Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

11.10.16

SUEPO (EPO Staff Union) “Fears Now That the Intention Behind This Blow is “to Destroy” the Union.”

Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Translation of the new article from Heise, revealing some new bits of information about union-busting activity in The Hague

EARLIER today we published a call for translations, after we had gotten a translation from Skarbrand in Diaspora* as it turns out. It’s a translation of the article from Heise and although not perfect (especially not the terminology which was somewhat lost in translation), it does contain some relatively new information.

European parliament fires more union workers

picture text: Again demonstration of employees in front of the European Patent Agency in Munich. (picture: dpa, Frank Leonhardt)

After the heads of the in-house union Suepo in Munich lost their jobs, the leader of the EPA (European Patent Agency) fires the financial secretary of employee-representation in The Hague. Approximately 800 workers demonstrate against it.

Despite multiple intern conferences to brighten the working atmosphere, the struggle in the EPA wont stop. On Monday in-house union Suepo called again on short notice for demonstration. Insiders say around 800 people joined at the agency-seat in Munich. Reason for the action: EPA president Benoît Battistelli fired Suepo financial secretary Laurent Prunier in the Hague last week.

Battistelli against union

Heise Online stated the EPA leaders accused Laurent Prunier, during his written call to protest, of pressuring and harassing an employee-board member in the Netherlands capitol. In contrast the union says that there was never an official complaint. The appropriate international labour-court has already clearly stated, that intern employee differences have to be handled among each other, without interference of the agencies management.

In January during an disciplinary inquiry against three union workers (which seemed to have spied on a special investigation unit) Battistelli imposed strict sanctions: Suepo leader Elizabeth Hardon and her predecessor Ion Brumme were laid off, additionally the treasurer was degraded. Suepo fears now that the intention behind this blow is “to destroy” the union. As foreign institution, German law is not applicable to the EPA.

Unrest in the workforce

Because of unrest in the workforce the European Patent Organisation (EPO), which carries the EPA, called upon Battistelli to “lay low”. The president has to ensure that “the disciplinary enquiry not only has to be fair, it must also be perceived as such” according to the Communique. Possibilities for this are external examination or mediation.

It is stated in the document that the Frenchman has to inform the supervisory board “with appropriate detail” till after the trial and before other disciplinary enquiries. The controllers also demand suggestions to improve trust of the appropriate actions. There should be an agreement with the union “without precondition and the possibility for all topics in future discussions”.

Frenchman Battistelli is no ordinary person. There’s something irregular about him. “Regarding your latest post referring to Battistelli’s increasingly erratic
behaviour,” one source told us, “I heard that he caused something of an éclat at the AIPPI conference back in September, where he gave a speech. It seems that he was adamant that he should sit flanked by his two bodyguards at the banquet’s officials table.”

Our source for this said it is better to treat this as gossip, but either way, it would not be the first time we heard such stories (or worse). Some we cannot even publish as it would jeopardise sources. █

“Not My President“: The Sentiment of European Patent Office Staff Towards Their Fascistic Boss

Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Trusting businessmen in suits to run an Office which is centered around science

Pinocchio

Summary: Battistelli hits back at IAM’s dissent with an unprecedented volume of lies, European media catches up with union busting by Battistelli, and staff of the EPO expresses frustration with everything at the Office under Battistelli’s incompetent management

WHAT a gross liar the President of the EPO has become. It’s not even funny, it’s just utterly disgusting. First Chile had a 9/11 (regime change by coup), then came 11/9 in Berlin, then 9/11 in New York and now 11/9 again in the US. Coinciding with 11/9 in the US we now have Liar Supreme Battistelli drooling lies into the pages of IAM — a site he loves so much to cite in support of his lies.

“Coinciding with 11/9 in the US we now have Liar Supreme Battistelli drooling lies into the pages of IAM — a site he loves so much to cite in support of his lies.”Several days ago IAM’s editor in chief seemed to have had enough. He or a colleague said that Battistelli had scored an "own goal" and later wrote an entire article about it. Battistelli with his infamous temper must have blown a fuse at the sight of that and he pressured IAM to print a lot of lies without questioning or fact-checking. This new ‘article’ is the biggest and densest pile of lies I have come across since the buildup for the Iraq invasion (like those horrible articles from Judith Miller or tweets from Donald Trump about climate science). To quote just one fragment from his lies and revisionism:

On another point, I also strongly refute any accusations of “management by intimidation”. To try to base the discussions on facts rather than rumours, we asked a team of renowned, experienced external consultants to analyse the Office’s situation with respect to our financial and social situation, and health and well-being. The results show a strong improvement compared to 2010, with some remarkable achievements and some areas of progress. They were shared with all the stakeholders (staff, managers, staff representatives, trade union and AC delegations) and will continue to be debated with all in order to define our next priorities.

There are too many lies in this response to rebut one by one. It’s like a whole diarrhea of false statements and cleaning it all up with detailed evidence is a monumental (time-consuming) task. We sure hope that Joff Wild believes none of that stuff he had just clicked “Publish” on.

“Looking at IP Kat today, we still find some distressed calls for intervention.”Elsewhere in the media we now have some press coverage from Germany (once again it’s Stefan Krempl, who knows this conflict very well) and a politician’s rant from France (not the first time she speaks of these issues). Can native German and French speakers help us get a decent translation of both articles/columns? We strive to maintain an accurate and complete record of it all. Can anyone please translate these and securely send these to us for publication?

Looking at IP Kat today, we still find some distressed calls for intervention. Things are becoming rather grim at the Office and one person told us today that “Not My President” is an apt description of the sentiment inside the Office. It’s actually the bigoted President who encourages violence and intolerance, not the staff (his victims). “What is really going on, nobody gives a damn,” this one person said, as the management’s abuse just carries on and there’s no sign of it coming to an end any time soon. Here is the full comment:

In December, the AC will let BB do what he wants. They’ll back down, like they’ve always done since they unanimously reelected him. They know what they’re doing. They want him to stay there (as well as his VPs) to introduce the pension reform that he promised to deliver next year and which ALL delegates and their ministers want dearly, especially the “big” member states. When they tell BB to calm down, it’s just for the show, or maybe, for some, because they’re a bit annoyed by the bad press. When they say that they want it to look like there is justice, that’s exactly what they mean: it has to LOOK all right, nothing more. Because when it does not, some ministers get some embarrassing phone calls from journalists and that must stop. What is really going on, nobody gives a damn. If you want to predict what they will do, just ask yourself: what is the easiest thing to do ?

You’re on your own. Close ranks and hang on…

President Battistelli “has an history of simply ignoring the Council requests,” notes the following new comment:

So what happens next? Maybe that is the question that should be asked?

What happens if the Council decides to put some pressure on the President (for example by requesting cooperation under Article 20 ppi as suggested here)? Wouldn’t the President continue business as usual? He has an history of simply ignoring the Council requests, hasn’t he? It is quite naive from Merpel to believe that Article 20 would have any effect. Why would Battistelli care?

What happens if the Council does nothing? Battistelli simply continues till the end of his period and the member States simply stay with their arms crossed doing nothing because of immunity?

I am afraid, the most likely future is that Battistelli will simply carry on for the next 2 years, firing whomever he does not like every other month, continue to give well paid administrative posts to whomever he wants and spend money on buildings and computer system without any real control.

Here is a note about erosion of patent quality — a subject that has intrigued us for as long as it became and remained a public issue (several years ago):

If the EPO re-starts examining applications properly, i.e. to a high standard, including those I prosecute, I may be more supportive of anti-PB sentiment. However, improvements need to be made, whether or not PB is attempting to imprive anythig.

On an individual level, I am fully supportive of protecting people from unfair treatment I get a lot of myself.

Here is one response to this:

Chicken and egg. As long as BB dictates, examiners cannot change their standards back. He is trying and succeeding in spending less on examination while claiming that can be done with improved quality.
Your call. Can it for you?

Here is another message tackling Battistelli’s lies about patent quality:

You know what the Management of the EPO has been publishing.
We improved our quality.
Out union published data saying we feel less confident about our product quality.

If you feel the quality has declined, it is your job to defend your applicant’s rights by complaining to the EPO management that the quality you have received has declined.

There is no need to refer to the actual product, but examples can help.

And do it publicly, preferably not anonymously.

Only then will the public pick up on this problem, and media may gain attention.
And only then will there be a pressure on the AC members to actually change anything.

If you won’t do anything for you, we will not risk our job being proactive for you, as we will get problems when we do anything without being prompted to do so.

“As I see it,” one person added, “applicants who get dodgy patents granted because of the present examination” at the EPO. That’s an important point and here is the entire comment:

As I see it, applicants who get dodgy patents granted because of the present examination process which discourages examiners from raising objections, are unlikely to complain. It is only those who have to defend themselves against dodgy patents in the courts who would complain. It will take some time for these patents to reach the litigation stage, by which M. BB will be long gone. Only a small proportion of patents get litigated anyway.

Don’t expect to get much support from the UK IPO: since the move to Wales, the upper echelons have been increasingly populated by Civil Service generalists rather than ex-examiners who had risen through the ranks and actually understood from personal experience what it is all about. Compared with the 1980′s the status and working conditions of examiners has been much reduced, reflected in the various public consultations which have included proposals to stop examining the description (allegedly following an embryonic EPO proposal) and to move some of the examiners’ work to clerical staff, ostensibly to save money that ought to have resulted in fee reductions but which in practice gets creamed off as special dividends to the BIS.

Some people have chosen humour to describe their frustration and wrote odes like this one:

Eponians, wha hae wi’ Prunier bled,
Eponians, wham SUEPO has aften led,
Welcome tae your gory bed,
Or tae Victorie!

Noo’s the day, and noo’s the hour:
See the front o’ battle lour,
See approach proud Benoît’s power -
Zeljko and Elodie!

Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha will fill a coward’s grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave?
Laat him turn and flee!

Wha, for Eponia’s rule o’ law,
Freedom’s sword will strangly draw,
Freeman stand, or Freeman fa’,
Laat him on wi’ me!

By Oppression’s woes and pains!
By your staff reps in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow! -
Laat us doe or dee!’

There was another such ode:

Psst.., it’s oh so quiet! says…

Many illegal loop holes remain to be plugged
EPO system is facing criticism and it is wholly bugged
Justice is sold as revealed with emergence of new facts
it is cleverly wrapped in BB’s words with simple tact

Under official ret act, nothing can be made public or revealed
Under the oath of secrecy it is cleverly concealed
Eponians can’t dream for getting immediate relief
Loosing faith and trust as mark of disbelief

Innocents are sometimes punished for nothing
Trial summary drags on for years to prove something
BB and his goons rule the scene
it has been made laughing stock which is never witnessed or seen

Let sacred principles of justice be upheld
Let innocents be not prosecuted and held
It may or can have legitimate delay
This may send the message across and relay

“Good to hear,” one insider told us this morning about our plan to continue covering these matters (we have a lot of material that has not been published yet). “It’s surprising that a critic of the EPO does so much to support its staff, and to save the Office. You would expect the AC to do that. But for political reasons they are (or at least were) against staff.”

“It’s surprising that a critic of the EPO does so much to support its staff, and to save the Office. You would expect the AC to do that. But for political reasons they are (or at least were) against staff.”
      –AnonymousWe were never against patents as a whole and certainly not against the EPO, just against particular elements therein, notably software patents. There’s a saying along the lines of, when people don’t criticise you, then they ceased to care, they no longer try to improve anything and thus it implies/insinuates your failure. I care about the EPO because I care about Europe and a potent patent system — not a production line — is what gives Europe a competitive edge. This weekend we’ll write about SIPO (China) and the USPTO, demonstrating just how attractive a target they’ve made their countries to patent trolls. They’re literally destroying their own country by issuing patents like Wells Fargo opens new bank accounts (“Wells Fargo Opened a Couple Million Fake Accounts” for those who have not heard yet).

At the EPO, based on our years of reporting (soon entering the third year of intensive/extensive reporting), workers worry. They want to do their job properly, but under Battistelli they cannot and many feel as though they’ll lose their job as Battistelli destroys their employer (the Office); The Administrative Council isn’t firing him because he allegedly pays them (or their country) — in its own right a sackable offense in a sane system.

“The situation at the EPO is catastrophic,” wrote one person today, adding some background information and writing to the original author, who has not touched the subject (EPO scandals) since the summer, until a few days ago…

You suggest that the AC members should invite a review and inspection from the national regulatory authorities in the countries in which the main Office sites are located, i.e. the German and Dutch labour ministries.

The idea is good. An honest man would not be afraid of an independent inspection. The problem comes when the man is not really honest and has things to hide.

The situation at the EPO is catastrophic. Far away from human rights, good governance and European standard. The dismissal of staff representatives and the no respect of the rules of law are the tip of the Iceberg.

Battistelli is all but stupid. He knows that an independent investigation at the EPO means the disclosure of a tyranny. The only inspection he will accept are the ones done by friendly auditors paid by himself (with the EPO money) which will repeat his rosy point of view.
The AC members know the situation at the EPO. They are afraid of the scandal that an independent inspection will pop up.
Because immediately questions will rise: Why did they let the situation go so far without control? Why the AC approved regulations that violate human rights and violate the rules of law? Which personal advantages did the AC members received from the EPO president to vote “yes” during years?

It’s rather amazing that in spite of 0% support from staff Battistelli continues to be the boss. The Council should stop sitting on its hands and its Chairman should pay closer attention to the irreparable longterm damage caused by Battistelli instead of skinning chinchillas for profit. █

Benoît Battistelli’s Marching Orders in Spain Through His ‘Pet Chinchilla’ Patricia García-Escudero, Whom He Got Overseeing the Boards of Appeal

Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The following two photos have both just been published by the EPO

Patricia García-Escudero and Benoît Battistelli

Patricia García-Escudero at EPOPIC

Summary: The pet chinchilla in the Boards of Appeal Committee (BoAC) makes a public appearance and even facilitates Battistelli’s awful agenda inside of Spain

THE EPO has become so scandalous (an elaborate mess!) that we need new tools/facilities just to keep track of it all and keep it properly cataloged. The American patent system looks like a saint compared to today’s EPO. There aren’t just technical problems but also human rights issues, nepotism, and possibly criminal elements like fraud. The Office and by extension the entire Organisation is rapidly becoming Europe’s greatest source of shame.

Patricia García-Escudero is a symptom of what goes on inside the EPO under Battistelli’s reign. We wrote several articles about this last month [1, 2] (see these for background/details).

Here is the pet chinchilla of Battistelli (Patricia García-Escudero), as boasted in Twitter this week. “On the #EPOPIC stage,” the EPO wrote, “now is Patricia García-Escudero, Director General of @OEPM_es pic.twitter.com/wXJTH6VMOA”

“Is Europe harbouring a banana republic right at the very heart of Bavaria?”“Buenos días from the 26th edition of #EPOPIC in Madrid,” it said separately. “Who’s joining us? pic.twitter.com/iY25LA4n2V”

Well, Patricia García-Escudero is joining you guys pretty soon. More specifically, she’ll serve almost like Battistelli’s ‘mole’ inside the BoAC. How can anyone not see that there is a ‘mole’ in the supposedly ‘independent’ Boards of Appeal? This was foreseen and it is increasingly being confirmed. Watch the photo in this new EPO “news” item (epo.org link). Scroll down and focus on the picture of “Ms Patricia García-Escudero, Director General of the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office and President Benoît Battistelli” under “Bilateral co-operation plan signed with Spain” (guess who signed it).

Remember Spain's opposition to the UPC. Is Battistelli using connections through a Vice-President from Spain? The EPO said this yesterday: “The EPO President used the occasion of the Madrid conference to meet with representatives of Spanish government, industry, media and the IP profession. After meeting with José María Jover, Under-Secretary of Industry, Energy and Tourism and President of the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office, a new bilateral co-operation plan in the field of patents was signed with Ms Patricia García-Escudero, Director General of the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office. Covering the period 2016-2018, the new bilateral cooperation plan also includes projects in the field of Patent Information and Awareness and Patent related IT services and tools. Spain has been a member of the European Patent Organisation since 1 October 1986. Last year the EPO received more than 1 500 patent applications from Spain, an increase of 3.8% over the previous year.”

The main issue here is that with growing proximity to Battistelli and his ilk it’s almost guaranteed that Patricia García-Escudero has new loyalties and she’ll be a force for Battistelli — not a force for good/justice — inside the BoAC. How can the AC (Administrative Council) be so blind to this? Is Europe harbouring a banana republic right at the very heart of Bavaria? █

Links 10/11/2016: Latest Microsoft Attacks on GNU/Linux (by Proxy), F2FS Growing Up

Posted in News Roundup at 10:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 5 open source dashboard tools for visualizing data

    I’ve always been fascinated by finding new and interesting ways to bring meaning to data with interactive visualization tools. While I’m definitely a geek for numbers, the human mind is simply much better at interpreting trends visually than it is just picking them out a spreadsheet. And even when your main interest in a dataset is the raw numbers themselves, a dashboard can help to bring meaning by highlighting which values matter most, and what the context of those numbers is.

    Figuring out how to best visualize your data can be challenging. Maybe you started out by creating a few graphs in a spreadsheet and are trying to find a way to tie them all together. Or maybe you’re working with an existing analytics tool and want to find a way to make your data more accessible to a wider audience. Or perhaps you’ve go several real-time sources and are trying to find a way to tie them all together.

    Fortunately, there are a number of great open source dashboard tools out there that make the job much easier. On one end of the spectrum are open source business intelligence tools, like BIRT or Pentaho. But for a smaller project, tools like these could be overkill, and in some cases, you might be able to find a dashboard tool that is already designed to work with the kind of data you are dealing with.

  • Events

    • NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2016 Tokyo/Fall
    • My First International FOSS Event: FUDCon Cambodia

      It was a privilege to be a speaker at FUDCon, Cambodia 2016. This being my first international FOSS event was ever more exciting. Right from the day I received the invitation from Sirko, I felt extremely privileged. On reaching the place I found that the event was much bigger than what I had expected it to be. There was a bar camp being organised by the university with over 5000 participants. Simply speaking it was a grand and huge occasion.

    • Endace Sponsors Open Source Suricata Conference

      Endace, a world leader in high-speed network monitoring and recording technology, is a sponsor of Suricon, which kicks off on Wednesday November 9th at the Hamilton Crowne Plaza in Washington D.C. Suricon, which draws attendees from around the world (including Suricata project contributors, developers and users), is the annual conference for the community behind the popular open-source intrusion detection (IDS) application, Suricata.

    • Message parsing and community building: All Things Open 2016

      Last week I visited All Things Open, one of the largest open source conferences of the US East Coast. The venue was the monumental building of the Raleigh Convention Center, just two blocks from Red Hat’s headquarters. I was presenting syslog-ng in the Operations track of the conference, but luckily I had a chance to stay for the full two days of the event.

      There were over 2400 visitors at the conference, so registration and check-in already started the day before. Those who leveraged this opportunity could not just avoid the crowd next morning, but also receive a nice t-shirt together with the conference badge:

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5 – Free Office Suite Keeps Getting Better

      LibreOffice is the best office software available, or at least on Linux. LibreOffice is a powerful office suite that comes with a clean interface and feature-rich tools that seeks to make your productive and creative. LibreOffice includes several applications including Writer for word processing, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, Draw for vector graphics and flowcharts, Base for databases, and Math for formula editing.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • TrueOS Succeeds PC-BSD Desktop-Friendly Unix OS

      The FreeBSD Unix operating system is one of the earliest open-source operating system projects, and it continues to be actively developed. The most recent update is the FreeBSD 11 release, which debuted Oct. 10. While FreeBSD is a robust operating system, it is not a desktop focused platform, which is where the PC-BSD operating system, based on FreeBSD used to fit in. On Sept. 1, PC-BSD was re-branded as TrueOS, providing FreeBSD users with an easy-to-use desktop as well as a new release cadence. In the past, PC-BSD releases followed FreeBSD milestones, providing users with code that had already been included in a generally available release. With TrueOS, the release model is now moving to what is known as a rolling release, with packages constantly being updated as they become available. As such, TrueOS is not based on the recently released FreeBSD 11; instead, it is based on the FreeBSD “current” branch that is the leading edge of the operating system development. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at the new TrueOS operating system and what it offers desktop users.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Can America’s two-party system evolve to crowdocracy?

      Since I’ve studied civics and governments, I’ve never thought a two-party system of elected officials in our executive and legislative branches was the best form of democracy. It worked for a time, but now it’s time for change. In the United States, our representative democracy has become polarized and plagued with raising money for re-elections instead of focusing on the issues—issues that are largely influenced by lobbyist and corporate interests.

    • Open Data

      • Who is leading Open Data in Europe? Walking the Open Data talk

        Capgemini Consulting’s Wendy Carrara, project manager for the European Data Portal, discusses the UK’s open data readiness, including ways it could learn from its neighbours and even improve on its open data policy

        Open data – that is, publicly available data that’s free for all to use – is set to have a monumental impact on societies in the next five years. Whether it’s information regarding public transportation, citypolicy or city infrastructures, open data enables public sector bodies, business and citizens alike to make more informed decisions about the things that really matter. While it may sound like a popular buzzword from years gone by, governments across the globe are now developing policies that encourage the release of open government data. However, having policy in place is a far cry from actually getting it done.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Nestlé Just Granted Permit to Double Water Extraction 120 Miles from Flint, MI

      Nestlé is at it again. Recently publicly condemned for pumping 36 million gallons of water from Strawberry Creek in the San Bernardino National Forest, paying a meager $524 annually for a permit that expired long ago, the multi-national company is now planning to milk the citizens of Flint, Michigan, to keep their water privatization plan afloat.

      Nestlé was just given a permit to almost double the groundwater they extract from the Michigan area amidst the recent Flint water crisis. This means the company will be taking more than 210 million gallons annually while many Flint residents are still suffering from the long-term effects of lead exposure.

      Nestlé is not even based in the U.S., but the Swiss transnational is taking water from hundreds of local water supplies. The U.S. represents its largest bottled water market. Nestlé also controls more than 70 of the world’s bottled water brands, among them Perrier, San Pellegrino, Ice Mountain, Pure Life, and Vittel.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Pentagon Again Dramatically Under-Reports Civilians Killed in Airstrikes

      Previous reports from Centcom were a dramatic under-count, and that trend continued with this new report, which carefully omitted some of the biggest and most well-documented incidents, which apparently fell into the category of strikes that the Pentagon decided not to investigate at all.

      The most conspicuously absent figures are from mid-July, when a flurry of US airstrikes against the city of Manbij and the surrounding area killed an estimated 200 civilians. At least 56 civilians were killed in one single incident, which at the time the US claimed they “mistook for ISIS.”

      Despite the Pentagon feeling the need to come up with excuses for the Manbij strikes at the time, they not only didn’t include them in the final death toll, but didn’t even hazard an attempt to mention the well-documented incidents in the document.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Now that Trump has won, TransCanada wants to give Keystone XL pipeline another try

      TransCanada said it hopes to persuade a new Trump administration to revive the controversial Keystone XL crude oil pipeline that President Obama rejected on Nov. 6, 2015.

      Taking advantage of President-elect Trump’s vow to launch a series of major infrastructure programs, Calgary-based TransCanada said it was “evaluating ways to convince the new administration on the benefits, the jobs and the tax revenues this project brings to the table.”

      “TransCanada remains fully committed to building Keystone XL,” the company said.

    • Construction of Dakota Access Pipeline set to begin its final, most contested stretch

      The company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline is preparing to tunnel under Lake Oahe, the body of water at the heart of the protests against the crude oil pipeline. This last phase of construction would join the two already-completed sections of the pipeline, Reuters reports.

      The company, Energy Transfer Partners, announced today that drilling underneath the lake will start in two weeks despite government agencies’ requests to wait, according to The Guardian. The pipeline is expected to be completed by the end of 2016, the company says.

      Protesters, including the local Standing Rock Sioux tribe, have been fighting the the $3.7 billion pipeline since April. They argue that the pipeline, which is intended to carry crude oil from North Dakota to a refinery in Illinois, could pollute water supplies and destroy culturally important land. In September, the US Justice and Interior Departments and the Army Corps of Engineer requested that Energy Transfer Partners voluntarily stop construction underneath the lake.

    • America’s Brief Role as a Climate Leader Is Probably Over

      While America was watching Donald Trump sweep the polls, climate representatives from over 200 countries saw America’s commitments to international climate goals blow away. This week, climate negotiators—along with NGOs, journalists, and other observers—are gathered in Marrakesh, Morroco to flesh out the details of the Paris agreement, newly ratified and enacted by the United Nations to address climate change. And though Trump hasn’t described his climate and energy policies in detail, he has made it clear that he will not honor promises the Obama administration made to combat the intensifying global warming catastrophe.

      The Clean Power Plan. Tax breaks for renewable energy. Cabinet appointees and a Supreme Court seat. Trump has the power to drastically change US environmental policy—and as the soon-to-be-leader of the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, his decisions will change the math for other nations previously committed to climate regulations. Some will follow the US, and dial back (or abandon) their goals. Others will stay the course. And still others might double down on climate goals, potentially gaining global clout as a result. However the 45th president of the US proceeds, his decisions on climate will affect everyone on Earth.

  • Finance

    • Shock as India scraps 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes

      Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley says “honest people” have no need to worry about a decision to scrap 1,000 and 500 rupee notes.

      Mr Jaitley said the move would flush out tax evaders, adding that all old notes deposited in banks would be subjected to tax laws.

      The surprise move, announced on Tuesday evening, is part of a crackdown on corruption and illegal cash holdings.

    • Robots Will Take Two-Thirds of All Jobs In the Developing World, UN Says

      It’s a common belief that low-wage workers will be hit the hardest by advanced robots in the workplace. When we take a global perspective on this, the people that will be most affected by widespread automation won’t be workers in North America, according to a new United Nations report—it’ll be people in developing countries.

      Automation stands to reduce opportunities for low-wage workers in North America, the report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development states. But the types of jobs most likely to be eliminated entirely are more prevalent in developing nations. That’s because those same jobs, in sectors like farming and manufacturing, have already mostly dried up in wealthier nations as corporations have moved their operations abroad, in search of higher profits through lower wage costs.

    • Feeling the oil crunch: Saudi Arabia cancels $266bn in projects

      Saudi Arabia’s governing economic body called the Council of Economic and Development Affairs (CEDA) has cancelled $266.7 billion in projects, the Saudi Press Agency said, and announced it would be settling much-delayed private-sector payments by year end.

      The projects that have been canceled are the ones that are not expected to accelerate the kingdom’s growth or improve the living standards for its people.

      The cancellations were first considered in September, but at the time, it was noted that only $20 billion in projects would be considered to put on the chopping block.

      The size of the delayed payments—mainly due to severe hits to the kingdom’s oil revenue—remains undisclosed, but it includes delayed payments to construction firms, medical establishments, and foreign consultants. One analyst, according to Reuters, estimated that the amount still owing just to construction firms was US$21 billion.

    • Engineer sold as slave in Saudi Arabia, family wants him back

      An automobile engineer, who went to Saudi Arabia for better job opportunities, has allegedly been “sold” to a Saudi national as a slave to work in his camel farm. The family members of Jayanta Biswas have approached the Ministry of External Affairs for help in bringing him back from Saudi Arabia.

      However, they are yet to receive a word from the ministry. “We appeal to the Indian government to initiate action in order to bring my brother back. We are at our wit’s end,” Gouri Biswas, elder sister of Jayanta, said.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Huffington Post ending editor’s note that called Donald Trump ‘racist’

      The Huffington Post’s editor’s note calling Donald Trump as a “racist” and “xenophobe” is no more, a source in the newsroom tells POLITICO.

      For months, every story on the Huffington Post about Trump came with the following note at the bottom of the article.

    • Vigils and protests swell across U.S. in wake of Trump victory

      Vigils and protests continued into the early hours Thursday as opponents of President-elect Donald Trump expressed dismay with the election results, underscoring the difficult task he faces in uniting a fractured country.

      Despite Hillary Clinton and President Obama urging their backers to accept Trump’s victory and support his transition into power, thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets decrying his crude comments about women and attacks on immigrants.

      Protests were reported in cities across the nation, from major metropolitan centers like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, to smaller cities, such as Richmond and Portland, Ore. Dozens of demonstrators were arrested.

      Even cities in red states, such as Atlanta, Dallas and Kansas City, Mo., saw demonstrations.

      At least two police officers in Oakland, Calif., were injured as protesters took to the streets and chanted slogans against Trump, a police spokeswoman said. A few protesters threw objects at police dressed in riot gear, set off fireworks and started small trash fires.

    • Donald Trump and the Art of the Political Deal

      If you have a quick look at President-Elect Donald Trump’s approach – as a businessperson – to legal obligations, you may see something interesting about his approach to politics.

      Trump sees himself as a master of the “art of the deal”.

      And he certainly has an interesting and artful approach to contract law.

      By way of background, classical contract law is about the sanctity of the agreement: the bargain.

      All parties to a contract agree in advance what to do throughout the period of the contract regarding foreseeable risks. This means that there is a lot of “front-end” thought put into a contract: more time working things out in advance, the fewer problems later.

    • The US Election

      But my main point is the European establishment’s response to the Trump presidential victory. And let us not deceive ourselves here – this was an emphatic victory. The American people wanted a candidate for change, for a push-back against the perceived Washington political elite.

      Perhaps the election could have swung in another direction towards another candidate for change – if Bernie Sanders had been the Democrat nominee. Alas, as we know from the DNC files leaked to and published by Wikileaks, his campaign was undermined by his own party in favour of Hillary Clinton, while promoting Trump as the Republican candidate that Clinton could beat.

    • Canadian immigration site crashes after Trump leads in election

      As the US presidential elections move along, Canada’s informational website for immigration has unexpectedly crashed as Donald Trump currently leads in votes.

    • RNC model showed Trump losing

      The RNC’s sophisticated predictive modeling had Trump losing in the campaign’s last stretch, all the way until the Friday afternoon before the election, according to an embargoed briefing the RNC delivered to reporters at the party’s Capitol Hill headquarters on Friday afternoon.

      At the time of the briefing, the RNC’s model showed Trump finishing 30 electoral votes short of the tally needed to clinch the White House, while losing by various margins to Hillary Clinton in the battleground states of Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

      Trump won all those states, and the Associated Press declared him the winner at 2:31 a.m. on Wednesday — a shocking upset victory that most pollsters struggled to explain.

      [...]

      The briefing was called ostensibly to highlight the RNC’s advances in voter modeling and its heavy investment in the party’s ground game. But it also seemed at least partly intended to prove that the Republican Party gave Trump — and all of its 2016 candidates — the tools to succeed in 2016.

      The suggestion was unmistakable: if Trump loses, the blame should fall on the rookie candidate and his overmatched campaign — and not the party or its chairman Reince Priebus.

      The briefing was conducted by the RNC’s top staff, who asked reporters to agree not to divulge details — or even the existence of the briefing — before the election was called.

      The RNC’s model included 9.8 billion rows of data collected from 26 million phone calls that allowed the RNC to assign scores between 0 and 100 on all manner of issues.

    • [Old] How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

      I was born and raised in Trump country. My family are Trump people. If I hadn’t moved away and gotten this ridiculous job, I’d be voting for him. I know I would.

    • How Does the Electoral College Work?

      The Electoral College is a group of people that elects the president and the vice president of the United States. (The word “college” in this case simply refers to an organized body of people engaged in a common task.)

      As voters head to the polls on Tuesday, they will not vote for the presidential candidates directly, in a popular vote. Instead, they will vote to elect specific people, known as “electors” to the college. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes based on its population.

    • Trump won – now what?

      In some sort of a reaction against the political elite, a corrupt system, and political correctness – the US has elected Donald Trump as president.

      On the one hand, it is more or less impossible to foresee the president elects politics on IT, mass surveillance, and civil rights. (OK, he has opened up for torture of suspected terrorists – but I’m not sure that he himself will remember or stand by that.)

    • Why TV News Couldn’t Quit Donald Trump

      Donald Trump’s relationship with the news media during his successful run for the presidency was, put politely, complex. A better word might be codependent. Trump lashed out regularly at those whose coverage of his campaign he found unfavorable — tweeting insults, banning and unbanning news organizations, promising to strengthen libel and defamation laws. But free media coverage, particularly from TV news outlets, was also the fuel that powered the Trump machine.

      What television news outlets received in return were outsize ratings. For the four weeks of Oct. 10-Nov. 6, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC averaged 84% more primetime viewers than they did over the same period a year ago. The increased numbers — and accompanying ad dollars — rolled in as the networks handed large swathes of airtime over to live feeds of Trump campaign events. Those same networks were caught by surprise Tuesday night by Trump’s victory. Now they must decide whether the trade-off was worth it.

      “I think they have to examine the amount of unfiltered airtime they gave to the President-elect,” said Katz Television Group’s Bill Carroll. “If you were going to look at any of the cable networks for the last year, often the key phrase would be, ‘And now we go to a rally for Donald Trump.’”

    • The Day After

      So: we wake up the morning after the US election to discover … what?

      Here’s my short term prediction, followed by my long term prediction. (And if you are American, I’m very, very, sorry.)

      Next couple of months: Obama exits. People will feel a strange sad fondness for the utopian era of good governance. (In time, the past 8 years will seem surrounded by a rosy glow, as of Camelot during the days of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; they will even come to think kindly of George W. Bush.)

    • Industry, party figures mix with Trump loyalists for cabinet picks

      The US government’s science efforts are split across a variety of agencies. Some are obvious, like the EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior, which oversees the national parks and Endangered Species Act. But others are less so. For example, the Commerce Department includes the NOAA, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, while the National Institutes of Health falls within the Department of Health and Human Services.

      The people who run these agencies will have major say over the US’ research priorities for the next four years, and they’ll determine what role science plays in making policy decisions. So, as the Trump transition team begins the work of vetting potential candidates, the rumored names may say a lot about what we can expect.

      A lot of these rumors are preliminary enough that they essentially tell us nothing. For example, possible candidates floated for Commerce Secretary include everyone from the Republican National Committee finance chair (Lew Eisenberg), to two different business executives, to several of Trump’s former primary opponents like Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Perry. The NOAA keeps one of the US’ two temperature records used for climate monitoring (NASA keeps the other), and it tracks the ocean’s health. (It may also get all of NASA’s earth sciences research.) But it’s hard to guess whether any of these figures would pay much attention to these activities, much less make major revisions in them.

    • WikiLeaks not letting up on Clinton, Podesta

      WikiLeaks on Wednesday published a 36th batch of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, just hours after the presidential election concluded with Donald Trump’s victory over Clinton.

      The release, which includes 225 emails obtained from Podesta’s personal Gmail account, brings the total released by WikiLeaks to 58,660. The organization began releasing the messages in early October, and claimed at the time to have around 50,000 on hand. It isn’t clear how many more the website holds, or how long the releases will continue, but they seemed timed to hurt Clinton’s chances of becoming the next president.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • China’s vast Internet prison

      CHINA’S INTERNET is a universe of contradictions. It has brought hundreds of millions of people online and has become a vast marketplace for digital commerce, yet it is also heavily policed by censors to snuff out any challenge to the ruling Communist Party. Under President Xi Jinping, the censors are working overtime to keep 721 million Internet users under control.

    • China’s new cybersecurity laws could have chilling effect on Tibet

      The Chinese government is to further restrict Internet use by adopting a new law that may have serious consequences for Tibetans who try to communicate with the outside world.

      The regressive measure named the Cybersecurity Law was passed by China’s Parliament on 7 November in order to combat what Beijing said is a growing threat of hacking and terrorism, but it has drawn criticism from the international community, business groups and human rights groups.

      The law aims to strengthen the country’s already restrictive internet controls by forcing companies to censor information the government declares “prohibited” and to support state surveillance requests. This includes requiring them to monitor network activity and provide investigative assistance to security agencies.

    • Far-right Polish groups protest Facebook profile blockages

      Several far-right Polish groups have protested outside Facebook’s office in Warsaw after the social networking site temporarily blocked their profiles.

      About 120 people demonstrated in the Polish capital Saturday afternoon, denouncing what they said was “censorship.”

      Facebook recently blocked the profiles of far-right nationalist groups ahead of nationalist demonstrations on Independence Day next Friday, Nov. 11. In recent years, extremist groups have clashed violently with police on the annual holiday. Facebook has since unblocked the profiles.

    • When the screen goes blank

      The Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s 24-hour ban on the television channel NDTV India over its Pathankot coverage is being seen as an attempt to muzzle inconvenient live reportage. And worse, a case of selective vendetta. The Ministry has invoked the Cable Television Networks (Amendment) Rules, 2015, on the ground that the channel broadcast “crucial information” which compromised national security. These rules prohibit “live coverage of any anti-terrorist operation by security forces” and restrict media coverage to “periodic briefing” by a designated officer “till such operation concludes”. It is not clear if the channel’s impugned broadcast was ‘live coverage’ or just ‘reportage’.

    • Censorship and ‘censorship’

      AT&T, the communications conglomerate which owns Direct TV, was hauled into the court of public opinion Friday, charged with censorship for pulling the plug on Fox News.

      Irate customers of the satellite television subscriber service took to the internet to voice their suspicions, tar and feathers at the ready.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • A madman has been given the keys to the surveillance state

      When the USA PATRIOT Act was signed into law on October 26, 2001, it erased many of the vital checks and balances that stood between the American people and their government. As Bush supporters cheered the unprecedented power that their people in Washington now held, the civil liberties world warned them: “Your president has just fashioned a weapon that will be wielded by all who come after him.”

    • Facebook built another Snapchat clone specifically for emerging markets [Ed: Facebook comes up with new ways to spy on people people, hoarding more secrets that can be sold]

      We’ve seen this play out before. Twice, in fact. In both instances — first with Poke, then with Slingshot — Facebook’s attempt to create a legitimate Snapchat competitor flopped.

    • Google’s Android Phones Threaten Democracy, ACLU Technologist Warns

      The editors at Businessweek like that approach. In a Halloween post on Bloomberg View, the editors argued privacy would be better served if internet service providers gave consumers the option to pay for it rather than for the FCC to require—as it recently has—that consumers must opt in to corporate surveillance. The editors wrote, “So-called pay-for-privacy policies, in which companies charge users more in exchange for not tracking them, is one promising approach.”

      It turns out that privacy already has a price, and one can roughly find it in a straightforward way, according to Christopher Soghoian, a technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. It runs about $400. That’s the price of the cheapest new iPhone available on the market today.

      In a recently released TED talk, Soghoian said there’s a “digital security divide” between wealthier iPhone users and generally low-income buyers of devices running on Google’s Android operating system. This threatens democracy, he argues, because today’s new civil rights movements run on mobile technology, but most of these new leaders’ followers will receive marching orders on phones that don’t protect them.

    • A Trumped America makes for bad UK surveillance, warns Open Rights Group

      THE OPEN RIGHTS GROUP (ORG) has been quick to express concerns that the new American president, a known reactionary blowhard, now runs the US National Security Agency (NSA) and will therefore work closely with GCHQ.

    • Trump’s torture support could mean the end of GCHQ-NSA relationship
    • Obama has handed a surveillance state and war machine to a maniac

      In a little over two months, Donald Trump – after his shocking victory last night – will control a vast, unaccountable national security and military apparatus unparalleled in world history. The nightmare that civil libertarians have warned of for years has now tragically come true: instead of dismantling the surveillance state and war machine, the Obama administration and Democrats institutionalised it – and it will soon be in the hands of a maniac.

      It will go down in history as perhaps President Obama’s most catastrophic mistake.

      The Obama administration could have prosecuted torturers and war criminals in the Bush administration and sent an unmistakable message to the world: torture is illegal and unconscionable. Instead the president said they would “look forward, not backward”, basically turning a clear felony into a policy dispute. Trump has bragged that he will bring back torture – waterboarding and “much worse”. He has talked about killing the innocent family members of terrorists, openly telling the world he will commit war crimes.

    • President Obama Should Shut Down the NSA’s Mass Spying Before It’s Too Late

      Modern surveillance programs would be a disaster under President Trump

      President Obama has just 71 days until Donald Trump is inaugurated as our next commander-in-chief. That means he has a matter of weeks to do one thing that could help prevent the United States from veering into fascism: declassifying and dismantling as much of the federal government’s unaccountable, secretive, mass surveillance state as he can — before Trump is the one running it.

    • Scared About Trump Wielding FBI And NSA Cyber Power? You Should Be
    • People in tech are freaking out about Donald Trump being given control of the NSA

      Last month, Wired published a story with the headline “Imagine if Donald Trump controlled the NSA.” Now there’s no need to imagine.

      Trump overcame all odds on Wednesday when he became the 45th president-elect of the United States. As a result, he’s about to gain control of the US intelligence agencies, including the NSA (National Security Agency).

    • Could President Trump Really Turn the NSA Into a Personal Spy Machine?

      It’s the nightmare scenario that many worried about: the US elects a president who uses the country’s nearly omnipotent surveillance powers for his or her own gain. Edward Snowden has described the NSA’s spying capabilities as the “architecture of oppression,” with the fear being that it could be deployed by a malicious commander in chief.

      But what could President Trump, a man who has incited hate speech against minorities and threatened to jail his political rivals, actually do with the NSA? Could he turn the NSA into his own personal spying army?

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Girls as young as 12 married off overseas, dropped off at school by 30-year-old husbands

      A Sydney woman, who attended Islamic colleges in Sydney’s west, says girls as young as 12 would be married off overseas and some were dropped off at school by husbands aged in their 30s.

      Iraqi-born Bee al-Darraj, now 24, said she tried to report multiple counts of child marriage among her friends and relatives to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) without success.

    • Erdogan: Don’t heed what Europe says, listen to what Allah says

      Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday called on his supporters not to heed what “Europe says and care about what Allah says,” on the latest developments in his country which the European Union described as “extremely worrying.”

      Addressing a public gathering in the capital Ankara, Erdogan slammed the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) leaders and lawmakers, 10 of whom Turkish authorities imprisoned since Friday.

      “Those who lean on terrorists will continue paying the price,” said Erdogan referring to a speech by the now jailed HDP co-chair Figen Yuksekdag.

      The HDP co-chair had earlier praised the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) fight against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria.

      “We lean on the YPG, YPJ, and Rojava,” Yuksekdag had declared in a July 2015 speech to a crowd in the Suruc district of Urfa Province right across the border with the town of Kobani in Syrian Kurdistan.

      Kobani was notably saved from a complete IS takeover earlier in the year by the US-backed Kurdish forces.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Net neutrality is suddenly on the chopping block

      The release of the FCC’s net neutrality rules in 2015 heralded one of the most important progressive changes to the internet in memory. The rules, which barred data throttling and paid fast lanes, were celebrated as a central tenet of Obama-era government regulation. At the time, Obama said the “decision will protect innovation and create a level playing field for the next generation of entrepreneurs.”

      Now it seems possible that next generation won’t see net neutrality in action. Although telecom policy was hardly a central pillar of Trump’s candidacy, he has gone on record against it. “Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab,” Trump tweeted in 2014. “Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media.” (It’s unclear what Trump means with comparisons to the FCC’s long-eliminated Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to provide airtime for opposing views. Conservative media was also not “targeted” by net neutrality in any tangible way.)

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Troll Backs Down When Faced With Exposure

        Companies that make money from threatening alleged file-sharers are known for their bullying tactics but those who are prepared to fight back can enjoy success. A letter sent by a defense lawyer to the copyright trolls behind the movie London Has Fallen provides an excellent and highly entertaining example.

11.09.16

Links 9/11/2016: Xen 4.6.4 and 4.7.1, Tor 0.2.9.5 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 9:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

    • Get Trained and Certified on Kubernetes with The Linux Foundation and CNCF

      Companies in diverse industries are increasingly building applications designed to run in the cloud at a massive, distributed scale. That means they are also seeking talent with experience deploying and managing such cloud native applications using containers in microservices architectures.

    • Kernel Summit + Linux Plumbers 2016

      Last week was the annual kernel summit and Linux Plumbers Conference in Santa Fe, NM. Like other conferences, this involved a bunch of scheduled talks and lots of hallway track (and plenty of Mexican food).

    • Cloud Native Computing Foundation Adds New Project, Grows Membership

      With Kubernetes momentum building, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation adds a fourth project, announces new members and starts a certification program.
      The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which got its start in July 2015 as a vendor-neutral home for the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration platform, is now a broader effort. On Nov. 8, the CNCF announced new members, certification, training and a new project at the inaugural Cloud Native Con, which is co-located with KubeCon in Seattle.

    • Canonical and Others Join Cloud Native Computing Foundation

      When The Linux Foundation announced the Cloud Native Computing Foundation last year, its members already represented some of the most powerful technology and open source leaders around. Right out of the gate, members included AT&T, Box, Cisco, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Docker, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Switch SUPERNAP, Twitter, Univa, VMware and Weaveworks.

    • Thunderbolt Networking Support For Linux Revised Once More

      Back during the summer we last wrote about Thunderbolt networking support for Linux being worked on. Back then the patches were up to its v3 revision while coming out today is the ninth version of these patches, but at least the end might finally be in sight.

    • Graphics Stack

      • HiZ Improvement For Intel Mesa Driver Has Possible Small Performance Gains

        Mesa Git continues to be an exciting place to live for open-source GPU driver fans.

        Landing Tuesday in Mesa Git was a HiZ auxiliary buffer support for Skylake “Gen 9″ hardware and that was followed by support for sampling with HiZ, again something for Skylake and newer.

        With this HiZ-based sampling, performance improvements can be expected in some cases. The Git commit notes of gains between 0.4~2.2% for some OpenGL tests. While their Vulkan driver has taken much focus lately along with completing OpenGL 4.5 compliance, great to see the Intel Mesa driver continuing to receive performance optimizations.

    • Benchmarks

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Q4OS 1.8 “Orion” GNU/Linux Distro Ships with Brand New Trinity 14.0.4 Desktop

        Today, November 9, 2016, the developers of the Q4OS GNU/Linux distribution were pleased to inform Softpedia about the release and immediate availability of the Q4OS 1.8 “Orion” release.

      • Alpine Linux 3.4.6 released

        The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.4.6 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

        This is a bugfix release of the v3.4 musl based branch, based on linux-4.4.30 kernels and it contains important security fixes for the kernel.

      • IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 107 released

        This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 107. It mainly comes with a fix for the Dirty COW vulnerability in the Linux kernel and fixes various issues with the latest DNS proxy update in Core Update version 106.

      • Announcing Rockstor 3.8.15

        I am thrilled to announce the release of Rockstor 3.8.15. It’s been a long release cycle and It’s our 30th release, woohoo! We have entered a new phase of Rockstor community growth with steady patches from dedicated contributors. A total of 43 issues were closed making this a substantial update. Several enhancements were made to the UI, prominently to the dashboard. I’d like to also highlight the big(design and implementation) refactoring of our backend disk management. Last but not least, numerous improvements and bugfixes were committed throughout the stack. Please see the list below for detailed log of all patches that went in.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • Now Available: Red Hat Certificate System 9.1 & Red Hat Directory Server 10.1

        Today we are pleased to announce the release of Red Hat Certificate System 9.1 and Red Hat Directory Server 10.1, both supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3.

        Red Hat Certificate System, based on the open source PKI capabilities of the Dogtag Certificate System, is designed to provide Certificate Life Cycle Management (i.e. to issue, renew, suspend, revoke, archive/recover, and manage the single and dual-key X.509v3 certificates needed to handle strong authentication, single sign-on, and secure communications).

      • Red Hat Named a Leader in Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management
      • Is Red Hat’s channel strategy paying off in Australia?

        Red Hat’s Australian operation is aiming to see a 50/50 split between direct and indirect revenues by the end of the company’s current financial year.

        If the company’s local business does, indeed, reach this equilibrium between channel and non-channel sales, it will have been helped along by the local team’s ongoing efforts to invest time and money into the Australian IT channel.

        “The channel business has been growing consistently now,” Red Hat Australia’s sales and channel director, Colin Garro, told ARN. “From a go-to-market perspective, we’ve deliberately set out to grow our channel business.”

        When Garro began working at Red Hat Australia in 2012, a large part of the open source software vendor’s local revenue was from direct sales, rather than channel-based activities.

      • Fedora

        • Your Last Chance To Test Out Fedora 25

          Fedora 25 is currently scheduled for release next week on 15 November. The Go/No-Go meeting for it is tomorrow so there’s still the chance it could be delayed but a (hopefully) final release candidate is now available for last minute testing.

        • Factory 2.0, Sprint 3 Report

          This was our first full sprint with the new team! Welcome, Jan Kaluza, Courtney Pacheco, Vera Karas, and Stanislav Ochotnicky. We’re glad to have Filip Valder join us in sprint 4 starting today.

          Our top priority in sprint 3 was making sure that the base runtime team isn’t blocked. They have a big job ahead of themselves to curate and build a collection of base modules at the core of the distro, and they need to use our prototype build tooling to do it. Anytime they’re blocked, the Factory 2.0 team is trying to chase down the solution — fixing tracebacks and developing new features. Cheers to Matt Prahl and Jan Kaluza for staying on top of this.

          Meanwhile, we’re continuing apace with the Dependency Chain and Deserialization epics that we originally scheduled for work this quarter. Mike Bonnet has been chasing down difficult technical pre-requisites for the later (message bus enablement), Matt Prahl demoed his dependency chain web UI, and Courtney Pacheco is giving shape to our metrics project (so we can have some confidence that future pipeline changes we make actually improve the state of affairs).

    • Debian Family

      • A few impressions of DebConf 16 in Cape Town

        Firstly, thanks to everyone who came out and added their own uniqueness and expertise to the pool. The feedback received so far has been very positive and I feel that the few problems we did experience was dealt with very efficiently. Having a DebConf in your hometown is a great experience, consider a bid for hosting a DebConf in your city!

      • Derivatives

        • Univention Corporate Server 4.1-4 Simplifies the Migration to Dockerize Apps

          Softpedia was informed today, November 8, 2016, by Univention’s Maren Abatielos about the release and general availability of the fourth point release of Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.1.

          Shipping with the latest security updates from the Debian Stable (Jessie) software repositories, Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.1-4 adds a bunch of interesting improvements and new features to the Linux-based, server-oriented operating system from Univention. Among these, we can mention the implementation of Samba 4.5.1 for better Active Directory compatibility and DRS replication.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Embedded PC runs Ubuntu on Tegra TX1

            Connect Tech’s “Rudi” mini-PC runs Ubuntu on an Nvidia Jetson TX1 COM with 4GB LPDDR4, eMMC and mSATA, 5x USB, 2x GbE, mini-PCIe, and -20 to 80°C support.

            Like many recent embedded computers. Connect Tech’s 135 x 105 x 50mm Rudi Embedded System fudges the line between mini-PC and a full-fledged industrial PC. Aimed at “deployable computer vision and deep learning applications,” the system ships with a Linux For Tegra R24.2 distribution based on 64-bit Ubuntu 16.04 pre-installed on 16GB of eMMC. Like Connect Tech’s Rosie embedded computer, the Rudi runs Nvidia’s quad-core, 64-bit Tegra TX1 SoC on Nvidia’s Jetson TX1 computer-on-module.

          • Ubuntu Budgie Is Now an Official Ubuntu Flavor

            Just a few moments ago, Softpedia was informed by budgie-remix developers David Mohammed and Udara Madubhashana that their GNU/Linux distribution built around the Budgie desktop environment is now an official Ubuntu flavor.

          • Ubuntu Budgie Becomes An Official Flavor

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Lubuntu 16.10 – enjoyable motley lightness

              Lubuntu is one flavour of the Ubuntu operating system that Linux notes from DarkDuck ignored for quite some time. The blog exists for 6 years now, but the first review of Lubuntu 16.04 was only written in September 2016, 2 months ago.

              Lubuntu 16.10 was released since then, so let’s have a look on this new release now. I have also written a review of Kubuntu 16.10 recently, so I will compare Lubuntu and Kubuntu here and there as we go.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux-driven COM/carrier offers mid-range Zynq

      MYIR has launched a COM that runs Linux on a Zynq-7015 ARM/FPGA SoC, and mounts on a carrier with USB, GbE, HDMI, PMOD, and FMC I/O.

      MYIR’s MYC-C7Z015 computer-on-module and MYD-C7Z015 development board are variations on the MYC-C7Z010/20 COM with accompanying MYD-C7Z010/20 baseboard. Instead of offering a Xilinx Zynq-7010 or -7020 SoC, the MYC-C7Z015 provides the Zynq-7015, which has the same dual 667MHz to 866MHz Cortex-A9 subsystem, but offers an Artik 7 FPGA variant that falls in between the -7010 and -7020. The Zynq-7015 features 74k logic cells, 160 DSP slices, 380KB block RAM, and four 6.25Gbps transceivers.

    • First 3.5-inch Apollo Lake single board computers appear

      Aaeon and Avalue each unveiled 3.5-inch SBCs using Intel’s Apollo Lake processors, providing triple display support, wide-range power, and up to 8GB of RAM.

      Aaeon’s GENE-APL5 and Avalue’s ECM-APL are the first 3.5-inch (146 x 101mm) form factor single board computers we’ve seen that support Intel’s 14nm-fabricated “Apollo Lake” Atom E3900 SoCs. The Avalue model is the only one with optional industrial temperature support.

    • Orange Pi PC 2 Is A Cheap Quad Core Linux Computer For $20 That Runs Ubuntu

      A new addition to the community of single board computers is the Orange Pi PC 2. It is a Linux computer which packs a 64-bit quad-core CPU. It can run various Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Raspbian, and Android. The tiny computer is available for $20.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • Top 3 questions job seekers ask in open source

    As a recruiter working in the open source world, I love that I interact every day with some of the smartest people around. I get to hear about the cool projects they’re working on and what they think about the industry, and when they are ready for a new challenge. I get to connect them to companies that are quietly changing the world.

    But one thing I enjoy most about working with them is their curiosity: they ask questions, and in my conversations, I hear a lot of inquiries about the job search and application process. That makes sense; it’s often opaque, never the same for any two people, and we are bombarded daily with new advice on every platform. So I asked my colleague at Greythorn, Mary Kypreos, to help me determine which questions we get the most often. With her assistance, I’ve answered the three most common questions we get.

  • Open source FIWARE platform creates new IoT business opportunities

    The European-funded IoT open source platform FIWARE has matured significantly in the past two years according to developers, and is now being used in industrial production cases, pilot smart city, and utilities projects. Two projects using the FIWARE platform include a city water quality pilot and an early warning system to identify and prevent pest risks to agricultural crops.

    To further support industry uptake, FIWARE has recently formalized a foundation to lead community efforts. The Foundation is expected to see a new wave of community participation in the open source platform, which already has significant links with other open source projects. For example, FIWARE’s testbed environment—FIWARE Labs—uses a multi-region cloud environment built on OpenStack.

  • Open source needs to deliver diversity

    Tech’s gender gap is no secret. It has been widely discussed for a decade, yet little progress has been made. In the five years between 2010 and 2015, the percentage of women in tech jobs in the UK increased from 17% to just 18%. This figure is underwhelming to say the least, but there is one critical area of technology where the gender gap is even wider.

    Analysis conducted last year by the co-founder of freelance software developer network Toptal found that just 5.4% of GitHub users with over 10 contributions from their sample were female. This indicates that open source software development teams are even less diverse than typical corporate software development teams.

  • Google unveils ‘Code-in 2016′ open source mentor organizations

    Open source software and ideology is critical to the future of technology. As more and more people demand transparency in the programs and applications they use, companies will have to take notice.

    To keep the open source movement going, it must be handed down to incoming developers. In other words, the children are our future, and education is key. Google’s “Code-In” contest is a great program that invites teen students to directly contribute to quality open source projects. Now, the search giant finally announces the projects that will be participating as “mentors”.

  • 4 open source initiatives that need your help

    What makes open source projects special isn’t the software or even the licensing, it’s the pooling of talents and the spirit of free giving around these projects.

    But not all open source initiatives become the object of corporate sponsorship or widespread devotion. And some that get such support don’t always keep it.

  • Another Old Intel Motherboard Gets Picked Up By Coreboot

    If you still are running Intel i945 era hardware, you may be happy to know another motherboard from this time is now supported by mainline Coreboot.

    The newest motherboard supported by Coreboot is the Gigabyte GA-945GCM-S2L. This micro-ATX i945 motherboard from the Core 2 Extreme / Core 2 Duo days has DDR2-667 support, Intel GMA 950 graphics, SATA 2.0, Gigabit LAN, and Intel HD Audio.

  • Events

  • Healthcare

    • Two Regenstrief innovators win AMIA’s Lindberg Award for open source EHR work in developing countries

      Burke Mamlin, MD, and Paul Biondich, MD, of the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine, will receive the 2016 Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics from the American Medical Informatics Association for their work on open source software.

      AMIA’s Lindberg award recognizes individuals for technological, research, or educational contribution that advances biomedical informatics.

      Mamlin, an internist, and Biondich, a pediatrician, are pioneers in the development, testing, and use of open source software to support the delivery of healthcare in developing countries.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Why keep Open States going?

      After the closure of Sunlight Labs, the Open States project is heading in a new direction.

    • Open Data

      • “500,000 data scientists needed in European open research data”

        There is an alarming shortage of data experts both globally and in the European Union. This is partly based on an archaic reward and funding system for science and innovation, sustaining the article culture and preventing effective data publishing and re-use. A lack of core intermediary expertise has created a chasm between e-infrastructure providers and scientific domain specialists.

  • Programming/Development

    • GStreamer and Synchronisation Made Easy

      A lesser known, but particularly powerful feature of GStreamer is our ability to play media synchronised across devices with fairly good accuracy.

      The way things stand right now, though, achieving this requires some amount of fiddling and a reasonably thorough knowledge of how GStreamer’s synchronisation mechanisms work. While we have had some excellent talks about these at previous GStreamer conferences, getting things to work is still a fair amount of effort for someone not well-versed with GStreamer.

Leftovers

  • BSA settles Australian software piracy cases

    Software industry advocacy group, the BSA|The Software Alliance, has settled three court cases in Australia, awarded a total of $58,000 in damages following the unlicensed use of software programmes owned by its members – Adobe, Autodesk and Microsoft – in breach of copyright law.

    The first case, Meldan (Vic) Pty Ltd, trading as Granvue Homes, a project home builder, paid $35,000 in damages for the use of unlicensed software, following an audit which revealed use of unlicensed product keys for Adobe Acrobat, Autodesk, AutoCAD and and Microsoft Office software.

    BSA says the Victorian settlement is the first for the state in 2016, following a record number of settlements for Victoria in 2014 and 2015 above any other state, “indicating an increase in Victorian business accountability in 2016 for software compliance”.

    In another case, Sosan Pty Ltd, an architectural model maker in Brisbane, was found to be using Autodesk Building Design Suite in excess of their license entitlements. In addition to paying damages of $18,000, Sosan has purchased the necessary licenses to legalise ongoing software deployments.

  • Croydon tram overturns: ‘Some loss of life’ and two trapped

    There has been “some loss of life” and dozens of people have been injured after a tram overturned in south London, police have said.

    British Transport Police said it was “too early to confirm numbers” following the derailment in Croydon just after 06:00 GMT.

    A number of people were freed but it is believed two people remain trapped.

    The cause of the crash is unclear, with investigators from the Rail Accident Investigation Branch on the way.

  • Science

    • Gus Grissom taught NASA a hard lesson: “You can hurt yourself in the ocean”

      Gus Grissom had just entered the history books. A mere 10 weeks after Alan Shepard made America’s first human flight into space, Grissom followed with the second one, a 15-minute suborbital hop that took him to an altitude of 189km above the blue planet. After the small Mercury capsule’s parachutes deployed, Grissom splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, seemingly bringing a flawless mission to a close.

      Only it wasn’t flawless, nor was it closed. At that moment, Gus Grissom almost drowned.

  • Security

    • Security, Cyber, and Elections (part 1)

      The US election cycle has been quite heavily dominated by cyber security issues. A number of cyber security experts have even stepped forward to offer their solutions to how to keep safe. Everyone has problems with their proposals, that fundamentally they all stem from not understanding the actual threat.

      Achieving security is possible using counterintelligence principles, but it requires knowing what you want to protect, who you want to protect it from, and then implementing that plan. I expect this post to be deeply unpopular with everyone, but I’ll explain my position anyway.

    • DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter

      A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack halted heating distribution at least in two properties in the city of Lappeenranta, located in eastern finland. In both of the events the attacks disabled the computers that were controlling heating in the buildings.

      Both of the buildings where managed by Valtia. The company who is in charge of managing the buildings overall operation and maintenance. According to Valtia CEO, Simo Rounela, in both cases the systems that controlled the central heating and warm water circulation were temporarily disabled.

      In the city of Lappeenranta, there were at least two buildings whose systems were knocked down by the network attack. In a DDoS attack the network is overloaded by traffic from multiple locations with the aim of causing the system to fail.

    • Communications watchdog: Criminals behind home automation system cyber attack

      The Finnish communications regulator Ficora said it suspects criminal entities of coordinating a web attack that disrupted home automation systems in the southeastern city of Lappeenranta. However the agency said that the real target of the attack may not have been in Finland.

      “According to our information, the systems in question are not the intended targets in this case, but they were compromised in a cyber attack that focused on European entities. In other words, it seems that there was some criminal group behind it,” said Jarkko Saarimäki, head of Ficora’s cyber security centre.

      Officials said that the event bore the hallmark of a denial of service (DoS) strike, which floods a service which so much web traffic that it is unable to provide services normally.

    • Researchers hack Philips Hue smart bulbs from the sky

      Security researchers in Canada and Israel have discovered a way to take over the Internet of Things (IoT) from the sky.

      Okay, that’s a little dramatic, but the researchers were able to take control of some Philips Hue lights using a drone. Based on an exploit for the ZigBee Light Link Touchlink system, white hat hackers were able to remotely control the Hue lights via drone and cause them to blink S-O-S in Morse code.

    • IoTSeeker Scanner Finds Smart Devices With Dumb Credentials

      The IoTSeeker tool from Rapid7 is designed to comb through users’ networks and identify common IoT devices with default usernames and passwords enabled. Those are the devices upon which botnets such as Mirai feed, especially those with telnet exposed on default ports. Mirai searches for devices with telnet enabled and using default credentials and then compromises them and begins scanning again.

    • DDoS Attack and Resiliency Measures

      Recently DDoS has come into the news because of recent attack (by IoT devices) on Twitter. Although DDoS is not a new kind of attack, because of the advent of IoT, the “smart” devices are new victims for web-based attacks, and as per the predictions it is more likely to grow. What makes this situation even more perilous is the rapid growth of IoT devices out there on the market. As per the estimate, there would be around 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020.

      The DDoS attacks cannot be mitigated completely but by taking some measures the effect can be minimized. This is the theme of this article. Let’s first understand…

    • Donald Trump’s campaign website ‘hacked’ by little poop emoji

      For a few hours the banner of Donald Trump’s website contained a familar face. The poop emoji.

      Perhaps foreshadowing the state in which we’re in, the little character appeared in the banner of donaldjtrump.com on Tuesday afternoon.

      This was a bug rather than a hack, and it allowed users to write in whatever they wished by adding it into the URL.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • 1 dead, multiple people shot near Azusa polling station as heavily armed man opens fire

      One person was killed and at least three others were wounded Tuesday in an active shooting near a polling place in Azusa.

      Authorities said police were dealing with at least one female suspect who was heavily armed. But several witnesses interviewed by The Times said the shooter was a man.

      “This is an active situation,” said Azusa Police Chief Steve Hunt, adding it’s too early to determine whether the violence was in any way related to the election.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • WikiLeaks published 300 more emails from Clinton’s campaign chief

      Although the US presidential election is over, WikiLeaks is continuing to publish the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, who remains a major player in Washington. This is the 36th batch of emails, released in a constant drip over the past month.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Environmentalists Target Bankers Behind Pipeline

      In early August, just as protesters from across the country descended on North Dakota to rally against an oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, some of the world’s biggest banks signed off on a $2.5 billion loan to help complete the sprawling project.

      Now, those banks — which include Citigroup and Wells Fargo of the United States, TD Bank of Canada and Mizuho of Japan — have come under fire for their role in bankrolling the pipeline. In an open letter on Monday, 26 environmental groups urged those banks to halt further loan payments to the project, which the Sioux say threatens their sacred lands and water supply.

      In campaigning to reduce the world’s carbon emissions, environmentalists have increasingly focused on the financiers behind the fossil fuel industry — highlighting their role in financing coal, oil and gas projects. It is an expansion of traditional protest efforts, and it has met with some early success.

      Environmental groups have also criticized the Dakota Access pipeline as outdated infrastructure with no place in a world racing to stave off the worst effects of climate change. The 1,172-mile pipeline is expected to carry nearly half a million barrels of crude oil daily out of the Bakken fields of North Dakota, according to the company building the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners.

    • Ecological Impact Assessments Aren’t Protecting Bats from Wind Farms

      Nothing is free in nature and this includes wind power. A particular concern with wind turbines is their effects on bats, which may often be found darting among treetops en masse while on the hunt for bugs to eat. When those treetops turn out to be spinning turbine blades, bad things happen: a bat might be hit directly, or it might wind up with bleeding lungs courtesy of abrupt changes in air pressure around turbines. Dozens of bats may be killed in a single night, only to be found the next morning littered underneath 30-foot turbine blades spinning at up to 80 miles per hour.

      The global standard for predicting such impacts from wind farms—and impacts from energy projects, generally—is the ecological impact assessment (EIA). In North America and Europe, bats are protected species (by the Endangered Species Act and EUROBATS, respectively), which means that such assessments are taken very seriously and are prepared at often great cost to wind farm developers. And, given this cost, we would hope that wind farm EIAs are actually doing something to protect bat populations. Alas, this does not seem to be the case, according to a study published Monday in Current Biology from the University of Exeter in the UK. Simply, the perception of risk revealed in the EIA process was not enough to predict actual bat casualties following construction of wind turbines. Bats are just too random.

    • Iran is back: Total signs $2 billion gas deal

      Foreign oil firms are returning to Iran for the first time since sanctions were eased early this year.

      France’s Total signed an agreement in principle on Tuesday to help Iran develop its giant South Pars gas field, together with Chinese state oil company CNPC.

      “Following Total’s successful development of phases 2 and 3 of South Pars in the 2000s, the group is back to Iran to develop and produce another phase of this giant gas field,” said Total CEO Patrick Pouyanné in a statement.

      Total (TOT) will operate the South Pars project with a stake of 50.1%. CNPC will own 30% and Iran’s Petropars 19.9%.

      The first phase will consist of 30 wells and two platforms connected to existing onshore treatment facilities by two pipelines at a cost of about $2 billion.

  • Finance

    • Taxpayers are still bailing out Wall Street, eight years later

      Eight-years after taxpayers rescued the U.S. financial system, some of the country’s largest banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, continue to receive billions in bailout money, according to government data.

      Wells Fargo is eligible for up to $1.5 billion in bailout funds over the next seven years. JPMorgan and Bank of America could receive $1.1 billion and $964 million respectively.

      The continuous flow of funds is a remnant of the $700 billion bailout effort, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP, put in place during the financial crisis. Some of that money, about $28 billion, was carved out to help distressed homeowners by paying banks to lower their interest rates and monthly payments.

      The program, the Home Affordable Modification Program, has undergone several revamps over the last few years and fallen short of helping the 3 million to 4 million homeowners the Obama administration initially hoped. But it continues to operate — HAMP will accept its last homeowner application at the end of this year — and big banks continue to be paid based on how many homeowners they help.

    • TPP ratification down to the wire in waning Obama White House

      No matter who prevails in Tuesday’s presidential election, the U.S. ambassador to Canada says President Barack Obama is determined to win an uphill fight to get congressional approval of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership deal during the lame-duck session.

      Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican challenger Donald Trump are opposed to the 12-country global trade deal, which includes Canada but excludes countries such as China and India. Both candidates have criticized the TPP for not being strong enough to provide more jobs to the U.S. economy.

      The intensely debated trade pact goes to a congressional vote at the end of the 2016 session. Congress has granted Mr. Obama “fast-track” authority over the deal, which allows lawmakers only to either reject or ratify it.

    • Obama will push for TPP trade deal in last days of term: ambassador

      President Barack Obama will use every remaining day of his term to win congressional approval for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, says the U.S. ambassador to Canada.

      Envoy Bruce Heyman says that remains the position of the current administration as Americans head to the polls today to select a new president from two protectionist candidates.

      Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump both oppose the 12-country Pacific Rim trade deal that would encompass 40 per cent of the world’s economy.

      Heyman had no comment on the two candidates’ positions on trade, but he made it clear in an interview that Obama will use the remaining time he has left in office to push the pact through Congress.

      There has been much speculation that Obama would use the period between the Nov. 8 election and the Jan. 20 inauguration of his successor to finalize the deal.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Hillary concedes in purple, color of pain, suffering, Last Rites, royalty

      Defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded Wednesday while dressed in purple, the liturgical color of pain, suffering, royalty and even death.

      Her black and purple suit matched the tie wore by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and others on the New York hotel stage including running mate Sen. Tim Kaine, his wife Anne Holton, and daughter Chelsea.

      During her much applauded address, Clinton talked about the pain she felt, quoted scripture, and encouraged her younger supporters to carry on her fight.

    • WikiLeaks not letting up on Clinton, Podesta

      WikiLeaks on Wednesday published a 36th batch of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, just hours after the presidential election concluded with Donald Trump’s victory over Clinton.

      The release, which includes 225 emails obtained from Podesta’s personal Gmail account, brings the total released by WikiLeaks to 58,660. The organization began releasing the messages in early October, and claimed at the time to have around 50,000 on hand. It isn’t clear how many more the website holds, or how long the releases will continue, but they seemed timed to hurt Clinton’s chances of becoming the next president.

    • WikiLeaks mocks Dems after election loss

      “By biasing its internal electoral market the DNC selected the less competitive candidate defeating the purpose of running a primary,” the official account tweeted near midnight.

    • White House doesn’t take potential Clinton pardon off the table

      The White House on Wednesday refused to say whether President Barack Obama would consider pardoning Hillary Clinton for her email scandal, but appeared to issue a warning to President-elect Donald Trump, saying powerful people should not exploit the criminal justice system for “political revenge.”

      As the Republican nominee, Trump has repeatedly suggested that Clinton could be thrown in jail during his presidency for mishandling classified materials through the private email server she used as secretary of state. Now that Trump is president-elect, Obama faces the delicate question of whether to issue a pardon to protect his preferred successor.

    • White House open to a Clinton pardon

      The White House isn’t ruling out the possibility of Hillary Clinton receiving a last-minute pardon from President Obama — even though she hasn’t been charged with a crime.

      Asked at Wednesday’s press briefing whether Obama had considered utilizing his unique executive power, press secretary Josh Earnest was cryptic.

      “The president has offered clemency to a substantial number of Americans who were previously serving time in federal prisons,” Earnest said.

      “And we didn’t talk in advance about the president’s plans to offer clemency to any of those individuals and that’s because we don’t talk about the president’s thinking, particularly with respect to any specific cases that may apply to pardons or commutations,” he added.

    • Jill Stein Files Complaint with FEC over Trump & Clinton Super PAC Coordination

      In more election news, Green Party presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in Washington, D.C., against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, alleging illegal coordination with their super PACs. These so-called dark money groups are allowed to raise unlimited amounts of funds for candidates, but they are not allowed to coordinate directly with the campaigns. In the complaint, however, Stein argues both Clinton and Trump have illegally coordinated with a handful of their super PACs.

    • Intelligence community is already feeling a sense of dread about Trump

      A palpable sense of dread settled on the intelligence community on Wednesday as Hillary Clinton, the candidate many expected to win, conceded the race to a GOP upstart who has dismissed U.S. spy agencies’ views on Russia and Syria, and even threatened to order the CIA to resume the use of interrogation methods condemned as torture.

    • What does a Donald Trump win mean for UK politics?

      It is 20 January 2017 and a cold wind is blowing across Washington’s Capitol as Donald John Trump raises his right hand and proclaims that he will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States.

      As he looks the chief justice in the eye, hundreds of millions of people around the world are wondering what his four-year term will bring.

      Among them are UK civil servants and politicians, pondering – with negotiations for leaving the European Union also soon to begin – what all this means for their country.

      So, how well prepared is the UK for dealing with Mr Trump, who has never previously held elected office, and how is the future looking?

    • WikiLeaks founder Assange writes: ‘The real victor is the US public’

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange defended the decision to publish electronic messages showing “what the Clinton campaign says about itself to itself,” saying his anti-secrecy group was not trying to influence the outcome of the election.

      The hacked emails, he said, were a matter of public interest.

      “The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks,” Assange said in a statement, adding: “Our organization defends the public’s right to be informed.”

      Regardless of who wins the presidential election, he said, “the real victor is the US public which is better informed as a result of our work.”

      WikiLeaks published a trove of emails that revealed embarrassing and sometimes damaging information from within the Clinton campaign. The emails showed that Clinton’s aides struggled to get past the controversy over her use of a private email server and expressed frustration at their candidate.

    • Greg Palast in Ohio on GOP Effort to Remove African Americans from Voter Rolls in Battleground State

      In an on-the-ground report from the battleground state of Ohio, investigative reporter Greg Palast has uncovered the latest in vote suppression tactics led by Republicans that could threaten the integrity of the vote in Ohio and North Carolina. On some polling machines, audit protection functions have been shut off, and African Americans and Hispanics are being scrubbed from the voter rolls through a system called Crosscheck. “It’s a brand-new Jim Crow,” Palast says. “Today, on Election Day, they’re not going to use white sheets to keep way black voters. Today, they’re using spreadsheets.”

    • Revealed: Bill Clinton says Jeremy Corbyn is ‘the maddest person in the room’ in private speech

      Bill Clinton described Jeremy Corbyn as the “maddest person in the room” in a private speech revealed by Wikileaks.

      The former US president, who could be returning to the White House as the husband of the next president, reportedly discussed the appointment of the Labour leader in a private speech at a Hillary for America fundraiser in Maryland in October 2015.

    • “Don’t boo, vote”: This election could be democracy’s last stop

      When I grow up, I want to be Charlie Pierce, who covers politics for Esquire and has toiled in our scrivener’s trade, as far as I can tell, since the late 1970s.

      I know, technically, he’s a couple of years younger than I am, but he writes with the fierce wit and well-aimed anger to which I aspire, and as this wheezing milk train of a presidential campaign clanks into the final station, few have been as perceptive when it comes to trying to figure out just what the hell has happened to America this year.

      Charlie Pierce has done so with great style throughout, but now, thanks to Donald Trump and just before Election Day, he has come to the end of his watchdog rope. He wrote on Saturday that Trump — to whom he refers as El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago — had “managed to exceed even my admittedly expansive limits for political obscenity.”

    • 4chan may have brought down pro-Clinton phone lines the day before the election

      Yesterday, as groups across the country hit the final stretch of their get-out-the-vote campaigns, workers at NextGen Climate noticed some problems with their automated dialer program. As the team started its morning hours, the program used to initiate and monitor voter calls was suddenly clunky, and cut out entirely for crucial hours in the afternoon.

      “It was slower in the morning, and then went down for hours at a time,” says NextGen’s Suzanne Henkels. The tool suffered intermittent downtime throughout the rest of the day. The campaign still made calls throughout the weekend, and was able to switch to backup methods of calling and texting to reach the remaining voters. Still, the attack caused significant trouble for the operation on the eve of Election Day.

      The downtime wasn’t a coincidence. Just after midnight on Sunday night, a post on 4chan’s /pol/ board announced an impending denial-of-service attack on any tools used by the Clinton campaign, employing the same Mirai botnet code that blocked access to Twitter and Spotify last month. One of those targets was TCN, the Utah-based call center company that runs NextGen’s dialer. According to the post’s author, the company was also providing phone services to Hillary Clinton’s offices in Nevada.

    • Understanding what lies behind Trump and Brexit

      As the US elections finish, many people are scratching their heads wondering what it all means. For example, is Trump serious about the things he has been saying, or is he simply saying whatever was most likely to make a whole bunch of really stupid people crawl out from under their rocks to vote for him? Was he serious about winning at all, or was it just the ultimate reality TV experiment? Will he show up for work in 2017, or like Australia’s billionaire Clive Palmer, will he set a new absence record for an elected official? Ironically, Palmer and Trump have both been dogged by questions over their business dealings, will Palmer’s descent towards bankruptcy be replicated in the ongoing fraud trial against Trump University and similar scandals?

      While the answer to those questions may not be clear for some time, some interesting observations can be made at this point.

      The world has been going racist. In the UK, for example, authorities have started putting up anti-Muslim posters with an eery resemblance to Hitler’s anti-Jew propaganda. It makes you wonder if the Brexit result was really the “will of the people”, or were the people deliberately whipped up into a state of irrational fear by a bunch of thugs seeking political power?

    • Trump’s tech plan: tariffs on electronics, ban on skilled tech migrants, cyber-weapons

      The United States Presidential Election has been run and at the time of writing looks almost certainly to have been won by Donald Trump.

      Which means we now have a decent idea of what’s in store for the global technology industry in the next four years. And it looks like a wild ride: Trump’s policies include a clamp down on H-1B visas, which will make it hard for US-based businesses to bring in skilled tech talent from abroad. H-1B critics argue the visas are a way to keep wages low by bringing in foreigners who work for less than American citizens. Supporters say the technology industries have a shortage of workers and therefore need foreigners to both fill seats and keep innovation humming along.

      Trump has also promised tariffs on imported products, especially from China, as part of a plan to ensure more companies manufacture in the USA. Apple shareholders beware: Trump once singled out the company as he feels it should “start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries.”

    • It’s Full-Bore Ahead For FBI’s Clinton Foundation Probe

      FBI agents across the country are continuing to actively pursue a broad political corruption investigation of the Clinton Foundation, a probe that is consuming the resources in the FBI’s Little Rock, Ark., field office where every agent assigned to public corruption matters now is working on the case, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.

      “Everybody’s working the foundation in Little Rock,” a former senior FBI official told TheDCNF. There at least 10 agents involved, but it’s possible the Little Rock field office is “pulling bodies from other programs.”

    • Canada’s immigration website just crashed

      The Government of Canada’s immigration website crashed on Tuesday night as the US election results were rolling in.

      The site went down about 10:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday, and there was intermittent accessibility after that.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Turks Are Flocking to Tor After Government Orders Block of Anti-Censorship Tools

      Turkish internet users are flocking to Tor, the anonymizing and censorship-circumvention tool, after Turkey’s government blocked Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

      Usage of Tor inside of Turkey went up from around 18,000 users to 25,000 users on Friday, when the government started blocking the popular social media networks, according to Tor’s official metrics. To prevent Turks from doing exactly that and connecting to the blocked sites through censorship-circumvention tools such as Tor and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), the government took a step further and ordered internet providers to block those too.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • China adopts cyber security law in face of overseas opposition

      China adopted a controversial cyber security law on Monday to counter what Beijing says are growing threats such as hacking and terrorism, but the law triggered concerns among foreign business and rights groups.

      The legislation, passed by China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament and set to take effect in June 2017, is an “objective need” of China as a major internet power, a parliament official said.

      Overseas critics of the law say it threatens to shut foreign technology companies out of various sectors deemed “critical”, and includes contentious requirements for security reviews and for data to be stored on servers in China.

      Rights advocates also say the law will enhance restrictions on China’s Internet, already subject to the world’s most sophisticated online censorship mechanism, known outside China as the Great Firewall.

    • Tim Berners-Lee warns of danger of chaos in unprotected public data

      Hackers could use open data such as the information that powers transport apps to create chaos, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has said.

      “If you disrupted traffic data for example, to tell everybody that all the roads south of the river are closed, so everybody would go north of the river, that would gridlock you [and] disable the city,” he said.

    • “DRM is Used to Lock in, Control and Spy on Users”

      In a scathing critique, the Free Software Foundation is urging the U.S. Government to drop the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions which protect DRM. The foundation argues that DRM is a violation of users’ rights, which under the guise of copyright protection is used to harm, control and spy on people.

    • Tor 0.2.9.5-alpha is released

      Hi, all! There is a new alpha release of the Tor source code, with numerous bugfixes. We’re getting closer to stable, but we still need testing!

      You can download the source from the usual place on the website. Packages should be up within a few days.

      Please remember to check the signature. Please also note that the signature may be with a key you aren’t familiar with. That’s because my PGP key changed a couple of months ago: see https://people.torproject.org/~nickm/key-transition-statement-2.txt.asc for more information.

    • Spyware routinely installed by UK schools to snoop on kids’ Web habits

      Over two-thirds of schools installed special software on school computers to spy on their pupils, responses to Freedom of Information requests have revealed.

      According to a report by Big Brother Watch, “classroom management software” is running on over 800,000 computers, laptops, and mobile phones found in 1,000 secondary schools across England and Wales. A whopping £2.5 million has been spent on the programs.

    • Spain publishes two guides on data protection in re-use of government information

      The Spanish Agency for Data Protection (Agencia Española de Protección de Dato, AEPD) has published two guides that should help Spanish institutions to publish public sector information (PSI) as open data.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • A Liberal Mother of Six Jailed for Challenging Saudi Taboos

      When Souad al-Shammary posted a series of tweets about the thick beards worn by Saudi clerics, she never imagined she would land in jail.

      She put up images of several men with beards: An Orthodox Jew, a hipster, a communist, an Ottoman Caliph, a Sikh, and a Muslim. She wrote that having a beard was not what made a man holy or a Muslim. And she pointed out that one of Islam’s staunchest critics during the time of Prophet Muhammad had an even longer beard than him.

      The frank comments are typical of this twice-divorced mother of six and graduate of Islamic law, who is in many ways a walking challenge to taboos in deeply conservative Saudi Arabia. Raised a devout girl in a large tribe where she tended sheep, al-Shammary is now a 42-year-old liberal feminist who roots her arguments in Islam, taking on Saudi Arabia’s powerful religious establishment.

      She has paid a price for her opinions. She spent three months in prison without charge for “agitating public opinion.” She has been barred by the government from traveling abroad. Her co-founder of the online forum Free Saudi Liberals Network, blogger Raif Badawi, is serving a 10-year prison sentence and was publicly lashed 50 times. Her father disowned her in public.

    • Russia orders inquiry into claims of FGM in Dagestan

      Russia has launched an investigation into claims that tens of thousands of girls in remote mountain areas, some as young as three months’ old, have been forced to undergo female genital mutilation.

      The general prosecutor’s office has acted following allegations that the life-threatening practice has been taking place “unchecked by the authorities” in the republic of Dagestan, Russia’s state-run news agency Tass reported.

    • Islamist ‘Morality Police’ Lurk in Troubled Swedish Suburbs

      Islamic “morality police” have become more active in vulnerable suburban areas across Sweden, which are in effect ghettoes where real police are hardly welcome. Girls’ rights have become heavily restricted when it comes to sporting activities, hanging out with guys or choosing partners, associations working against “honor crimes” stated.

    • These anti-terrorism posters echo Nazi propaganda

      My daily commute takes me through London’s Liverpool Street station. Most days I walk by a tiny touching statue, a bronze of two small children with a suitcase. A sign reads: “Für Das Kind”, meaning for the children. The statue commemorates the Kindertransport that rescued 10,000 child refugees and brought them by train to safety in Britain, escaping the persecution of Jews in Nazi Europe. Few of those children ever saw their families again. Most who could not leave were exterminated.

      Last week, just yards away from the statue, appeared a poster that fills me with horror. A looming, dark, hook-nosed figure dominates the foreground. This man is an object of suspicion, watched apprehensively by a pretty, pale-skinned young woman. This man is instantly identifiable – at least to anyone who knows world war two history – as the caricature Jew of Nazi propaganda posters.

      However inadvertently, the designers have used a horribly familiar antisemitic image. The impact goes far beyond these associations, serious as those are. A friend who was unaware of Nazi iconography revealingly said that she saw on the poster an “evil-looking dark-skinned man”. The image plays on people’s fears of “the other”, and creates anxiety about a suspicious “they” who may be hiding something, in the words of the poster.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • China’s Internet Controls Will Get Stricter, to Dismay of Foreign Business

      In August, business groups around the world petitioned China to rethink a proposed cybersecurity law that they said would hurt foreign companies and further separate the country from the internet.

      On Monday, China passed that law — a sign that when it comes to the internet, China will go its own way.

      The new rules, which were approved by the country’s rubber-stamp Parliament and will go into effect next summer, are part of a broader effort to better define how the internet is managed inside China’s borders.

      Officials say the rules will help stop cyberattacks and help prevent acts of terrorism, while critics say they will further erode internet freedom. Business groups worry that parts of the law — such as required security checks on companies in industries like finance and communications, and mandatory in-country data storage — will make foreign operations more expensive or lock them out altogether. Individual users will have to register their real names to use messaging services in China.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Bulk block of pirate streaming sites ordered by Italian court

        A court in Rome has ordered that 152 sites involved in the unauthorised streaming of sporting events and films should be blocked by Italian ISPs.

        The request was made by the Guardia di Finanza, the country’s financial police force that has become increasingly involved in tackling online piracy.

      • CBC threatens podcast app makers, argues that RSS readers violate copyright

        The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation publishes several excellent podcasts, notably the As It Happens feed; like every podcast in the world, these podcasts are available via any podcast app in the same way that all web pages can be fetched with all web browsers — this being the entire point of podcasts.

        In a move of breathtaking, lawless ignorance, the CBC has begun to send legal threats to podcast app-makers, arguing that making an app that pulls down public RSS feeds is a “commercial use” and a violation of the public broadcaster’s copyrights.

        This is a revival of an old, dark era in the web’s history, when linking policies prevailed, through which publishes argued that they had the right to control who could make a link to their sites — that is, who could state the public, true fact that “a page exists at this address.”

        But the CBC is going one worse here: their argument is that making a tool that allows someone to load a public URL without permission is violating copyright law — it’s the same thing as saying, “Because Google is a for-profit corporation, any time a Chrome user loads a CBC page in the Chrome browser without the CBC’s permission, Google is violating CBC’s copyright.”

11.08.16

EPO Social Workshops on Monday and Tuesday? No, EPO Staff up in Arms!

Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Benoît Battistelli keeps digging his own grave

Flash demo

Summary: A large bundle of information about the latest horrible actions from Benoît the Terrible, who decided to bust unions also at The Hague, not just in Munich where he resides

TODAY, THE EPO is throwing another stupid and distracting party (an event called Patent Information Conference 2016) and after the social conference from an antisocial boss we expect to see social “workshops”, ones that are supposed to have taken place today and yesterday. But don’t expect staff to have attended or for anyone to genuinely care for this. Staff of the EPO was up in arms after it learned that on Friday the boss had fire yet another staff representative, as first covered in our site with this leak.

Today we heard of yet more “erratic behaviour” from Battistelli, but we shall leave that aside as a subject for another day.

Looking at some correspondence that got leaked to us, “Laurent Prunier is FIRED with immediate effect – no game changer” was the initial word, preceding if not almost coinciding with Battistelli’s announcement. “It has been reported that the EPO president has taken a final decision regarding our suspended Colleague in The Hague,” said one person. “After Els Hardon and Ion Brumme earlier this year it is now the turn of Laurent Prunier, elected Central Staff Committee and SUEPO official, to be fired with immediate effect!”

“One thing can be concluded,” said this message. “Fact is that the clear warnings given by the AC delegates in the last AC (see previous mail below) has had little influence on the President of the Office.”

Well, he certainly doesn’t seem to care.

“Under these conditions, despite many declarations of intent,” continued the message, “it is hard to believe that there is any significant paradigm change in the present management policy. And It bodes bad news for the further two further investigations and disciplinary cases running presently on The Hague Union officials… for the record, there have been also four further downgrades and several additional suspensions not listed over the past two years.”

We happen to be aware of some of them. Things are even worse than it appears to outsiders because de facto gag orders or scare tactics (or even blackmail) are being used to discourage or suppress facts. It’s like those fictional novels that are cautionary tales about totalitarian regimes. Apparently, some say, Mr. Prunier risks losing even his pension if he speaks out too much. What on Earth is this, an authoritarian failed state? At the very heart of Bavaria or in The Hague? How can it be and one can that persist?

At The Hague, told us one source “The Office does not allow demonstrations on the premises, and in the Netherlands public demonstrations cannot be organised spontaneously (the preparation takes about a week, at least). That’s why some staff members organised a spontaneous gathering to protest against the unfair dismissal of Laurent: 250 to 300 persons wearing solidarity T-Shirts spontaneously gathered on Monday morning in the canteen of the EPO’s The Hague branch. Sad and angry, they expressed their disagreement with the emperor’s bullying against their staff reps and the firing of Laurent.”

The protest photos from Monday was posted here yesterday (hours after they had been taken) and these help spread the message to more sites. “Even IAM could finally see the light,” one EPO insider wrote, after IAM said Battistelli had scored an "own goal".

Is IAM finally ‘defecting’? Does it realise that in order to save the EPO change in management is urgently needed?

IAM’s Editor in Chief (Joff) later published in the blog “EPO users and staff need the Administrative Council to get a grip on current events,” albeit he maintained caution, probably because he needs not to get into a fight with his buddies/parters at the EPO. Battistelli does not tolerate any dissent, or even a minor disagreement. To quote a portion:

What’s more, we have continuously pointed out that disputes between the EPO’s senior management and the staff union SUEPO were taking place long before Benoît Battistelli became the EPO president, and that the union has often been its own worst enemy by making explosive, unsubstantiated claims and by being highly provocative in its approach to negotiation. If being an EPO examiner is such a bad thing, we have always asked, why do so few people ever leave?

This was noticed by the following new comment that said:

Joff Wild of IAM writes:

EPO users and staff need the Administrative Council to get a grip on current events

I have always given the EPO’s senior management the benefit of the doubt, but increasingly it looks like I may have been wrong to do so. With the same things happening over and over again, what other conclusion can I reach – especially when I have met many SUEPO members and know them not to be agitating obstructionists, but people who genuinely want what is best for the office and those who use it.

Mr. Müller and I spoke about Joff’s motivations [1, 2] and meanwhile yet another article was written about the subject, arguing that “The Rule of Law (Rechtsstaat) is Endangered and Needs to be Defended!”

Here is the most relevant portion

The first two examples that, in my view, demonstrate how the Rule of Law is currently endangered came from the “ugly world” of politics. So you might not expect that my third one stems from an organisation which ought to be relatively apolitical, namely the European Patent Office. Unfortunately, however, all is not well there either. This has to do with the peculiar “constitution” of the EPO, the European Patent Convention, which only provides for an imperfect system of checks and balances and in particular does not subject the Office President to an independent judiciary, whereas the members of the Boards of Appeal are subject to being proposed by the President for being (re)appointed by the EPO’s Administrative Council. In other words, the Office President has a lot of power and the only entity that can control him is the same Administrative Council that elected him in the first place.

Given how important an independent and fearless judiciary is for a functioning system of checks and balances, an Office President would, in this author’s view, be well advised to exercise utmost restraint in interfering with the Boards of Appeal as the EPO’s judiciary. Yet I am afraid that this is not what happened in summer of this year. Quite to the contrary, the members of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the EPO made very clear that they actually felt threatened by disciplinary measures of the Executive Branch of the EPO, i.e. the President, and insufficiently supported by the Administrative Council. The clash came up in proceedings between the Administrative Council as Petitioner and a member of the Technical Boards of Appeal who seems to have been accused of libelling the EPO’s President and Vice Presidents, which he/she has apparently denied. The Enlarged Board stated in its decision this:

As the Petitioner did not clearly distance itself from the Office President’s position, there is the threat of disciplinary measures against the members of the Enlarged Board. It is then the Enlarged Board’s judicial independence in deciding on this case which is fundamentally denied.

I will not bother you with the complete background of this case that is summarized in the EBA’s decision and has amply been reported by IPKat, in my 2014 blog on the same case, and by others. Suffice it to say that the Enlarged Board had ordered to conduct its latest hearing coram publico, which apparently incensed the Office President (why? – honit soit qui mal y pense) to a degree that he felt he should intervene into the judicial proceedings by writing a letter to the Enlarged Board of Appeal which the Board perceived as a threat. Inter alia, the President instructed his lawyer to write that “In view, in particular, of the gravity of the reputational, security, welfare and public order risks identified, there is a strong case for saying that any decision to conduct this hearing in public would be unlawful because it could not be defended as either proportionate or reasonable”. (This may be right or wrong, but is it for the President to decide on whether it is lawful or unlawful to conduct the EBA’s hearing in public, or is it for the EBA itself???) And even more, the letter continued with stating that the President “will not hesitate to take any appropriate steps available to him to ensure the proper running of the Office and the safety of its employees”.

Now, might you argue, the President has just voiced his opinion to the EBA – so why should this be a threat? The problem is exactly the background of the case at stake, i.e. that the President imposed and immediately executed a house ban on a Board of Appeal member for alleged unlawful conduct, without adhering to the procedure prescribed in Art. 23 EPC. Who can guarantee to the EBA that such a thing cannot happen again, if the President feels that some conduct of the EBA is unlawful and sees only himself in the position to ensure the “proper” running of the Office?

I am afraid (and very sorry) to say that even among the EPO’s top officials, the principle of the Rule of Law does not seem to be respected very much. Where are you, Administrative Council?

Given the source of the above, a pro-EPO blog, we can deduce that Battistelli is rapidly running out of allies and regarding the above one comment said that “violation of all principles of due process sadly confirms the damage done to the whole institution.” Here is the full comment:

The following recent contribution refers to the situation at the EPO and mentions the lack of independence of the boards of appeal:

http://kluwerpatentblog.com/2016/11/07/rule-law-rechtsstaat-endangered-needs-defended/

In this respect the evident lack of support by the members of the boards of appeal for their colleague who has been maintained in limbo for almost 2 years now in violation of all principles of due process sadly confirms the damage done to the whole institution.
Looking forward to reading the upcoming decisions of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht on the constitutionality of an european patent system lacking a truly independent higher instance.

And also:

Kluwer Patent Blog has a post titled The Rule of Law (Rechtsstaat) is Endangered and Needs to be Defended!

It refers to the case of the suspended member of the Boa – but I quote:

“I am afraid (and very sorry) to say that even among the EPO’s top officials, the principle of the Rule of Law does not seem to be respected very much. Where are you, Administrative Council?”

Well, maybe it’s busy slaughtering chinchillas in Denmark.

Someone wrote a little poem about the situation:

Plum position falls foul of a one man gang
Representative Prunier dried out to hang
Unless the Muppets wake up fast
No functional office can this last
EPO on a highway to hell
Does the AC need some DC as well?

AC is the Administrative Council and DC is the Disciplinary Committee/s.

Regarding some of the above comments, one person asked “Why pick Germany and the Netherlands to review the cases? What about a UK review, for example? May one be more likely to exonerate El Presidente, I wonder.”

One answer to that was: “How many Epo staff work in the U.K.? Or do you propose to apply U.K. Law in NL, DE?”

Another person responded with “errrrmmmm – none, but then no EPO staff actually work under NL or DE law either.”

“French review,” said another. “And thanks for BB France!!!”

“Do not forget that the delegate from the Netherlands was (is) one of the few AC members that dares to withstand the President. The Netherlands was one of the few countries that voted against the reorganisation of the BoA,” added another person and someone who knows Prunier (presumably from the Office at The Hague) wrote:

I think all we can say is that so far the AC has shown itself to be about as much use as the proverbial one-legged man in the arse-kicking competition. Kicking arse is certainly not their forte so far.

As far as Laurent goes, I’ve known him for a long time: he’s a fiery character with strongly-held opinions who isn’t averse to voicing them. Unfortunately, some seem to think that to do so within the context of a heated discussion amounts to harassment. If that’s true, I have certainly been guilty of harassment in the past. I personally don’t believe that the Laurent I know is guilty of harassment. Harassment is about bullying and spite. He may be guilty of expressing himself too forcefully or of intemperate language, but the Laurent I know is not a bully. Unfortunately, of course, neither I nor anyone outside a certain charmed circle know exactly what he is accused of which is said to amount to harassment. So who knows?

That’s why, in proper judicial procedures, rather than the banana republic/kangaroo courts we have here, evidence is tested in open court in public (unless there is a good reason why not) and weighed by an independent arbiter who considers only the law. Here, as in the (still-unresolved) case of the DG3 judge, we have a bunch of vague rumours and innuendos put out by Batistelli in his latest communiqué to justify his partial and self-serving adjudication.

In Laurent’s case, justice is neither done nor seen to be done. Nevertheless, I have already heard colleagues who should know better opining that they ‘haven’t much sympathy’ with his position, which seems to be another way of saying: ?I didn’t like him much and therefore he had it coming’.

Is this where we are now? Trial by prejudice?

“Has the alleged victim of LP’s harassment not been recently promoted,” one person asked, “consequently should a victim of BB’s harassment not be compensated as well?…WHERE IS THE JUDGE??”

Which judge? The one Battistelli illegally suspended? Nearly 2 years ago? “The EPO is becoming sick by the day,” the comment below says. Here it is in full:

Bingo!

and guess what they did it clever to cover up the reward. Technically this was no promotion but, after a selection procedure to a position designed for a very specific profile matching precisely the domain of competence of the individual concerned, he was appointed to a position higher graded.

And the “funny” thing is that Battistelli in his address email to staff (read smear campaign) on intranet about this sad story dared to complaint that Laurent did not presented excuses!

Well to whom should he do this: to the alleged victim who is not the one who filed the complaint since he is no victim or to the top manager close to Battistelli who filed the complaint and is a true harasser (everyone knows it by now)?

The EPO is becoming sick by the day

“How can they indulge in the EPO being driven in the wall, and forced in expenses,” another person wrote. The comment is fairly long:

It cannot continue this way and at this pace.

It is high time for the AC to make clear to the president and all the yes men and women around him that immunity does not mean impunity.

How can they indulge in the EPO being driven in the wall, and forced in expenses which do not have any other aim than to satisfy the president’s wish for retaliation against the boards of appeal. After all he started by disregarding the separation of powers.

When one looks at the vote in the BFC, it appears that the states which barely contribute to the filings have decided in favour of sending the boards to the outskirts of Munich. That this implies unnecessary extra costs for the users did not seem to have played a role.

That any organism which does not change dies, this is valid as well for the EPO. Any reasonable person will agree that changes had to be carried out at the EPO. But did it have to be in such a ruthless manner?

If the social climate would be as rosy as tooted out by the higher management of the EPO, why did the president not organise Christmas gatherings with staff for many years? This alone is revealing and says a lot.

“Indeed all organisms must change,” wrote another person. “And that applies to top management as well. And the AC. Maybe time for that 5-yearly conference to address failings at the top to deal with issues?”

No doubt changes are necessary at many levels as Battistelli’s departure, which is inevitable, won’t be enough to restore a decent working atmosphere. “Can’t we simply vote to leave the EPC? It would make things so much easier,” one person proposed, as if the Brexit effect now spreads to the EPO, not just the EU. One person, on the day of the US election, wrote: “Battistelli is the Trump of the IP world. Be careful IPpussyKat. Early Uncertainty…”

Well, both Battistelli and Trump manage to stay in the race no matter how extraordinary the scandals. Battistelli kills the EPO (Office) as well as the Organisation by suspending members of the Boards of Appeal. See this new legal article titled “Disclaimers face an uncertain future at the EPO: new Enlarged Board referral”:

The EPO Enlarged Board in G 1/03 decided disclaimers that did not have basis in the application as filed were in some cases allowable, but only where a disclaimer was required to: i) restore novelty over an A54(3) document; ii) restore novelty over an “accidental” prior art document, where the anticipation was “so unrelated and remote that the person skilled in the art would never have taken it into consideration when working on the invention”; or iii) disclaim subject matter that was excluded from patentability for non-technical reasons. This allowed a disclaimers to be made that would otherwise fall foul of Article 123(2), in other words the language of the disclaimer was not included in the content of the application as filed, but only in quite limited circumstances.

A further Enlarged Board decision in G 2/10 related to disclaimers, but instead to those that were based on subject matter disclosed in the application as filed. The Board did, however, state that the test to be applied is “whether the skilled person would, using common general knowledge, regard the remaining claimed subject-matter as explicitly or implicitly, but directly and unambiguously, disclosed in the application as filed” (point 4.5.4 of the reasons). This test was, according to G 2/10, the generally accepted “gold standard” for assessing any amendment for compliance with Article 123(2) EPC.

Without the boards, especially without their complete independence, the EPO will certainly continue to fall into the abyss as patent quality declines and there is not enough capacity to correct this. A company called BioPorto has just issued a whole press release [1, 2, 3] to brag about a European Patent (EP) being approved at time of EPO turmoil and lack of quality control. How long will the perception of high value of EPs last? Based on Dutch attorneys, clients already start asking them troubling questions about the EPO.

This later comment, also posted in the above-mentioned thread, is alluding to a Battistelli Chinchilla, Bergot, and says the following about the HR angle:

Merpel,
Thanks for picking this up. Was beginning to wonder if you had been gagged.

With regard to your final witty comment “Of course this presents a shining opportunity for ambitious, concerned members of staff to take up the banner and step forward into leadership roles in the staff union. Those without dependent families and who are financially independent would be best suited to take on this career-ending role.”, I don’t remember if you previously noted that:

A. Standing for staff representation is at the president’s agreement and there is a ban on those at the end of their career. Staff don’t simply get to choose their representatives. Being close to retirement and likely to say what the heck, as you joke, is a good reason to prevent you from being a position to do so.
B. Being a representative means being moved administratively into a separate department run by his well-known HR Director. She must approve all your ‘work’ and its related travel etc. And sign off your holidays, sick leave etc. All a bit strange that staff are deliberately moved under the control of the person with whom they should negotiate/interact. Certainly one way to stifle the ‘awkward squad’ and, if all else fails, you can accuse them of harassment of each other and get them sacked (I don’t refer to Laurent’s case since that is secret).
C. And the threat to cut your pension at the presidents whim could take a column and a half to deal with as a final blunting instrument.

A “Fine Social Balance” (sarcastic) says:

BoA: “Madness is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”

SR: “Messing with madness is one thing, when madness is messing back, it is time to call the whole Social Conference off”

Someone then spotted “another report on the topic,” this time from IP Watch. “IP-Watch also reports that the Union Calls “Flash Demo” After EPO Fires Another Union Representative,” wrote another commenter, noting that “it was the first day of snow in Munich today.”

We’re expected to have our first day of snow in Manchester on Wednesday, but anyway, here is a portion from the article:

The Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO) called a 7 November “flash” demonstration in Munich after the office fired Laurent Prunier, SUEPO secretary in The Hague. The move dismayed employees encouraged after the Administrative Council (AC), made up of the office’s member states, last month pressured President Benoît Battistelli into backing off from two unpopular proposals for investigating and disciplining staff.
via the term “snipers of the Hague,” the source said.
[...]

The communiqué “is another example of an attempt of character assassination made by the president,” a source known as “epoinsider” told Intellectual Property Watch. Battistelli linked two disciplinary cases, the one against Prunier and one against Elizabeth Hardon,

We particularly like the part which says it “is another example of an attempt of character assassination made by the president” because we saw so much of this. In fact, the EPO even accused me of “defamation”, without even providing a clear example. They just can’t help shooting the messengers everywhere (even foreign/overseas). They’re like Stalin!

SUEPO’s public Web site has been updated to include much of the above and it currently says:

“Firings will continue until morale improves – Merpel revisits the EPO” (IPKAT, 7 November 2016).
“EPO users and staff need the Administrative Council to get a grip on current events” (IAM, 7 Novmber 2016).
“Union Calls “Flash Demo” After EPO Fires Another Union Representative” (IP-Watch, 7 November 2016).
“The Rule of Law (Rechtsstaat) is Endangered and Needs to be Defended!” (Kluwer Patent Blog, 7 November 2016), especially section 4 of the article dealing with the EPO.
“Fresh Euro Patent Office drama: King Battistelli fires union boss” – EPO president ignores his own admin council (The Register, 4 November 2016).

Earlier today someone asked the EPO if they “have a response to http://www.iam-media.com/Blog/Detail.aspx?g=85178c62-24df-403f-990d-f3f5f5c4ce51 … ?”

‘Do you believe in Fairytales,” an insider replied with a rhetorical question. “Me neither!”

The EPO will just pretend none of this is happening. What kind of social workshop actually took place on Monday and Tuesday? What a sham! The only “work” was Battistelli working on (or stroking) his big ego. █

At EPOPIC Today, As Expected, Software Patents Courtesy of EPO

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The race to the bottom of patent quality continues…

CII at EPO
Photo credit: EPO Patent Information Conference 2016

Summary: European events that strive to expand the scope of patents so as to grant ever more patents, essentially by lowering patent quality, broadening range of applicability, and ‘automating’ translations

THERE ARE MANY PATENT events in Europe and some of them, as we mentioned last month, promote software patents in Europe, regardless of the Parliament’s opposition.

Some of the proponents of software patents are Team UPC, and despite Brexit, which effectively killed the UPC (it’s in a limbo now and cannot proceed), these bunch of people live in a fantasy land. There is no sign of the UK ratifying the UPC any time soon (or ever!), but the patent microcosm never gives up and it has just published yet another piece on the subject. Folks, get over it. Move on, the UPC is dead.

“Sadly, a growing number of EPO events and UPC events promote the software patents agenda and put at tremendous risk the frugal software industry, not to mention invite patent trolls to attack European programmers.”More relevant to today’s focus, however, is Grant Philpott, one of the (growing number of) people who came from the military and now work for Battistelli (we covered examples other than this).

People can see in the above photo (source) that much/just as we predicted (based on the abstract), he was talking about software patents using the misleading term “CII”. There are more photos in [ 1, 2] and while we don’t have the transcripts we can imagine what he said, based on the abstract which we remarked on before (there are more EPO events that interject this cheeky terminology). Last year we wrote several articles about his software patents agenda and at the end of last year we were threatened to remove an article with an E-mail from Philpott — one in which he urged his colleagues to grant patents to Microsoft faster (not all applicants are equal).

Sadly, a growing number of EPO events and UPC events promote the software patents agenda and put at tremendous risk the frugal software industry, not to mention invite patent trolls to attack European programmers. That includes yours truly. Later this month we can expect these people to congregate again and attempt to push the Trojan horse of software patents right through the gates of Europe. Someone sent us the following message earlier today, showing us that people like Winfried Tilmann (covered here many times before) will take somewhat of a lead:

Subject: Finalising the Unitary Patent Package – 30 Nov, Brussels

Finalizing the Unitary Patent Package:

Challenges and Ways Forward
Manos Hotel Premier
Wednesday 30th November 2016

Willem A. Hoyng, Partner, Hoyng Rokh Monegier

Pierre Véron,
Lawyer, Member of the Paris Bar
Véron & Associés

Frank Van Coppenolle
Head of High-Tech Patent Team, Gevers
European Intellectual Property Architects

Bruno van Pottelsberghe
Economist, Solvay Chair of Technological Innovation
ULB

Prof. Dr. Winfried Tilmann,
Of Counsel
Hogan Lovells, Düsseldorf

Darren Smyth
Partner, Patent and Design Attorney, London, EIP Europe LLP
Author for The IPKat & IP Alchemist
Member of the Editorial team for the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice

On December 2012, after a 40 year long quest, the European Parliament and the European Council finally reached a formal agreement on two EU regulations, making the European Patent with Unitary Effect (EPUE) an achievable prospect. With almost all EU member states – except for Spain and Croatia – participating in the enhanced cooperation, the legislation is supposed to come into force by the end of the year 2016/beginning 2017.

Experts, however, argue about the intended cost saving factor as well as the theoretical simplicity the EPUE package will bring, being mostly concerned about the patchwork nature of the system. Also, with the recent Brexit vote, additional straits are adding up, making the future of the Unitary Patent unclear.

This timely Symposium will offer an opportunity to inform and find out more about the current developments and challenges regarding the Unitary Patent and the Unitary Patent Court. The conference will evaluate advantages and disadvantages, build strategies for businesses on how to proceed and support the exchange of information and best practices with experts, practitioners and policymakers at EU level.

Delegates will also:

Identify the latest developments regarding UP & UPC
Qualify various issues, opportunities and challenges regarding UP
Prepare for any eventuality and develop a successful transition strategy
Analyse ways forward and challenges for the industry in Europe
Examine practical issues such as the recruitment of judges, court procedures, fees and logistics
Find out more about methods to prevent UPC bifurcation, infringement and revocation
Develop strategies for protection and new portfolio creation under the new system
Discuss the potential impact of the Brexit vote on the future of the EPUE package

For further details, please refer to the enclosed event abstract and programme. Do feel free to circulate this information to relevant colleagues within your organisation.

In the meantime, to ensure your organisation is represented, please book online or complete and return the registration form at your earliest convenience in order to secure your delegate place(s).

Kind regards,

Conference Team
Public Policy Exchange
Tel: +44 (0) 20 3137 8630
Fax: +44 (0) 20 3137 1459

It’s stuff like this which motivates us to work even harder against the menace of patent maximalism — that same misguided plan which threatens to undermine not only the EPO but the whole of Europe. And for what? Foreign multinational corporations and their patent law firms (like the above people)? █

Links 8/11/2016: SUSE Release, Android Distribution Stats

Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Techrights Turns 10 Years Old

    The site Techrights is turning 10 years old. Though now called Techrights, it was best known as Boycott Novell until 2010. It has become an internationally recognized site whose aim has been advocacy of digital rights with the goal of maximizing freedom, reducing surveillance, and generally promoting the sharing of knowledge. This, in turn, requires transparent systems, open licensing terms, no censorship, and active collaboration among parties. Its focus has always included the fight against software patents and in recent years it pays special attention to the goings on and intrigues within the European Patent Office and their attempt to bring by hook or crook software patents into Europe.

  • Desktop

    • Lenovo releases BIOS for loading Linux on Yoga 900, IdeaPad 710S BIOS

      Lenovo took some heat from Linux users a few months ago when it was discovered that some of the company’s recent Windows laptops were configured in a way that blocked them from running Linux or other operating systems.

      Some saw a conspiracy, while others pointed out that it had to do with the lack of Linux drivers for the storage configuration in those laptops. Either way, the end result was that it was difficult, if not impossible to install Linux on a Lenovo Yoga 900 or IdeaPad 710 notebook.

    • After protest, Lenovo brings Linux compatibility to Yoga 900 and 900S [Ed: Techrights started the protest]

      Lenovo created a stir when it said the Yoga 900 and 900S hybrids would work only with Windows, not Linux. The company has now changed its stance, bringing Linux support to those PCs.

      The PC maker earlier this month issued a BIOS update so Linux can be loaded on Yoga 900, 900S and IdeaPad 710 models.

      The BIOS update adds an AHCI (Advance Host Controller Interface) SATA controller mode so users can load Linux on the laptops.

      This is a Linux-only BIOS, meaning it should be used only by those who want to load the OS. If you want to continue with Windows, do not load the firmware.

    • New Laptop / Problems with Windows part 896,324

      I had mentioned previously that I had been forced to purchase a new laptop. I decided that I didn’t want another Thinkpad. The Lenovo ones no longer have the high quality they had in the IBM days and while support is still pretty good by todays dismal standards it’s not worth the premium price. (If I’m buying it with my own money that is.) I had heard good thing about Dells’ Linux support so I looked into their offerings and ended up buying a Precision 7510. Mind you this model came with Windows 7 installed but I didn’t mind. As I wanted to install Debian according to my own specs anyway, I was ok with just knowing that the hardware would be compatible. So I prepared a Jessie USB installation stick (This model doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive.) and shrunk down the Windows installation (but not deleted it altogether for reasons to be explained below.)

  • Server

    • Mitchell Hashimoto talks about new technologies and DevOp tools

      A few weeks earlier, when I’d talked with him to kick off IT Pro’s coverage of ATO, I purposefully didn’t ask him about his upcoming conference talks because I didn’t want to spoil it for him or his audience. That he would talk about DevOps tools was a given. After all, HashiCorp, the company he co-founded and where he’s CTO, is known for tools like Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Consul and Vault, which are designed to help DevOps secure and operate distributed application infrastructures. In this keynote he would be talking about automation tools in general. Later in the day, he’d conduct a workshop that would focus specifically on his company’s products.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation Certified Engineer: Alexandre Krispin

      Back in 2005, when I was 18, I met someone from Germany who used SUSE. In 2007 I bought my first computer from Apple, with Mac OS X. When I had to change my computer—maybe 2 years later—I did not have a lot of money and heard that those using Linux had to pay less to get the same quality offered by Unix systems like Mac OS X. I say “quality” because I read at the time that it was hassle-free because there were no viruses, etc. That’s what initially hooked me on Linux (that and Apple products were too expensive). When I finally started using Linux, I experienced the joy of being free to do whatever I wanted with my own computer—the desktop was completely customizable.

    • The Linux Foundation Launches its 2016 Guide to the Open Cloud

      The Linux Foundation has announced the release of its 2016 report “Guide to the Open Cloud: Current Trends and Open Source Projects.” This third annual report provides a comprehensive look at the state of open cloud computing. The foundation originally created the guide in response to market and industry confusion about which projects really stand out.

      According to Libby Clark, writing on Linux.com: “The report aggregates and analyzes industry research to provide insights on how trends in containers, microservices, and more shape cloud computing today. It also defines the open source cloud and cloud native computing and discusses why the open cloud is important to just about every industry.”

    • Linux Foundation Appoints Jeff Garzik to Board of Directors

      Garzik, formerly a 10-year employee at Red Hat, brings a wealth of Bitcoin Core development experience back to the leading open-source software development foundation. The Linux Foundation is spearheading a conglomerate of organizations involved with the Hyperledger Project, of which Bloq is a member. Garzik’s presence on the Linux Foundation’s board should hopefully help to bridge ongoing efforts in the open source, Linux world with advancements in the cryptocurrency space.

    • Move over Bitcoin, the blockchain is only just getting started

      It’s easy to think we’ve reached peak Bitcoin, but the blockchain at the heart of cryptocurrencies contains the seeds of something revolutionary.

      The blockchain is a decentralised electronic ledger with duplicate copies on thousands of computers around the world. It cannot be altered retrospectively, allowing asset ownership and transfer to be recorded without external verification.

      Investors have now realised the blockchain is bigger than Bitcoin. In the first quarter of 2016, venture-capital investment in blockchain startups overtook that in pure-play Bitcoin companies for the first time, according to industry researcher CoinDesk, which has tallied $1.1 billion (£840m) in deals to date.

      Even governments have taken an interest. Sir Mark Walport, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, published a report on the blockchain in January this year, outlining how the massively distributed shared ledger is “a database that tracks who owns a financial, physical or electronic asset”. But it could also, say, monitor driverless cars.

    • Linux Foundation Fumbles

      FLASH? LF webinars depend on FLASH!? This is the 21st century. Folks are using HTML5 and lots of other popular standards. Why is LF trying to hold the world back to a deprecated technology, one that only awkwardly works with their kernel?

    • Linux Foundation ‘Fails’ Linux Mint: Suggests Upgrade to Windows or Mac

      Excuse me if I have a little fun at the Linux Foundation’s expense.

      Linux Foundation failed textThis morning while perusing the day’s tech news, I ran across an article on Linux.com about a free webinar, “Open Source Automotive: How Shared Development Will Drive the Industry Forward,” being hosted on Wednesday by the Linux Foundation. This sounded like something I wouldn’t mind spending an hour watching, so I registered. Afterwards, I clicked a “Test Your System” link, just to make sure that I’d have no problems using the good ol’ FOSS Force machine.

      The results were a big surprise, and hearkened back to the bad ol’ days when open source and the rest of the world usually didn’t work and play well together. Browser, cookies, bandwidth and “Flash Test Video” all passed with flying colors. What didn’t pass? Our Linux Mint operating system.

      “We have detected that your operating system does not meet the optimal webinar specifications for listening to and/or viewing webinars,” the test automation said. “We recommend the following operating systems: Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, and the latest Mac OS X.”

      For an online event being hosted by the Linux Foundation? Really? I understand that the foundation isn’t very interested in desktop Linux, but…

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • OpenGL vs. Vulkan With AMDGPU-PRO 16.40, Compared To NVIDIA On Linux

        At the end of October AMD released the long-awaited AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 update. For some birthday benchmarking fun today, I finished up a comparison of the AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 stack with its proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan components on various AMD GPUs compared to NVIDIA results using the 375.10 binary driver.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KaOS 2016.11 Distro Gets KDE Plasma 5.8.3 & Linux Kernel 4.8, AMDGPU by Default

        Today, November 7, 2016, the developers of the KaOS rolling GNU/Linux distribution were pleased to announce the release and immediate availability for download of KaOS 2016.11.

      • KaOS 2016.11

        KaOS is pleased to announce the 2016.11 release. As always with this rolling distribution, you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.27.0, Plasma 5.8.3, KDE Applications 16.08.2 & not yet released ports of KDE Applications. All built on Qt 5.7.0.

      • Krita 3.1 Digital Painting App Gets Closer, Beta 3 Is Out with More Improvements

        Today, November 7, 2016, the developers of the popular, open-source and cross-platform Krita digital painting software have released the third Beta milestone towards the major 3.1 update of the application.

        Krita 3.1 Beta 3 is here exactly two weeks after the announcement of the second Beta development snapshot, in an attempt to polish the upcoming release by patching various annoyances and adding some minor improvements. For examples, several crashes were addresses, and it’s possible to load swatch names in ACO files again.

      • digiKam 5.3.0 Open-Source Image Editor Released for Linux as an AppImage Bundle

        In the last minutes of November 7, 2016, the development team behind the open-source and cross-platform digiKam image editor, viewer and organizer software was proud to announce the release of digiKam 5.3.0.

        digiKam 5.3.0 is the third maintenance update to the stable 5.x series of the software project, bringing a month’s worth of bug fixes and general improvements. However, the biggest new change in digiKam 5.3.0 is the availability of an AppImage bundle that allows Linux users to install the application in virtually any GNU/Linux distribution.

      • digiKam 5.3.0 is published…

        After a 3rd release 5.2.0 published more than one month ago, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.3.0 of digiKam Software Collection. This version introduces an important common solution to deploy the application under Linux using AppImage bundle.

        AppImage is an open-source project dedicated to provide a simple way to distribute portable software as compressed binary file, that standard user can run as well, without to install special dependencies. All is included into the bundle, as last Qt5 and KF5 frameworks. AppImage use Fuse file-system, which is de-compressed into a temporary directory to start the application. You don’t need to install digiKam on your system to be able to use it. Better, you can use the official digiKam from your Linux distribution in parallel, and test the new version without any conflict with one used in production. This permit to quickly test a new release without to wait an official package dedicated for your Linux box. Another AppImage advantage is to be able to provide quickly a pre-release bundle to test last patches applied to source code, outside the releases plan.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Epiphany 3.22.2 Web Browser Improves Password Form Autofill Handling, Adblocker

        As reported earlier, the GNOME development team is hard at work these days to bring us the second and last point release of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, versioned 3.22.2.

      • Evolution 3.22.2 Groupware Client Released for GNOME 3.22.2 with Many Fixes

        The GNOME Project is preparing to unleash the second and last maintenance update of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, which already started to land in the stable repositories of various GNU/Linux distributions.

      • Cinnamon 3.2 Desktop Environment Now Available with Support for Vertical Panels

        Today, November 7, 2016, Linux Mint leader Clement Lefebvre tagged the final release of the Cinnamon 3.2.0 desktop environment on the GitHub page of the project, from where users can download the source archive if they want an early taste.

      • Cinnamon 3.2 Desktop Arrives
      • Reaching more FEDORA and GNOME newcomers at UTP

        With Hack Space permitting on November 11, the next Friday at UTP (Universidad Tecnológica del Perú – Technology University of Perú), I am going to present the Free Software Projects: FEDORA and GNOME. The workshop will be focused in installation of FEDORA and then build the jhbuild of GNOME as a challenge for more than 8 hours. Then, the journey will start at 10:00 p.m. and it will finish at 7:00 a.m.

      • GXml 0.13.1 Released

        Now you can convert your GObject classes in XML nodes. This is, you can read and write XML trees directly to object classes’ properties, from basic types to complex like object properties, representing XML element’s attributes, to other child elements, while you can use collection of child nodes.

        This has been easiest to implement than GXml.SerializableObjectModel, which requires you to read an XML tree and then translate to your object properties. This should be slower than new GOM implementation included in this release.

      • About internet comments and aggressive communication

        That made me think about how we usually run conversations through internet. Because I work with GNOME, a thick skin naturally grew. I eventually have people yelling me “y u keep breaking stuff?” or “stop making this piece of crap” or even “ur product is bad, u offend me by releasing it” (and yes, they’re all real comments). After some time, this kind of thing becomes just background noise which we have to work with every day. I can only think that other contributors faced the same kind of top-notch treatment.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Six big projects that went open-source

    Making big software and hardware projects open-source is an increasingly popular thing to do, whether you’re a big company, a small company, or even the government. Here’s a sampling of the latest major projects to hit the open-source realm. Enjoy.

  • Using Apache Hadoop to Turn Big Data Into Insights

    The Apache Hadoop framework for distributed processing of large data sets is supported and used by a wide-ranging community — including businesses, governments, academia, and technology vendors. According to John Mertic, Director of ODPi and the Open Mainframe Project at The Linux Foundation, Apache Hadoop provides these diverse users with a solid base and allows them to add on different pieces depending on what they want to accomplish.

  • AMD Stoney Ridge Support Lands In Coreboot

    It has been a long time since last seeing any new AMD support in Coreboot while that changed this past week with the arrival of the mainline Stoney Ridge support.

  • How to create an internal innersource community

    In recent years, we have seen more and more interest in a variance of open source known as innersource. Put simply, innersource is taking the principles of open source and bringing them inside the walls of an organization. As such, you build collaboration and community that may look and taste like open source, but in which all code and community is private within the walls of the organization.

    As a community strategy and leadership consultant, I work with many companies to help build their innersource communities. As such, I thought it could be fun to share some of the most important principles that map to most of my clients and beyond. This could be a helpful primer if you are considering exploring innersource inside your organization.

  • Open is a means, not a movement

    In the humble beginnings of the GNU and Linux projects, open source was a primitive and narrowly-defined idea. It applied only to programming, and was a largely legal designation that sought to guarantee that source code remained available to users even as others augmented it through subsequent contributions.

    Now, thirty years later, “open” is sweeping the enterprise. On top of “open source,” we also have “open data,” “open management,” “open design,” “open organizations,”—and even just “open,” which we often take to imply something vague about a progressive policy.

  • Showing Code

    Which goes to show that terseness is a demanding constraint; I did not adequately state what I was trying to state in my attempt to limit it to a single tweet. And of course, that meant it became a discussion back and forth.

  • Open-source Sesame! Alibaba promises super-size magic for Java

    Online commerce giant Alibaba is among a crop of “new world” Java users seeking to shape the direction of both language and platform.

    Alibaba, one the world’s largest users of Java, has entered the race for election to the ruling executive committee (EC) of the Java Community Process (JCP). Jack Ma’s ecommerce giant joined the JCP only three months ago – in August.

    Also running for election to Java’s steering group are representatives of end user groups from China, Africa and Germany. One, the GreenTea Java User Group (JUG) in Shanghai, was founded and sponsored by technical staff from Alibaba.

  • Events

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Kubernetes

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The Sorcerer’s Code

      Richard Stallman, a software advocate affiliated with MIT, doesn’t really wear hats, but he’s been known to don tinfoil. In 2005, while attending a U.N. technology summit in Tunisia, he received a photo badge with a radio-frequency identification chip. Disgusted, he purchased a roll of aluminum foil, covered his badge, and handed sheets out to others. Tunisian security nearly blocked him from giving his talk. “By covering our badges,” he later noted, “we could prevent our movements within the summit, and our movements outside, from being scanned; we could also make a visible protest against the surveillance society that many governments are trying to impose.” A fellow delegate blogged that Stallman had “a legitimate gripe, handled with Richard’s usual highly visible, guileless, and absolutely unsubtle style of nonviolent protest.”

  • Public Services/Government

    • US launches website to share open-source software code

      The US government has just launched its latest website, Code.gov with the aim of preventing the replication of code across government agencies in order to conserve valuable time and resources.

      The site, which was launched on Thursday, already contains almost 50 open-source projects from a number of government agencies. Code.gov is the product of the Federal Source Code policy that was first announced in August by the White House.

      The site’s goal is to provide new custom source code that can be reused across government agencies to cut down on replicating code which is a waste of government expenses and time. The public will also benefit as a result of Code.gov since government agencies are required to make some of the software they create available under an open-source license.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open-source tool to put optogenetics in more labs

      The first low-cost, easy-to-use optogenetics hardware platform will let biologists who have little or no training in engineering or software design incorporate optogenetics testing in their labs.

      The Light Plate Apparatus (LPA), which researchers created in the lab of Jeffrey Tabor, assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice University, uses open-source hardware and software. The apparatus can deliver two independent light signals to each well in a standard 24-well plate and has sockets that accept LEDs of wavelengths ranging from blue to far red.

    • Open Data

      • Identify-org launched to better identify organisations through Open Data

        A group of Open Data standard bodies have launched Identify-org, a new initiative whose goal is to create an open codelist in Open Data to better identify organisations in the world.

        International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), Open Contracting Partnership, 360Giving, Joined Up Data Standards (JUDS) and the Initiative for Open Ag Funding presented the initiative at the Open Data International Conference in Madrid in October.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Lab creates open-source optogenetics hardware, software

        Nobody likes a cheater, but Rice University bioengineering graduate student Karl Gerhardt wants people to copy his answers. That’s the whole point.

        Gerhardt and Rice colleagues have created the first low-cost, easy-to-use optogenetics hardware platform that biologists who have little or no training in engineering or software design can use to incorporate optogenetics testing in their labs.

  • Programming/Development

    • Building code faster and why recursive Make is so slow

      One of the most common reactions to Meson we have gotten has been that build time is dominated by the compiler, thus trying to make the build system faster is pointless. After all, Make just launches subproject processes and waits for them to finish, so there’s nothing to be gained.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Why didn’t PDF die like Flash?

      The British government’s Accessibility department has just published the results of a six-week online survey, quizzing users of assistive technology about what aspects of government publishing might need addressing. Many of the users, according to the section’s blog, find the government’s widespread use of the semi-open Adobe PDF format ‘hard to use’, asking for alternative content in HTML. The government is considering these complaints, but civil and municipal retrenchment into PDF-dependence does seem to make change unlikely…

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Reproducible Builds: week 80 in Stretch cycle

      Patches to GCC to generate reproducible output independently of the build-path were submitted by Ximin Luo.

    • Security considerations with github continuous integration

      Continuous integration (CI) support in github is a very useful addition. Not only can you utilize existing services like Travis CI, you can utilize the github API and roll your own, which is exactly what we did for libStorageMgmt. LibStorageMgmt needs to run tests for hardware specific plugins, so we created our own tooling to hook up github and our hardware which is geographically located across the US. However, shortly after getting all this in place and working it became pretty obvious that we provided a nice attack vector…

    • The perfect cybercrime: selling fake followers to fake people

      Hackers are recruiting the internet of things into a botnet. But this time they’re not trying to take down the internet. They’re just using them to make fake social media accounts – which they can then sell to online narcissists to make an easy buck.

      Masarah-Cynthia Paquet-Clouston, a criminologist with the University of Montreal, and Olivier Bilodeau, a cybersecurity researcher at Montreal-based company GoSecure, have uncovered a large botnet that recruits everyday devices such as connected toasters, fridges or even your grandmother’s router to help commit social media fraud. They think that this stealthy, lucrative scheme is a glimpse into the future of low-level cybercrime.

    • Yet Another E-voting Machine Vulnerability Found

      We’ve been talking about the ridiculousness of e-voting machines for well over a decade. If a machine doesn’t include a paper trail for backup, it’s suspect. That’s been the case since e-voting machines have been on the market, and many of us have been pointing this out all along. And the big e-voting companies have a long history of not really caring, even as their machines are shown to be vulnerable in a variety of ways. So it come as little to no surprise to find out that security firm Cylance has announced that it’s found yet another set of e-voting vulnerabilities in the Sequoia AVC Edge Mk1 voting machine. Sequoia especially has a long history of buggy, faulty machines.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Pundits think Islamic State’s Baghdadi is smart because he’s cruel. That’s nonsense

      Is Abu Bakr Baghdadi, the infamously cruel Islamic State leader, an unusually smart terrorist?

      Terrorism pundits seem to think the answer is “yes” — precisely because he’s turned cruelty into a sort of brand. He gained notoriety in the West for indiscriminately killing civilians and then directing his followers to brag about wanton bloodshed in “Jihadi John” beheading videos. Many would argue that, by leaving a photographic trail of bloodshed in his wake, Baghdadi has surpassed Osama bin Laden, the former Al Qaeda leader. In a Politico article from last year, for example, a prominent Brookings analyst exclaimed that Baghdadi “out-terrorized bin Laden,” who never fully grasped how well “violence and gore work.”

      I see things differently. I think the Islamic State CEO is an unusually stupid terrorist — precisely because he’s turned cruelty into a sort of brand.

      For a decade, political scientists have known that terrorist groups suffer when they exercise too little restraint by attacking civilians. Civilian attacks carry substantial downside risks by strengthening the resolve of target countries, eroding their confidence in negotiations, lowering the odds of government concessions, reducing popular support for the group and, all in all, expediting its demise.

    • Long-range projectiles for Navy’s newest ship too expensive to shoot

      …Navy is canceling production of the LRLAP because of an $800,000-per-shot price tag — more than 10 times the original projected cost. By comparison, the nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missile costs approximately $1 million per shot, while the M712 Copperhead laser-guided 155-millimeter projectile and M982 Excalibur GPS-guided rounds cost less than $70,000 per shot. Traditional Navy 5-inch shells cost no more than a few hundred dollars each.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Vancouver Considers Abandoning Parts of the Coast Because of Climate Change

      Vancouver prides itself on being a coastal city, nestled between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. Like every other part of the world, it’s under threat from climate change, as warming temperatures cause sea levels to creep ever-higher. The city is looking at many options to hold back the rising water—and for the first time, retreat from the coast is one of them.

      This week, Vancouver officials put out a report laying out plenty of options to deal with sea level rise, including barriers, dykes, and seawalls. But it also suggests that, at least in some parts of the city, they may want to consider just getting people out of the way. The option of retreat from the coast is on the table in Vancouver, and other cities might soon follow.

    • Palm oil’s green body comes under fire from activists

      Some activist groups are withdrawing support for the palm oil body that provides sustainability certificates for the industry, saying it is biased toward producers and its complaints panel is flawed.

      Aidenvironment, an Amsterdam-based green group, could become the latest to cut ties with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) over what it calls poor handling of a complaint against major palm producer IOI Group.

      RSPO — a body of palm producers, consumer companies, and activist groups — has long faced criticism for weak enforcement standards. Some faith was restored earlier this year when RSPO suspended IOI’s certificates, which then dissipated when RSPO revoked the suspension four months later.

      A withdrawal by green groups, long seen as the conscience of the RSPO, could undermine the credibility of the industry body, especially for consumer manufacturing companies under pressure globally to ensure they have a sustainable supply chain.

    • Poaching is on the rise — most illegal ivory comes from recently killed elephants

      Almost all the world’s illegal ivory comes from elephants that have been recently killed, researchers say. The new study shows that seized ivory isn’t coming from old stockpiles, but from African elephants that have been poached less than three years before the tusks were seized. That means that poaching — one of the biggest threats to elephants — is widespread and may be a bigger problem than we think.

    • Elephant poachers are hard at work in Africa, and carbon dating proves it

      Elephant poaching is alive and well — and the elephants are not. A team of scientists examining seized shipments of elephant tusks from Africa have found that the vast majority of the ivory came from elephants that died within the last three years.

      The sobering results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that the killing of elephants for their ivory is continuing at a disturbing pace — even as elephant populations across the continent are in sharp decline.

      While poaching had been easing for several years, it has returned with a vengeance in the last decade or so, said lead author Thure Cerling, a geochemist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Central African forest elephants have fallen by an estimated 62% from 2002 to 2011. At the Selous Wildlife Reserve in Tanzania, savanna elephants have declined 66% from 2009 to 2013.

      “There’s been a staggering rate of elephant loss every year,” Cerling said.

    • Dakota Access Pipeline CEO Kelcy Warren Should Face the Music

      President Barack Obama foreshadowed more complications for the Dakota Access pipeline this week, as he told an interviewer that “right now the Army Corps is examining whether there are ways to reroute this pipeline.” With hundreds arrested in recent weeks at the Standoff at Standing Rock, North Dakota, the movement to halt construction of this 1,200-mile, $3.8 billion oil pipeline only builds. Musicians are increasingly joining the fray, striking an unexpected chord: pressuring oil billionaire Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, which owns the pipeline. Warren also owns a small music label and recording company, and is the founder and driving force behind the Cherokee Creek Music Festival in Texas. Many musicians, including folk/rock legend Jackson Browne, are banding together to confront Warren and help stop the pipeline.

      In a statement published in September by Indian Country Today Media Network, Jackson Browne wrote: “I met Kelcy Warren on one occasion, when I played at the Cherokee Creek Music Festival, held at his ranch. Later his company, Music Road Records, produced an album of my songs. Though I was honored by the ‘tribute’ and think highly of the versions—which were done by some of my favorite singers and songwriters, I had nothing to do with producing the recordings or deciding who would be on it.”

  • Finance

    • We need a Brexit deal that heals the north-south divide

      It’s official. The north-south divide in Britain is now wider than at any time since the beginning of the industrial revolution – wider than when Charles Dickens was writing about Victorian squalor, and wider than in the depression years of the 1930s, when George Orwell exposed the grinding poverty of northern England in The Road to Wigan Pier.

      Remarkable new evidence from a study by the academic Philip McCann, The UK Regional-National Economic Problem, shows that while economic output per head, measured by gross value added, is near £43,000 a year in London – and as high as £135,000 in inner west London – almost half the UK population lives, in regions where output per head is below £22,325.

      Indeed the regional divide is so vast that, at £13,500 per person, economic output in Gwent, Wales, is a tenth that of one of the wealthiest part of London; and in the Tees and Welsh valleys it has now fallen below that of Lithuania, Slovenia and Slovakia.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Affinity Interviews Jill Stein!
    • Voters Express Disgust Over U.S. Politics in New Times/CBS Poll

      An overwhelming majority of voters are disgusted by the state of American politics, and many harbor doubts that either major-party nominee can unite the country after a historically ugly presidential campaign, according to the final pre-election New York Times/CBS News Poll.

      In a grim preview of the discontent that may cloud at least the outset of the next president’s term, Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump are seen by a majority of voters as unlikely to bring the country back together after this bitter election season.

      With more than eight in 10 voters saying the campaign has left them repulsed rather than excited, the rising toxicity threatens the ultimate victor. Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, are seen as dishonest and viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters.

    • Wikileaks releases second batch on Election Eve
    • As Our Revolution’s Former Electoral Manager, This Is How We Keep President Clinton Accountable

      With the right combination of strategies, we can make Bernie Sanders the most powerful senator in the country and keep President Hillary Clinton accountable to the progressive movement. Our best opportunity to accomplish this is right around the corner.

      The Huffington Post points out that Clinton leads in a greater proportion of polls than Obama did in 2008 and 2012. Their model gives Clinton an overwhelming 98.2 percent chance of victory. Clinton’s lead is so substantial that she could lose all seven swing states, a highly improbable outcome, and still have enough electoral votes tucked away in safe states to win the election. In short, Hillary Clinton will be our next president.

      Instead of staying home or turning Clinton’s big lead into a landslide, we should invest our votes into getting the most progressive candidate in the race, Dr. Jill Stein, to the major electoral threshold of 5 percent. Success will qualify the Green Party for official national party status, along with a simplified path to ballot access and about $10 million dollars in federal campaign funds for the next presidential election.

    • EMAILS: Clinton Sent Classified Info To Chelsea After UN Climate Talks

      Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent her daughter an email after the conclusion of a United Nations climate summit that had information later deemed classified by the Department of State.

      Clinton sent an email to her daughter, Chelsea, two days after she and President Barack Obama tried to negotiate an international global warming agreement at Copenhagen in 2009. The email was sent to Chelsea’s alias email account under the name, “Diane Reynolds.”

      Clinton forwarded Chelsea a Dec. 19, 2009 email from top State Department officials and Obama’s global warming “czar” Carol Browner — a long-time Clinton ally — according to emails released by the State Department Friday.

    • WikiLeaks releases election day batch from Clinton campaign chair

      WikiLeaks has released its 35th batch of emails from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, as Americans go to the polls in the presidential election.

    • The 44 Most Damning Stories From WikiLeaks

      WikiLeaks has published tens of thousands of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. This is what The Daily Caller believes are the most important findings from them.

      They expose a corrupt press, Clinton Foundation play for play, cronyism, and the Clintons’ real thoughts on the issues.

    • Bill Clinton branded Jeremy Corbyn ‘maddest person in the room’, leaked speech reveals

      Bill Clinton branded Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn the “maddest person in the room” in a speech he gave explaining the resurgence of left-wing politics in Europe and America.

      Documents released by Wikileaks show the former President joked that when Mr Corbyn won his leadership contest, it appeared Labour had just “got a guy off the street” to run the party.

    • WikiLeaks: Mook Frantic Over Appearance of TPP Support

      It likely will not make a difference in the outcome of today’s presidential election, but WikiLeaks offered more evidence Tuesday that even campaign staff for Democrat Hillary Clinton couldn’t follow her shifting position on trade.

      Clinton had studiously avoided taking a public position on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, which her Democratic primary opponents had been bashing with gusto. On June 14 of last year, at a campaign rally in Iowa, she dipped her toe in the water.

    • Statement by Julian Assange on U.S. Presidential Election

      In recent months, WikiLeaks and I personally have come under enormous pressure to stop publishing what the Clinton campaign says about itself to itself. That pressure has come from the campaign’s allies, including the Obama administration, and from liberals who are anxious about who will be elected U.S. president.

    • The Stakes Are Higher Than You Realize

      In one of the more memorable riffs of the 2016 election, President Barack Obama recently said “My name may not be on the ballot, but our progress is on the ballot. Tolerance is on the ballot. Democracy is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot. Good schools are on the ballot. Ending mass incarceration – that’s on the ballot right now!”

      I increasingly fear that The West is on the ballot too.

    • THE SECRETS OF THE US ELECTION: JULIAN ASSANGE TALKS TO JOHN PILGER

      What’s the significance of the FBI’s intervention in these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton?

    • A Tale of Three Foundations: Carter, Clinton and Trump

      Seen the latest front-page Jimmy Carter Center scandal? Hear about the six figure fees speaking former president Jimmy Carter pulls in from shady companies and foreign governments? An oil painting of himself he bought with charity money? Maybe not.

      Take a moment to Google Jimmy Carter. Now do the same for Bill Clinton. The search results tell the tale of two former presidents, one determined to use his status honorably, the other seeking exploitation for personal benefit. And then throw in Donald Trump, who of course wants to someday be a former president. Each man has his own charitable foundation. Let’s compare them.

      Three charitable organizations enter, only one emerges with honor. Let’s do this!

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Following scare at Trump rally, life is now different for protester

      Life was fairly normal for Austyn Crites until Saturday night.

      The 33-year-old, Eagle Scout and high-altitude balloon inventor was by his own account a fairly average guy. He wasn’t famous — or infamous — and his face certainly wasn’t plastered all over international media.

      That is, until the Donald Trump rally on Saturday in Reno.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Thinking Like an Intelligence Officer: Anthony Weiner and Russian Spies

      There are many reasons why Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey is interested in the emails on Anthony Weiner’s home computer, emails which may include United States government information pertinent to Hillary Clinton or those communicating with her.

      The majority of those reasons for Comey’s involvement, for good or for bad depending on your political position, have been laid out across the media spectrum.

      But there may be one more reason not yet discussed. Since we seem to be spending so much time this election cycle on the Russians this year, let’s think like Russian intelligence officers. Comey may be looking at an intelligence operation.

    • If GCHQ says it then it must be right, right?

      What happens if GCHQ advice is questionable or goes directly against the direction the majority of industry is heading?

    • France wants a ‘monster’ database of citizens’ info

      The French government’s fairly discreet plan to create a massive database containing personal information of the country’s population has encountered gremlins in the form of growing opposition.

      French government plans to create a new database containing details of almost the entire population suffered fresh blows on
      Monday as criticism grew of the controversial project.

      The Socialist government announced a decree to create the database, which would contain personal information of 60 million people, on a public holiday weekend at the end of October.

      It has led to fears that hackers might target the information as well as anxiety that so much personal data could be misused in the future by the security forces or other government agencies.

    • Can FBI review 650,000 emails in nine days? Absolutely, says Edward Snowden

      GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters are questioning whether the FBI could have sifted through 650,000 emails quickly enough to clear his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, just nine days after they were discovered.

      But the FBI and cybersecurity experts say it can be done with database scanning software – and one of those experts is none other than Edward Snowden, the fugitive whistleblower who’s hoping to get a presidential pardon.

      The debate unfolded today in the wake of FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that a search through a laptop used by Clinton aide Huma Abedin turned up nothing to change “our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.”

    • Disable Nvidia Telemetry tracking on Windows

      Telemetry — read tracking — seems to be everywhere these days. Microsoft pushes it on Windows, and web and software companies use it as well.

      While there is certainly some benefit to it on a larger scale, as it may enable these companies to identify broader issues, it is undesirable from a user perspective.

      Part of that comes from the fact that companies fail to disclose what is being collected and how data is stored and handled once it leaves the user system.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Indonesia Police Question Christian Politician in Blasphemy Case

      Police questioned the most prominent Christian politician in this predominantly Muslim country on Monday as they consider a blasphemy charge against him, just three months ahead of an election where he is the leading candidate.

    • ‘Persecuted’ family forced to flee Manningham home as threats escalate

      Mr Hussain converted to Christianity 20 years ago, but says in recent years he has been subjected to harassment and violence by sections of the Islamic community.

      “This extreme persecution by certain people in the Muslim community because we are converts has broken us as a family,” he said.

      “We are fragmented and I do not know how we will recover from this. We haven’t functioned properly for years.”

      He said “serious questions” needed to be answered.

      Last year, Mr Hussain was hospitalised after his kneecap was smashed and his hand broken during an attack outside his home in St Paul’s Road, Manningham.

      Two hooded men, one armed with a pick-axe handle, assaulted him in a vicious attack caught on CCTV.

    • Officials: SA cop fired for attempting to feed fecal sandwich to homeless person

      An officer from the San Antonio Police Department has been fired for allegedly attempting to feed a fecal sandwich to a homeless person, several sources have confirmed.

      The City Council was briefed on the matter during a private session Thursday, sources said. The officer reportedly placed fecal matter between two pieces of bread and gave it to a homeless person.

      “This was a vile and disgusting act that violates our guiding principles of ‘treating all with integrity, compassion, fairness and respect,’ Chief William McManus said in a prepared statement. “The fact that his fellow officers were so disgusted with his actions that they reported him to Internal Affairs demonstrates that this type of behavior will never be tolerated. The action of this one former officer in no way reflects the actions of all the other good men and women who respectfully serve this community.”

    • One woman’s brush with Sharia courts in the UK: “It ruined my life forever”

      The UK government is conducting an inquiry into the operation of Sharia courts which is being boycotted by a number of women’s organisations because its remit is too narrow, and the panel of judges is not seen as ‘independent’ enough.

      Parallel to this, the Home Affairs Committee has also launched an inquiry into whether the principles of Sharia are compatible with British law.

      On 7 November, there will be a public seminar on “Sharia Law, Legal Pluralism and Access to Justice” 7-9pm at Committee Room 12 at the Houses of Parliament. Below, we publish the story of a woman Shagufta (not her real name) who spoke to the campaign group, One Law for All, and described how a brush with the Sharia courts ruined her life forever.

      I am a practising Muslim. My faith is central to who I am. I was born in 1947 in Pakistan and joined my husband in the UK in 1965. I am from a middle-class Pakistani family and found life in England hard. It was a huge culture shock. We settled in the north of England. I supported my husband with his business interests and eventually had my own business running a cookery school and a halal food company. I had six daughters and a son.

    • Hong Kong pro-democracy politicians banned by China as crisis grows

      Hong Kong is facing a severe political crisis after China barred two pro-independence politicians from the city’s legislature.

      In a highly controversial move, Beijing said Yau Wai-ching and Sixtus “Baggio” Leung would not be able to hold office, striking a blow to the burgeoning movement calling for greater autonomy from the mainland.

      The ruling, which amounts to Beijing’s most direct intervention in the territory’s legal system since the 1997 handover to Chinese rule, is expected to spark renewed street protests in the former British colony.

    • Sweden now allowing US Homeland Security officers at Stockholm airport, permanently and with access to own weapons

      In brief: Sweden is now allowing US Homeland Security to station officers at Stockholm airport on a permanent basis, and with access to their own weapons. The US “custom and security controls” in Swedish soil are supposed to stop suspected terrorists, which include “cyber-terrorists”, and other individuals suspected of criminal-behaviour – who appear on lists which may also include whistle-blowers and their publicists, who may be considered to have “stolen information”. The Department of Homeland Security declared in 2013 that “the unlawful disclosure of classified information by WikiLeaks in the summer of 2010 has rightfully renewed the Department’s focus on risk management.”

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

Further Recent Posts

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts