–doing exactly what Osama bin Laden and terrorists historically have wanted–George W. Bush, employing the classic Washington trick of taking advantage of a crisis to promote an unrelated policy agenda, needlessly invaded yet another Muslim country.

    • Russian forces kill 4 militants, including rebel chief

      The Anti-Terrorist Committee said the suspects were killed in a raid in the province of Dagestan. It identified one of them as Magomed Suleimanov, the leader of the Caucasus Emirate, a loose group embracing Islamic militants in the Caucasus. Suleimanov’s deputy was also among those killed.

    • How to Confront ISIS

      The reactions to these policies have been compounded further by the bombs and drones used to kill “terrorists” along with significant number of civilians. In January, the U.S. used a “signature strike” — a drone strike based on a pattern of movement and intelligence — against an al-Qaeda compound in Pakistan. The strike killed two Western hostages. In Yemen, another drone strike killed a dozen civilians in a wedding party in 2013. One can only imagine how many civilians have been killed in recent years — the most conservative estimates range from a few hundred to over a thousand — and how much anti-U.S. rhetoric has resulted.

    • Anti-drone protesters on criminal damage charges

      ANTI-DRONE protesters have appeared before magistrates to deny causing criminal damage at Llanbedr Airfield.

      Sian ap Gwynfor, 59, of Yr Hafod, Llandysul, and Anna Jane Evans, 52, of Cae Corn Hir, Caernarfon, both pleaded not guilty to causing crimi-nal damage by painting slogans on Llanbedr airfield earlier this year.

      Awel Irene, 61, of Garreg Frech, Llanfrothen, Penrhyndeudraeth, did not indicate a plea and Angharad Wyn Tomos, 56, of Betws, Ffordd Haearn Bach, Penygroes, Caernarfon, ref used to plead.

      Because of the pleas, court clerk Ffion Medi told the four defendants that the case had to be adjourned for a trial date to be fixed.

      Rhian Jackson, prosecuting, said that slogans such as “death drones” were painted on the airfield land and that the criminal damage was estimated at £1,750, which the company that runs the airfield was claiming in compensation.

    • Indian troops kill another woman

      India opened fire Friday at about 8am without any provocation, targeting the civilian population. The Indian firing was in progress until last reports. The people of the firing-hit villages close to this side of the LoC in Haveli were confined to their houses the whole day due to the Indian firing. However, the morale of the local population was high and there was no report of shifting of the people to some safer place.

    • Authorities investigate after hotel attack in central Mali

      Authorities launched investigations at the hotel that was attacked in central Mali, a United Nations official said Monday.

    • Private airspace rights still evolving in age of drones

      Now, those almost seem like the good ol’ days. Not only do we have to worry about out-of-control vehicles, but we also have to watch the skies so we don’t find ourselves on the latest viral YouTube video taken by one of the rapidly growing number of drones. But are they trespassing in your airspace? Depending on their altitude, maybe — and maybe not. Currently, this seems to be a legal question that rivals “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin” when it comes to agreeing on a consistent standard. So fasten your seat belt and get ready for a long and somewhat bumpy flight as I take you on a brief evolution of the law.

    • French seaside town brings in drone to tackle ‘carnivorous’ seagull invasion
    • Summer’s seagull scourge could be ended by DRONES that shoot eggs with steriliser
    • UK councillor wants armed drones to kill seagulls
    • Fed-up council considers drone strikes against ice-cream snatching sea gulls
    • Anti-seagull drones could be taking to the skies of Cumbria
    • Call for drones to tackle seagulls
    • Drone vs seagull! ‘Egg oiling’ UAV to target aggressive birds
    • California legislators to eye police push for use of drones
    • Legislature eyes police use of drones
    • California Legislature Considers Allowing Police To Use Drones Amid Privacy Concerns
    • A Theory of the Drone

      The doctrine being developed to legally justify targeted killing is contingent on vague and dubious presumptions about who is an enemy qualified to be killed, and the kind of threats he or they purportedly pose. Decisions about who and when to kill involve two intersecting registers: surveillance and threat assessment. Technologically, drones can function as “unblinking eyes” capable of “total surveillance” because they are equipped with dozens of high-resolution cameras aimed in all directions, and software that sends a constant stream of footage to remote centers and aggregates it into a single view. Even though human operators blink, the footage doesn’t; it is archived and can be viewed by multiple people. Threat assessment, in contrast, is (to date) entirely human and involves interpreting and acting on surveillance data. Sometimes targets are specifically identified individuals; bombing them is termed “personality strikes.” But because the model of security is predictive, more often assessment of who and where to bomb derives from observed behavior—specifically, “patterns of life” and those behaviors that are interpreted to be anomalous and thus deemed actually or potentially threatening. The bombings of people whose individual identities are not known to the killers but who are deemed kill-able because of their behavior are termed “signature strikes.”

    • Why are humans so determined to create armed artificial intelligence?

      The iconic scene at the start of Terminator 2 documents that humanity created an artificial intelligence computer network called Skynet as part of an American defence plan. But after turning it on, the software becomes self-aware, decides humanity is the big threat, hijacks the nukes and wipes most of humanity out. In the future, those still alive have to face Skynet’s autonomous robotic killing machines, in the form of the Terminators. This includes the iconic image of a dusty skull being crushed by a grinning laser-toting Terminator as it begins to kill the human resistance.

      [...]

      The risk of such contraptions thinking for themselves and duly killing with no recourse or human way to stop them is a troubling one, and is also a concept that has massive moral and ethical dilemmas. Yet the momentum is seemingly in favour of its arrival, and its an uncomfortable thought that somewhere, scientists are spending their time creating something with extinction level possibilities for no discernible reason.

    • Humans, Not Robots, Are the Real Reason Artificial Intelligence Is Scary

      This is the immediate danger with AI weapons: They are easily converted into indiscriminate death machines, far more dangerous than the same weapons with a human at the helm.

    • As Carter fights cancer, his post-White House years may set his legacy

      So Carter has had a bit of a tabula rasa to work with, which he has filled with annual home-building projects for Habitat for Humanity, monitoring elections around the world (he cut short a monitoring trip to Guyana in May, his 39th, because he wasn’t feeling well, though it’s unclear whether that ailment was tied to recent diagnosis), serving as a mediator or fact-finder in disputes around the world, publishing 27 books (he published two others before becoming president), as well as criticizing George W. Bush over his decision to invade Iraq, and Obama over human rights issues and the use of drones to kill civilians.

      All of which has earned him the support of a lot of political progressives, though it has done little to soften the views of Republicans who believe the Reagan presidency saved the nation.

    • Peace and the Ideology of Greed and Division

      We all want peace, don’t we? Peaceful relationships and communities; an absence of violence and conflict: a World at Peace. This is surely everyone’s heartfelt desire. Without peace nothing can be achieved, none of the subtler essential needs of our time, such as feeding everyone and providing good quality health care and education to all – let alone the urgent need to save our planet (S.O.P.), beautify the cities and develop sustainable alternative energy sources.

      Despite the fact that we all hanker after peace, there are currently around thirty armed conflicts taking place across the globe – wars in which many hundreds or many thousands of innocent people are being killed. They are not on the whole conflicts between one country and another, not directly anyway, although some may be. Ideology fuels much of the fighting, as well as popular armed resistance to corporate state power, state terrorism and repression. It’s worth saying at this point, that in addition to armed conflict the ‘war’ on independent ‘free’ thinking, true democracy and the freedom of the individual is a constant one. Brutal and unrelenting, it is fought by the ‘Masters of Mankind’ (Adam Smith’s famous term for the ruling elite) against the rest of us, the 99%.

    • No new WWII apology from Japanese leader Abe; China critical

      Prime Minister Shinzo Abe acknowledged that Japan inflicted “immeasurable damage and suffering” on innocent people in World War II, but stopped short of offering his own apology, drawing criticism from China and South Korea.

      In a widely anticipated statement 70 years after his country’s surrender, he said Friday that Japan’s repeated past “heartfelt apologies” would remain unshakeable, but that future Japanese generations should not have to keep apologizing.

    • U.S. meddling forgotten

      I suggest Harari, and many others, read Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize,” in which you will find that U.S.-Iran history didn’t begin in 1979-80. Our government assisted in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government in the 1950s, and installed the Shah, who ruled brutally until overthrown through the Iranian revolution.

      I’m not sure anyone can know today if a deal with Iran, bringing them back into the world of nations, is better or worse than continued sanctions. However, the countries of the Middle East are rightfully angry with our never-ending meddling in their countries, including drone strikes in which we kill innocent civilians.

    • Negotiate, don’t bomb

      Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. Why did we fight these wars?

    • A Plea to Pope Francis: Name United States Foreign Policy Genocide

      Pope Francis’ recent comments regarding war, the environment and economic justice inspire our letter, which cites segments of his new encyclical, Laudato Si. “War always does grave harm to the environment and to the cultural riches of peoples,” Pope Francis writes, “risks which are magnified when one considers nuclear arms and biological weapons.” In the light of this reality, our letter suggests that Pope Francis avail himself of the challenging opportunity to acknowledge that the United States is “the most prolific polluter and, not coincidentally, the greatest war maker on the globe.”

    • America’s Transition to the “State Terrorist Model of Government”
    • George Kerevan: Build politics of peace, not weapons of nuclear war
    • Another Voice: Peaceful conflict resolution benefits everyone

      We don’t need more military spending – we need less. Our military aggression makes us a target.

    • Australian pilots begin missions over Syria, flying American Reaper drones

      RAAF pilots are poised to begin flying deadly American Reaper drones over Syria, taking for the first time Australia’s involvement in the fight against the so-called Islamic State from Iraq into the more complex neighbouring country.

    • Yemen: U.S. Drone Strike Kills 5 Men Suspected of Being Militants

      Meanwhile, in Yemen, officials say a suspected U.S. drone strike killed five men on Wednesday. The officials say the men were suspected of being militants with the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

    • Drone strike, operation kills 14 rebels in Afghanistan
    • US drone crashes in northeast Afghanistan

      A US drone has crashed in Afghanistan’s Kapisa province, the NATO has announced without explaining the cause of the crash.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Democrats panic over Clinton email scandal: Hillary campaign issues 4,000-word explanation of why she’s innocent after it emerges her private server held secret CIA intelligence and satellite info

      At least two classified messages on Hillary Clinton’s home-brew email server contained top-secret intelligence including signal intercepts and information from keyhole satellite conducted by the CIA and the Pentagon’s satellite-spying National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

      U.S. Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough reported to Congress on Wednesday that the sensitive information dated from 2006 and 2008, and was ‘classified up to “TO.PSECRET//SI/TK//NOFORN”.’

    • Top secret Clinton emails came from CIA

      A pair of classified emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server that should have been marked “top secret” originated in the Central Intelligence Agency, raising questions as to why they had been stripped of their classification markings by the time they reached the secretary of state.

    • Report: ‘Top Secret’ Hillary Email Discussed CIA Drone Program
    • Clinton, CIA chief visit for conference

      Multiple off-the-record sources told the News&Guide the VIP on the jet was CIA Director John Brennan, in town for the same conference that drew former President Bill Clinton and CNN correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. That would correspond with the U.S. Air Force’s acknowledgement that it had a C-40B in the valley, but the military’s public affairs desk has refused to say who the jet’s passengers were or why it was here.

    • The UK’s Official Secrets Act, Forgeries and Facts Part 1

      ‘Within western democracies the UK has a powerful and persistent culture of secrecy. Richard Crossman, Labour Cabinet Minister and commentator on the British constitution, once called it the real “BRITISH DISEASE”.’

      These very words are quoted from David Vincent’s book, ‘The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998’, published by the Oxford University Press in 1998.

      On December 15th, 1858 William Hudson Guernsey, was tried on the charges of stealing 10 printed papers and 10 pieces of paper from the “Sovereign Lady, the Queen”. The documents related to the malicious role of the Colonial Office in conspiring to colonize and suppress the rights of the people of the colonized Islands. The documents were initially dismissed as ‘forged’.

      When the scandal refused to go away (even in those days) Guernsey was arrested. The basis of arrest was the very same ‘forged’ documents, published in The Daily News on November 12th 1858. The alleged documents, initially called ‘forged’ and then used as the evidence to arrest Mr. Guernsey, were written by the Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands, John Young, concerning the future of the Ionian Islands.

      One almost feels the history of the empire repeating itself, if we are viewing the events of history that shaped the Cayman Islands once we got separated from Jamaica in 1967. The British ‘abandoned’ Jamaica and ‘colonized’ the Cayman Islands to further their financial interests. Standard script should we say?

    • Sweden Drops Part of Sexual Assault Inquiry Against Julian Assange

      Swedish prosecutors have dropped part of their sexual assault inquiry against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but the most serious part of the probe remains in place. The announcement was made as the statute of limitations ran out on three parts of the investigation. Assange has been holed up for three years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he’s received political asylum. He fears he will be extradited to the United States to face prosecution for his role at WikiLeaks if he leaves the embassy. Both Ecuador and Sweden accuse the other of delaying a possible Swedish police interview with Assange inside the embassy. Sweden has never charged him with any crime.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • German economy gets euro boost to grows 0.4 percent in Q2

      The German economy picked up pace in the second quarter of the year, growing by 0.4 percent from the previous three-month period, official figures showed Friday.

    • Kraft Heinz cuts 2,500 jobs

      And Heinz issued layoffs not long after the 3G/Berkshire takeover as well.

    • EU doubles down on TTIP secrecy as public resistance grows

      The fact that most people have still never heard of the world’s biggest trade deal—the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and Europe—even after two years of negotiations, might suggest that whatever its problems, maintaining secrecy is not one of them. But the European Commission begs to differ: since the end of July, instead of sending up-to-the-minute summaries of its talks with the US to EU politicians, the Commission now requires that national politicians travel all the way to Brussels to a special reading room where the texts can be viewed under tight security. MEPs must also use this same system.

    • People in rough neighborhoods trade HIV meds instead of taking them

      The social environment of an area, including factors such as poverty, stress, and living conditions, contributes to the disease burden. A recent study published in AJPH shows that patients from a disordered environment don’t stick to their medication schedule, even for a potentially lethal condition like HIV. As the researchers found, residents of highly disordered neighborhoods will sell or trade their antiviral medication rather than taking it and adhering to their drug plans.

    • Greece’s euro partners approve billions in new loans

      Finance ministers of the 19-nation euro single currency group on Friday approved the first 26 billion euros ($29 billion) of a vast new bailout package to help rebuild Greece’s shattered economy.

      The approval came after Greece’s parliament passed a slew of painful reforms and spending cuts after a marathon overnight session that divided the governing party, raising the specter of early elections.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The covert “selling” of anticommunism

      A dirty business, the CIA devised schemes to create or utilize social organizations, phony pass-through entities, universities, various media, artist groups, foundations and charities to service their propaganda wars—attempting to place a “progressive” or even “humanitarian” veneer upon America’s expanding grip.

    • What is Propaganda? CIA and Hollywood Are Offering Perfect Examples

      When we think of propaganda, the distribution of information of a biased or misleading nature for the purpose of promoting a point of view or political agenda, what do we think of? World War II and the Nazis perhaps? Alarmingly, some of the most pertinent examples of propaganda can be found much closer to home, in two of the United States’ biggest institutions – Hollywood and the CIA.

    • Democrats eye Gore for presidential run

      Some insiders in the Democratic Party are discussing having former Vice President Al Gore make another run for U.S. presidency, BuzzFeed reported on Thursday, adding that the man who won the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election has not taken any steps toward entering the current race.

      “They’re figuring out if there’s a path financially and politically,” an unnamed Democrat told BuzzFeed about the insiders. “It feels more real than it has in the past months.”

  • Privacy

    • Spy agencies monitor Facebook, seminar told

      Mirza Abdul Rahim informed the students that all kind of data uploaded at Facebook was monitored by the CIA which help to collect all required information about persons and organisation from all over the world. He advised student to remain careful while using computer, internet, mobile phone, IPod, Skype and other such applications and platforms.

    • Can big databases be kept both anonymous and useful?

      FREQUENT visitors to the Hustler Club, a gentlemen’s entertainment venue in New York, could not have known that they would become part of a debate about anonymity in the era of “big data”. But when, for sport, a data scientist called Anthony Tockar mined a database of taxi-ride details to see what fell out of it, it became clear that, even though the data concerned included no direct identification of the customer, there were some intriguingly clustered drop-off points at private addresses for journeys that began at the club. Stir voter-registration records into the mix to identify who lives at those addresses (which Mr Tockar did not do) and you might end up creating some rather unhappy marriages.

    • The internet of things – who wins, who loses?

      Recently I went on a BBC news programme to give “the privacy side” of a technology story. Employees of a software company in Sweden had implanted chips in their wrists that activated the company photocopier. Yes, you read that right. Having minor surgery instead of just remembering a four-digit PIN is a pretty daft idea. You’d have to be a tech utopian to want to do it.

    • iPhone cyber-flashing: What is it and how to stop it happening to you

      Security experts have begun issuing advice on how to prevent iPhone users from becoming the victims of a new phenomenon known as cyber-flashing. The advice has started to appear online in the wake of a woman contacting the police after she was sent explicit and unsolicited photos from a stranger in her close vicinity on a train in London.

      Using AirDrop – a feature on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers where users can send files, such as images, to each other at close range – the cyber flasher can request to send photographs to any fellow iPhone users within the range of a Bluetooth connection – usually around 10m. Even if the receiver rejects the photo, they are still shown an uncensored preview of the image.

    • Privacy visor which blocks facial recognition software set for public release

      Japanese researchers have announced the commercial launch of a “privacy visor” which confuses facial recognition technology in cameras, social networks and software.

      Surveillance is a standard element of daily life in the West. In the UK alone, there is at least one surveillance camera for every 11 citizens, and we encounter them on our streets, in our stores and online through tracking cookies, government programs and GPS-linked applications.

  • Civil Rights

    • 6 Insane Realities Of Life In A Modern Dictatorship

      Belarus is frequently called “Europe’s last dictatorship.” Unlike starfighters, samurai, or of the Mohicans, this is not a good thing to be the last of. We sat down with a man who’s lived most of his life in Belarus, and asked him what life was like in a modern country ruled by a despotic leader who can’t seem to pull his ass out of the 19th century.

    • What Other Countries Can Teach America About Transgender Military Service

      Huckabee, who is a fan of reinstating the repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and has previously made ugly comments about trans people, probably isn’t interested in some of the more prosaic reasons a military should strive for open LGBTQ service: to live up to the core values of dignity, integrity, and respect; to reflect the diversity of the country it serves; to bring its long-outdated medical standards up to date; or to recognize that there is “no compelling medical reason for the ban,” according to a report from a commission co-chaired by former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. So let’s just assume that his main concern is that the armed services are prepared to kill people and break things.

      [...]

      A few months ago, I asked Okros what the United States could learn from Canada’s experience. Okros pointed out that when Canada lifted its military ban, it hadn’t taken into account many of the administrative policies it would need to codify for a smooth transition. What’s more, at the time, Canadian society wasn’t particularly hospitable to gay and transgender individuals. Nevertheless, despite open hostility and a lack of administrative planning, the Canadian Forces was able to open its ranks without compromising military readiness.

    • Latinos Have Gone Missing at CIA

      CIA Director John Brennan made a rare public appearance Monday to try to address the agency’s “woeful” record of hiring and promoting Hispanics.

      Accompanied by the agency’s highest ranking Latina, Brennan traveled to New York for the annual convention of the Association of Latino Professionals for America (ALPFA), to meet with potential applicants at a job fair and deliver remarks to the organization’s leadership at lunch.

    • CIA director tells Latino professionals agency has ‘woeful’ record of hiring Hispanics
    • CIA chief: Yes, we work with human rights abusers

      In response to questions from three Senate Democrats, the head of the CIA is walking back a previous claim that U.S. intelligence agents never work with countries that abuse human rights.

      “While we neither condone nor participate in activities that violate human rights standards, we do maintain cooperative liaison relationships with a variety of intelligence and security services around the world, some of whose constituent entities have engaged in human rights abuses,” Director John Brennan wrote in a letter to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) sent last week.

    • CIA director responds to Alabama man’s claims of sexual harassment in the warzone

      The director of the CIA vowed a thorough investigation into an Alabama man’s claim that he was subject to sexual harassment while serving as a contractor in Afghanistan.

    • CIA Head Indicates Swift Action After Warzone Gay Harassment Claims

      The Director of the CIA today addressed recent allegations by a gay CIA contractor who said he was harassed while on a dangerous deployment by other CIA contractors and staff officers, saying his spy agency has “zero tolerance” for such behavior and indicating the agency is moving swiftly in response.

    • CIA Whistleblower to Civil Rights Groups: Where are You?

      A former CIA officer described as the latest victim of the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers has issued a scathing open letter to civil rights groups asking, “Where were you?”

      In the letter published at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jeffrey Sterling, who is black, specifically calls out the NAACP, National Action Network, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and Congressional Black Caucus, writing “I saw you when other black faces were either killed or mistreated.” But, to these civil rights groups, he writes, he is “invisible.”

      In a case that relied on circumstantial evidence, Sterling was convicted in January on nine separate felony charges, including seven counts of espionage.

    • An open letter to civil rights groups in the U.S.

      Where were you?

      Where were you when I was faced with blatant discrimination at my job, when my employer told me I was “too big and too black” to do the job?

      Where were you when I, one of the first black officers to do so, filed a discrimination suit against the Central Intelligence Agency?

      Where were you when the justice system of the United States dismissed my discrimination suit because the U.S. government maintained that trying my suit would endanger national security?

      Where were you during the many years I reached out to you, begging, pleading for help from you while the United States government pursued and tormented me for years, bent on retaliation and persecution?

      Where were you when I begged for help from Congressman Lacy Clay’s office and they told me to run away, to leave the country? I was there … and I didn’t run.

      Where were you when the United States government arrested me, put me in jail and branded me with espionage?

    • CIA pays McKinsey 10 million in fees for reorganisation

      The CIA is about to enter into one of its most ambitious restructuring exercises in its history. In March Director John O. Brennan unveiled the blueprint, and the plan is set to have a massive impact on the organisation structure of the major directorates of espionage and analysis, which have been part of the agencies structure for decades. In its new model the agency will create a hybrid unit that combines analysts and operators in centres which are focused on specific regions, such as the Middle East, as well as on security issues including weapons proliferation. The new approach is modelled on the success of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Centre, which has enjoyed considerable influence since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

    • US refuses to free ‘near death’ Gitmo hunger striker weighing 33 kg

      A prisoner of US military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay may soon starve to death, as after more than eight years of force-feeding his body is said to be unable to take the nutrients he is pumped with. The DoD opposed the ailing man’s release.

      Tariq Ba Odah, a Saudi resident of Yemeni descent, was captured in Pakistan and held in Guantanamo facility since 2002. In 2009 he was cleared for release by the Obama administration, but remains in US custody. In 2007 he went on a hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention without charges. After more than eight years without taking food voluntarily, he weighs less than 34 kilograms and may soon die, his lawyer says.

    • Obama Seeks Legal Loophole in Strategy to Close Gitmo – Former CIA Officer

      Guantanamo’s continued importance for the US government was to continue to hold suspects captured in the War on Terror. Therefore, Obama needed a legal strategy allowing him to continue to hold detainees on US territory before he could feel free to close the facility, Kiriacou said.

    • CIA boss John Brennan drafted this never-sent apology letter to senators over the CIA hacking

      “The CIA accidentally released a document to me under FOIA and then asked that I refrain from posting it,” says VICE’s Jason Leopold.

    • The Google Search That Made the CIA Spy on the US Senate

      On July 28, 2014, the CIA director wrote a letter to senators Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss — the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) and the panel’s ranking Republican, respectively. In it, he admitted that the CIA’s penetration of the computer network used by committee staffers reviewing the agency’s torture program — a breach for which Feinstein and Chambliss had long demanded accountability — was improper and violated agreements the Intelligence Committee had made with the CIA.

    • CIA Accidentally Releases Apology Letter It Wrote, But Never Sent To The Senate For Illegally Spying On It

      Jason Leopold — terrorizer of FOIA staffers throughout the US government — has again obtained documents many would have expected to remain out of reach for years to come. Certainly, the CIA thought one of the documents would remain its little secret for the rest of whatever.

    • CIA director almost apologized for spying on Senate

      After CIA agents hacked into the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer network and accessed a report the Senate was preparing on the agency’s torture program, CIA Director John Brennan drafted an apology letter to Vice Chairman Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a report by VICE News reveals.

    • Report: John Brennan drafted apology to senators for CIA hacking
    • How potent can a citizen journalist be? Ask the CIA about a certain MIT researcher.

      The Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate, who says his interests include “animals, civil liberties, national security and freedom of information,” took note when members of the U.S. Senate alleged last year that CIA employees had hacked into a computer network used by staffers of the Senate Intelligence Committee. At the time, the committee was looking into, among other things, allegations about the CIA’s involvement in torture.

    • The Faulty Google Search That Set Off A Constitutional Crisis

      We already wrote about Jason Leopold “accidentally” receiving a letter the CIA never actually sent that was an apology for spying on Senate staffers, but there was a lot more that Leopold received in that FOIA dump as well. Beyond the document Leopold wasn’t supposed to receive, the 300 pages handed over by the CIA (not by its voluntary desire to respect FOIA stipulations, but rather because a judge told it to) provide additional details about the alleged Senate breach and its “investigative” spying — and the ensuing fight that set off something of a Constitutional crisis in the separation of powers between the executive branch and the legislative branch.

      Leopold’s article goes into great depth on the subject and is well-worth reading in its entirety. One of the many, many details worth noting is that the CIA’s “firewall” between it and Senate staffers wasn’t really anything of the sort. A Google-powered custom search function allowed staffers to search CIA documents, but only the documents the CIA wanted them to see. The problem was that the search didn’t work correctly. Keyword searches were returning documents the CIA hadn’t approved for Senate perusal. This was how the hidden Panetta Report was discovered.

    • The Justice Department says it approved subpoenas or search warrants for three journalists last year

      The Justice Department said Friday that former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. authorized three subpoenas or search warrants last year for journalists or people viewed as members of the media, though two of the three were not ultimately used.

    • Lawyer: Chelsea Manning faces possible solitary confinement for alleged prison infractions
    • Chelsea Manning having troubles with military brig authorities

      Convict faces solitary confinement over unauthorized toothpaste, books.

    • Slaying casts pall on plan to reduce solitary confinement

      California’s efforts to ease its famously harsh use of solitary confinement are clashing with a bloody reality after an inmate who spent decades alone in a tiny cell was sent back to the general population and killed by fellow inmates within days.

      Hugo “Yogi” Pinell’s repeated assaults on guards landed him in solitary confinement beginning in the early 1970s, making him one of the longest-serving solitary confinement inmates in the nation, said Keramet Reiter, a University of C

    • Obama’s Africa Hypocrisy

      During his trip to east Africa the president chastened Kenyans about gay rights, domestic violence, genital cutting, forced marriage and equal rights for women. He went on and on with no mention of how well his country lives to any accepted standards of human rights.

      American presidents have no business chastising others. The country with the world’s largest prison state, military and history of aggressions is on shaky ground when giving anyone else advice. In the neighboring country of Somalia the United States regularly sends drones intended to kill al-Shabaab fighters but they deliver collateral damage to other people too. The blowback has killed many Kenyans, who are targeted by al-Shabaab because of their country’s role as an American puppet.

      Because hypocritical Americans have made gay rights the new measurement of societal well being all over the world, the president took the opportunity to castigate Kenyans about that too. Of course homosexuality is illegal in Saudi Arabia, America’s partner in crime. Yet there is no record of public shaming for any Saudi prince or king on that or any other issue. Their sensibilities are deemed too delicate for tongue-lashing. It must be pointed out that Saudis take lashing quite literally.

    • Jonathan Pollard’s Release Doesn’t Erase 30 Years of Injustice

      The official announcement that Jonathan Pollard will be paroled on November 21, having served 30 years for transmitting classified American documents to the Israeli government, is a welcome – if much-belated – development. The fact of his prospective release, however, must not be allowed to overshadow the injustices of his life sentence – and 30-year prison term – as set forth below.

      [...]

      Sixth, false accusations have likewise been made by U.S. government agencies that Pollard compromised intelligence operations in Eastern Europe and was consequently implicated in the deaths of American informants. Yet, these accusations were never part of his indictment, and no evidence for them has ever been adduced. In fact, the architect of these treasonable acts, and the source of the disinformation against Pollard, was none other than senior CIA official Aldrich Ames, who pleaded guilty to them in 1994.

    • Let’s Talk About Torture

      The CIA’s torture-era leadership won’t repent. Even after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report saying in no uncertain terms that the CIA had tortured its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that torture never elicited any actionable intelligence that saved American lives, Bush-era CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and several of their underlings announced plans to release a book justifying torture.

      They intend to repeat a lie over and over again in this book: that torture worked. They hope that the American people are either so gullible or so stupid that they’ll believe it. It’s up to the rest of us to ensure that our government swears off committing this crime against humanity.

      I know that these former intelligence leaders are lying because I worked with them at the CIA. When I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, they came down on me like a ton of bricks.

      It’s not necessarily news that these former CIA heavyweights believe in torture, even if they refuse to call it what it is. Many television news outlets still run clips of George Tenet’s 2007 appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in which he repeats “We do not torture! We do not torture!” as though he were unhinged and living in a dream world. Perhaps what Tenet needs to do is to read the United Nations Convention on Torture, to which the United States is a signatory.

    • Report Concludes C.I.A. Torture Program was Bolstered by American Psychological Association

      Dr. Scott A. Allen, professor of medicine, was a co-author of a report that concluded the American Psychological Association (APA) coordinated with federal officials to create an ethics policy on national security interrogations that aligned with the government’s legal justification for the post-9/11 CIA torture program. Featured in a New York Times story published in April, the study characterized the collaboration between the APA and officials in the CIA, White House and Department of Defense as secretive.

    • Righting Governance Gone Rogue in the American Psychological Association: The Torture Scandal

      The vote occurred at the APA’s first convention since the release of an extensive independent investigative report confirming the APA leadership actively colluded with the Pentagon and the CIA during the Bush administration to facilitate torture programs. It concluded that the APA Board and some senior staff, including its ethics director, engaged in a pattern of secret collusion with the Department of Defense officers to defeat efforts by the APA Council to introduce and pass resolutions that would have prohibited psychologies from participating in interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and other U.S. detention centers abroad. Specially, the then-APA board president and then-APA president-elect were cited as key players who participated in this collusion.

    • American Psychological Association Finally Bans Torture

      …many psychologists helped the CIA develop torture techniques after 9/11, making huge amounts of money in the process.

    • The APA’s Watershed Move to Ban Psychologists’ Complicity in Torture

      It was a stunning about-face for the APA. Having spent the better part of the last eight years supporting the “dissident psychologists” in their battle against the organized profession, I had trouble believing my ears as the steady wave of yesses rolled through that Toronto conference room last week. It was as if we had stepped into an alternate reality.

    • Torture, Psychology and the Real APA

      The real APA is all too real, I responded, but it is no longer my APA. I resigned in December 2007 after the August 2007 annual meeting effectively endorsed a professional role for psychologists in torture.

    • A Meeting of Psychologists Becomes a Moment of Soul Searching

      During the American Psychological Association’s conference in Toronto, members reflected on how the group and the discipline can recover from revelations about torture. Some also attended a separate gathering of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, which held a teach-in focused on the matter of psychologists involved in torture.

    • Dissident Psychologists Speak Out on APA Role in CIA-Pentagon Torture
    • No More Torture: World’s Largest Group of Psychologists Bans Role in National Security Interrogations
    • US psychologists’ convention bans participation in torture
    • American Psychological Association Bars Psychologists From Colluding In Torture
    • Psychology group bans members from harsh national security interrogations
    • Psychology Association Bans Members From Participating In Interrogations
    • Psychology Group Votes To Ban Members From Taking Part In Interrogations
    • Newspaper Review: Palestinian Hunger-Striking Detainee ‘Allan’ Slipping into Coma as Focus of Dailies

      The health condition of Palestinian detainee Mohammad Allan, who has been on a hunger strike for two months and has passed into a coma amidst a dispute over force-feeding him hit the front page headlines in Palestinian dailies.

    • Palestinian vigilante groups are last line of defence

      It is close to midnight. The silhouettes of ink-black hills across the valley are outlined against a sky splashed with hundreds of stars. A cool breeze causes the branches of the surrounding olive trees to wave in unison while bringing relief from the heat wave currently scorching the Middle East.

    • The Last Seamen of Gaza
    • Jeb Bush Leaves Door Open for Use of Torture by Government
    • Jeb Bush leaves door open for use of torture by government

      Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush declined to rule out resuming the use of torture under some circumstances by the U.S. government if he becomes president.

    • Jeb Bush refuses to rule out use of torture if he becomes US president

      Republican candidate Jeb Bush says torture is inappropriate, but use of brutal questioning methods may be justifiable and necessary for the US government

    • Jeb Bush leaves door open for CIA torture

      Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has declined to rule out resuming the use of torture under some circumstances by the US government.

    • CIA Torture Tactics Reemerge in New York Prison

      Over 60 inmates at New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility have complained of abuse by prison guards in the wake of the June escape of convicted killers David Sweat and Richard Matt.

    • Chicago Stop And Frisk Settlement Puts ACLU At Odds With Activists

      Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois announced a “landmark” agreement with the Chicago Police Department and the City of Chicago on stop and frisks by police officers. However, in the days following, it became evident that activists from the local movement for police accountability were upset because they believed the ACLU’s settlement undermined their efforts.

    • Thousands of Americans Have Been Illegally Detained in Chicago’s CIA-Style Detention Center

      The Chicago Police’s CIA-style black site, Homan Square, has seen more people detained than died on 9/11 or imprisoned at Guantanamo, according to a new report by the Guardian. The newspaper, which sued the Chicago police to obtain further details on Homan Square, reports overwhelming targeting of minorities as well as other sordid and violative policies.

    • Judge: DOJ May Join Racial Profiling Case Against Sheriff Arpaio

      The U.S. Department of Justice, after settling most of its own civil rights lawsuit against the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, will be able to intervene in a separate lawsuit that found the sheriff’s office had engaged in racial profiling against Latino drivers.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Broadband Speeds, New Data

      Thanks to edmundedgar on reddit I have some more accurate data to update my previous bandwidth growth estimation post: OFCOM UK, who released their November 2014 report on average broadband speeds. Whereas Akamai numbers could be lowered by the increase in mobile connections, this directly measures actual broadband speeds.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Hosting Company Wants to Wipe 1,103 Megaupload Servers

        Millions of users lost access to their personal files when Megaupload was raided and soon this data loss may be permanent. Carpathia Hosting’s new parent company has asked the court’s permission to wipe the servers clean, arguing that it should not bear the high financial costs. Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom disagrees and says his legal team will do its best to prevent any data from being destroyed.

      • Dallas Buyers Club Ruling Devastates Copyright Trolling Down Under

        The U.S. studio behind the movie Dallas Buyers Club (DBC) has been handed a devastating blow in Australia. The company wanted to ‘fine’ downloaders many thousands of dollars each but the Federal Court has seen through the scheme and has refused to hand over alleged pirates’ identities unless DBC pays a AUS$600,000 bond.

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