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09.09.15

Links 9/9/2015: Steam for GNU/Linux Rising, Plasma 5.4.1 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 11:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for the Unix shell

    When I first got involved in Unix and open source, I was choosing a pseudonym for a little podcast that I do called GNU World Order. I naively thought that in a community that values technology and, frequently, speculative fiction, the name “Klaatu” would be a quaintly obscure reference to my favorite movies. Of course, I have since learned that “Klaatu” as your handle in the tech community is rather like “Bob Smith” in the real world, so online I am also sometimes known as “notKlaatu” to set me apart from the other Klaatus.

  • Events

    • Birthday party at Endocode in Berlin: 30 years Free Software Foundation

      On 3 October 2015 Free Software Foundation Europe invites you for the 30th birthday party of the Free Software Foundation. While the main event will take place in Boston/USA, there will be several satellite birthday parties around the world to celebrate 30 years of empowering people to control technology, and one of them will be at Endocode in Berlin.

    • Lightning Fast

      For the last two years, we had only lightning talks & workshops at the ownCloud Contributor Conference. This is an exceptionally good model for creation-type events like ours and your event might benefit from it, too.

    • Looking Ahead to New Linux/FOSS Promotional Events

      While the FOSS/Linux expo season is winding down – Ohio Linux Fest, All Things Open and the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (SeaGL) next month, and Fossetcon in November in sunny Florida, before we ramp up for the first-of-the-year 2016 event at SCALE 14x in January – thoughts wander to other events that could possibly take place sometime in the future, with a little imagination.

    • Inkscape Workshop at Smallworld

      Last weekend, I had the first Inkscape workshop at smallworld. It was very successful, we had 13 participants.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla pays it forward

        Mozilla and seven other organizations will be participating in the Grace Hopper Open Source Day codethon taking place during the main conference event, on October 14. Emma Irwin is a Community Education Lead with Mozilla, and talks to me about why Mozilla is involved in the codethon, what she gets out of it, and what participants learn from it.

      • Bugzilla Bug Tracker Was Key to Recent Firefox Security Snafu

        The Bugzilla bug tracker has been a major part of how Mozilla has kept Firefox secure and stable for a long time, but according to the company, it was also the key to a recent attack on Firefox browser users. “An attacker was able to break into a privileged user’s account and download security-sensitive information about flaws in Firefox and other Mozilla products,” Mozilla said Friday in an FAQ about the security snafu (PDF doownload available). “Information uncovered in our investigation suggests that the user re¬used their Bugzilla password with another website, and the password was revealed through a data breach at that site.”

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

  • Education

    • Linux and Python education for students in Israel

      Now entering its third year, the ROSE (Red Hat Open Source for Education) Project is a cross-community effort that brings students from Tira together with students from Yonatan Middle School in Ra’anana to the Red Hat offices in Israel to learn about the Linux operating system and Python programming. The students spent six months on a weekly basis working and learning together. At the graduation ceremony executive members of both municipalities were present and awards were given to the students including two special achievement awards.

    • Apps, bots, drones, and 3D printers: Coming to a school near you?

      I work at a university, in the computer science department, and my college-age students have access to all this technology and more. Imagine the things they’re able to do and create—better yet, imagine the things they’ll be able to do and create in five years with the next generation of all these technologies in the workplace and at home.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The Free Software Foundation: 30 years in

      We’re also endorsing hardware that respects users’ freedoms. Hardware distributors whose devices have been certified by the FSF to contain and require only free software can display a logo saying so. Expanding the base of free software users and the free software movement has two parts: convincing people to care, and then making it possible for them to act on that. Through this initiative, we encourage manufacturers and distributors to do the right thing, and we make it easy for users who have started to care about free software to buy what they need without suffering through hours and hours of research. We’ve certified a home WiFi router, 3D printers, laptops, and USB WiFi adapters, with more on the way.

  • Public Services/Government

    • UK government publishes ODF guidance

      The UK government on 7 September published recommendations and guidelines on the use and implementation of ODF, the Open Document Format. The compendium is authoritative, from its general introduction to the recommendations on procurement, a guide on integration of ODF with enterprise software, software that allows collaborating on documents and a review of ODF’s change tracking features.

    • Munich Becomes A Big Contributor To Open-Source

      The arguably best town in the world is now even better! The beautiful city of Munich has become “a major contributor to open-source.”

    • After Ditching Microsoft, the City of Munich Is Now an Open Source Contributor

      The city of Munich became famous in the open source community by ditching its dependency on Microsoft products and adopting open source. This, in turn, is having a secondary effect on the community because the developers working with the city are now contributing code back.

    • Belgian HR agency promoting use of open badges

      Selor, the recruitment and selection agency for the Belgian public administration, is encouraging the use of Mozilla’s open badges, aiming to make the recognising of skills and achievements interoperable across organisations and systems. The HR agency is one of the organisers of the first Belgian workshop on Open Badges on 26 November.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • 15 open web advocates to follow on Twitter

      Working on the Open Web is a niche area of the greater open source community. Usually the work does not get the same level of fanfare of other areas of open source, but the work is very important.

      Here, I’ve compiled a list of 15 people helping move the Open Web forward you should follow on Twitter. All of them are doing amazing work and have great content to share and will help keep you up to date on important things happening on the Open Web.

    • Every Lesson Is an Experiment with ‘Open Source’ Science Class

      If you ask Rosalind Poon about the science class of yester-year — the kind my generation, my parents’ generation and their parents’ generation attended, where the entire class follows the same instructions for an experiment like it was a recipe for baking cookies — it doesn’t explain how real science happens.

      “If you think about champagne or penicillin,” said Poon, teacher consultant with the Richmond School District and a trained biology teacher, “a lot of our discoveries are discovered by mistake.”

    • Three New Experiments in Science Education
    • A closer look at the world’s first open digital cinema camera

      The journey of the AXIOM camera began years ago with simple, small devices, and then gained suuport in 2014 with a successful Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that exceeded its funding goal. A couple months later, a grant from the European Union gave the project the financial momentum it needed to move forward.

    • Open Data

      • Reedsy Launches Open Source Author Survey

        How much money do authors typically make? And how much does it cost an author to self-publish a book?

        Questions like these are part of a new author survey launched by Reedsy, an all-encompassing self-publishing platform.

      • Open Data: ‘civic engagement’ is on the cusp

        Mark Headd is the key guy when it comes to developer evangelism at Accela — the firm provides cloud-based ‘civic engagement’ solutions for government.

    • Open Access/Content

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Tuesday
    • SELinux insides – Part2: Neverallow assertions
    • Researchers have disclosed severe security flaws within the firm’s products over the holiday weekend.

      Ormandy’s disclosures were made at the same time another researcher’s findings, Kristian Erik Hermansen, were posted online. Hermansen publicly disclosed a zero-day vulnerability within cyberforensics firm FireEye’s security product, complete with proof-of-concept code.

    • Seagate drives at risk of data theft over hidden ‘root’ account

      A public vulnerability disclosure warns that an attacker could remotely download files from an affected hard drive, thanks to the hard-coded default password.

    • HP Drops Support For Hacking Competition As Wassenaar Arrangement Continues To Make Computing Less Safe

      An international agreement to treat certain software as weaponized is well on its way towards making computing less safe. Recent changes to the Wassenaar Arrangement — originally crafted to regulate the sale of actual weapons — have targeted exploits and malware. The US’s proposed adoption of the Arrangement expands on the definitions of targeted “weapons,” threatening to criminalize the work done by security researchers. While the Arrangement will likely have little effect on keeping weaponized software out of the hands of blacklisted entities, it could easily result in a laptop full of security research being treated like a footlocker full of assault weapons.

    • Duo Security Research Reveals Half of Apple iPhones on Corporate Networks Run Out-of-Date Versions of iOS

      Duo Security, a cloud-based access security provider protecting the world’s largest and fastest growing companies, today announced results from a Duo Labs research study focusing on mobile devices on corporate networks. Unpatched and end-of-life devices that are no longer supported by the manufacturer are much more prevalent than expected and create significant risk for corporate networks. The Duo Labs research draws on data gathered from thousands of customer deployments in more than 150 countries worldwide.

    • TSA Master Keys

      Someone recently noticed a Washington Post story on the TSA that originally contained a detailed photograph of all the TSA master keys. It’s now blurred out of the Washington Post story, but the image is still floating around the Internet. The whole thing neatly illustrates one of the main problems with backdoors, whether in cryptographic systems or physical systems: they’re fragile.

    • A Tale of Three Backdoors

      The tale of three backdoors: TSA locks, the CALEA interface, and the Dual_EC PRNG, all amply illustrate the dangers posed by backdoors in systems. For backdoors may fail catastrophically, degrade national security, and can potentially be used against those who demanded the backdoors in the first place. The scars born by the security field in dealing with failed backdoors provides ample illustration why we find the idea of backdoors troubling and dangerous.

    • reproducible builds are a waste of time

      Yesterday I read an article on Motherboard about Debian’s plan to shut down 83% of the CIA with reproducible builds. Ostensibly this defends against an attack where the compiler is modified to insert backdoors in the packages it builds. Of course, the defense only works if only some of the compilers are backdoored. The article then goes off on a bit of a tangent about self propagating compiler backdoors, which may be theoretically possible, but also terribly, unworkably fragile.

      I think the idea is that if I’m worried about the CIA tampering with Debian, I can rebuild everything myself from source. Because there’s no way the CIA would be able to insert a trojan in the source package. Then I check if what I’ve built matches what they built. If I were willing to do all that, I’m not sure why I need to check that the output is the same. I would always build from scratch, and ignore upstream entirely. I can do this today. I don’t actually need the builds to match to feel confident that my build is clean. Perhaps the idea is that a team of incorruptible volunteers will be building and checking for me, much like millions of eyeballs are carefully reviewing the source to all the software I run.

      The original source document doesn’t actually mention deployment of the whacked SDK, just research into its development. Perhaps they use it, perhaps they rejected it as being too difficult and risky. Tricking a developer into using a whacked toolchain leaves detectable traces and it’s somewhat difficult to deny as an accident. If we assume that the CIA has access to developer’s machines, why not assume they have access to the bug database as well and are mining it for preexisting vulnerabilities to exploit? Easy, safe, deniable.

    • Debian Reproducible Builds to Detect Spyware

      Debian has been getting a lot of attention the last couple of days for Jérémy Bobbio’s work on Reproducible Builds. Bobbio has been working on this idea and implementation for a couple of years now, but after a presentation at Chaos Communication Camp last month it’s come back into focus. In other Debian news, updates 8.2 and 7.9 were released.

    • Debian Linux versus the CIA

      Hidden backdoors into software have long been a concern for some users as government spying has increased around the world. Now the Debian project has taken aim at the CIA and other government spy agencies with reproducible builds that aim to stop hidden backdoors.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Operation Flavius and the Killer Cameron

      Exactly twenty years ago the European Court of Human Rights found that the British Government had acted illegally in shooting dead three IRA members in Gibraltar, even though the court accepted that the government had a genuine belief that they were planning a bombing attack. Indeed the court accepted the victims were terrorists, and refused compensation to their families on those grounds. But the court refused to accept there was no possibility of foiling the plot through methods other than summary execution.

  • Finance

    • Has the CETA free trade deal run into more trouble?

      The EU/Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CETA) may have run into more trouble following news that the EU trade commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, has indicated that that there are now “no plans” to change the initialed agreement containing a rejected ISDS clauses – as she had previously said would happen.

      The Investor State Settlement clauses – which allow secret courts to adjudicate on disagreements between companies and sovereign states and on the ability of companies to sue sovereign countries at the ISDS court if they believe a country has taken actions which effect their profits or interests – have been holding up what the commission has described as “legal scrubbing” – tidying up the legal language and drafting errors.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • 6,000 drop in number of UK journalists over two years – but 18,000 more PRs, Labour Force Survey shows

      Government statistics suggest the number of employed journalists has declined by 6,000 from a peak of 70,000 in 2013.

      The latest figures, for the year to June 2015, estimate that 64,000 people in the UK describe themselves as “journalists, newspaper and periodical editors”.

      This is a slight increase on the figure for the year to June 2014 of 60,000, but still a decline on the 2013 total.

      Meanwhile, the number describing themselves as “public relations professionals” as risen sharply from 37,000 in 2013 to 55,000 in the last data.

  • Privacy

    • IBM just signed a brilliant deal with ARM to ‘watch’ billions of devices on the Internet

      IBM has scored a sweet new partnership with ARM, the company best known for designing the chips that power our smartphones and tablets. This deal will let IBM’s cloud watch and analyze data from billions of devices on the internet.

      The Internet of Things is the trend of adding chips and sensors to everyday items (from dishwashers to thermostats) and connecting them to the internet.

      Sensors will do everything from monitor the health of industrial equipment to monitor your medical issues in a fitness device.

    • Apple and Other Tech Companies Tangle With U.S. Over Data Access

      In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice Department obtained a court order this summer demanding that Apple turn over, in real time, text messages between suspects using iPhones.

      Apple’s response: Its iMessage system was encrypted and the company could not comply.

    • US claim on the world’s servers at a crossroads

      The Obama administration on Wednesday will argue to a US appeals court that companies operating in the US must comply with valid warrants for data—even if that data is stored on overseas servers.

    • Facebook’s Way Past Friends—It Wants to Be Your Whole World

      Facebook doesn’t just want to be a social network. It wants to be your world.

      At an event at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters today, Facebook said that 45 million small businesses worldwide are now using Pages as their digital storefronts. And Facebook wants to make it even easier for you to find businesses, and for businesses to serve you, all within its app.

      [...]

      The crux of these new updates comes down to the increasing power of your phone. As more and more users gravitate to mobile, businesses are hoping to reach users where they are. But according to a recent Forrester study, 85 percent of time spent on smartphones happens within apps, not web pages. That’s a problem not just for small businesses but larger businesses, too, says Benji Shomair, Facebook’s product marketing director for Pages. Apps are difficult and expensive to build—plus most users wouldn’t want, say, a company-specific app anyway.

  • Civil Rights

    • Right Wing’s False Narrative on Scott Walker Probe Fueling Attack on Election Watchdog

      Newly-released emails from the now-halted campaign finance investigation into Scott Walker and his allies are being touted by right-wing media as proof of the probe’s partisan motivations.

      Yet in many ways, the documents show the opposite.

      The Wall Street Journal editorial board trumpeted the two emails, sent between two lawyers in 2013, claiming that they demonstrate “that partisanship drove Wisconsin’s John Doe.” Wisconsin Watchdog calls the emails “explosive,” which “expose the regulator as hyper-partisan.”

      In truth, the emails demonstrate that prosecutors had a stated goal of not influencing the gubernatorial election, and show a career federal prosecutor leaning over backwards to avoid doing so, ultimately erring on the side of helping Walker and undercutting claims of his opponent.

    • Commission won’t ask EU judges to decide on legality of ISDS

      The European Commission will not ask EU judges to decide on the legality of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism in free trade agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

    • European migrant crisis: Top UN official urges ‘global response’ for asylum seekers; Germany calls for joint system

      The United Nations’ top official in charge of migration says that the crisis rocking Europe needs a “global response” amid a warning from the European Union that the situation could last for years.

    • Cautious on Syria war, Obama now cautious on refugee crisis

      During the past four years, 4 million Syrians have fled their country’s civil war. The US has accepted just over 1,500 refugees, so far allowing Europe to take the lead on the issue.

    • Confidential Informants: Inherently Trustworthy Until They’re Not

      The Tampa Police Department has suddenly been put in a very uncomfortable situation. On May 27, officers executed a raid on an alleged drug dealer. By the time it was done, one suspect had been killed by the SWAT team and only $2 worth of marijuana — 0.2 grams — had been recovered.

      It was a righteous kill. Letting themselves in through an unlocked door after no one answered their knock, the SWAT team came across Jason Westcott in his bedroom. Westcott had a gun (a legally-owned one) which he raised when the cops came crashing through the door. He was shot multiple times. Open/shut. Officers in danger, suspect with weapon, etc.

    • As Systems Collapse, Citizens Rise

      As we see pictures of German citizens cheering tens of thousands refugees arriving from Syria and other war zones, we may be witnessing an emerging pattern of the years to come: bureaucracy is failing (EU), systems collapsing (millions of Asylum seeking refugees in urgent need of helping hands) — AND: citizens rising to the occasion!

  • DRM

    • Here’s Why Netflix Won’t Let You Download Movies

      Now that some Amazon Prime subscribers are able to download movies and TV shows for offline viewing, rival streaming company Netflix has been left to defend its reasoning for not offering a similar service.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • IP Enforcement Czar Wants To Hear From You About Government’s IP Enforcement Plan

      It’s that time again. The White House’s IP Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) — often called the IP Czar — is asking for public input on the upcoming “Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement” that it will be releasing next year. The Joint Strategic Plan comes out every three years and is supposed to guide the federal government in how it handles priorities around intellectual property enforcement. Now, I recognize that the cynical among you will already be insisting that there is no value in responding to this, because the government is going to simply repeat the arguments of the legacy industries and its copyright extremists. However, in the past, these open comment periods have actually helped, and the two previous Joint Strategic Plans have not been as bad as expected. In 2010, we sent in our feedback and was pleasantly surprised that at least some of it was reflected in the plan. It recognized the importance of fair use and encouraging innovation. It also admitted that most studies on the impact of intellectual property on the economy were bogus.

    • Copyrights

      • Minding the gap in research and policy

        Opening keynote speaker Julia Reda, MEP for the German Pirate Party, started the debate by calling for more and better evidence. Recounting a number of tales of poor stats, she warned that industry lobbyists are quick to fill the evidence void.

        [...]

        Closing keynote speaker Pamela Samuelson, Berkeley, encouraged academics to write more for non-academic audiences. She recounted her great fear that she would never be taken seriously again after penning an article for WIRED on the ‘Copyright Grab.’ Her fears were unfounded, but it does touch on a key point – there is a cultural taboo associated with non-academic publishing within academia. (Aha! That explains the slight terror I have every time I click the Blogger ‘publish’ button.)

      • Kim Dotcom Seeks Delay of 10th Scheduled Extradition Hearing

        Kim Dotcom and his former business partners want to delay an extradition hearing scheduled to take place in two weeks’ time. The U.S. government wants Dotcom to face the largest copyright infringement trial in history but the Megaupload defendants say a fair hearing will be impossible if they aren’t able to fund expert witnesses outside New Zealand.

      • Police Raid Fails to Dent UK Top 40 Music Piracy

        A raid last week by the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has done little to reduce the availability of packs containing the country’s most popular music tracks. Aside from the disappearance of the torrents usually uploaded by the individual who was arrested, it was very much business as usual during last Friday’s global release day.

      • Getty Images Goes Copyright Trolling After A Meme Penguin

        Getty Images has a bit of a reputation for being a ridiculous copyright troll at times — sending out threatening letters demanding large sums to “settle” for people who use an image from Getty’s database. But, now, it appears to have taken the trolling to a new level, as the German blog GetDigital.de revealed last week when it reported that Getty had demanded nearly $1,000 for one year’s use of an image of a penguin that is actually part of a semi-popular meme, better known as the Socially Awkward Penguin.

EPO Management May Not Have Resigned (Yet), But the Rest of the Staff is Leaving in Droves

Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

EPO has gone militant

Investigation Unit

Summary: Several independent reports of ‘BRAIN DRAIN at the EPO’, including so-called ‘interrogations’ of staff which make it no wonder that some people die

A TRULY TOXIC work environment is what the European Patent Office (EPO) became quite a long time ago. Employees have to cope with terrible, merciless rulers and give up many of their basic rights. Sick leave is the least of the problems, though media under the influence of EPO (like “media partners” [1, 2]) helps the management paint the situation and frame staff demands like this, essentially portraying the staff as arrogant and spoiled (the same media strategy the City of London used when Tube workers went on strike several times this past summer). The EPO’s management simply breaks some fundamental laws, ignores court rulings, and even bullies staff. People don’t want to work there and it’s easy to see why. Some want change, but some have given up. Some decide to go on strike, but some decide to just walk out the door for good. To use the words of one source of ours, the EPO Investigation Unit “illustrates the work sphere.” It’s like the Stasi, maybe worse, and it extends well beyond Munich (it is Office-wide across Europe). The Investigation Unit is international and it is aided by spies who even work outside of Europe. Good use of taxpayers’ money clearly it is not.

“The Investigation Unit is international and it is aided by spies who even work outside of Europe. Good use of taxpayers’ money clearly it is not.”A toxic work environment — sometimes literally toxic — is something that I last discussed with my wife yesterday as she recalled her time working in Taiwan. After confiscating all workers’ passports (having forcibly, as per the oppressive rules, visited the police where everyone had to register) they proceeded to taking fingerprints, faeces samples etc. (people treated like cattle and reduced to mere objects, assets, resources). They were then exposed to cancer-causing X-ray (more than once) and were led to machines that not only ruined their vision but also their general health (because of exposure to hazardous chemicals). Moreover, they were pressured to work very fast in order to meet quotas and not only underperforming staff (based on very demanding standards) got laid off but also ones who had charisma and merely suggested that meals can be shared among colleagues; not only one such worker got fired (and ended up in tears) perhaps because she was deemed a potentially unionising force and thus a ‘threat’ but also her friend got fired, merely for association (or maybe fear of retaliation by communication after her friend got unjustly fired). Union-busting may be very prevalent in places like Taiwan and China, but it is also alive and well in Europe, not just famously in the US (Walmart for instance).

The EPO’s management ruined what was supposed to be decent, at least on paper. It has become a nasty organisation that targets unionists and their friends. It is therefore no wonder that the management lost legitimacy and there is now “BRAIN DRAIN at the EPO,” one source has told us, expanding that “the EPO suffers from a massive BRAIN DRAIN. Many staff members (examiners, formality offices) leave the hell, if they can, by early retirement (between 50 and 60, you still can early retire, with certain amount of deductions), “normal” retirement, or they resign. I just received information about figures, but as long as I don’t have a proof, this info is in a kind of limbo.”

“The EPO is so unbelievably corrupt, but there are things people know but cannot say (at least not yet).”“Perhaps you receive such information from other sources,” said the source, “they are not lying, but simply telling the truth.” As pointed out in recent letters to Benoît Battistelli, this has become common knowledge now and we have been hearing it from several sources (independently). “I expect the office failing in the future,” told us a source, adding: “Who is responsible? Benoît Battistelli & clique damaged the EPO and patent system.”

For the time being, this is information that we can publish with the caveats, at least until we have some harder figures. We know about the fifth suicide, but what about people who make their way out of the EPO alive?

“Better wait until “hard” figures are published,” a source told us about this “BRAIN DRAIN” at the EPO, “or leaking.” It “may be needed to wait until the next year when the official yearly report for 2015 is published, with the staff figures. Personally I know of dozens of colleagues who retired, early retired or resigned.”

We will follow up with publication if someone can send us additional details and preferably hard proof, aside from many anecdotes. According to suepo.org’s silence as of late, the atmosphere of intimidation has had a chilling effect on people who may want to come forth with information (members of the union and outsiders). We have seen cases of hesitance to speak out, even when information is available that can seriously undermine the rogue elements at the organisation.

The EPO is so unbelievably corrupt, but there are things people know but cannot say (at least not yet). It’s almost as though fascist regimes are back with a vengeance even in Europe, but as long as they are compartmentalised, people don’t quite know about them. The EPO is a good example of a worrisome trend where an employer or a government treats staff and citizens like enemies, acting accordingly.

To better understand why there are many EPO staff suicides one needs to know what happens behind closed doors, including revolving doors. There are people who move from war in Afghanistan to the EPO and from spy agencies to the EPO, where ‘interrogation’ techniques are now being used on staff. If only more people knew the full extent of what the EPO does, there would possibly be a mass exodus.

“We kindly ask anyone with relevant information to consider contacting us.”Calls for the arrest of high-level EPO officials aren’t new, but apparently these thugs are too well-connected to face justice. To tackle the abuses of the EPO we don’t need MEPs to speak out; we need special units of German police and we need immediate action that is based on the hard facts. What the public really needs to know about the EPO is the stuff that EPO threatens people who speak out about.

Based on our research, the EPO now employs (not contracts) staff from CRG (Control Risks Group, or ‘British Blackwater’) and we know now who asked Battistelli to sign a contract with CRG, showing disturbing intersection between EPO management and the Military-industrial Complex. For those who forgot how CRG relates to the EPO, recall the following older articles:

We kindly ask anyone with relevant information to consider contacting us. We have never let down a source (in nearly a decade of operation) because we are prudent, discreet, and have strict policy on data security (my laptop, for instance, never leaves the house and messages are encrypted). If enough people speak out, things will change. European politicians access our article and occasionally interact with us because they are growingly disturbed by what is happening at the EPO, but they can only go as far as the information available to them allows. █

09.08.15

Benoît Battistelli in Denial Over Suicides in EPO, Accuses and Threatens the Messengers

Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A letter addressed to Benoît Battistelli about staff suicides and his controversial response to it

EARLIER this year we showed and specifically highlighted French- and German-speaking articles [1, 2, 3, 4] where Battistelli, ringleader of the scandalous EPO, expressed outrage not over suicides themselves but over people who merely ‘dared’ to point out the correlation between suicides and the EPO’s poor management. The appalling treatment of staff will be the subject of numerous posts this month. It’s a lot worse than people have come to imagine. It’s almost definitely beyond what’s permitted by law (European law), but then again, if the EPO hires thugs and felons to join even the highest of levels in the organisation, this probably is perfectly in line with the current standards.

In the following series of letters, circulated among several people, Battistelli is shown yet again fuming at staff representatives and even threatening them (more than implicitly) because of their concern for colleagues. We have deleted names and other identifying parts in respect to the privacy of the deceased person and we can safely present it below for future reference.

A letter to Battistelli

A letter from Battistelli

A letter from Battistelli

A letter to Battistelli

A letter to Battistelli

The above does not need any further comment (especially as the last letter sheds light on what was wrong with Battistelli’s reply), except a reminder that this is not the first time that Battistelli acts in such a fashion. This is systematic and it is consistent with Battistelli’s past attitude. It’s not some hot-headed tantrum. This alone helps demonstrate how toxic EPO management has become, making life very unpleasant for highly-skilled employees, many of whom are leaving (more on that we shall cover separately). █

Free Software Establishments in India Fight Back as Efforts to Spread Software Patents Are Reported

Posted in Asia, Free/Libre Software, Patents at 6:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

OOXML protests in India
From the Campaign for Document Freedom

Summary: India’s move towards software patents already encounters opposition from the Free Software Movement of India (FSMI) and China’s new obsession with software patents is addressed

SOFTWARE patents are truly a menace. Virtually no software developers would ever defend these, except maybe their ‘pioneer’. These are hurting even proprietary software companies, not just Free software developers. As the Microsoft booster Tim Anderson put it yesterday, “[l]egal woes (and cracked licence keys) cause dev favourites to throw in the towel”. He wrote about “Iron Speed, a firm which provided a rapid application development tool for creating .NET apps [which] is shuttering itself thanks to “litigation with a patent troll”, according to a letter sent to customers by co-founder and chairman Alan Fisher.”

The fight against software patents ought to be a common cause among proprietary and Free/Open Source software developers. Conglomerates such as Microsoft and IBM, which are not run by developers, want software patents in order to merely cement their monopolies, which they acquired only because of lack of software patents (back when they were small). Companies that focus on software can only succeed and thrive in the absence of monopolies on algorithms.

“The fight against software patents ought to be a common cause among proprietary and Free/Open Source software developers.”India’s policy on algorithm monopolies has been sound for a number of years, especially given the large number of software developers in India (both proprietary and Free/Open Source software developers). We were therefore rather stunned to learn that India is making a terrible, suicidal move. The Indian Patent Office sells out, causing huge issues for everyone, based on patent-centric sites. There is a panic among everyone except patent lawyers. Some rightly ask: “Will It Stifle Innovation in the IT Industry?”

Of course, it has been repeatedly shown in practice and in theory. India is making even more impact in the media (even international networks like Reuters [1, 2] by giving Pfizer the finger again. As PTI put it, “India rejects Pfizer’s patent application for arthritis drug”. Pfizer just wants another monopoly and India, realising the ethical impact, denies/declines. Why can’t the Indian Patent Office realise that patents on software too are unethical, irrational, and damaging to India? Who is this patent office working for? As one site put it: “The Indian Patent Office (IPO) has addressed limitations on patents for computer-related inventions to clarify the Patents (Amendment) Act 2002.”

It didn’t just address limitations; the word “limitations” has a negative connotation, as if patent maximalism is a good thing.

“Free Software activists against changes to patent norms” is the headline of this new article in English, which shows that the Free software types are already responding to this crisis. To quote the opening paragraph: “The Free Software Movement of India (FSMI) has alleged that the new Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions are illogical. It argues that they violate the spirit and law contained in the amended Patents Act of 1970 and could pose a grave threat to innovation in our country.”

There are meanwhile reports also from China, the other Asian technology giant. “Last year,” said this article, “for the fourth year running, China topped the patent league with 928,000 patent applications compared to 578,800 patents filed in the USA.”

This is not because of increased innovation but due to patent maximalism. As this new article indicates, software patents are becoming widespread in China (we wrote about this trend before). To quote the lawyers’ site:

Patenting computer software inventions makes sense for the Chinese e-commerce industry for three reasons. First, the Chinese government wants more businesses to patent their technological innovations. This policy is supported at the national level and the central government pays for inventors to apply for patents. Second, e-commerce is very important in China. One quarter of all consumer purchases in China are done on-line. And that number is unlikely to get smaller. Third, today’s Chinese consumers have many options and they have grown to expect quality products, quick service and reasonable prices.

For most active businesses, the third reason is the key. Finding an edge in meeting those consumer expectations has made for a fiercely competitive marketplace. Protecting process innovations that involve software improvements is, as it is everywhere, problematic. How are computer software inventions protected in China as a matter of law?

China would not gain any advantage by allowing patents on software. It would just be wasting time and other resources composing documents in Mandarin. A lot of these so-called ‘innovations’ are not innovative at all; they can be found in existing patents (maybe in other languages) and refer to ideas that got implemented a very long time ago. These patents are good for nothing, except maybe serve as trophies (although the higher the number of such ‘trophies’, the less impressive each becomes).

Business hawks in the US are not resting [1, 2]. They still lobby against patent reform in the US, pretending it would “hurt innovation”, “weaken patent laws”, and the usual nonsense about hurting businesses, which is exactly what patent law does at the moment (hence the need for reform). To quote the latter example, here is why the hawks have just resumed this lobbying (it’s about timing): “Toward the end of each summer lawmakers travel back to their home states and districts for the August recess. This time away from our nation’s capital allows elected officials to reconnect with constituents and hear which issues matter most to folks back home.”

US officials will hopefully work towards a real reform, not the diluted one which had been tabled before they went on holiday.

It is rather worrisome to see software patents spreading to large parts of the global economy (India, China, and even Europe if the corrupt EPO management gets its way) while the US itself, the original source of these patents, is coming to grips with the harms of these patents and cutting down accordingly. █

Dark Days for Microsoft as Windows Phone Further Abandoned

Posted in Microsoft, Vista 10 at 5:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Manchester at night

Summary: Microsoft is trying to label everything ’10′ (like Vista 10), despite there being no significant adoption of the ’10′ franchise

THE Vista 10 charade is not quite over yet. Microsoft is now ‘spamming’ people (using its so-called ‘decisions’ engine) to get them to use proprietary spyware, essentially lock-in with back doors. A bait title (headline) was used in a Microsoft puff piece the other day, demonstrating what we consider to be Microsoft and Vista 10 ads in ‘article’ form. It is too easy to be fooled by the artificial hype and actually believe that ’10′ is a success. It’s not.

Now that Nokia is dying (due to Microsoft) and is belatedly moving to Android, Microsoft “kills off some of Nokia’s apps for Windows Phone”. To quote IDG:

Microsoft announced Friday that it will cease development of several apps Nokia developed for Windows Phone as the company streamlines the photo experience on Windows 10 Mobile.

This will never take off. Vista 10 has been a disaster even on desktop, so why would it ever gain a foothold on mobile devices, where Microsoft has such minuscule market share whereas Linux dominates? █

Links 8/9/2015: Peppermint 6, elementary OS 0.3.1

Posted in News Roundup at 5:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Viewer for Ubuntu Touch Making Great Progress

      Developers are preparing a LibreOffice viewer for the Ubuntu phones, and it looks like it’s coming along just nicely. It’s still early work, but its makers are already reporting great progress and really good performance.

    • Microsoft vs OpenOffice in Pesaro: first, let’s recap

      Pesaro is a town of about 100 thousands people on the northern adriatic coast of Italy. Its Public Administration has been facing lots of critics from Free/Open Source software supporters because, in the last five years, it changed twice the same, important part of its ICT infrastructure. Both those changes bring consequences and open issues, both for the critics and for Pesaro, that have had little or no coverage at all so far, especially outside Italy (1). Before talking about them, however, it is necessary to summarize what happened.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Porting Guix and GuixSD

      A few weeks ago, Manolis Ragkousis announced the completion of the GSoC project whose purpose was to port Guix to the Hurd. The system distribution, GuixSD, cannot run GNU/Hurd yet, but the package manager itself can both cross-compile from GNU/Linux to GNU/Hurd and build natively on GNU/Hurd. The work of Manolis is being gradually merged in the main branch.

      More recently, Mark H Weaver posted a series of patches porting GuixSD to MIPS (Lemote Yeeloong), making it the first GuixSD port to non-Intel-compatible hardware (the package manager itself has supported mips64el for two years already.) By removing several platform-specific assumptions, this work paves the way for future ports.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Munich now a major contributor to open source

      The city of Munich is a major contributor to free and open source projects, sending bugfixes to upstream developers, making available software solutions and sharing best practices and technical information. In August, Munich IT staff members shared the city’s accomplishments with the community of Debian developers, one of the main free software distributions.

    • Munich Does A Lot Of The Right Things But Still Drags Onwards

      Munich may have put out the fire but they still are far from optimal in IT. There’s no reason at all they have to support 20-year-old computers. Such things can be replaced rather readily in today’s market with savings in energy-consumption, size, space, noise, dust,… Why spend a lot on labour to maintain obsolete technology far past its “best before” date? It’s not as if they are just getting full value out of previous expenditures nor keeping junk out of the landfill. Ten years’ support does that very well. Twenty years is just silly. 20 years ago, I was using a ‘486, for pity’s sake.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Know Your Language: C Rules Everything Around Me (Part One)

      C is everywhere and in everything. C powers the Mars Curiosity rover, every computer operating system, every mobile OS, the Java Virtual Machine, Google Chrome, ATM machines, the computers in your car, the computers in your robot surgeon, the computers that designed the robot surgeon, the computers that designed those computers, and, eventually, C powers itself as its own implementation language.

Leftovers

  • How Apple is preparing for the end of the iPhone affair

    The launch of the iPhone 6s, fourth generation Apple TV and iPad Pro is impending…

    [...]

    Apple knows it can’t rely on the annual iPhone hype-release cycle
    forever.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water

      Glance at a lawn in East Porterville, California, and you’ll instantly know something about the people who live in the house attached to it.

      If a lawn is green, the home has running water. If it’s brown, or if the yard contains plastic water tanks or crates of bottled water, then the well has gone dry.

  • Security

    • Linux Foundation Security Checklist: Have It Your Way

      The Linux Foundation’s recently published security checklist may draw more attention to best practices for protecting Linux workstations, even if IT pros do not embrace all of its recommendations.

    • ICT faces critical shortage of IT security execs

      There’s a critical shortage of IT security experts in Australia to meet an otherwise welcome increase in the demand for ICT executives after months of employment uncertainty for the country’s tech executives.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Why Murdoch Pushes for War

      Given the disgraceful Sun front page and middle spread urging war on Syria, and the all-out propaganda on Sky News, it is important to understand why Murdoch is pushing so hard for war. I therefore reproduce my article from February 2013. It is important to note that the links are to industry publications: this is very genuine, hard information.

    • Secret RAF drone strike kills two Britons in Syria

      DAVID CAMERON revealed yesterday that the RAF carried out a secret drone strike in Syria which killed two British citizens fighting for Islamic State (Isis).

      The Prime Minister insisted the strike was “necessary and proportionate” to stop attacks being planned on Britain.

      But campaigners described it as a an “extrajudicial killing” that “violated” the will of Parliament.

  • Finance

    • ‘Why this long PayPal delay?’

      In the past I sold a few personal items on eBay that were paid for with PayPal. On those occasions I had immediate access to the money I received.

      However, in recent weeks I have sold some other items, also paid for with PayPal, but was able to access the money only after 21 days, even though PayPal deducted its fees immediately. Have things changed?

    • I Foreclose Houses For Banks: 5 Awful Realities

      About a decade ago, home prices exploded to bizarro levels, then millions of families got behind on their mortgage payments. A financial crisis spiraled out from there, almost destroying the world. Things have improved a bit since then, but it still sucks for lots of people. If you can’t make your payments, the bank squares the debt by seizing your home, and you’re left out in the cold. In the modern world, it’s one of the worst things that can happen to you that doesn’t involve a somber doctor asking you to please sit down.

      That’s where Evelyn comes in. As part of her real estate job, she works with banks to handle foreclosures, evictions, and lockouts. We asked her what it’s like watching this tragedy unfold again and again.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Harvard Professor Larry Lessig Says He’s Running for President

      After exceeding his $1 million crowd-funding goal, Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig announced today on “This Week” that he is running for president.

      “I think I’m running to get people to acknowledge the elephant in the room,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We have to recognize — we have a government that does not work. The stalemate, partisan platform of American politics in Washington right now doesn’t work.”

    • The Usual Warmongers

      To many of us who have been in conflict zones without a sanitised cordon around us, and actually seen the effects close-up (and that excludes almost all of the political class), it is astonishing that the neo-cons constantly seek to promote war, any war. They just cannot sit comfortably unless we are blowing somebody, somewhere, limb from limb.

      Little Aylan Kurdi and his family were fleeing Kobani, a town the US Air Force have been bombing relentlessly for weeks. Bombs are entirely agnostic over who they kill, and have not made life notably better for the population.

      Yet the news media are now insistently beating the drum for British bombing in Syria.

  • Censorship

    • Google DMCA Notice Record Smashed Again – But Why?

      Despite scaling dizzy heights in recent months, the record for DMCA notices being sent to Google’s search engine has been smashed again. In a single week Google just processed a mind-boggling 13.68 million URLs, or to put it another way, almost 23 copyright complaints every second. So what’s behind the massive surge?

    • Pirate Party Offers Uncensored DNS to Bypass Pirate Bay Blockade

      The Norwegian Pirate Party has made a big statement by launching a free DNS service which allows Internet users to bypass the local Pirate Bay blockade. The party advocates a free and open Internet for everyone and believes that the recent website blockades set a dangerous precedent.

    • Norwegian Pirate Party provides DNS server to bypass new Pirate Bay blockade

      Following a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay and a number of other file-sharing websites in Norway, the Norwegian Pirate Party (Piratpartiet Norge) has now set up free, uncensored DNS servers that anyone can use to bypass the block. While the DNS servers are based in Norway, anyone can use them: if your ISP is blocking access to certain sites via DNS blackholing/blocking, using the Piratpartiet’s DNS servers should enable access.

  • Privacy

    • It’s Impossible to Torrent Anonymously, Lawyer Says

      With dozens of cases under his belt Oregon lawyer Carl Crowell can be considered an expert when it comes to suing BitTorrent pirates. However, a recent claim that pirates can’t be anonymous online conflicts with day-to-day reality.

  • Civil Rights

    • Sex abuse royal commission: Geelong Grammar paedophile teacher paid to retire to avoid scandal

      A former Geelong Grammar headmaster paid a teacher to retire early, in order to avoid a formal complaint about sexual abuse, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse has heard.

      The former headmaster, Nicholas Sampson, is now the principal of elite New South Wales school, Cranbrook School.

      Former teacher Jonathan Harvey was jailed in 2007 for 10 months, with another 22 months suspended, after pleading guilty to abusing a former student, known as BLF, between 1976 and 1978.

      In his testimony to the royal commission on Monday, Harvey claimed the elite school’s then-headmaster Nicholas Sampson suggested that he retire early, after hearing of his misconduct relating to a student.

    • Feds allege 4 men executed heist of $1 million worth of MacBook Airs

      Saljanin appears to have stopped at home in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he left the large, rented Penske truck in a parking lot overnight. When he came back the next day, he told police, the truck was gone. Of course, he told the authorities, he had no idea who could have done such a thing, nor did anyone else know that he was making the delivery.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • How Comcast is changing tactics in response to cord cutters

      Reddit user demian87 recently posted a letter from Comcast notifying him or her of a new Comcast internet access pricing plan being trialed in Fort Lauderdale, the Keys, and Miami, Florida. According to this letter, Comcast will set a limit beginning on October 1 of 300 GB per household per month. Customers who exceed this limit will have to pay $10 for every additional 50 GB needed after that, or sign up for an unlimited data plan for an additional $30 per month.

      Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed that the letter is authentic, along with the company’s new unlimited pricing plan. Douglas explained that “the company has trialed three other pricing plans since 2012 when Comcast had a static limit of 250 GB per month.”

      In a related development reported by the New York Times, Comcast will campaign to win over the quintessential cord-cutter class with new TV services designed to entice them into subscribing to its internet access service. Comcast will begin offering a $15-a-month TV service called Stream that includes broadcast networks and HBO for its internet customers. The new service will be available in Boston, Chicago, and Seattle later this year and across the company’s coverage areas in the United States in 2016.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

09.07.15

Sabotage, Not Negligence: It’s 2015 and Microsoft Still Cannot Properly Handle Bootloaders

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista 10 at 4:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Manchester

Summary: Microsoft’s aggression against GNU/Linux as witnessed in light of the company’s multi-boot policies and handling

AT THE very end of July we noted (in several articles in fact) that Microsoft continues to attack dual-boot setups (meaning GNU/Linux). After all these years and despite having the manpower, Microsoft still claims to be incapable/unable to do what very few Linux hackers could do decades ago in order to facilitate OS co-existence. grub is maintained by very few people (almost none) and lilo is dying. As we noted here 4 days ago, "Microsoft's Vista 10 Still a Failure, So Focus Shifts to Attacks on GNU/Linux, Android". Below [1,2] there are some newest rants about dual-booting. Microsoft, now with the UEFI trap (some computers won’t made ‘secure boot’ toggle-able with the introduction of future versions of Windows), continues to making life hard for GNU/Linux users. It’s not a coincidence, it’s intentional. Formal complaints were made as recently as 2 years ago to European authorities, which are too slow or apathetic to take action.

“Formal complaints were made as recently as 2 years ago to European authorities, which are too slow or apathetic to take action.”Vista 10 reportedly gets some users banned from particular sites, notably torrent sites. It is not as though many people are affected because according to the most Microsoft-friendly data/surveys, Vista 10 has not even reached 5% market share. The market share share of Vista 10, based on the past week’s logs in Techrights, is 0.8%. This is not a success story considering the zero-cost ‘upgrade’ in the summer vacation months (when people have time to undertake this task). The market share share of Vista 10 based on the past week’s logs in Tux Machines is even lower (0.18%). Deterrence against exploration of GNU/Linux is now high on the agenda at Microsoft, as recent stories of ours served to demonstrate. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Solution to freezing Ubiquity while attempting to dual-boot Ubuntu with Windows 10
  2. How to delete GRUB files from a Boot EFI partition in Windows 10

India Shoots Itself in the Foot With Software Patents, Time to Act and Prevent This Worldwide

Posted in Asia, Patents at 4:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Software patents comeback shows that protests in India are needed again

Software patents protest in India

Summary: The disease which is software patents keeps trying to spread while its home country, the United States, is gradually ending software patents

THIS WEEK begins with some bad news. IAM, despite its biases, was right to suggest that patent proponents that push for software patents in India are trying, with some success in fact, to gain legitimacy and change the law.

“Even the highest court in the US ruled against these, by extension.”Based on today’s new article from the corporate media in India: “The Indian Patent Office’s recent guidelines, declaring that software and business methods are patentable in India, has set off alarm bells across the software product industry.

“The patent office for the first time made a clear interpretation of the Patents (Amendment) Act, 2002 to mean that if a software has novelty, is inventive or tangible, and has proper technical effect or industrial application, it can be patented. The guidelines serve as a reference for officers in granting patents. Software product industry experts are against modifying the law to make computer programs easily patentable, arguing that innovation in the area is often incremental and programs are built on top of other programs.”

This is disturbing as it seemingly came out of nowhere. It’s due to lobbying that never stops, for instance in New Zealand this summer [1, 2, 3].

India’s patents and policies on granting any is not as lenient as in Western nations and in fact earlier this morning the same paper (as above) wrote: “The Indian Patent Office has denied American drugmaker Pfizer patents for certain isomers and stereoisomers of tofacitinib, a product it markets globally as Xeljanz for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, in the latest example of a foreign company finding it difficult to patent incremental innovations in the country.”

If India can (famously) grasp the evils on patents like these, why can’t it see that software patents are inadequate? Even the highest court in the US ruled against these, by extension. It makes absolutely no sense for patents like these to spread from the US elsewhere when the US itself is now questioning (and invalidating en masse) software patents.

There is currently some European analysis of Apple‘s software patents in Europe (EPO-steered policies made these possible) and it’s noted that:

It is only in the U.S. — in California, Apple’s home state – that Apple has been able to score wins when it comes to the slide-to-unlock patent. In any case, the scope of the patent is quite limited (it only covers the slide-to-unlock where an image is moved across the screen) and can be worked around (it has been implemented into a multitude of Android devices). It’s hard to ignore the suggestion that Apple made this feature “famous” and most likely forced other smartphone makers to implement distinguishable slide-to-unlock mechanisms. Now people know instinctively what to do to unlock a phone but, at the end of the day, in this case it was not considered that their innovative capabilities were a sufficient reason to limit consumer choice.

Well, on the basis of it being a software patent, this patent ought to have been immediately thrown out. But after Brimelow’s “as such” nonsense (notorious loophole) it often seems as though Europe only pretends to be banning software patents. There are further plans to further legitimise software patents in Europe.

India, New Zealand, and Europe should all fight back against the software patents lobby and make it explicitly clear (without exceptions) that software patents are forbidden. Failing to do this would cause enormous damage to these economies, and moreover welcome patent trolls. █

Software patents protest in India

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