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

01.09.16

Links 10/1/2016: Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” Xfce and KDE Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Sorry, grammar nerds. The singular ‘they’ has been declared Word of the Year.

    Singular “they,” the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening.

    In a landslide vote, the language experts chose singular they over “thanks, Obama,” ammosexual, “on fleek,” and other contenders for this annual award given to the most significant term or word in the past year.

  • Science

    • Scientists At Odds With EPA Over Fracking Study

      In June, the Environmental Protection Agency released a draft report on fracking that concluded the practice has not led to “widespread, systemic impacts” on drinking water. Now, the agency’s own advisory board is taking some issue with those findings.

      In a draft peer review report released Thursday, the EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) said that it had concerns regarding the agency’s conclusion in the fracking report. Namely, it found that the EPA failed to “clearly describe the system(s) of interest (e.g., groundwater, surface water) nor the definitions of ‘systemic,’ ‘widespread,’ or ‘impacts.’” In addition, the review board said it was “concerned that this statement does not reflect the uncertainties and data limitations described in the body of the Report associated with such impacts.”

    • All of the Reasons Scientists Are Certain We Are Now Living in the Anthropocene

      “Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth.” So begins one of the more depressing scientific papers I’ve ever read.

      What follows in “The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene,” a new study published in Science, is a laundry list of human sins that, in total, add up to what its authors say is irrefutable evidence that Earth has entered a human-driven geological epoch that began midway through the 20th century and continues today.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Why Are We Dying From Drinking in Record Numbers?

      Almost 31,000 Americans died from drinking in 2014, a nearly 40 percent increase since 2002.

    • Campbell Announces Support for Mandatory GMO Labeling
    • ‘No GMO Soup for You’? Consumer Victory as Campbell Announces New Labels

      Campbell Soup’s announcement that it will become the first U.S. company to begin labeling genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in its products garnered accolades on Friday from food and safety groups, who heralded the development as a “significant win” for transparency.

      “The decision by Campbell’s sends a clear message to Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association which have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat GMO labeling laws,” Ronnie Cummins, the international director for advocacy group Organic Consumers Association, said in a statement.

    • Spike in Drug Shortages Worries ER Docs

      Drug shortages have jumped more than five-fold from 2008 to 2014, following a 7-year decline, and access issues are hurting emergency departments, researchers reported in Academic Emergency Medicine.

    • Lead Poisoned Kids in Flint Will Need More Than Apologies, Declarations

      The children of Flint will need more than new declarations of emergency, state-level resignations and public apologies to help reverse the damage that has been done to their young bodies and developing brains. And now is the time for the state to step in with a proven strategy to help the most vulnerable citizens among us.

      The tragic crisis in which too many Flint children have been poisoned by lead from drinking toxic water after lax state regulatory oversight requires an immediate and significant investment in proven interventions that already exist. That is why Michigan’s Children calls on the state to step in – without delay – to increase funding to Early On services, a proven and existing program that helps families with infants and toddlers birth to age three who have a developmental delay or a diagnosed health condition that could lead to such delay. Elevated lead is one of those health conditions that result in automatic eligibility for Early On due to its strong connection to cognitive impairment and developmental challenges.

    • President Obama Needs to Intervene in Flint Water Crisis

      It’s hard to believe that in 2016, people in the United States are contending with poisoned water, but that’s the sad, frustrating, outrageous problem facing many today in Flint, Michigan. Although Governor Rick Snyder finally declared a state of emergency, the problem has persisted for over a year, affecting almost 100,000 people, many of whom will feel the repercussions of this for years to come in the form of chronic health problems from lead exposure.

    • Important Reminder in the Flint Crisis: People Still Have No Safe Water

      The lead contaminated water crisis in Flint, Michigan is receiving increased national attention—yet what the people of the Rust Belt city urgently need to receive is clean drinking water.

      Republican Governor Rick Snyder on Thursday offered a second apology for the crisis, saying it’s an “unfortunate situation.” That problem, which began as the city was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, has left 200 children below the age of six with confirmed elevated blood lead levels, spurred calls for Snyder’s ouster, and prompted filmmaker Michael Moore to say the governor has to go to jail, as he “effectively poisoned, not just some, but apparently ALL of the children in my hometown of Flint, Michigan.”

    • Death Rates Rise for Young White Americans Too

      It’s not just midlife whites – mortality rates for whites ages 25 to 34 are also increasing

    • Comments about people with mental illness

      As a developer, I wouldn’t really like the idea of doctors meddling with my code, so why is it that some people in the IT and business community are so happy to meddle around in the domain of doctors, giving such strong opinions about something they have no expertise in?

    • Unpatriotic militants? No, Jeremy Hunt – doctors are just fighting to be able to care for us all.

      For the last 9 years I have been the medical director of an NHS service providing confidential help to doctors and dentists with mental health problems, seeing a rising number of doctors week on week.

      But our patients have changed.

      In our early days the ‘typical’ patient was an older male (GP or psychiatrist) with alcohol problems.

      Now nearly half of all new patients are under 30 years old. They come to us with depression, anxiety and symptoms akin to posttraumatic stress disorder. Many have worked in the NHS only a few years. They started out bushy tailed and bright eyed, but end up ‘burnt-out’ (a polite euphemism for depression) after only a few years working. Our youngest patients are only a few months qualified and many are in their Foundation years.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Hackers caused a major blackout for the first time

      Hackers were behind a cyber attack on Ukraine in December that had real offline consequences: A blackout that killed electricity to roughly 700,000 homes.

      On December 23, around half the homes in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region lost power for at least a few hours. Initially reported in Ukrainian media as being caused by hackers, cybersecurity experts have now confirmed that was the case, saying the power company was infected with malicious software.

    • Finland extradites Russian hacking suspect to US

      US authorities are to escort Maxim Senakh out of Finland within a month. They suspect him of stealing millions of dollars from infected computer servers in the US, Finland and elsewhere.

    • Linux Ransomware creators third time unlucky as researchers crack encryption again

      Researchers find Linux.Encoder 3 version still uses buggy encryption and allows file recovery

      Much to the delight of security researchers, a group of malware creators are currently having difficulty getting cryptographic implementations right in their ransomware. This has not happened once but thrice.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • In Response to Continued Resonance of Awlaki Videos, US Relaunched Social Media Propaganda Campaign

      As far as we know, the perpetrators of the November attack on Paris were radicalized by each other, in specific neighborhoods in Europe.

      According to the complaint filed against his Enrique Marquez, the friend who got him guns, Syed Rizwan Farook, adopted radical beliefs after consuming the lectures, videos, and magazine of Anwar al-Awlaki. In fact, Farook and Marquez moved towards planning an attack in 2011, in the immediate wake of the drone killing of Awlaki and his son. As to Tashfeen Malik, Farook’s wife, while she did some searches on ISIS just before Farook started an attack on his workplace, public reporting suggests that like the French terrorists, she adopted extreme beliefs through relationships formed in brick and mortar life.

    • Saudi Arabia’s US-Backed Air War in Yemen May Have Committed War Crimes—Again

      Saudi Arabia is yet again adding to its trail of destruction in its war in Yemen, and its tactics are drawing condemnation from the United Nations. The Saudi’s latest actions include firing missiles on civilian buildings in the capital, Sanaa—striking a wedding hall, the Chamber of Commerce, and a center for the blind—as well as dropping US-made cluster bombs on at least two of Sanaa’s residential neighborhoods.

    • One by One, South Sudan Tries to Name Its War Victims

      It was December 16, 2013, just hours into a civil war pitting President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, the largest tribe in the country, against Riek Machar, his former vice president and a Nuer, the second largest tribe. The war has defied ceasefires and continues to this day despite a peace deal signed in August.

    • Does North Korea Need Nukes to Deter US Aggression?

      Question 1– How many governments has the United States overthrown or tried to overthrow since the Second World War?

      Answer: 57 (See William Blum.)

      Question 2– How many of those governments had nuclear weapons?

      Answer— 0

    • North Korea’s “H Bomb”: No Ado About Something

      In my opinion, a lot of the mockery of the North Korean nuclear test—the silly little man with his silly little bomb—is racism that reassures. It evokes the explanation for why many poor rural whites adopted a posture of racial exclusion instead of class solidarity with poor rural blacks in the American South: “because ‘If you ain’t better than a ****, who are you better than?’”. We may have our problems, in other words, but at least we’re not North Korea.

    • Decades After Atrocities During US-Backed Dirty Wars, Nations Take Promising Legal Steps

      El Salvador says will make arrests over notorious massacre of Jesuit priests; Guatemala arrests over a dozen former officials for rights abuses

    • US drone crashes in Iraq; not shot down by enemy fire

      U.S. military officials say an American Predator drone crashed Thursday in Iraq but say it was not shot down by enemy fire.

    • 112 Killed across Iraq; US Drone Crashes
    • We Are the Human Shields of the Political Class

      Sitting ducks, in other words, people that are easy to kill. This is why they are targeted, obviously. A “hard target”, on the other hand, is an individual, structure, or institution that is very hard to inflict much damage on by any organization other than a technologically advanced military. The Pentagon (with the exception of 9/11), White House, Congress, Homeland Security, the elites who can afford round-the-clock protection, all these come to mind. These “hard targets”, although safe from attack, are usually the ones chiefly responsible for whatever danger from terrorism that we “soft targets” are exposed to. Blowback, the retaliation by those angered at Western interventionism, is our lot in life in the thick of War on Terror hysteria.

    • Saudi Arabia Executed a Nonviolent Shiite Cleric – It’s Going To Cost Them Big

      Apparently not content to rest on those dubious laurels, Saudi authorities followed that high water mark by executing 47 people – by beheadings and firing squads – on New Year’s Day alone. It was the highest number of executions in a single day in the kingdom since 1980, when Saudi authorities publicly beheaded 63 Sunni fundamentalists behind the takeover of the Kaaba during the 1979 Hajj.

      The majority of those killed on January 1 were alleged terrorists convicted on charges stemming from the country’s al-Qaeda insurgency, which wreaked havoc across Saudi Arabia in the mid-2000s. Four, however, were Shiites – including the internationally revered Ayatollah Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, a vocal advocate for the kingdom’s oppressed Shiite minority.

    • Taking On the Nuclear Goliath

      Say hello to the Marshall Islands, the tiny, heroic island nation in Micronesia, with a population just over 70,000. This former U.S. territory, which still bears the terrible scars of 67 aboveground nuclear blasts between 1946 and 1958, when this country used it as an expendable nuclear test site, has engaged the United States – and, indeed, all nine nations that possess nuclear weapons – in lawsuits demanding that they comply with the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and begin the process of negotiating global nuclear disarmament.

    • Kenya has become a perilous place to be a teacher with the threat of al-Shabaab leaving young people in crisis

      Morning was several hours off when passengers boarded the ill-fated bus bound for Nairobi. Among them, teachers heading home for the long holidays started to doze off, others murmured quietly.

      An hour into the journey from Mandera in northern Kenya, Osinga Atibu was awoken from his reverie by the sound of gunfire. Masked men, armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, forced the driver to a shuddering halt. A short while later, the terrified passengers were ordered off the bus, non-Muslims singled out, and forced to lie face down on the ground.

    • Saudi Arabia a Force for Stability? Dream On!

      The Saudi mass beheadings on January 2 proved nothing new to a world that well knows Saudi Arabia is still a tribal police state with a moral code of medieval barbarity. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni-Muslim country that executes people for witchcraft, adultery, apostasy, and homosexuality (among other things). And the Saudi regime is perfectly willing to torture and kill a Shi’a-Muslim cleric for the crime of speaking truth to power, knowing that that judicial murder will inflame his followers and drive the region toward wider war. The Saudi provocation is as transparent as it is despicable, and yet the Saudis are held to no account, as usual.

    • U.N. Chief to U.S.-Backed Saudi Air Coalition: You May Be Committing War Crimes in Yemen

      The U.N. has asked Yemen to reverse its decision to expel a top U.N. human rights official after cluster-bomb complaints.

    • Noam Chomsky: Electing the President of An Empire

      The spectrum is broad but in an odd sense. The spectrum is basically center to extreme right. Extreme right. Way off the spectrum. The Republican Party about 20 years ago basically abandoned any pretense of being a normal political party. In fact, the distinguished, respected conservative commentators, from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank, like Norman Ornstein, described the Republican Party as a radical insurgency which has abandoned parliamentary politics. They just don’t want anything to happen. Their only policies are “don’t do anything” or bomb. That’s not a political party.

    • Regime Change Madness: Hillary, Obama and Murderous Mayhem in the Muslim World

      Still, recalling that it was a Democratic U.S. president (Jimmy Carter) who first provided the resources that made Osama bin Laden a force to be reckoned with and that leading Democrat Hillary Clinton voted (as a U.S. Senator) for Bush’s invasion, responsible observers of U.S. policy need to give the current Democratic president, Barack Obama, and the next one, his former Secretary of State, Hillary, equal credit for growing deadly Sunni extremism. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have pursued aggressive policies of regime change that have opened the door for jihadist expansion. They have done so over and against the opposition and warnings not just of peace activists but also of top U.S. military analysts and officials.

    • Russia, as Explained to Russians by Americans

      This is rather odd because who needs propaganda when the Russians can read the Western media themselves and see firsthand all the lies it puts forth about them and the demonizing of Putin. There are several political-debate shows on Russian television where they invite Western journalists or politicians; on one there frequently is a really funny American journalist, Michael Bohm, who keeps regurgitating all the western propaganda, arguing with his Russian counterparts. It’s pretty surreal to watch him display the worst political stereotypes of Americans: arrogant, gullible, and ignorant. He stands there and lectures high ranking Russian politicians, “explaining” to them the “real” Russian foreign policy, and the “real” intentions behind their actions, as opposed to anything they say. The man is shockingly irony-impaired. It is as funny to watch as it is sad and scary.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Federal Judge Finds NYPD Engaged In Evidence Spoliation By Destroying Documents Related To Summons Quota Lawsuit

      Just recently, we discussed the revelation that former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s emails were deleted right as he was exiting office — despite being ordered by a federal court to preserve all communications relevant to a summons quota lawsuit.

      The city claimed it was a clerical error, but the plaintiffs pointed out that, despite the retention order being issued in 2010, the city had yet to produce a single email from Kelly’s account in response to its discovery requests.

    • FBI Finally Completes FOIA Request 1,393 Days After It Was Filed; Withholds All 509 Responsive Pages

      Michael Morisy — founder of FOIA clearinghouse MuckRock — has been waiting since February of 2012 for the FBI to hand over information on its GPS tracking devices. Specifically, Morisy was looking for information on any devices it deactivated/recollected after the Supreme Court (US v. Jones) declared the warrantless, long-term tracking of individuals could amount to a Fourth Amendment violation.

      The decision didn’t explicitly state GPS tracking devices now needed to be accompanied by warrants, but it was enough that the FBI began shutting down its 3,000 devices. (It turned most of them back on a month later after securing the proper paperwork. Only 250 or so were permanently switched off. And, of course, the FBI grumbled about having to obtain warrants for devices it had already deployed, because the Fourth Amendment doesn’t do anything but slow down law enforcement.)

    • US Courts Administrative Office Sued Because PACER’s Bad Math Is Overcharging Users

      There’s plenty to complain about when discussing the federal court’s document filing system known as PACER. Lots.

      [...]

      Then there’s the fact that PACER hands over PDFs like the pages are rolling off the Xerox. To access a digital file, you’ll be paying $0.10 a page. Sure, it caps at $3.00 (30 pages) but that’s only per individual PDF. Download another from the same case and you’re back to square one, paying a dime a page. Opinions are free, which helps, but everything else steadily adds up.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Emergency Declared by Governor as Massive Methane Leak in Los Angeles Spews Record Amounts of Pollution
    • FBI to Track Animal Abuse Like Homicide—But Which Animals?

      Activists say new system is step in the right direction, but reveals bias that favors household pets over farm animals

    • More droughts may mean less power

      Rising temperatures and reduced rainfall will make the flow of rivers less dependable, affecting supplies to the electricity generators that rely on them.

    • Donald Trump fined for pollution from one of his private jets

      US presidential candidate joins the Bahrain royal family and Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox America whose aircraft have all fallen foul of the EU’s emissions trading scheme

    • The U.S. Was Hit With Seriously High Temperatures In 2015

      If you thought 2015 was unusually hot, you were right. Last year was the second hottest on record in the United States since data collection began in 1895, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday.

      Last year was also the 19th consecutive time that average temperatures in the U.S. exceeded the 20th century average, which means everyone born after 1996 has only experienced warmer than normal temperatures. NOAA also reported that December was record warm for the contiguous United States, with temperatures at 6°F above average. Twenty-nine states had their warmest December on record, while no state was record cold. The last time the country saw a warmer December was in 1939.

      This year-over-year trend could continue in 2016. For this winter, NOAA said in October that above-average temperatures are forecast across much of the West and the northern half of the contiguous United States. Temperatures are also predicted to be above-average in Alaska and much of Hawaii.

    • New US Diet Guidelines Say Yes to Meat, Screw the Climate

      Every five years, the government tries to tell Americans what to put in their bodies. Eat more vegetables. Dial back the fats. It’s all based on the best available science for leading a healthy life. But the best available science also has a lot to say about what those food choices do to the environment, and some researchers are peeved that new dietary recommendations released yesterday seem to utterly ignore that fact.

      Broadly, the 2016-2020 dietary recommendations aim for balance: More veggies, leaner meats, try some fish! Oh, and eat way less sugar, no more than 10 percent of your total diet.

    • Charles Koch Is Disappointed That He Can’t Buy More Influence

      There are two interesting things going on here. First is Koch’s disappointment that his money doesn’t buy him more influence. It’s easy to laugh at that, but he’s probably right. He’s raised a lot of money. But it’s hard to see that Republican views have changed in his direction much. The entire party denies climate change and wants to lower taxes already, so there was no work to be done there. But a less aggressive foreign policy? An end to corporate welfare? Turning down the volume on social issues? Koch is right: all his money has had no effect on that. It’s only had a significant effect when he’s pushing in the same direction that the GOP wind is already blowing.

    • The Arctic Is Melting at a Record Pace — and It’s Having a Scary Impact on Global Weather

      Arctic sea ice is melting at a record pace – and every summer looks grimmer. This past summer saw the ice pack at its fourth-lowest level on record, and the overall trend in recent decades suggests this will only continue.

    • Look What We’ve Done: Human-Made Epoch of Nightmares Is Here

      There’s no question about it. A new epoch—the Anthropocene—has begun.

      So says an international group of geoscientists, in a paper published Friday in the journal Science. They point to waste disposal, fossil fuel combustion, increased fertilizer use, the testing and dropping of nuclear weapons, deforestation, and more as evidence that human activity has pushed the Earth into the new age that takes its name from the Greek anthropos, or human being.

      Some argue the new era began in the 1950s, the decade that marks the beginning of the so-called “Great Acceleration,” when human population and its consumption patterns suddenly speeded up, and nuclear weapons tests dispersed radioactive elements across the globe.

  • Finance

    • Basic Income, Basic Issues

      But basic income is much more than that because it addresses the basic human right without which all other rights are impossible: the right to material existence.

    • Yet Another Fabricated Jobs Report — Paul Craig Roberts

      Americans of prime working age, 25 years old to 54 year old, only received 16,000 or 5% of the new jobs.

      Those aged 46 to 54 lost 165,000 jobs. In other words, middle aged people are losing their jobs before they can provide for their retirement.

      There are 527,000 more Americans working multiple jobs in December 2015 than in December 2014.

    • Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks Than Most of Us Earn in a Lifetime

      Clinton’s most lucrative year was 2013, right after stepping down as secretary of state. That year, she made $2.3 million for three speeches to Goldman Sachs and individual speeches to Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments, Apollo Management Holdings, UBS, Bank of America, and Golden Tree Asset Managers.

      The following year, she picked up $485,000 for a speech to Deutsche Bank and an address to Ameriprise. Last year, she made $150,000 from a lecture before the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

      To put these numbers into perspective, compare them to lifetime earnings of the median American worker. In 2011, the Census Bureau estimated that, across all majors, a “bachelor’s degree holder can expect to earn about $2.4 million over his or her work life.” A Pew Research analysis published the same year estimated that a “typical high school graduate” can expect to make just $770,000 over the course of his or her lifetime.

    • Paul Krugman: Are We Heading to a Global Economic Catastrophe?

      Paul Krugman does his best to analyze the current economic crisis and venture a guess about whether it will trigger a worldwide economic catastophe in Friday’s column.

    • The corporate university and its threat to academic freedom

      Neoliberalism has facilitated the emergence of the ‘corporate’ university, which dangerously prioritises market rationality and public relations over academic freedom.

    • How to Spend Less So You Can Afford to Save More
    • 6 Creepy Schemes Companies Use To Bury You In Debt

      Unless you come from an obscenely rich family, one of the first things you find out when you hit adulthood is that your future might depend on your willingness to take on debt. Do you want to go to college? You’ll probably need a loan for that. Need a car? That’s going to require a loan. Ready to put down some roots and settle in a permanent place of your own? Unless your name is Mr. or Ms. Money Bags, get ready to borrow.

      And the fact that borrowing is a part of adulthood isn’t even the bad news. If you were paying attention as a child, you saw that one coming. The bad news is that your car, education, and house are only the tip of the debt iceberg. Beneath the sea is a whole other landmass of ways the world wants to keep you in the red.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Nuclear Perceptions: North Korea and the arts of Guerrilla Partisanship

      Nuclear weapons have always had a habit of inviting games of perception. Will the state in possession of a nuclear option make use of it? Obviously, there is always precedent that any state with an option will, at some point, make do with it. The importance here is one of perception.

      The DPRK has tended to be in the business of mastering perceptions over reality for much of its existence. In many ways, it has had to. In the face of a dominant United States, a retreating Russia, and a China that has proven to be more qualified about its support, Pyongyang has become more boisterous and terrier-like in its pronouncements.

    • How is citizen journalism transforming the BBC’s Newsroom practices?

      User-generated content offers new ways of covering ‘black hole’ stories such as the Syrian conflict. But how do journalists make sense of what is happening on the ground?

    • Latest: Trump crowd estimated at 2,000, plus protests

      Donald Trump says the crowd for his speech Thursday night in Burlington was 25,000.

      Untrue, according to the city police chief.

      About 2,000 people lined up starting at 4:30 a.m. for access to the Flynn Center, Chief Brandon del Pozo told the Burlington Free Press. The Trump campaign instituted a loyalty test at the door and allowed into the 1,400-seat Flynn Center only people who professed support for the candidate.

    • ESPN Employees Keep Failing To Disclose Their Advertising Tweets As Advertising
    • Bernie Sanders Goes on the Offensive Against Trump: He’s “Doing What Demagogues Always Do”

      Sanders noted that the American worker is making far less today “in real, inflation adjusted for dollars” than thirty years ago, and that Trump is tapping into the anger that’s creating. “What I am saying is you have a right to be angry. Let’s create an economy that gets to the root cause of greed and corporate greed. Let’s take them on.”

      “You know what Trump is saying?” he asked. “The cause of your problems is that Latino tomato picker who’s making $8 an hour, or that Muslim engineering student — that’s the old-fashioned scapegoating, it’s doing what demagogues always do.”

    • Muslim Woman Gets Kicked Out Of Donald Trump Rally For Being Muslim

      A Muslim woman was kicked out of a Donald Trump rally on Friday night for no apparent reason. The woman, Rose Hamid, told CNN that she “came to the rally to let Trump supporters see what a Muslim looks like.” She stood silently with a t-shirt that read “I Come In Peace.”

      About halfway through the rally, held in Rock Hill, South Carolina, some people in the crowd “turned pretty ugly” toward the woman, shouting “epithets.” She was then escorted out by security.

    • Donald Trump’s Supporters Are Poorly Paid, Distrustful and Convinced They’re Anything but Racist
    • Trump’s angry white men – and why there are more of them than you think

      Michael has presumably had a rough day. Nine hours working as an exterminator takes a physical toll on the 45-year-old, who didn’t go to college, makes $33,000 a year, and relies on a steady swarm of pests to pester people in his 90% rural county.

      But home, with a glass of wine and Fox News, he’s excited to hear from the only candidate who’s making any sense these days: Donald Trump.

    • Fox Downplays Sexual Assault, Until It Fits Their Anti-Muslim Refugee Agenda

      Fox News devoted numerous segments to reports of mass sexual assaults committed in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve by men “having a ‘North African or Arabic’ appearance,” using the story to fearmonger about the “direct threat” posed by “how fast you allow … Syrian refugees into this country.” This reporting stands in contrast to Fox’s history of downplaying sexual assaults when it doesn’t fit their anti-refugee agenda.

  • Censorship

    • Canadian Company Netsweeper to Censor Bahrain’s Internet for $1.2M

      A Canadian company has offered to provide the Bahraini government with internet censorship technology, according to a tender published on Thursday—the latest in a string of questionable partnerships the company has forged in recent years.

    • ‘Censorship should be at the individual level’

      Censorship of any kind has to be individual wherein a person who does not like something should not watch or read it, said eminent author Nayantara Sahgal here on Friday.

    • Twitter Celebrates The Return Of Politwoops, Which It Tried To Murder

      Well, Politwoops has been resurrected, and here to tell us how great that is, is the new CEO of Twitter, the company that initially killed it off.

      [...]

      It’s a nice, well-crafted message, to be sure. That said, it wouldn’t feel right to laud Twitter for about-facing a terrible attempt to knee-cap the usefulness of its own site. If Twitter is a platform chiefly about inter-expression, then hiding any of that expression is antithetical to its very purpose. Reinstating a service primarily useful to the public, once murdered out of deference to the elite class, is self-evidently the right thing to do, and the only lesson to be learned here is that Twitter’s initial treatment of Politwoops was a major mistake to begin with.

    • The Pirate Bay Now Starts Operating From New .MS Domain

      Notorious file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has just started operating from a new .MS domain name. Notably, The Pirate Bay already registered the new .MS extension many years ago but it didn’t use it as a primary domain until now. If we recall the recent troubles faced by the website operators over the copyright issues, the future of .MS domain name seems very uncertain.

    • Hong Kong Bookseller Abducted by Chinese Government Thugs
    • Sense and censorship

      A committee led by Shyam Benegal may have been set up to look into revamping the Censor Board. But if not censorship, then what system should films be subjected to?

    • Poll: Colleges Should Punish Students for Offensive Speech

      A new HuffPost/YouGov survey found majority support for the position that colleges should punish students who engage in racially offensive speech.

      Respondents consisted of 1,000 random adults from around the country—not just college students, in other words. Fifty-three percent agreed that colleges should discipline students for making racially insensitive comments. Just 28 percent disagreed, and 19 percent weren’t sure.

  • Privacy

    • Note to Congress: The NSA Seizes More than Just Your Conversations with Israeli Leaders

      Over the holiday break, Congress was up in arms over a Wall Street Journal report revealing lawmakers’ private conversations with Israeli officials and interest groups were swept up by the National Security Agency during the US-Iran nuclear negotiations. But these aren’t the only congressional communications collected by the NSA.

      How vast is the dragnet? On what other national policy matters has NSA surveillance impacted Members of Congress? A congressional investigation remains long overdue, but these revelations should prompt Congress to create a Church Committee for the 21st Century.

    • The NYPD spied on Muslim Americans. Will a court settlement change anything?

      Five years ago, news broke that the NYPD was engaged in an expansive domestic spying operation targeting American Muslim communities for surveillance, mapping and infiltration. Two lawsuits were filed in the New York federal courts in response to these practices and in defense New York City Muslims’ – and all minority communities’ – right to equal treatment and religious freedom.

    • Your Apps, Please? China Shows how Surveillance Leads to Intimidation and Software Censorship

      Xinjiang, home of the China’s muslim Uighur minority, has long been the world’s laboratory for Internet repression. Faced with widespread local unrest, and online debate, China has done everything it can to enforce its vision of the Net in the region, from imprisoning bloggers and online publishers, to quarantining the entire Xinjiang network from the rest of the Internet for over ten months in 2009. Nonetheless, Xinjiang residents still circumvent censorship and surveillance in the pursuit of privacy and free expression. They use virtual private networks and other methods to get around the Great Firewall. They use popular messaging apps that they have heard could defend them against surveillance, like WhatsApp and Telegram.

    • After Spending Time As Surveillance Subjects, Intelligence Oversight Committee Suddenly Performing Some Oversight

      Once again, it appears the only way to make our nation’s intelligence oversight committees care about surveillance is to include them in the “fun.”

      Fervent surveillance apologist Dianne Feinstein had zero fucks to give about the steady stream of leaks until it became apparent that the CIA was spying on her staffers while they put together the Torture Report. Likewise, many members of the House Intelligence Committee couldn’t be bothered to care much about domestic surveillance until they, too, were “inadvertently” included in the NSA’s dragnet.

    • White House Raises Encryption Threat in Silicon Valley Summit
    • Germany reportedly resumes domestic surveillance efforts with the NSA

      After halting its internet surveillance targeting German companies and officials last May, the country’s BND intelligence agency has resumed its spying operations in collaboration with the NSA, according to Reuters.

      German media reported that collaboration between the two agencies have started up again at the Bad Aibling surveillance station and that the BND has resumed supplying intelligence to the NSA.

    • Forbes, ad blockers and malware

      If you’ve been following the news about ad blockers, you might have heard about Forbes asking its readers to turn off ad blockers to access its content. Apparently the site promised to provide an “ad light” version of its site that provides less ads or something like that.

      Well one guy, Brian Baskins, turned off his ad blocker and promptly got some pop-under malware on the Forbes site.

    • The Transatlantic Data War

      The United States faces a profound choice. It can continue to work in a world of blurred lines and unilateral demands, making no concessions on surveillance and denouncing privacy rights as protectionism in disguise. Yet if it does so, it is U.S. companies that will suffer.

      Alternatively, it can recognize that globalization comes in different flavors and that Europeans have real and legitimate problems with ubiquitous U.S. surveillance and unilateralism. An ambitious strategy would seek to reform EU and U.S. privacy rules so as to put in place a comprehensive institutional infrastructure that could protect the privacy rights of European and U.S. citizens alike, creating rules and institutions to restrict general surveillance to uses that are genuinely in the security interests of all the countries.

      More broadly, the United States needs to disentangle the power of a U.S.-led order from the temptations of manipulating that order to its national security advantage. If it wants globalization to continue working as it has in the past, the United States is going to have to stop thinking of flows of goods and information as weapons and start seeing them as public goods that need to be maintained and nurtured. Ultimately, it is U.S. firms and the American economy that stand to benefit most.

    • How the US Is Playing Both Ends on Data Privacy

      There’s an excellent article in Foreign Affairs on how the European insistence on data privacy — most recently illustrated by their invalidation of the “safe harbor” agreement — is really about the US talking out of both sides of its mouth on the issue: championing privacy in public, but spying on everyone in private. As long as the US keeps this up, the authors argue, this issue will get worse.

    • House with Banksy mural mocking GCHQ spooks goes on sale for £350,000
    • United States network NBC News reports on ‘$300K sale’ of Cheltenham’s Banksy house
    • Millionaire businessman to put in offer for Banksy house with aim of turning it into a ‘spy museum’
    • Juniper will scrap code giving NSA backdoor access
    • Juniper promises to scrap firmware code that granted NSA backdoor access
    • New Questions Swirl About Security Failure at Tech Giant Juniper Networks
    • Juniper will release another patch for its backdoored firewalls
    • Juniper Networks will drop code tied to National Security Agency
    • Juniper’s products are still insecure; more evidence that the company was complicit

      It’s been a month since Juniper admitted that its firewalls had back-doors in them, possibly inserted by (or to aid) US intelligence agencies. In the month since, Juniper has failed to comprehensively seal those doors, and more suspicious information has come to light.

      U Illinois researcher Stephen Checkoway has revealed that Juniper’s backdoor was only possible because the company added a known-insecure random number generator, Dual_EC, years after the company had started using a more-secure alternative, ANSI X9.31, deliberately introducing a vulnerability into its product.

    • ‘Insider Threat’ Program: Hundred Thousand Pentagon Personnel Under Total Surveillance

      At least a hundred thousand military, civilian, and contractor personnel at the Defense Department have been subjected to a “continuous evaluation” or total surveillance of their electronic activities and communications. The surveillance is part of the department’s “Insider Threat” program and raises concerns about the extent to which whistleblower communications are being intercepted.

      According to a 2015 report to Congress obtained by Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News, “Multiple pilots and concept demonstrations using ‘push’ and ‘pull’ capabilities to conduct continuous evaluation” have been used to monitor personnel with access to classified information.

    • Top White House Officials Talk Encryption in Silicon Valley
    • Gmail Creator Named Head of Y Combinator’s Tech Startup Incubator

      Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s largest startup factory, is rejiggering responsibilities at the executive level and adding more staff. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and of Google’s onetime slogan “Don’t be evil,” replaces Sam Altman as managing partner of Y Combinator’s main accelerator program, which helped launch companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, and Stripe.

    • This is the web browser you should be using if you care at all about security

      No matter what you’ve heard about the Tor network, the basics of the service are simple: Tor keeps anyone who uses it safe, secure, and anonymous on the Internet.

      Originally created by the U.S. Navy, Tor can be used to browse the Web anonymously, send and receive private communications, or make other computer software anonymous by integrating it with Tor software.

      Tor’s reputation, however, is less straightforward. Many equate the anonymity the network provides with those who decide to use it for illegal purposes. From terms like “Dark Net” and ”Deep Web” to who actually uses the privacy software, here’s everything you need to know about Tor.

  • Civil Rights

    • Neoliberalism and its forgotten alternative

      …the natural ‘commons’ is turned into a potential new source of value which can be speculated on by investors…

    • On the edge of a nation, sitting on the border

      Life in UK’s indefinite immigration detention regime evokes the ‘barbed wire disease’ experienced by ‘enemy aliens’ interned during the World Wars. We must learn from our past to end detention.

    • Mein Trumpf Makes a Stop in Vermont
    • VIDEO: Is Right-Wing Populism the New Normal?

      In this video from The Guardian, Younge describes the ascent of rightwing populist leaders as the result of democracy in crisis…

    • San Bernardino Police Abuse Victims May Get Screwed Over by Bankruptcy

      Today, three and a half years later, The Wall Street Journal reports that the city wants to find its way out of bankruptcy by wriggling out of its police abuse settlements.

    • Migrants In Europe Are Getting Stereotyped As Dangerous Criminals

      At least 18 migrants are among the 31 people believed to have carried out a spate of attacks on women at a New Year’s Eve celebration in Cologne, Germany. More than 170 criminal complaints have been filed, the majority of which claim sexually motivated attacks. A spree of similar attacks across Europe has been used to justify fears that so many Middle East and North Africa natives will not be able to fully integrate into European societies.

    • When Men and Women Work Together, Men Get All the Credit

      Anne Case and Angus Deaton recently wrote a paper that’s gotten a lot of attention. One of the minor ways it’s gotten attention is in the way a lot of people talk about it: as the Deaton paper, or the Deaton/Case paper, despite the fact that it’s traditional in economics to list authors alphabetically.

    • A Left-Wing Hero of Brazil, Jean Wyllys, Comes Under Fire for Israel Trip, Anti-Palestine Comments

      A POPULAR LEFT-WING Brazilian congressman known for his leadership in the social justice movement is trying to fend off a major backlash from his left flank while he travels in Israel. The legislator, Jean Wyllys, has angered much of the base of the leftist Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), which he represents, after participating in a conference at an Israeli university with deep ties to human rights abuses against Palestinians and then defending that decision with anti-Palestinian talking points common among hard-core Israel defenders. Wyllys’ unexpected stance is one of the most powerful cases yet to highlight the tried-and-true tactic of exploiting liberal social issues to generate left-wing support for militarism.

    • For Maine Gov. Paul LePage, “Cocaine Negroes” Have Given Way to Horny Heroin Dealers

      Says “guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” drive north from New York and Connecticut to sell drugs and knock up local girls.

    • Here’s Gov. Paul LePage’s Non-Apology for Comments About Drug Dealers “Impregnating” White Women

      “You’s don’t like me and I don’t like you.”

      That’s how Gov. Paul LePage began his press conference on Friday to formally address the racially charged remarks he made this week about drug dealers with names like “D-Money” and “Smoothie” coming to “impregnate” young white girls in Maine.

      LePage’s opening line, which he cited as a quote from the film “Rocky,” was aimed squarely at media and reporters in the room.

      “I made one slip up,” he said. “I was going impromptu and my brain didn’t catch up to my mouth.”

      “Instead of saying Maine women, I said white women,” he added. “I’m not going to apologize to the Maine women for that because if you go to Maine, you will see we are 95 percent white.”

    • Yo Guv, We Mighta Found Smoothie, Still Looking For D-Money and Shifty

      Sigh. Our racist imbecile of a governor Paul LePage is making news again for projectile vomiting moronic words out of his face – this time, blaming Maine’s real, ruinous, death-dealing heroin epidemic on imaginary black dudes named D-Money, Smoothie and Shifty, who come here from New York and Connecticut to sell dope, impregnate white girls, maybe rap a bit and then go home. After everybody freaked out that he actually out loud said those things, he sorta lumbered through an even more stunningly offensive non-apology that utterly, miraculously missed the point, blathering about how his “brain (sic) didn’t catch up to my mouth” and why are these lefty bloggers out to get him for One Little Slip-Up and anyway who said anything about race, not him, nope, uh uh. Twitter was on it. Samples: “The governor of Maine’s comments are disgusting. D-money, smoothie & shifty are actually stand-up guys once you get to know em” and “Je suis smoothie.”

    • Governor Delivers Racist Rant At Public Meeting
    • Right-Wing Governor LePage Issues Appalling Defense of His Racist Remarks

      He did add that perhaps his brain was slower than his mouth. “Instead of ‘Maine women,’ I said ‘white women’ and I’m not going to apologize to the Maine women for that because if you go to Maine, you’ll see that we’re essentially 95 percent white.”

    • Man Shoots Officer While Pledging Allegiance To ISIS, But Mayor Says He Doesn’t Represent Islam

      The shooting comes at a time when police deaths are actually at a low point, but when anti-Islam incidents — where American Muslims are harassed, shot, or have their houses of worship damaged or destroyed — are on the rise.

    • Cop Arrested Twice for Assaulting Women, Stayed a Cop and Was Just Arrested a Third Time

      Philadelphia police officer Deric Lewis was recently arrested for the third time, after being arrested on two other occasions and losing his job as a result. In his two previous arrests, Lewis was charged with assault and reckless endangerment, and was reported as being violent in both situations.

    • America Must See the Truth About Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan

      The Obama administration must see Turkey under the reign of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for what it is.

    • Saudi Arabia executions: Philip Hammond condemned by rights campaigners for ‘excusing’ mass killings

      The Foreign Secretary says ‘just to be clear, these people were terrorists’ – despite at least four of the 47 being arrested over political protests. Rights groups say Britain continues to ‘parrot the propaganda’ of its Middle East ally

    • Artist protests naked at Cologne cathedral

      “Respect us! We are not fair game, even when we’re naked,” Moiré’s sign read.

      The 32-year-old Swiss artist stood on the square outside Cologne’s world-famous cathedral for around 20 minutes on Friday morning, watched by members of the public and a few police officers, who joined the group of onlookers but took no action against Moiré.

      “I stand for women’s freedom to move freely. For the things we’ve achieved in the past 50 years – for women’s emancipation,” Moiré told Bild.

      “I don’t want people to trample on these values and for women to have to adapt themselves. Women must be able to live their values of freedom, with self-determination and self-awareness,” she said.

    • Former Cardinals Scouting Coach To Plead Guilty To Hacking In Espionage Case

      But media reports speculated that charged officials could incur heavy penalties for computer hacking under the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — a law that has been used to convict malicious hackers but has also been used to prosecute more innocuous online behavior, such as downloading documents or using a shared password.

      Internet activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide after the Justice Department charged him with criminal hacking under the CFAA for downloading documents from a research database. He was facing up to 35 years and $1 million in fines for downloading millions of academic articles.

    • The 2 Refugees Charged With Terrorism-Related Crimes, In Context

      Two Palestinian refugees, both born in Iraq, were arrested in Sacramento and Houston respectively on Thursday for terror related charges. The arrests have already elicited responses from certain U.S. governors who vowed to not accept Syrian refugees.

      “This is precisely why I called for a halt to refugees entering the U.S. from countries substantially controlled by terrorists,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said in a statement, according to Fox News. “I once again urge the President to halt the resettlement of these refugees in the United States until there is an effective vetting process that will ensure refugees do not compromise the safety of Americans and Texans.”

    • Teacher Says She Was Fired For Teaching Students About The Central Park Five

      A New York City high school teacher says she was fired after teaching her class about the Central Park Five — a case involving five black and Hispanic men who were accused of raping a jogger as teenagers but later exonerated after spending between six to 13 years in prison — because administrators were worried the lesson would “rile up” students of color.

    • Alabama Cops, Confederate Flags, Racism, and an Over-Eager Media

      Last month, dozens of news outletsshared a “bombshell” story about a cabal of neo-Confederate police officers in Dothan, Alabama. The officers had allegedly been systematically planting evidence on innocent black men for decades, resulting in hundreds of wrongful convictions.

    • 7 of 2015′s Most Outrageous Killings by the Drug War Police

      Drug law enforcement operations in the US killed people at the rate of more than one a week last year.

    • What The San Francisco Police Wants You To Do With Your Smartphone Instead Of Recording Police Misconduct

      San Francisco police want onlookers to turn their smartphone camera on suspected criminal activity — instead of police behavior.

      The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) is reportedly developing a crime-reporting app, Fight Crime SF, that will allow citizens to submit photos and video of suspected criminal activity. The app doesn’t have a release date but is expected to be released to the public early this year, according to SFD spokeswoman Officer Susan Merritt’s statements in a recent issue of the police union’s journal.

    • The Rise of France’s Far Right

      France’s far right benefits from almost everything in the country: a broken economy; a still-rising unemployment rate; job insecurity and a fear of loss of social status; an endangered welfare system and public services; a repellent “European project”; a wave of migration, heightened by chaos in some Arab countries; coordinated attacks planned by those who claim to act in the name of Islam. And a Socialist Party that for almost 30 years has shared with the right the responsibility for neoliberal policies now locked in through European treaties, and a project of remaining in power indefinitely by presenting itself every election as the last defence against the Front National (FN).

      [...]

      Like the far right, the mainstream right likes to lambast the politically correct.

    • Europe Besieged

      More than a million requests for asylum; dozens of boats landing daily on Greek and Maltese beaches; a record number of deaths in the Mediterranean; armies sent in to control borders — migration in 2015 was exceptional in scale, and has challenged how the EU functions. Between August and October, Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia all reintroduced border controls to try to stem the influx.

    • Why the Feds Punk Out When Confronting White Rightwing Insurgents

      When a criminal justice system born in Native American genocide and Black slave patrolling finds itself in conflict with conservative white Christian landowners, it short-circuits.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • T-Mobile CEO John Legere got caught lying by the EFF, and now he’s totally losing it

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation caught T-Mobile and its bombastic CEO John Legere in a huge lie, and instead of addressing the findings, Legere is quickly becoming unhinged. Here’s the short version: T-Mobile has been claiming that its “BingeOn” program, which offers some free video from select partners to customers, and also downgrades the quality of all other video as part of an opt-out program, is collectively a form of video “optimization.” Three days ago, the EFF published an investigation that exposed T-Mobile’s marketing language for the euphemistic misdirection it is: instead of “optimizing” video streams, the company has been identifying video traffic and then throttling that traffic to 1.5Mbps.

      In other words, it’s the biggest fuck you to net neutrality that any company has dared since the FCC passed new rules in 2015. And John Legere wants you to thank T-Mobile for it.

  • DRM

    • iPhone & iTunes sync – Don’t want

      Aesthetics and hardware aside, iPhone 6 does not have a single usability advantage over its rivals. None whatsoever. Moreover, the ultra-restrictive way you must do things is frustrating and maddening and utterly sub-100 IQ. Fine for people who believe California is the center of the Universe, less so for people who can spell cynicism without getting confused. I will not partake in this silliness. Which means the moment my bunch of Apple stocks finally makes some kind of a profit, I will most likely dump them all back into the shares sea. There is no reason to keep investing in this. All I wanted was to play an MP3 file. That’s all I asked. Won’t let me play? Won’t give you my money. Fair deal. And you’re welcome, dear readers. I’m suffering so you don’t have to. We’re done.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Monsanto + Syngenta: Agribusiness Giants Get Even Bigger

      A merger between agricultural biotech giants Monsanto and Syngenta is becoming likelier by the minute. The proposed merger has generated much commentary and speculation in the business world as well as among anti-GMO activists since the resulting corporation would control 45% of the global seed market and 30% of the agrochemical market (1).

      In 2015 the US-based Monsanto tried to buy Syngenta twice, and was twice spurned by the European corporation. But Monsanto is not the only suitor. Syngenta has also been courted with similar buyout bids by Germany’s BASF and Asian corporate colossus ChemChina.

    • A Pill That Cures Hepatitis Costs Just $4, but If You Live in America It’s $1,000

      On April 8, 2013, the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, Inc., filed a New Drug Application claiming to be able to cure hepatitis C. They received the FDA’s coveted Breakthrough Therapy Designation, which is is given to drugs that show significant treatment advantages to existing options.

Microsoft to Make Vista 10 ‘Upgrade’ Virtually Mandatory to Virtually All Windows Users (Unless They’re Technical Enough to Block it)

Posted in Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 7:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Force-fed like malnourished children

Baby squirrel

Summary: The same old vanity and the abusive behaviour of Microsoft is showing again, as the company disregards the will of users and essentially takes over their machines, putting Orwellian levels of surveillance on them (in the name of ‘security’, of course!)

THE WORLD’S most aggressive software company (which doesn’t even make all that much software, as a lot of the code gets acquired, not developed) is forcing people to change. It is imposing its spyware, Vista 10, on people’s PCs unless they’re savvy enough to stop it.

“Say goodbye to this abusive behaviour from Microsoft as it’s only going to get worse in future years.”According to this article, one needs to actually follow guides to manage to prevent Microsoft from doing this. “If you’re using a PC running Windows 7 or 8,” it explains, “you may be getting a little sick of endless popup screens telling you to upgrade to version 10. And you may be worried about inadvertently installing the upgrade as part of a security update. Microsoft will start pushing out a Windows 10 upgrade as a recommended, virtually mandatory, update very soon (it’s right now only an optional download). Some people are tempted to turn off Windows Update completely to avoid getting the new operating system – don’t.”

Well, don’t, indeed. Just install GNU/Linux on the PC. Say goodbye to this abusive behaviour from Microsoft as it’s only going to get worse in future years. Microsoft inadvertently made it known some days ago that it is stalking Windows users in real time. This one new article says: “We now know just how much Windows 10 is spying on everybody, and it’s all thanks to Microsoft itself. In a Windows Blog post, Microsoft details a number of stats related to Windows 10 usage. However, these usage stats inadvertently reveal how much data the company is collecting on Windows 10 users.”

“When North Korea does something similar by creating its own warped distribution of GNU/Linux the Western press jumps/capitalises on the old news to berate GNU/Linux, not when Vista 10 does the same or worse.”If it was some small company doing the same thing, there would be severe consequences, like having their offices raided by law enforcement and employees escorted into custody in handcuffs. Microsoft, however, is very well connected with the US government and with the NSA. Microsoft gives them advantage on the espionage front. When North Korea does something similar by creating its own warped distribution of GNU/Linux the Western press jumps/capitalises on the old news to berate GNU/Linux, but not when Vista 10 does the same or worse.

Microsoft has already kick-started FUD tactics, warning people that they’ll get hurt (in the security sense) if they don’t ‘upgrade’. Now is a good time to dump Windows altogether. █

“You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

–Al Capone

China-US Trade Wars With Patent Raids, Confiscations, Embargoes, and Low-quality Patent Stockpiling

Posted in America, Asia, Patents at 7:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Companies can now literally steal other companies’ products because they claim that patent infringement is “theft”

Executed
Death penalty: killing people to demonstrate that killing is wrong

Summary: Companies from the US are trying to teach companies from China that ‘stealing’ (alleged patent infringement) is wrong by basically stealing (literally!) their products in a trade show in the US, even though both China and the US have a notoriously low bar for patenting (includes abstract concepts, as long as they’re not framed as such)

TWO countries where the quality of patents is notoriously low (hence a high number of patents) are China and the US. We wrote many articles about it before. Quite a few Chinese companies are now building up/amassing stocks of thousands of patents, catching up with their US-based counterparts (which manufacture all their products in China anyway). Who benefits from this? Conglomerates and their lawyers, at everybody else’s expense.

“Quite a few Chinese companies are now building up/amassing stocks of thousands of patents, catching up with their US-based counterparts (which manufacture all their products in China anyway).”Years ago we showed how trade shows had been transformed into raiding opportunities [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13], causing a major scene out in public, degrading confidence, and destroying the reputation of certain events/trade shows. These raids are now a reality in the US because Onewheel from Future Motion decided to go litigious with patents and actually confiscate another company’s products, which it can make itself in China. This has raised quite a few eyebrows. What would attract east Asian companies to America (or the US), where you can officially — but without notice — be raided over patents? All this disruptive U.S. Marshals’ involvement because of patents alone? As a little background to this, see TechDirt‘s coverage: “One of the big stories coming out of CES this week is the bizarre situation in which US Marshals showed up here at the event yesterday and completely shut down the booth of a Chinese company, named Changzhou First International Trade Co. This happened after a judge granted a motion for a temporary restraining order, filed by US company Future Motion, following a seven minute hearing about the matter, in which Changzhou was not present and had no say. [...] In other words, there’s a fair bit of evidence to support that the patent infringement case is fairly strong. That said, it still seems quite troubling for US Marshals to then get involved and completely shut down Changzhou First International Trade Co.’s booth at CES right in the middle of the show, when the company doesn’t get a chance to present to the judge until January 14th, long after CES has packed up and left town.”

This story involves a Chinese company coming to the US. China and the US have some things in common when it comes to patents, as both countries’ patent offices (SIPO and USPTO) have very low-quality patents and approve almost everything (poor quality control). Patents for patents’ sake, regardless of the consequences! In the US, unless you’re a rich and highly determined defendant, you never know if a patent is worth something unless challenged for years in the courts. USPTO examination is being grossly rushed, so prior art search is somewhat of a joke. We wrote about this for years. There is this new article titled “U.S. and Chinese Courts’ Software Patent Requirements” and it says that “In China, software inventions that comprise only rules and methods for intellectual activities are not patentable. Thus, a claim that describes an algorithm, mathematical rules, or computer program “as such” and alone may not be patented. However, software inventions that comprise both rules and methods for intellectual activities and technical features of means in order to solve technical problems and obtain technical effects can be patented. Software that (a) uses a technical solution to (b) solve a technical problem concerning (c) a law of nature, may comprise patent eligible subject matter and are subject to patent law protection. The subject of the patent must pass the three part test and still must satisfy the basic requirements for patentability—novelty, non-obviousness, and usefulness—the same as in the U.S.”

“A lot of startups in the US are rightly worried about software patents.”Notice the use of the term “as such” and recall how Brimelow arguably brought to Europe or made it possible to bring to Europe software patents.

A lot of startups in the US are rightly worried about software patents. A couple of days ago somebody published “Arguments you can make against software patents as a startup CTO” [via Bessen and Henrion].

To quote some bits from it:

Most software engineers believe that software patents are bad for innovation, and shouldn’t exist. Unfortunately, this isn’t a good argument against filing for software patents, since it’s essentially a complaint about the rules of the game, but as a startup CTO you still have to play the game, regardless of what you think of the rules.

Many CTOs of seed or A-round companies find themselves under pressure from non-technical co-founders and investors to spend time and money on software patents. While I don’t always win the debate, I can say with confidence that the return on investment on all of this time and effort was precisely $0 in every case.

[...]

When people ask about my “IP defensibility” strategy, I generally argue for trade secrets. They’re free, require no effort, you’re not disclosing potentially important information to competitors, and they basically lack any of the other shortcomings I describe above.

IBM’s Manny Schecter/Schechter has just published this paper. It speaks about the effects of Alice on business method patents, not just software patents, which Schecter and his employer support [1, 2]. “Many sources track aspects of PTAB outcomes,” says the abstract, “but none have specifically analyzed CBM outcomes at both the institution and final decision stages by ground. Practitioners, policymakers, patentees, and petitioners can benefit from an empirical analysis of outcomes. Our study analyzes CBM outcomes according to the basis for the challenge and examines whether the Supreme Court’s ruling in Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 134 S.Ct. 2347 (2014) (Alice) makes § 101 grounds more popular in CBM petitions. We also investigate the effect of Alice on CBM petition filing and success. We determined that there were more § 101 challenges in CBM filings post-Alice.”

Patent lawyers are rightly worried (for themselves) that a lot of patents would no longer withstand challenges in/from a court of law. There is more uncertainty for them. Whether or not these patents are worth something, injunctions, embargoes and even raids remain a scary prospect to companies that actually produce things. █

“Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.”

–Dwight Eisenhower

01.08.16

Abogados de Patentes Dicen ¨Todavía No se Ha Confirmado Cómo la OEP Limitará el Número de Patentes un Aplicante Puede Solicitar¨

Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

English/Original

Publicado en Europe, Patents a las 4:20 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

La manera correcta es la más lenta, es lo que las PYMEs europeas están consiguiendo al momento.

Roadworks

Sumario: Abogados de Patentes de Barker Brettel LLP inádvertidamente revelarón que incluso para aquellos que son cercanos a la OEP pueden ver los obvios problemas de PACE (acelerar el proceso de aplicaciones de patentes para las grandes CORPORACIONES) como si la línea rápida so se atascaría si todos se registrarían por ella.

El programa PACE de la OEP es una VERGUENZA y ESTAFA por que actualmente favorece sólo a las grandes corporaciones, muchas de ellas ni siquiera europeas. Esto destruye mitos (del equipo de la OEP dedicado a crear mitos [para ¨mecer¨ a la gente) y claramente interfiere con toda la propaganda que la OEP disemina en Twitter y en su propio sitio web, así como en varios sitios de noticias donde se pinta a la OEP como el ¨amigo¨ de Europa y el protector de inventores vulnerables.

“El completamente discriminatorio régimen favorece aquellos que aplican en masa, por ello es inherently BENEFICIOSO sólo para las grandes empresas.”“La OEP recientemente publicó una notificación con respecto a cambios a y aclaraciones del procedimiento de PASO a implementarse este mes (enero 2016),” escribió Barker Brettell LLP (abogados de patente cuyo sitio de Web hace su próposito bastante aparente incluso en su homepage). Ellos publicaron algunos comentarios en los medios de comunicación de los abogados sobre el ASOLAPAMIENTO sobre lo que escribimos en inglés y luego en español (recientemente publicamos la traducción española, literalmente hace unos cuantos minutos). Los abogados dicen que los cambios de “la OEP , en particular, tiene un impacto en solicitantes que aplican en masa (volumen) y quiénes actualmente petición PACE en todas las aplicaciones. Todavía no se ha comprobado sin embargo, cómo la OEP limitará el número de aplicaciones por PACE un solicitante puede hacer.”

Bueno esto NO se espera que sea efectivo. El entero discriminatorio *régime favorece aquellos que aplican al por mayor, por ello es *inherentemente BENEFICIOSO A EMPRESAS GRANDES. Más tarde este mes compartiremos al público más historias de PYMEs europeas que cada vez más han sido conscientes (y se quejaron por ello) de las prácticas discriminatorias de la OEP en contra quienes son pequeños e impotentes. █

“El poder de observación cuidadosa es llamado cinismo generalmente por quienes no lo han adquirido.”

–George Bernard Shaw

Links 8/1/2016: Polaroid, Freetel Android Devices, More From CES

Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Thinking Outside The (Linux) Box

    So, what does this have to do with Linux or computers in general? It illustrates an important truth about technology and that is that it is not and never will be perfect. Anyone who wants to use any technology to make life easier or to accomplish a task must be prepared to live with imperfection and learn how to work around it. If you can’t handle that concept then you will find yourself very frustrated. Sometimes a little analytical thinking and judicious application of pragmatic logic are necessary to get the most from a complex system. Anyone not prepared to roll with the changes is doomed to failure. The Linux ecosystem is vast and developers are constantly working to find new ways to get things done, deprecating the old and embracing the new. It will never be perfect, it will never be one-size-fits-all. The number of choices are dizzying and that is a good thing because it gives you options to deal with these little imperfections and stumbling blocks as the present themselves.

  • Server

    • Behind the scenes: How the FCC migrated to the cloud

      “We literally retired two Sun E25Ks, which as background, these systems each weigh one ton. We clearly did not want to load those into the trucks, and they were 11 years old. Those were moved to newer server blades that were lighter, more modular, etc., so that they could be more easily transported to the commercial data facility. Those one-ton systems could now be gracefully retired and disposed of as appropriate,” Bray said.

    • Introducing dumb-init, an init system for Docker containers

      At Yelp we use Docker containers everywhere: we run tests in them, build tools around them, and even deploy them into production. In this post we introduce dumb-init, a simple init system written in C which we use inside our containers.

      Lightweight containers have made running a single process without normal init systems like systemd or sysvinit practical. However, omitting an init system often leads to incorrect handling of processes and signals, and can result in problems such as containers which can’t be gracefully stopped, or leaking containers which should have been destroyed.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Podcast Season 4 Episode 01

      In this episode: Ian Murdoch, creator of Debian, has died. AMD is overhauling its open source driver approach. Linux has been made to run on a PS4. IPv6 is now at 10% adoption, after only 20 years. And there’s an outbreak of common sense at the Dutch Government. All this plus our regular Finds, Brains and Voices sections. Plus, One. More. Thing.

  • Kernel Space

    • diff -u: What’s New in Kernel Development

      There’s an ongoing impulse among a diversity of developers to be able to compile some or all of the Linux kernel as a library, so that a piece of software could use kernel services and APIs while running under a different kernel entirely, or a different operating system.

    • FIXME and TODO comments in the Linux kernel source

      While looking at some code in the Linux Kernel this morning I spotted a few FIXME comments and that got me wondering just how many there are in the source code. After a quick grep I found nearly 4200 in v4.4.0-rc8 and that got me thinking about other similar comment tags such as TODO that are in the source and how this has been changing over time.

    • The Thousands Of FIXMEs & TODOs In The Linux Kernel

      Canonical’s Colin King has looked at the number of FIXME and TODO comments within the Linux kernel tree.

      King found that currently there are more than four thousand “FIXME” comments within the Linux 4.4 kernel source code. After becoming curious, he found almost 4,500 “TODO” comments in the kernel source code as well.

    • Automotive Grade Linux makes the grade with AGL UCB for Ford, Subaru, Mazda & Mistubishi

      Automotive Grade Linux , connected car open source software, announced that Subaru, Mitsubishi Motors, Mazda Motor Corporation and Ford Motor Company are joining The Linux Foundation and AGL. Ford Motor Company is the first U.S. car manufacturer to join AGL. These latest automakers join existing members Toyota Motor Corporation, Nissan Motor Company Ltd. and Linux Foundation board member Jaguar Land Rover to round-up the list of OEM supporters within AGL.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Akonadi – still alive and rocking

        It’s been a while since I wrote anything about Akonadi but that does not mean I was slacking all the time Wink The KDE PIM team has ported PIM to KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 and released the first KF5-based version in August 2015 and even before that we already did some major changes under the hood that were not possible in the KDE4 version due to API and ABI freezes of kdepimlibs. The KF5-based version of Akonadi libraries (and all the other KDE PIM libraries for that matter) have no guarantees of stable API yet, so we can bend and twist the libraries to our needs to improve stability and performance. Here’s an overview of what has happened (mostly in Akonadi) since we started porting to KDE Frameworks 5. It is slightly more technical than I originally intended to, sorry about that.

      • KDE Plasma 5.5: The Quintessential 2016 Review

        It’s the start of 2016 and over the past year KDE developers have brought numerous new features and improvements to the Plasma 5 desktop, some tangible with others more under-the-hood.

        With the sun set on 2015 it marks the first full year since Plasma 4, a stable workhorse which many users still rely on for day-to-day computing, has been discontinued. Plasma 5 is on the clock for users who need to know if the widgets, settings, and some painful regressions have been sorted out to see if it’s safe to embrace modern Plasma in the new year.

        This review will cover the evolution of KDE Plasma and its applications since the release of 5.2, listing many of the biggest differences and examining if they have caught up with Plasma 4 to a satisfactory degree for everyday users looking for a supported daily driver. We will also look at the desktop from the viewpoint of users who are thinking of trying or returning to the KDE/Plasma ecosystem, and may not necessarily know about some of the core Plasma functionality.

        While I have avoided bias to the best of my ability, for full disclosure I am a member of the KDE Visual Design Group.

      • Updates on KBibTeX

        In this posting, I am going to tell about the changes and development done in KBibTeX during the last few months. Most notably, KBibTeX has been ported to KDE Frameworks 5, but also some effort has been spent into code quality.

      • Care to help test?
      • Creating lessons with Cantor

        As a student from the competition Google Code In, I saw that there is a task to create lessons in Cantor. Although I haven’t worked with this KDE software before, I accepted the task.

      • The Kubuntu Podcast team’s latest video is live

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME’s Mutter Now Supports Screen Rotation On Wayland

        Thanks to work that landed today by GNOME’s Carlos Garnacho, there is now support on the GNOME desktop for supporting screen rotation on Wayland.

        Mutter has picked up native, DRM-based CRTC rotation based upon the modes exposed by the DRM kernel graphics driver. This implementation is only for drivers/hardware supporting rotation modes and is not yet a driver-independent solution. The other caveat, which isn’t anything really unique, is that when screen rotation takes place GNOME falls back to using a software cursor.

      • Watch: GNOME Desktop Environment Makes Appearance in Justin Bieber’s ‘Sorry’ Video

        It’s almost weekend, so we’re continuing our “Watch” series of articles with a really funny one, the latest video of Justin Bieber for the song Sorry, where you can see the GNOME Shell user interface of the GNOME desktop environment for GNU/Linux OSes.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Nvidia unveils Drive PX 2 platform for self-driving cars

      Nvidia unveiled a “Drive PX 2” platform for self-driving cars, an update to its earlier Tegra-based Drive PX automotive mainboard design.

      Nvidia and Qualcomm showed off new automotive platforms at CES that demonstrate the power of their advanced GPUs to achieve sophisticated computer vision capabilities. Qualcomm’s new Linux- and Android-ready Snapdragon 820a is an automotive spin on its quad-core 820 SoC, that targets in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Here, we look at Nvidia’s Drive PX 2 platform for self-driving cars, an update to its Tegra-based Drive PX automotive board with 16nm Tegras that haven’t even been announced yet.

    • Qualcomm aims new Snapdragon 820a SoC at smart cars

      Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 820a, a version of its 64-bit Snapdragon 820 SoC targeting automotive applications including IVI and ADAS.

      Nvidia and Qualcomm showed off new automotive platforms at CES that demonstrate the power of their advanced GPUs to achieve sophisticated computer vision capabilities. Nvidia’s Drive PX 2 platform is aimed at self-driving cars, and updates the Tegra-based Drive PX automotive board with 16nm Tegras that haven’t even been announced yet. Here, we look at Qualcomm’s Linux- and Android-ready Snapdragon 820a, an automotive spin on its quad-core 820 SoC designed for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

    • Augmented reality helmet moves to Skylake, RealSense, Linux

      Daqri has upgraded its augmented reality Smart Helmet, which now runs Linux on a 6th Gen Intel Core M7 processor, and includes an Intel RealSense camera.

      Daqri first announced its Daqri Smart Helmet in Sept. 2014, and rolled it out to aerospace, construction, oil & gas, and other industrial firms for pilot programs shortly thereafter. At CES this week, Daqri showed off a second generation model of the Linux-based augmented reality helmet that will ship commercially later this quarter.

    • Latest Intel Compute Sticks use Skylake and Cherry Trail CPUs

      With its relatively high, $89 (Linux) to $149 (Windows) price, middling Bay Trail processor, and one lonely USB port, the Intel Compute Stick was clearly in need of some improvements. At CES, Intel launched several second-gen versions that add more USB ports, faster 802.11ac 2×2 WiFi, and much faster processors.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • Half of AT&T’s networks are controlled by open-source SDN code

    AT&T says it has replaced nearly half of the software in its vast operations with open-source software-defined networking (SDN) code.

    Speaking to developers just before this year’s CES conference kicked off on Tuesday, technology and operations veep John Donovan dropped that number as evidence that the operator’s SDN strategy is working.

  • Open-source ‘ecosystem’ central to fight against Ebola

    Harnessing open-source software and the voters’ roll solved the issue.

  • Embracing open source as a visual artist

    I’d heard about Linux, but I thought it was scrolling green terminal output on black monitors for Hollywood hackers and geeks. Reading Sennett write about Linux in such a way that connected free, open source software to craftsmanship (and radical, avant-garde politics) piqued my interest. Unhappy with the standard computing options and wanting a deeper understanding of the means of media production, I made a leap into the void and built a Linux desktop. It was my first rig and my first distro (Ubuntu). The learning curve was steep and the new environment put a serious hamper on my creative output as there was no 1:1 correlation between the tools with which I was familiar. I began working with openFrameworks and while a visualist-in-residence at The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, created my first truly open source art work.

  • Was 2015 the Year When Open Source Software Finally Won?

    Open source software has made huge strides in a short time. But do platforms like the cloud, IoT and Android help or hinder the mission of free and open source code?

  • The role the channel can play in managing open source security

    With the growing popularity of wearables providing determined hackers with yet another means of accessing the sensitive information they desire, this year will see a need for security to extend beyond the perimeter as these hackers continue to find ways into IT infrastructure through alternative, less prioritised routes.

  • Raspberry Pi-based home AI project open-sources key components

    Mycroft.ai, which is working to create a home AI platform based on Raspberry Pi, Arduino and an extensive in-house software stack, has opened an important part of that stack to developers everywhere as of Wednesday.

  • WD and ownCloud team up on consumer cloud device

    ownCloud started off as a humble ‘free software’ file syncing project from Germany. But that project has evolved into an open source company that is now headquartered in Boston, Mass. And ownCloud has become a platform that does much more than just file syncing: It has an online collaborative document like Office 365, it has apps like mail, it has calendar, and much more.

  • A new home AI system, an open-source AI engine, and Apple’s acquisition of AI company Emotient—SD Times news digest: Jan. 8, 2016
  • AT&T software plans gain steam, focus on cloud and open source

    AT&T continues to steadily march towards a virtualized future, which will see the carrier hit software control of 75% of its network by 2020 using software-defined networking and network functions virtualization technologies.

  • Mycroft Open Sources Artificial Intelligence Library for IoT Devices

    Mycroft says it aims to assure the future of open source artificial intelligence through its release this week of Adapt, an intent parser engine for embedded devices, as an open source project.

    Mycroft’s main product is a device of the same name that is designed to manage IoT devices in the smart home and office. The chief selling point of the Mycroft is its ability to predict and learn what users want in an intelligent way.

  • Events

    • The Linux Foundation Announces 2016 Events Schedule

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced its 2016 events schedule. Linux Foundation events are where the creators, maintainers and practitioners of the world’s most important open source projects meet. Linux Foundation events in 2015 attracted nearly 15,000 developers, maintainers, sysadmins, thought leaders, business executives and other industry professionals from more than 3,100 organizations across 85 countries.

    • International Free Software Conference in Havana Cuba

      The 100 EUR (General Admission) Ticket is for people from economically developed countries (but if you happen to be rich in a poorer country, please stick to this category). The 20 EUR category is for people from economically developing countries (we are naming Africa, Middle- and South America – if you happen to come from another country, please contact us individually).

    • Spotlight! Call for Proposals and Event Suggestions!

      You, and your suggestions and proposals, are the heart of Penguicon’s programming. The deadline for all event proposals and suggestions is February 1st, 2016, in 3 short weeks! This is a great time to tell us what you’d like to present, or suggest ideas our track heads can use, using our forms.

    • Bad Voltage Live in Los Angeles: Why You Should Be There
    • We Need Your Answers
    • Speaking at SCALE 14x

      I’m working on my GIMP talk for SCALE 14x, the Southern California Linux Expo in Pasadena.

    • Developer: Tizen Community Dinner at FOSDEM 2016

      Last year the event attracted 5000+ attendees and its looks like a similar number for this year. There will be a number of Tizen talks and you will have the opportunity to meet and listen to Tizen developers from all over Europe (and further away). There will be a EFL / Tizen booth where developers can learn about the Tizen ecosystem, available devices and also about coding using EFL.

    • Design Hackfest in Rio de Janeiro

      In a week and a half, a bunch of us that are involved in GNOME design will be heading to Rio de Janeiro, in order to spend some time with the good people at Endless. (If you don’t know them yet, Endless are selling computers for the developing world, all of which run a GNOME-based operating system. Their latest device, the Endless Mini has been getting some good press recently.)

    • Shuttleworth at SCALE, Google Rolls Over & More…

      To SCALE or not to SCALE: If you live somewhere within driving distance of Southern California and you’ve been sitting on the fence trying to decide whether to attend SCALE 14X (that’s the Southern California Linux Expo for the jargon impaired), then we’re about to give you a tidbit that might help you make up your mind. FOSS Force has learned from a SCALE official that FOSS rocket man and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth will be giving the keynote address at SCALE on Saturday January 23. Although Shuttleworth’s scheduling has not been posted on the event’s website as we go to press, it’s presumed that he will speak at 10:00 a.m. According to our source, Shuttleworth will most likely discuss Linux on Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

  • Web Browsers

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Third bug hunting session for LibreOffice 5.1

      The LibreOffice community is working hard on the next major release of LibreOffice 5.1 – planned for early February – with a bug hunting session focused on new features and fixes for bugs and regressions, to test the second release candidate.

      The session will last 3 days, from January 15 to January 17, 2016. On those dates, mentors will be available from 08AM UTC to 10PM UTC to help volunteers to triage bugs, on the QA IRC channel and via email on the QA mailing list.

    • A first look at Collabora/LibreOffice online (and a little bit of frustration)

      Recently, I read a blog article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols about an initiative from Collabora, an “Open Source consulting” firm, OwnCloud, an Open Source Cloud solution and the well-known LibreOffice office suite (actually a fork of OpenOffice.org, which itself is a fork of StarOffice), to release an online version of LibreOffice. Finally!

  • CMS

    • How to perform Drupal 7 integration tests with Red Test

      The spotlight is back on Drupal with the 8.0.0 release. The successful launch is a testament to the hard work put in by members of the Drupal community, but Drupal 7 still has a huge install base and likely will for many years to come. To support Drupal 7 development, let’s take a look at a testing platform built exclusively for the platform. Red Test is an open source integration testing framework aimed at making life easier for Drupal developers.

    • Drupal sites at risk due to insecure update mechanism

      The update mechanism of the popular Drupal content management system is insecure in several ways, allowing attackers to trick administrators into installing malicious updates.

      Researcher Fernando Arnaboldi from security firm IOActive noticed that Drupal will not inform administrators that an update check has failed, for example due to inability to access the update server. Instead, the back-end panel will continue to report that the CMS is up to date, even if it’s not.

      This can be a problem, considering that hackers are quick to exploit vulnerabilities in popular content management systems like Drupal, WordPress or Joomla, after they appear. In one case in 2014, users had only a seven-hour window to deploy a critical Drupal patch until attackers started exploiting the vulnerability that it fixed.

  • Education

    • How students can get started contributing to open source software

      As a student, getting involved in open source is a great way to improve your programming skills. From my experience, it can even help kickstart your career. But where do you begin? And how do you get involved?

      I started my open source journey during my high school days when I had a lot more free time on my hands (and lived on IRC). It was through that experience that I learned how to contribute to open source through communication media like IRC and Usenet. Open source has grown since those olden days, and there are now more formal ways to get involved with open source as a student.

    • Rapid Router: why Ocado Technology turned to open source

      Ocado Technology has open-sourced its free coding education application to encourage a wider community of contributors.

      The firm’s free Rapid Router coding education resource is teaching 38,500 people across the UK to code.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Facebook and Google Use Open Source To Recruit Developers

      Artificial Intelligence (AI)—technology that is adept at identifying images, recognizing spoken words and translating information from one language to another—is the hottest new topic in Silicon Valley. In fact, as of late, both Google and Facebook have found themselves in a race to secure the most brilliant software engineers to continuously improve upon this technology for their own purposes. Specifically, in an attempt to get a leg up on Google, Facebook recently opened sourced its AI software in an effort to draw in top-level developers.

    • How tech giants spread open source programming love

      “Go is a programming language designed by Google to help solve Google’s problems.” So said Rob Pike, one of the Go language’s designers.

      That may be the case, yet the open source language is increasingly being adopted by enterprises around the world for building applications at large scale.

  • BSD

    • Pre-5.9 pledge(2) update

      In a continuing series of pledge(2) reports, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) gives us the latest update before the 5.9 freeze.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GnuTLS 3.4.8

      Released GnuTLS 3.3.20 and GnuTLS 3.4.8 which are bug fix releases in the previous and current stable branches.

    • The Licensing and Compliance Lab interviews Guillaume Roguez, Ring Project Director

      Ring is multi-media communication platform with secured multi-media channels, that doesn’t require centralized servers to work. It is developed by Savoir-faire Linux, a Canadian company located in Montréal, Québec. It is a potential free-software replacement for Skype, and possibly more.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Blackpool becomes third NHS trust to get open-source EPR

      Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is the third UK health trust to decide to implement the open-source electronic patient record system (EPR) from supplier IMS Maxims.

      The trust began implementing the EPR in December and aims to go live within the next 12 months.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Source Seed — the past meets the future

      Open-source seeds offer farmers and alternative to other types of seeds.

    • The Origins of Totalitarianism: Interlude on The Commons

      One of the primary goals of neoliberals is to take over the commons.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Source RISC-V Core Designs, Why Google Cares and Why They Matter

        The CPU is one of the most crucial components of our computers, responsible of performing basic calculations, logical comparisons and moving data around. These simple tasks are the building blocks of any more complex operation, and make running our systems and programs possible.

        How these operations are done is not random: an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) defines what they are and what computer processors are supposed to do.

        An ISA defines supported instructions and features, but not how these instructions are specifically carried out. Think of it like a cooking recipe — let’s say it’s for bagels: while the recipe is the same, each chef will carry it out differently, arranging the sesame seeds differently for instance. The chef cooking based on the recipe is, in our example, the computer processor carrying out instructions as per the defined ISA. The result will always be the same in theory, though: a tasty bagel.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • North Korea’s Nuclear Ambition and the U.S. Presidential Campaign

      We must demand answers to these questions about the greatest imminent existential threat to our world. We cannot rely on the hope that someone else will take care of this or the notion that I cannot make a difference. In our democracy each of us has a duty and responsibility to be informed and to take action.

    • Media Demonstrate GOP Hypocrisy In Blaming Obama And Hillary Clinton For North Korea’s Nuclear Testing
    • Hillary Clinton Suggests She May Oppose Obama’s $1 Trillion Nuclear Arms Upgrade

      In October, the administration awarded Northrop Grumman a contract to develop next-generation long-range bombers capable of firing nuclear weapons, a project that analysts expect will swell to $80 billion.

    • To End North Korea’s Nuclear Program, End the Korean War

      Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test may be a last-ditch effort to get on the U.S. agenda before Obama leaves office and a hawkish new president comes in.

    • Taking on the Nuclear Goliath

      Say hello to the Marshall Islands, the tiny, heroic island nation in Micronesia, with a population just over 70,000. This former U.S. territory, which still bears the terrible scars of 67 above-ground nuclear blasts between 1946 and 1958, when this country used it as an expendable nuclear test site, has engaged the United States — and, indeed, all nine nations that possess nuclear weapons — in lawsuits demanding that they comply with the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and begin the process of negotiating global nuclear disarmament.

    • A lot of chatter about terrorism

      Tim Wilson (TW): Privacy is a human right, but there is a difference between privacy and secrecy. Private information is information that we don’t want publicly disclosed. But some of that information does need to be accessed by third parties such as the government. The issue and the challenge is, if the information is going to be disclosed, who gets to decide that and then who gets to access it, and under what circumstances.

      Think about it in terms of, for example, a data retention regime. If I use my phone now, I go through with my ISP and online content providers. At every point I have voluntarily said the trade-off for accessing information is that I have put out a certain amount of material about myself to these different companies. The question is how they long they store my information for, and who can access and on what terms.

    • New Research Explains Why Immigrants Are Fleeing Latin America

      In 2005, Mexico’s homicide rates was 9.5 homicides per 100,000 people. By 2010, that rate more than doubled to 22 per 100,000. Homicides have not subsided — May 2015 saw at least 1,621 homicides, marking one of the deadliest months since January 2014.

    • Saudi Arabia: the West’s Chosen Islamist Head-Cutters

      The latest executions in Saudi Arabia should make it very clear that the Western powers’ “war on terror” has nothing to do with opposition to chopping off heads and sectarian religious fanaticism. Instead of condemning this crime, the U.S., UK and other Western powers have continued to give the Saudi regime, if not their public political blessing, at least their practical backing – in the name of the necessary alliances they claim flow from that “war on terror”.

    • Why Is North Korea Our Problem?

      Why, then, are 25,000 U.S. troops still in South Korea?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • A Look Into the Future at How TPP Could Create Environmental Nightmares

      The TPP makes the rights of companies sacrosanct, including the right to mine. But what about the rights of people who live in the way of proposed mining sites?

    • ‘Environmental’ Comic Strip’s Author Wants Global Warming Believers to ‘Get Real’

      The leading environmental-themed comic strip in the United States, Mark Trail, is apparently written by a climate-change denier.

      The strip’s expanded Sunday editions are intended to be educational, and this week’s (1/3/16) featured a lesson about sulfur dioxide. “Sulfur dioxide is a major cause of acid rain!” the title character, a naturalist, exclaims. He notes that it’s “a byproduct of large-scale farms, power plants and other industries,” as well as “the burning of fossil fuels by large transportation vehicles.”

    • Republicans Are Pushing a Bill That Could Make It Much Harder to Sue Volkswagen

      Volkswagen will likely be spending a lot of time in court over the next few years. On Monday, the automaker was presented with a new lawsuit from the Justice Department over allegations that it had illegally rigged half a million cars sold in the United States to cheat on emissions tests. The suit is the first step the Obama administration has taken to hold VW accountable for the scandal, and it could leave the company on the hook for billions of dollars in fines. Federal criminal charges could also be forthcoming.

      Meanwhile, VW is also facing a torrent of outrage from some of the folks who bought those cars, which include the diesel-powered versions of Jetta and Golf models made since 2009. A court in Northern California is scheduled to decide this month whether to hear a group of more than 350 class-action lawsuits from VW customers who feel they were misled about the environmental benefits of the cars before buying them.

    • Warming fuels rise in methane threat

      Higher temperatures and permafrost thaw could cause an increase of up to 50 per cent in emissions of a key greenhouse gas from northern lakes and ponds by 2100.

    • Calls for Michigan Gov. Snyder’s Arrest as Flint Poisoning Scandal Implicates Top Staffers

      “The source of the Flint Water Crisis leads directly to Gov. Rick Snyder and the fiscal austerity policies that he and his Republican colleagues have been pushing for years on Michigan residents,” said Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan,” in a statement released Thursday. “Families in Flint were forced to drink lead-tainted water while the administration scoffed at their concerns and cries for help. An entire generation of Michiganders now face an uncertain future because of Republican cuts to essential and life-giving services.”

    • How Michigan literally poisoned an entire city to save a few bucks

      You know what’s bad? Brain damage.

      Flint, Michigan, is finding this out after it accidentally gave its entire population at least a little bit of lead poisoning when it switched up their water supply. In an attempt to save money for a cash-strapped city, Flint started drinking water from the Flint River — but ended up contaminating children with a poisonous heavy metal. Governor Rick Snyder has declared a state of emergency, and the federal government is investigating.

    • Calls for Michigan Gov. Snyder’s Arrest as Flint Poisoning Scandal Implicates Top Staffers
    • The Geopolitics of Cheap Oil

      There are a number of reasons for the price drop, but it boils down to supply (more of it) and demand (less of it). The United States boosted oil production by 66 percent over the last five years, making it the largest oil and natural gas producer in the world in 2015. Other producers, like Saudi Arabia, also didn’t scale back, in part to stick it to a sanctions-hobbled Iran and snatch up its clients. Meanwhile, greater fuel efficiency and slower economic growth around the world (particularly in China) have reduced demand.

    • How the Koch Brothers’ ‘Bankers’ Snuck an Anti-Wind Op-Ed Past the New York Times

      Since 1997, the Kochs have given more than $79 million to groups that distort climate science and malign renewable energy.

    • TransCanada Goes Legal On US Government Over The Rejection Of Keystone; Will It Wake Obama To The Problems Of Corporate Sovereignty?

      Over the last few years, there’s been a big controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline project, a massive planned project to build an oil pipeline from Canada to the US that many folks had been protesting, and which (after years and years of debate), President Obama finally rejected a few months back. That’s not a topic that we’ve really covered here, other than a single mention when we questioned why the FBI had spied on activists protesting the potential pipeline.

    • The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

      In its NAFTA complaint, TransCanada alleges that “the politically-driven denial of Keystone’s application was contrary to all precedent; inconsistent with any reasonable and expected application of the relevant rules and regulations; and arbitrary, discriminatory, and expropriatory.”

    • Trans-Canada Sue US Government for $15 Billion over Tar Sands Pipeline Cancellation
    • The EPA Finally Admitted That the World’s Most Popular Pesticide Kills Bees—20 Years Too Late

      Bees are dying in record numbers—and now the government admits that an extremely common pesticide is at least partially to blame.

    • Exposing the EPA’s Dark Side

      The federal agency has a broken process for regulating pesticides.

    • It’s Official: 2015 Was America’s Second-Hottest Year on Record

      It’s official. The United States roasted in 2015. All that unseasonably warm December weather that saw flowers blooming in Central Park and shirtless Christmas Day volleyball set a record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which released its year-end findings on Thursday. In fact, 29 states in the eastern half of the country experienced their hottest Decembers on record, a phenomenon that sealed 2015′s fate: It was the second-warmest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.

    • Severe cold causing havoc on railway, public transport

      The deep freeze that has descended upon Finland is causing disruptions to train traffic in several areas of the country. On Wednesday night some trains were delayed by hours and problems appear to be continuing.

    • Governor declares state of emergency in connection with California methane leak

      On Wednesday evening, California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles County in connection with a massive natural gas leak that’s ongoing at a Southern California Gas Company storage facility. The leak, which began on October 23, has been spewing methane into the air at a rate of tens of thousands of kilograms (PDF) per hour.

      Governor Brown’s declaration of a state of emergency requires that SoCal Gas and other gas storage facility operators throughout California start conducting daily inspections of well heads and implement infrared imaging technology to detect leaks. Facility operators will have to monitor the wells for mechanical integrity, gas pressure, and safety on an ongoing basis.

      The emergency declaration doesn’t earmark any state funds to help fund a cleanup, but it orders the California Public Utilities Commission to “ensure that Southern California Gas Company covers costs related to the natural gas leak and its response, while protecting ratepayers.”

  • Finance

    • Con man Chancellor George Osborne terrified game is up amid dire economic warnings

      Con man George Osborne screeching “Not me, Gov!” is the whine of a spineless Chancer of the Exchequer terrified the game is up.

      Blaming everything and everybody except himself for Britain’s faltering economic “recovery” – China, oil, Middle East, that big boy with a stick who ran away – is the spineless politics of a dishonest politician.

      Oh my how his tune has changed, not since an election when Osborne deliberately gave the impression we’d be wading knee deep in milk and honey to swindle voters, but also from just before Christmas when, boasted the Treasury chiseller, the country was “growing fast”.

      Spewing out alibis for the gathering storm after statisticians cut growth figures will convince only the criminally gullible.

    • Everything Is (Even More) Awesome!

      As we enter 2016, Americans are still feeling grouchy. Only one-fourth of the public believes the United States is heading in the right direction. The Republican presidential debates have been malaise-a-thons, competitions to portray American decline in the most apocalyptic terms possible, while Bernie Sanders is pursuing the Democratic nomination with a message so depressing that professional curmudgeon Larry David has basically played him straight. A year after I wrote an article only somewhat ironically titled Everything Is Awesome, cable news is an endless Debbie Downer loop of terrorism fears and market jitters, periodically interrupted by a weirdly coifed nativist blowhard promising to Make America Great Again.

    • K12 Inc. Tries to Pivot from Virtual School Failures to Profit from “Non-Managed” Schools

      Big, Big Payouts to Execs at Taxpayer Expense

      In its recommendation that shareholders vote against the pay proposal, the advisory firm Glass Lewis & Co. said K12 exemplifies a “substantial disconnect between compensation and performance results.” Glass Lewis gave the company an “F” for how it paid its executives compared to peers.

      In 2015, K12 CEO Nathaniel Davis was making $5.3 million and CFO James Rhyu was making $3.6 million. Their base salaries were $700,000 and 478,500, respectively, which were dwarfed by additional pay and stock for their “performance.” (See more details on their total compensation in the pdf uploaded below.)

      In all, K12′s five highest paid executives received a total of more than $12 million in compensation last year. That’s one of the reasons CMD has called K12 Inc.’s former CEO, Ron Packard, the highest paid elementary and secondary school educator in the nation.

    • This Map Shows How Student Debt Is Crushing Your Community

      Student debt is an elephant in the room of the American economy. Total educational debt has ballooned from $840 billion in 2010 to more than $1.3 trillion this year, according to the Federal Reserve. And yet the Education Department has been reluctant to share data on the federal government’s student loan portfolio, meaning that, until recently, there has been very little detailed information available on the burgeoning crisis.

    • Denials and devaluation as China’s currency tumbles to five-year low

      The phrase “currency war” speaks to a seemingly phoney battle between the world’s major trading powers over the price of exports. It has all the attributes of an illusory conflict because no one ever agrees that a genuine dispute has taken place. And as long as everyone denies they have drawn swords to slash their currency to compete with rival powers, talk of a war fizzles and dies.

    • Is a $15 an Hour Minimum Wage Adequate?

      Social movements calling for raising the minimum wage to $15/ hour with yearly adjustments for increases in the cost of living deserve support. However, earning $15/ hour will not guarantee a decent standard of living.

      An individual working forty hours a week at $15/ hour for an entire year earns $31,200, an income that is more than two and a half times the 2014 official poverty threshold of $12,316 for one adult. One might readily conclude that this individual is doing well since $15/ hour is also more than twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25/ hour.

    • Making America safer for predatory capitalism

      Forcing customers into arbitration makes it easier to rip them off

    • Bernie Sander’s Plan to Tame Wall Street Riles Team Clinton

      Sanders’ presidential campaign is making history in other ways. Sanders raised more than $33 million in the final three months of last year, $73 million for the year, compared to Clinton’s $37 million in the last quarter for a total of $112 million for the year. But the vast majority of Sanders big bucks came from very small donors. The 2,513,665 donations to Sanders’ campaign broke the record set four years ago by President Barack Obama’s re-election committee.

    • How Corrupt Officials Screwed Up An Extremely Poor Town’s Big Break

      But while the columns hearken back to the town’s prosperous times, Yanceyville has long been one of the poorest places in the country. More than half of the population lived below the poverty line in 2013 and the median household income was $14,500. Poverty falls harder on African-American residents, 64 percent of whom lived below the poverty line, compared to 29 percent of white residents. At the county level, African Americans suffer from an unemployment rate of 18 percent (although as recently as 2011, it was over 20 percent).

    • How Jeb Bush Plans To Destroy Anti-Poverty Programs
    • Turkey Seeks Inclusion in US-EU TTIP Free Trade Deal – Turkish Deputy PM

      Turkey hopes to renegotiate its current trade agreements with the European Union, so it can be included in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade deal between the United States and EU, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek said.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Wash. Post Highlights How Trump’s Media Dominance “Obscure[s]” Ted Cruz’s Extremism — To His Benefit

      The Washington Post’s David Weigel highlighted how Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz “actually benefits from Trump’s full-spectrum dominance of the national media conversation,” which “obscure[s]” Cruz’s extreme positions.

    • Ted Cruz is a Natural Born Citizen

      May lightening not strike me, but I am going to help Ted Cruz now. Ted is a natural-born citizen and he can be president. There is no ambiguity, no legal question. It is very clear.

    • O’Reilly: Trump’s Attack Ad Against Hillary Clinton Is So Vile It Might Have Been Made By Hitler
    • The Problem With Hillary Clinton Using a Progressive Hero to Attack Bernie Sanders

      Hillary Clinton is using a prominent surrogate to attack Bernie Sanders’s emphatic proposals for reforming Wall Street: Gary Gensler, former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

      Gensler, who is the Clinton campaign’s chief financial officer, has enormous credibility among financial reformers after his aggressive (and lonely) efforts to rein in banks during the early years of the Obama administration.

    • Feminism A Neo-Con Tool

      Catching up on a fortnight’s news, I have spent five hours searching in vain for criticism of Simon Danczuk from prominent or even just declared feminists. The Guardian was the obvious place to start, but while they had two articles by feminist writers condemning Chris Gayle’s clumsy attempt to chat up a presenter, their legion of feminist columnists were entirely silent on Danczuk. The only opinion piece was strongly defending him.

      This is very peculiar. The allegation against Danczuk which is under police investigation – of initiating sex with a sleeping woman – is identical to the worst interpretation of the worst accusation against Julian Assange. The Assange allegation brought literally hundreds, probably thousands of condemnatory articles from feminist writers across the entire range of the mainstream media. I have dug up 57 in the Guardian alone with a simple and far from exhaustive search. In the case of Danczuk I can find nothing, zilch, nada. Not a single feminist peep.

      The Assange case is not isolated. Tommy Sheridan has been pursuing a lone legal battle against the Murdoch empire for a decade, some of it in prison when the judicial system decided his “perjury” was imprisonable but Andy Coulson’s admitted perjury on the Murdoch side in the same case was not. I personally witnessed in court in Edinburgh last month Tommy Sheridan, with no lawyer (he has no money) arguing against a seven man Murdoch legal team including three QCs, that a letter from the husband of Jackie Bird of BBC Scotland should be admitted in evidence. Bird was working for Murdoch and suggested in his letter that a witness should be “got out of the country” to avoid giving evidence. The bias exhibited by the leading judge I found astonishing beyond belief. I was the only media in the court.

    • Wall Street Journal Flip-Flops To Attack Obamacare, Praise GOP

      Reversing on their past condemnation of the use of a budget procedure called “reconciliation,” The Wall Street Journal praised Republicans for using the tactic in their latest attempt to repeal Obamacare. The Journal also bashed, the law falsely claiming the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has resulted in “huge” premium increases, and showed little concern for the millions of Americans who would lose healthcare if the law is repealed.

    • Just Because Donald Trump Says It Doesn’t Mean You Have to Report It

      Stop it, stop it, stop it, STOP IT! Just because Donald Trump says something calculatingly stupid and provocative doesn’t mean it has to be reported as front-page news. Everyone knows that his “Cruz is a Canadian” thing is ridiculous—and he wouldn’t bother saying it if he didn’t know that it was going to get loudly amplified by a media that just can’t say no to him.

    • Washington Post Fact Checker Has A Double Standard On Gun Claims

      Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler ruled that a true statement by President Obama on how guns are sold was inaccurate because it was “confusing,” just weeks after writing that an unprovable claim about mass shootings made by GOP hopeful Marco Rubio was true.

    • Official Member Of Trump Campaign Joins Oregon Militia

      The co-chairman of Donald Trump’s New Hampshire “Veterans for Trump” group has arrived in Burns, Oregon, to assist the small cadre of armed men who are seeking to provoke a standoff with federal officials there.

      That not-quite-standoff began over the weekend when a handful of men led by Ammon Bundy decided to turn a much larger peaceful protest over a decision to send two ranchers back to jail for arson into an armed struggle. The group’s numbers are small – especially compared to the 300 who reportedly joined the peaceful protest of the re-sentencing – but they have now been reinforced by Jerry DeLemus, a former United States Marine living on the opposite side of the country.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • More Needs to be Done to Strengthen Protection of Human Subjects in Scientific Experiments

      The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has proposed a sweeping update to the federal regulations that govern scientific experiments involving human subjects, whether it’s studying behavior, testing biological specimens, or analyzing DNA. While the proposed policy [.pdf] generally moves in the right direction, EFF has filed formal comments outlining several serious concerns about how these rules will impact privacy.

      The “Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects”—often referred to as the “Common Rule”—is the ethical framework for biomedical and behavioral research established in the wake of medical scandals that shook the nation, including the now infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the U.S. government withheld treatment and medical information from rural African-American men suffering from the disease. Much of the Common Rule revolves around two concepts: informed consent and independent review. These principles reflect the need for people need to know the risks and benefits and what will happen to their specimens before agreeing to participate in an experiment and the idea that researchers will make better ethical decisions with the guidance of oversight bodies.

    • Fort Dix Five: Prosecuted by Christie, Muslim Brothers Get Rare Day in Court in FBI Entrapment Case

      In 2008, the Duka brothers—Shain, Dritan and Eljvir—were among five men from suburban New Jersey who were convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers at the Fort Dix Army base. The three are serving life sentences, but their supporters say the men were entrapped by the FBI. On Wednesday, the three brothers appeared in a courthouse in Camden, New Jersey, for a rare court-ordered hearing to determine whether they received a fair trial and effective representation from their lawyers. We bring you voices from a rally organized in support of the three Duka brothers and speak with Robert Boyle, attorney for Shain Duka.

    • As Chris Christie Rises in Polls, Appeal of His Fort Dix Terrorism Case Moves Ahead

      A detailed investigation published last year by The Intercept suggested that the plot against the military base had actually been fomented by highly-paid government informants. Mahmoud Omar, one of the informants, told The Intercept that he believed the Dukas were innocent, describing them as “good people.”

    • U.S. Cops Already Killed More Since Xmas Than UK Cops Have Killed in Five Years

      In all of 2011, British police killed two people. In 2012, one. In 2013, a total of three shots were fired by British police, and no one was killed. In the last two years, a total of three people lost their lives because of British cops, bringing the total number of citizens killed in the UK to all of seven in the last five years.

    • Nebraska routinely holds children in solitary confinement, report finds

      Solitary confinement is a commonplace experience for children held in Nebraska juvenile detention facilities, a report has shown, with minors routinely detained in isolation for days, weeks, even months at a time.

      To varying degrees, in each of the state’s nine juvenile facilities children are placed in solitary confinement for “relatively minor offenses” such as keeping too many books, according to the report compiled by the state’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter. Other infractions triggering the “overused” practice included talking back to staff members or refusing to follow directions.

    • Report: Nebraska Lets Juveniles Be Locked in Solitary Confinement for 90 Days

      As a teenager, Jacob Rusher was detained at the Douglas County Youth Facility in Omaha, Nebraska. After he broke his ankle, he was told that he was being placed in “lockdown” — a form of solitary confinement — for “his own good.” He spent three months there, often pounding against the door begging to be released.

      “It was 23 hours a day alone, no TV or radio. You were in there with one book, a blanket, a mat, and a toothbrush. No art materials, no hobby items — everything was considered contraband,” he told the ACLU of Nebraska. “Nighttimes, you’d get a little crazy. They kept the light on and would wake us up every hour to check on you so you’d never get any good sleep.”

    • Washington’s Multi-Million-Dollar Saudi PR Machine

      Public image isn’t something one can always control, but Saudi Arabia is spending millions of dollars on Washington lobbyists and PR firms to improve the Kingdom’s reputation in the West. The execution of Shiite leader Sheik Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, followed by an attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran and the Kingdom’s severing of diplomatic relations with Iran, would seem to offer few upsides for the Saudi government. Riyadh’s behavior comes across as a desperate Hail-Mary pass to isolate Iran at the expense of regional efforts to negotiate a de-escalation of the Syrian civil war and defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

    • Two Years Behind Bars or 20? One Day, a Computer Formula May Have a Say

      Just looking at a defendant’s criminal record to decide a sentence could be racially biased, Ghandnoosh argues. “Criminal history measures criminal justice policies,” she said, adding that “people of color are more likely to be surveilled and arrested and convicted” for crimes, especially less serious ones. The fact that police departments tend to focus more on minorities means minorities are more likely to be arrested, which means members of these groups are more likely to have criminal records in the first place.

    • Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, American War Crimes, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

      Yes, you read that correctly: tiny numbers of Americans live on a different tax planet from the rest of us. They’ve paid for the privilege, of course, and increasingly for the political class that oversees how our country runs. They’ve insulated themselves in a largely tax-free zone that ensures their “equality” before the law (such as it is) and your deepening inequality before the same — and before them. Their actions have garnered them the ultimate in impunity. In this election season in a country of more than 300 million people, for instance, a mere 158 families (and the companies they control) are putting their (largely tax-free) dollars where our mouths once were. By October, they had provided almost half the money thus far raised by presidential candidates in a move meant to ensure that American democracy becomes their system, their creature. (“Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.”)

    • FBI Helps Shut Down Seattle Sex-Work Review Board

      So perhaps the only surprising thing about this Review Board situation is it produced a local TV news report (featuring Reason contributor Maggie McNeill) that doesn’t merely parrot police talking points. Newscasters actually allow sex workers to speak for themselves about the site’s shutdown and how it puts them at risk, while noting that Seattle recently received a $1.5 million grant from the Justice Department to help “eradicate human trafficking” and “end modern slavery.”

    • Don’t Fear the Refugees

      Americans are skeptical and afraid of allowing Middle East refugees into this country. Should they be?

    • The refugee question in Europe: ‘south’ vs ‘east’

      The refugee crisis has triggered a diplomatic row between Greece and certain ‘new’ member-states from Central and Eastern Europe. Does this tell us something about the various shades of Euroscepticism, whether ‘soft’ or ‘hard’, in the peripheries of the EU?

    • Govt Pays Millions in Reparations to 57 Victims of Worst Cop in History – Who Still Receives a Pension

      Former Chicago Police Commander received 13 commendations before his termination for torturing over 200 citizens.

    • Tunisia’s fight against its revolutionary youth

      The threat of terrorism has been exploited to justify anti-democratic laws and an escalation of arrests and detentions, apparently more focused on silencing dissent than anything else.

    • The illusion of security

      Jérémie Zimmermann (JZ): In the last year and a half, four security laws have been adopted in France in the name of combating terrorism. Now would be the right time to question their efficiency.

      Things did not start with Charlie Hebdo: in the last 15 years about fifteen other bills were adopted which closely followed the example of the US and some other European countries after 9/11. The most recent law, prolonging the state of emergency to three months and even renewable for longer, is the most striking because it coincides with the collective emotional shock and disorientation of French society as a whole after November 13. This state of emergency was adopted in an extremely rushed procedure, almost overnight, with no room for debate, so that one might surmise that most of the MPs did not have time to read the bill they voted for. It seems as if the political process has been poisoned by the intelligence agencies, who are given more power with less accountability requested every time they fail, so that this efficiency cannot even be assessed properly. We are in a downwards spiral, where policies that are driven by fear undermine the rule of law and fundamental rights, in favour of an illusion of more security.

    • 7 Myths About Gun Violence in America, Debunked

      On live television Thursday evening, President Barack Obama will hold a town hall meeting about gun violence. He will take questions from participants who support tighter gun laws and from others who want fewer restrictions on guns. It’s a prime-time moment for separating fact from fiction—so here’s a shortlist, with the data to back it up.

    • Wearing the Hijab in Solidarity Perpetuates Oppression

      Saturday night at the Dar Al Noor mosque in Manassas, Va., near Civil War battlefields, a girl of about 7 sat cross-legged in a dimly lit back corner of the prayer hall in the cramped “sisters’ section.” A tinted waist-high glass barrier separated the girl from the spacious “brothers’ section,” where about 50 men listened intently to a Saudi preacher who ignored the “sisters.”

      The girl’s hair was entirely covered by a scarf, per the mosque’s guidelines for “proper Islamic attire, including Hijab for girls, while boys dress modestly.”

      As mainstream Muslim women, we see the girl’s headscarf not as a signal of “choice,” but as a symbol of a dangerous purity culture, obsessed with honor and virginity, that has divided Muslim communities in our own civil war, or fitna, since the Saudi and Iranian regimes promulgated puritanical interpretations of Sunni and Shia Islam, after the 1970s Saudi oil boom and the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

    • Muslim cleric vows to behead anyone who speaks against Islam – Watch

      New Delhi: A Muslim cleric stirred a controversy recently when he announced on live TV that he would behead any person who speaks against Islam.

    • Saudi executions: beyond the numbers

      Freedom is the ability to speak out, including against the ruler, according to one’s opinions and beliefs, even—and especially—if those opinions and beliefs run counter to the ruling class or majority opinion.

    • Tears

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Binge On Lite? Ask for the Truth about T-Mobile Video Throttling

      Now, T-Mobile is on the defensive. John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile, is hosting a Q&A on Twitter today, starting at noon Pacific time, in an attempt to quell concerns. That means concerned members of the digital public have an opportunity to discuss the issues directly with Mr. Legere. Just use the hastag #AskJohn.

    • T-Mobile Doubles Down On Its Blatant Lies, Says Claims It’s Throttling Are ‘Bullshit’ And That I’m A ‘Jerk’

      There were a bunch of problems with this, starting with the fact that favoring some partner traffic over others to exempt it from a cap (i.e., zero rating) is a sketchy way to backdoor in net neutrality violations. But, the bigger issue was that almost everything about T-Mobile’s announcement implied that it was only “partner” video that was being “optimized” while the reality was that they were doing it for any video they could find (even downloaded, not streamed). The biggest problem of all, however, was that the video was not being “optimized” but throttled by slowing down video.

      Once the throttling was called out, T-Mobile went on a weird PR campaign, flat out lying, and saying that what they were doing was “optimizing” not throttling and that it would make videos stream faster and save users data. However, as we pointed out, that’s blatantly false. Videos from YouTube, for example, were encrypted, meaning that T-Mobile had no way to “optimize” it, and tests from EFF proved pretty conclusively that the only thing T-Mobile was doing was slowing connection speeds down to 1.5 Mbps when it sensed video downloads of any kind (so not even streaming), and that actually meant that the full amount of data was going through in many cases, rather than an “optimized” file. EFF even got T-Mobile to admit that this was all they were doing.

    • John Legere asks EFF, “Who the f**k are you, and who pays you?”
    • T-Mobile’s John Legere Goes Off The Deep End: ‘Who The Fuck Are You, EFF?’
    • T-Mobile Confirms It Slows Connections to Video Sites
    • T-Mobile CEO to EFF: ‘Who the Fuck Are You?’
    • Friends, Please Tell T-Mobile’s CEO About EFF

      We think the best response comes from the community of people who support our work. As a member-funded organization, EFF exists because of the donations of tens of thousands of regular people. And as an advocacy organization fighting for civil liberties in the digital world, we are able to influence powerful entities—from heads of state to elected officials to tech giants—because so many people stand with.

    • As Its CEO Continues To Claim It Doesn’t Throttle, T-Mobile Spokesperson Confirms Company Throttles

      And yet now the company is admitting that they are, in fact, slowing down YouTube, not “optimizing” it or making the resolution lower. As I said at the time, T-Mobile is flat out lying. And now two statements from the company directly contradict each other, and the company’s CEO is still insisting that the company isn’t doing what the company admits it’s doing.

      I’ve seen some corporate snafu meltdowns before, but this is reaching epic levels — and that’s bad news for a company that had spent so much time building up a reputation as a “straight shooter.” Good reputations are hard to build, but easy to let slip away….

    • Streaming Video Company Drops Out Of BingeOn To Protest John Legere’s Attack On EFF; It Will Still Get Throttled, Though

      Well, this has really turned into quite a week for T-Mobile CEO John Legere, huh? First, his lies about BingeOn throttling were exposed. Then he doubled down on the lie insisting that BingeOn wasn’t throttling despite clear evidence that it is. Then, he attacked EFF for exposing his lie. All the meanwhile, T-Mobile spokespeople were confirming that the company is, absolutely, slowing down all video traffic.

      And it appears the fallout from this keeps spreading. Legere keeps touting the number of partner video companies that have signed up for BingeOn, but it appears that number needs to go down by one.

  • DRM

    • Warner Bros and Intel Sue 4k Content Protection “Stripper”

      Warner Bros. and Intel’s daughter company Digital Content Protection have sued a hardware manufacturer that creates devices enabling consumers to bypass 4K copy protection. The devices, sold under the HDFury brand, can be used by pirates to copy 4k video from streaming platforms as well as other HDCP 2.2 protected content.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Target cleared in Rosa Parks image rights dispute

      Rosa Parks may be best known for her refusal to move from her seat on the bus, but her many years of campaigning for equality places her at the centre of the civil rights movement story in the US.

      And according to a judgment handed down by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit yesterday, January 4, it is important that the story continues to be promoted without too many restrictions.

    • New Year Brings New Faces To IP World, Bids Others Farewell

      The New Year brings some new faces in the intellectual property world as several changes were announced at the end of 2015, in particular at the European Commission, in the private sector and non-governmental organisations. In Geneva, the coordination of the Group of Latin American and Caribbean countries changes, and the UN Plant Treaty is working on intersessional committees. And a leading light in the IP publishing world has retired.

    • Cartoonist Who Claimed ‘Kung Fu Panda’ Ripped Off His Work Might Be Headed To Prison

      Jayme Gordon, the other person to sue Dreamworks for allegedly copying his work has won the Worst Outcome Ever sweepstakes. The cartoonist claimed Dreamworks ripped off his sketches and he seemingly had the evidence to prove this — including a rarity in many of these little-guy-sues-big-studio lawsuits: actual registered works.

      Gordon demanded $12 million and a cut of the proceeds. He survived a motion to dismiss and seemed ready to take a serious run at the studio. Two years after he filed the lawsuit, Gordon suddenly dismissed it with prejudice and received no settlement for doing so.

      [...]

      That’s the bogus part of this prosecution. Sure, perjury is a given, considering the evidence uncovered by Dreamworks’ lawyers. But wire fraud? That’s just charge stacking. This office, however, isn’t exactly shy about trumping up charges to make itself seem more impressive. It’s the same US Attorney’s Office that was behind the investigation and prosecution of Aaron Swartz, so this could go very, very badly for Gordon.

    • Trademarks

      • Australian Federal Court Prevents Registration of the Word ‘Yellow’ As Trade Mark

        Yellow is one of this writer’s least favourite colours. Garish, sickeningly bright, and forever tarnished by its association with both liver disease and the band Coldplay, yellow is highly, highly overrated. But, credit where credit is due, it does tend to make things stand out. For this reason, it is the colour of choice for school buses, road signs, and, for historically anomalous reasons, telephone business directories – commonly known as Yellow Pages. This phrase, as well as its accompanying ‘Walking Fingers’ logo, are registered trade marks in many countries around the world, including the UK, Canada, and Australia – though curiously not the United States.

    • Copyrights

      • NY Public Library Embraces The Public Domain Big Time: Releases 180,000 High Resolution Images

        There’s some wonderful news from the NY Public Library, which has released over 180,000 high resolution digital images of public domain works that it found in its collection. We’ve seen too many organizations, mainly museums, try to claim copyright over public domain works, or otherwise limit access. The NY Public Library, on the other hand, is going the other direction. Not only are they releasing these works and making it clear that the works are in the public domain, but they’re releasing them as high resolution images and actively encouraging people to make use of them.

      • ‘Monkey selfie’ copyright claim rejected

        A US court has dismissed a claim filed by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in which the organisation claimed that the copyright to the ‘monkey selfie’ photograph should belong to a macaque ape.

        Judge William Orrick of the US District Court for the Northern District of California rejected PETA’s claim yesterday, January 6, stating that it is a matter for Congress not the courts.

      • German Publishers Still Upset That Google Sends Them Traffic Without Paying Them Too; File Lawsuit

        Oh boy. Remember VG Media? That’s the consortium of German news publishers who were so damn angry that Google News sends them all sorts of traffic without also paying them. A year and a half ago, they demanded money from Google. That failed, so they went crying to German regulators who laughed off the request. After there were some concerns that a new “ancillary copyright” right regime in Germany might require payment for posting such snippets, Google properly responded by removing the snippets for those publishers, who totally freaked out and called it blackmail.

      • Techdirt Reading Club: The Boy Who Could Change The World: The Writings Of Aaron Swartz

        We’re back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.
        This week we have a brand new book, but one I’m disappointed needs to be a book. It’s the collected writings of Aaron Swartz, called The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz. As I’ve noted in the past, I knew Aaron as we worked in similar circles and interacted on a bunch of occasions, though I didn’t know him well. But, more importantly, I’d actually been following Aaron’s writings on his personal blog and elsewhere from a very early age (I particularly remember following his writings about his experience as a freshman at Stanford). As you probably know by now, Aaron committed suicide almost three years ago, while dealing with a ridiculous federal prosecution for downloading too many academic papers from a computer system at MIT, where the license was clear anyone could download as much as they wanted.

      • The New York Public Library Just Unleashed 180,000 Free Images. We Can’t Stop Looking at Them.

        The New York Public Library just digitized and made available more than 180,000 high resolution items, which the public can download for free.

        The images come from pieces in the library’s collection that have fallen out of copyright or are otherwise in the public domain. This includes botanical illustrations, ancient texts, historical maps–including the incredible Green Book collection of travel guides for African American travelers in mid-1900s. They’ve also released more than 40,000 stereoscopes, Berenice Abbott’s amazing documentation of New York City in 1930s and Lewis Hines’ photos of Ellis Island immigrants, as well as the letters of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among other political figures.

Patent Lawyers Continue to Spin Grim News About Patents (UPC, Lawsuits Peak, Patent Raids) as Good News

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 9:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Good for lawyers and their super-affluent clients, bad for everyone else…

The trickle-down
Patent trickle-down effect: large corporations at the top, their patent lawyers at the bottom, and the public just gets flooded (with lawsuits, embargoes/injunctions, and raids)

Summary: A roundup of misleading coverage from patent lawyers, to whom any kind of corporate landgrab or monopoly (by means of patenting) is seen as a win

THE mouths of the EPO and of patent trolls just can’t stop moving. And when they move (talk) they lie. Our collective jaws were on the floor (not just mine) when we saw IAM saying: “The headline is that US patent suits are at record highs. The reality is it’s never been tougher to be a plaintiff.”

Cry us a river. “Plaintiff” just means patent aggressor, and in many cases these aggressors are patent trolls, like those that are paying IAM (it cost us to say this*). Figures from Unified Patents and Lex Machina are being cited by IAM (both sources and their findings were mentioned here earlier on) and IAM is not denying the growth in litigation, just finding some yardsticks by which to spin these figures in favour of greedy patent lawyers who receive money from patent trolls. Remember that IAM is literally funded (e.g. through events) by the world’s worst patent trolls (it’s stated openly in the list of sponsors). We covered this before. The patent propagandists from IAM are willing to go as far as trying to spin news about patent wars as a positive news (in full-length articles).

People might think we’re being cruel and merciless when it comes to IAM, but these people are dangerous, they are talking to Manny Schechter, who promotes software patents for IBM [1, 2], and influential people like Wouter Pors (occasionally an EPO critic) uses IAM to promote the unitary patent (UPC). Days ago he wrote: “The German ratification of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement will most likely be postponed until September 2016 and be decisive for the Unitary Patent (UP) system to go live. Wouter Pors, partner of law firm Bird & Bird, has said this in an interview with Kluwer IP Law. Thirteen ratifications are needed for the new European patent system to start functioning, including those of France, the UK and Germany. So far eight countries, including France, have ratified.”

He was then citing the EPO’s mouthpiece, IAM ‘magazine’, as follows: “In a recent IAM report, it was pointed out that so far there have been no signs from Germany when it will ratify the UPC Agreement.”

IAM just keeps shaming Germany into it (at least thrice that we’ve noticed it so far). At the bottom it says: “Wouter Pors is one of the speakers at the Unitary Patent Package conference, 4 & 5 February 2016 in Amsterdam.”

This is a pro-UPC event sponsored by patent lawyers, notably NLO, “one of the larger European firms providing specialist advice in the field of intellectual property in all its aspects for more than 125 years,” according to the backers’ page.

It’s said to be costing about €1000 to attend, ensuring that all those in attendance will basically make it an echo chamber with no real diversity of views. It’s an event by lawyers, for lawyers, and for their richest clients (companies like IBM or Microsoft).

Remember that another pro-UPC event is sponsored by EPO through FTI Consulting, in addition to patent lawyers. IAM is organising this. They’re all working together to get more money for themselves and their rich clients (large multinational corporations) at the expense of everybody else. The patent system has a red tape or ribbon ensuring that everyone who interacts with it is pressured to pay a lawyer (as told by a recent SME story that we shared here).

As told yesterday by a patent lawyers’ site (linking to a recent paper), the patent bar (in the legal sense) has become a necessity for many. The abstract says that “the vast majority of lawyers cannot represent clients in the Patent Office. The paucity of critical debate regarding the size and structure of the Patent Bar is surprising given that innovators spend billions of dollars each year on legal services in the Patent Office.”

To quote from the paper (a few weeks old now): “many companies only hire patent attorneys with relevant experience in the appropriate technological area and don’t simply rely upon the “patent attorney” status as a total qualifier.”

All that patent mess and the altercations in court (or with examiners) is big business for non-producing actors, not inventors. The inventors are just the ones losing money. Who is this system really for? Seriously, speak to SMEs about their negative experiences with the EPO…

Watch what happened in this week’s CES tech show in Las Vegas, based on this new BBC report. To quote the reporter: “The officials confiscated all the company’s one-wheeled vehicles and took down its signs after a Silicon Valley-based rival filed a patent infringement claim.”

Yay, innovation!

It’s just like the Sisvel patent mafia situation [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13], only in the US this time around. They work for large corporations. Watch IAM defending this! They frame this as helping the ‘little guy’ or inventors, when obviously enough it’s exactly the opposite (the only ones agreeing with IAM are in the same business, e.g. Jeremy Phillips).

It’s not tactless and it’s not rude to point out who stands where. Florian Müller, for instance, appears to have officially flip-flopped back to truly opposing software patents and those who use these against Linux. Irrespective of his past (including payments from Microsoft), we should all welcome him back to the fight against software patents in Europe and elsewhere. █
________
* After blocking many people who don't agree with them, IAM decided it was an exercise in futility (it cannot just magically halt public criticism) and is now unblocking all those who were banned, supposedly for the “new year” [1, 2, 3].

The European Patent Office (EPO) Doesn’t Like Spanish, So Why Should the Spanish Tolerate the EPO?

Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Contra EPO

Contra EPO

Summary: Old complaints about the EPO’s discrimination against Spanish speakers, as demonstrated by actually speaking to EPO staff

Spanish is — by some criteria and depending on the definitions one chooses — the world’s most used language (e.g. based on number of countries where it is a first/spoken language). Techrights made Spanish its second language and there are many articles here which were published in Spanish.

“The Spanish language hardly even exists at the EPO. It is definitely not treated as it should and one needn’t look far back to see how the EPO, which is based in Munich, (mis)treats Spanish staff.”The EPO discriminates against many European languages, but only the Italians and the Spanish had the courage to stress this point and fight over such an important matter (perpetuating power through lingual domination, as the British have done for centuries). The EPO’s Twitter account (“European Patent Office” only ever writes in English) promoted automated translations the other day, but these are subpar. Here is the tool they recommend (warning: epo.org link). “Patent Translate,” they said in Twitter a few days ago, “comes with a correction editor, which allows you to propose even better translations” (well, that’s crowdsourcing, turning Spaniards, for instance, into volunteers for corporations’ private gain).

The Spanish language hardly even exists at the EPO. It is definitely not treated as it should and one needn’t look far back to see how the EPO, which is based in Munich, (mis)treats Spanish staff. One of them had a nervous breakdown a couple of months ago, after he had been bullied by the ‘whiter’ staff of the EPO, the I.U. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

“They can at least demand that the EPO doesn’t treat Spanish as a non-language.”We recently became aware of other forms of discrimination against Spaniards at the EPO. “I was reading this article,” one person told us about an article we've translated into Spanish a few days ago. “I tried to request Spanish as an opposition language when we were opposing the Amazon Gift patent,” this person told us. “We got a nice phone call and email from the EPO saying we have to pay for a translator, while other people with German or French would not have to pay for simultaneous translations during oral proceedings.”

That’s rather revealing, is it not?

We decided to look further and deeper into it because this is a shared complaint (shared among EU member states); only the Spanish, however, have a strong enough voice (large population) and a good argument for the inclusion of their language because it’s incredibly popular (second only to Chinese, Arabic, and English depending on the definition of popularity). It was brought up when debating the UPC’s viability at one time. The EPO’s management wants the UPC to pass (it even lobbies for it out in the open), but the Spanish people, if properly organised, can definitely do a lot to derail it. They can at least demand that the EPO doesn’t treat Spanish as a non-language. Some groups already complained about this, but nothing really came out of such efforts.

“We sent this request in Spanish,” wrote to us the above person (the name can be found deeper in the links if one is desperate to know it), and the English translation is his. He ended up “trying to download the thousand pages in the EPO register to locate the right PDF” in this mess. The original letter is as follows (from the FFII):

Bruselas, 07 de mayo 2012

Sujeto: EP927945: el lenguaje de la vista oral de 12 de junio 2012

Estimados Miembros de la Oficina Europea de Patentes,

FFII eV ha recibido su carta del 16 de abril 2012 en relación con la elección de las lenguas de los procedimientos orales con respecto a nuestra oposición a la patente de regalo de Amazon EP927945.

Tenemos la intención de usar el español tanto para los procedimentos por vía oral (habla) como para la interpretación simultánea (escucha).

Saludos cordiales,

And in English:

Brussels, the 7 may 2012

Concerns: Amazon gift patent EP927945: language of the oral
proceedings of 12 June 2012

Dear Members of the European Patent Office,

FFII eV has well received your letter of 16th of April 2012 regarding the choice of languages of the oral proceedings regarding our opposition to the Amazon gift patent EP927945.

We intend to use Spanish for the both the language of the oral proceedings (speaking) and the simultaneous interpretation (listening).

Best regards,

“The link to the EPO register is here,” he said. “Unfortunately, their website is so crappy that you cannot download the PDF with wget. Here is our answer to their refusal. Trying to find the original in plain text…”

“What is going on, how did it become so bad, and why aren’t Spaniards more vocal about this?”Their official answer is here.

“Trying to recover the email from [a person] who is Spanish,” he wrote, “when he received the phone call from the EPO yields the following old letter…”

The following is quite self-explanatory:

Dear board,

this email is private, don’t forward it, etc.

A German speaking woman from the EPO has just called the office. She was speaking like a script. Question from me, standard answer from her. Well trained. I summarized.

Mr. [redacted] has sent a fax in Spanish :-), but Spanish is not one of the 3 languages accepted by the EPO. I of course said that this is not good for the Spanish speaking people in the EU, bla bla. The standard answer: the 3 official languages of the EPO are bla bla, additionally the EPO offers at no cost a list of translators bla bla that we can hire. I asked for this in written form, she said she cannot reply to a fax in Spanish, we should send the fax in one of the 3 official languages and then she will reply. She asks for this to happen quickly, as she cannot achieve a fax in Spanish in the EPO system.

In conclusion, Spanish is strangely enough being snubbed by the EPO, whereas French (which fewer nations and people can speak) is an “official” language. The same goes for German, which not many people speak at all (except in Germany’s area). Are member states treated favourably based on their financial might as opposed to the target audience internationally and locally (Portuguese is more popular than both French and German, maybe even combined, going by some criteria)? What is going on, how did it become so bad, and why aren’t Spaniards more vocal about this? █

“The European Patent Office is a Corrupt, Malicious Organisation Which Should Not Exist”

–Richard Stallman

Actualmente Sólo Abogados de Patentes (y sus Multibillionarios Clientes) Contra Todo el Mundo Buscán Máximizar Proteccionismo

Posted in Patents at 7:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Original/English

Publicado en Patentes a las 8:13 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Cómo preservar al Rico en el poder y hacerlos incluso más ricos, INMUNES a la competición

Greed
Codicia

Sumario: Un roundup de artículos recientes, mayoritariamente aquellos compuestos por abogados de patentes en un esfuerzo para *eternamente expandir el alcance de patentes (por ello monopolios en ideas y más allá) *irrespectivamente de su efecto colectivo sobre la sociedad. Un efecto OPRESIVO.

AA codicia-impulsora maximalista en el área de derechos de autor es bastante MALA (véa la controversia de Anne de Frank) e igual es por patentes. Expandiendo la longitud y el alcance de los derechos de autor al parecer infinitamente (a cien años o incluso más allá de la muerte del creador) es IRRACIONAL. Dejando personas mantener/crea derechos de autor por frases de dos palabras es también francamente ridículo. En el caso de patentes, dejando las personas patentan los MEROS CONCEPTOS y las IDEAS ABSTRACTAS no ayudan a la innovación o a mejorar sociedad. Dejar la vida ser patentada en algunos casos aumenta la frecuencia de muertes y el número de muertes. Tan qué da? Ahora hay incluso clandestinidad nueva (el eufemismo es “secretos de comercio¨ ) produciendo leyes, incluyendo aquellas altamente secretivos tratados extensos que el público no puede ver (bien, secretos!). I.S.D.S. Van un paso más allá e *incentiva dejar las personas ricas demandar a los gobiernos, presuntamente en el interés de los-llamados ‘accionistas‘.

“I.S.D.S. Van un paso más allá e *incentiva dejar las personas ricas demandar a los gobiernos, presuntamente en el interés de los-llamados ‘accionistas‘.”Alérta por los *maximalistas y notén qué a menudo los maximalistas son básicamente parásitos que se benefician (como minoría minúscula) del *maximalismo. En el caso de la OEP ahora tenemos patentes por vida — un error serio que incluso la Comisión de la UE recientemente criticó. Para citar un artículo acerca: “En una resolución respaldada por gran mayoría de sus miembros, la Eurocámara ha tomado una posición clara en contra concediendo las patentes en plantas derivaron de convencionales (“esencialmente biológicos”) reproductivos. En su declaración la Eurocámara dice que estas plantas, semillas, carácteristicas nativas o los genes tendrían que ser excluidos de patentabilidad. Además, criadores de plantas no tendrían que ser impedido por patentes para acceder la diversidad biológica necesitada para más crianza. Los miembros de Eurocámara insisten más allá que en prohibiciones en existentes leyes de patente europeas para excluir patentes en variedades de plantas y crianza convencional , no es socavado por la interpretación errónea actualmente seguida por la Oficina de Patente europea (OEP). No hace mucho tiempo, la OEP concedió varias patentes en tomates, la pimienta y el brécol derivados de cruzas y selección.”

‘Pobres’ abogados de patentes, personas que están ahora enojados porque han sido acostumbrados a ganar dinero por solicitar y demandar con patentes de software, no están teniendo un día de picnic. Aquí están gimiendo acerca del régimen de Alice, refiriéndose como “régimen” (aquello es una nueva corrida). Para citar los medios de comunicación de los abogados (de ayer): “parece que podría ser la prueba. Bien, pueda ser. Bajo el nuevo régimen Alice , es duro de decir, pero los EE.UU. la decisión reciente del tribunal Supremo para rechazar la apelación de un dueño de patente basadó el despido de su patente como una “idea abstracta” bajo Alice muestra que el tribunal supremo está detrás de la regla nueva que está aplicado por lo que ha sido acuñado como la “Policía de Pensamiento.””

“Müller parece haver cambiado de opinión de nuevo.”Veán cómo otros abogados de patente admiten estar temerosos de la palabra “abstracta” ahora. Para citar uno ejemplo nuevo de un vocal proponent de patentes de software: “Un caso actualmente pendiente antes del Circuito Federal está anticipado para proporcionar guiaje más grande a la respuesta a esta cuestión, concretamente, cómo tribunales de distrito tendrían que determinar si una reclamación está dirigida a una idea abstracta.”

El trístemente célebre Florian Müller (quién ha pasado a la historia como el besador de traseros de los dueños de grandes corporaciones, i.e, Gates, Jobs y todos esos hijos de …) quien en sus principios batallo a favor de software patents en Europa, ahora critica a Apple enforzamiento de patentes en su blog, así como en Twitter (una docena de twits los ultimos dias), en este blog explica por que era simpatizante de Apple por que su historia de ćopiado parecía creíble. Ha mostrado las débilidades de estas patentes como la 647 ¨rápidas links¨ clase por la desliza para abrir familia de patentes los últimos ańos. Incluso fuertes cosas que los jueces en las audiencias no son lo mismo que una decisión actual, la simple realidad que el Circuito Federal ha expresado masiva duda en esa patentes ya refuerza mi incredulidad.¨

Müller parece haver cambiado de opinión de nuevo.¨ Se reunió con ejecutivos de Apple, simplemente falló de convencerlos del mérito en llevar a corte a Android (y por ende Linux).

“Instamos a cualquier abogado, juez, examinador etc. quién lea esto a antagonisar a los maximalistas.”En otras noticias, los sitios de abogados de patente sugieren maneras nuevas para patentar software después del caso Alice. Esto es tendencia actualmente. Están buscando maneras nuevas hacer tontos/truquear/*bamboozle jueces y examinadores. No los dején salirse con la suya (p. ej. por añadir esquemas y utilizar analogies que suenen físicos). Estas personas (hijos de …) quieren más para ellos a costa de los demás; sus clientes son normalmente empresas multinacionales como Apple y Microsoft. De hecho están demandando para prohibir Linux-*powered countrapartes. Es un ataque en la economía de compartir y cualquier cosa que típicamente conduce a innovación más rápida y más efficiente.

Esto artículo nuevo titulado “Es el software todavía patente elegible?” Bien, no es nada como solía ser. El software no puede ser patentado más, a no ser que los examinadores y los jueces pueden ser cogidos fuera de guardia. Como el autor lo puso:

Una de las primeras preguntas de cualquier examinador de patentes de los EE.UU. cuándo revisa una aplicación de patente nueva es si la materia que el inventor está intentando proteger es patente elegible. Puede la invención ser patentada, o es excluido de patentabilidad?

El Tribunal Supremo de los EE.UU por sólo dos veces en 30 años, emprendió esta cuestión en el contexto de un software método empresarial cuándo emitió su decisión en el caso de Alice *Corp. *Pty. *Ltd. *v. *CLS Banco *Int’*l, 134 *S. *Ct. 2347, 2355, 189 L. *Ed. 2*d 296 (2014).

En su decisión, el tribunal solidificó la prueba para patente-elegilibility e indicó que patentes de software (p. ej., patenta reclamar los pasos implementaron por un ordenador de propósito general) puede ser la patente elegible bajo algúnas circunstancias.

Patente-elegibility está definida por una combinación de estatuto y ley de caso. Sección 101 del Acto de Patente declara que “quienquiera que invente o descubre cualquier proceso nuevo y útil, máquina, fabricación o composición de asunto, o cualquier mejora nueva y útil del mismo, por lo tanto puede obtener una patente, tema a las condiciones y requisitos de este título.” 35 *U.*S.C. 101.

Instamos cualquier abogado, juez, examinador etc. quién lee esto a antagonizar a los maximalistas. No están sirviendo sociedad y no están buscando adelantar/promover la innovación. Simplemente están sirviendo a sus propios bolsillos y a sus multibillionarios clientes para quienes la innovación (disrupción) es perpetuamente una amenaza que NUNCA debe ser tolerado; están dispuestos a incluso PATEARLO fuera de existencia. █

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

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