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02.22.16

Links 22/2/2016: IceWeasel/Firefox Debian Debate, Linux-powered Microwave

Posted in News Roundup at 6:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • ETSI Launches Open Source Mano Group

    A total of 23 Service Providers and Solution Vendors have announced their intent to join the Open Source MANO (OSM) Community in the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona focused on delivering an open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack aligned with ETSI NFV Information Models. OSM has been created under the umbrella of ETSI and it is an operator-led community to meet the requirements of production NFV networks such as a common Information Model (IM) that has been defined, implemented and released in open source software.

  • OSM Demos First Steps to Open Source MANO

    A new ETSI-based open source community, launched this week, is demonstrating its model-based approach to management and orchestration for NFV here at Mobile World Congress, hoping to build consensus and speed practical deployment of virtualization by solving its most persistent problem.

  • How to choose a brand name for your open source project

    When it comes to developing a new open source software project, most developers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about brand strategy. After all, a great idea, solid code, and a passionate community are what really matter when you’re getting a project underway.

  • Web Log: Quitter appeals to Twitter deserters

    All the hoo-hah around Twitter tweaking its timeline, shortly after ditching ‘favourites’ for ‘likes’, along with its decision to censor certain content and accounts, has left some folks weary and wary of the microblogging platform.

    If you’re planning on quitting Twitter perhaps you plan on tweeting via Quitter?

    That’s a bit of a mouthful but Quitter is an ad-free, not-for-profit alternative that runs on a volunteer basis.

  • Mejiro Update: Responsive and Improved

    As always, a Mejiro demo is available for your viewing pleasure. And you can download the latest version of the app from the project’s GitHub repository.

  • Events

    • Connfa: An open source mobile app for conferences and events

      Connfa is an open source app for conferences and events aimed to make paper brochures a thing of the past. Yes, those large, clumsy brochures.

      Imagine you’re at a conference. A nice person at the reception desk checks your ticket and hands you one of these bright and shiny paper program guides. You walk off and start circling the events you want to attend. Everything goes fine until you miss the session you wanted to go to because you confused the date, or maybe you spent ages looking for the venue. To top it all off, you forget the brochure the next day and you’re pretty lost. Sound familiar?

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox: on the right fix, and why the Bugzilla breach made me proud

        At Mozilla, we keep security-sensitive bug reports confidential until the information in them is no longer dangerous. This week we’re opening to the public a group of security bugs that document a major engineering effort to remove the rocket science of writing secure browser code and make Firefox’s front-end, DOM APIs, and add-on ecosystem secure by default. It removed a whole class of security bugs in Firefox – and helped mitigate the impact of a bug-tracker breach last summer.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • ls output changes considered unacceptable

      There are some software changes that are simple accidents resulting in bugs; folks find them, fix them, and all is well. Then there are intentional changes, which don’t affect functionality, but instead change _essential aesthetics_. These are much more alarming issues, the kind of issues that get under your skin, that disrupt your relationship with the terminal, as though you suddenly woke up and all your countrymen but not you spoke with a hardly comprehensible accent. It’s a shock, a disruption, a psychological chasm. And, when such a change is made in software considered “core”, by a single individual unilaterally without extremely wide consultation of the larger community, it is clear that a grave an unacceptable thing has happened. The recent change to ls (commit 109b922) must be reverted immediately, a new package version released, and only after large multi-distro discussion might a similar change be made.

  • Programming

    • Don’t use the greater than sign in programming

      Has 15 other possible ways to be expressed if you include the greater than sign and don’t make your expressions conform to the number line.

    • Upgraded to Jekyll 3.0

      Github Pages now supports Jekyll 3.0 which has some backward incompatible features, so I have decided to upgrade. I was quite surprised when I realized I am still using Jekyll 1.0 and everything was working great so far!

    • GCC vs. Clang On POWER8 Is A Competitive Compiler Match

      Most often when running GCC vs. LLVM Clang compiler benchmark comparisons it’s done on Intel/AMD x86 hardware or occasionally on ARM when benchmarking an interesting ARMv7/ARMv8 system. However, in having remote access last weekend to the prototype of the Talos Secure Workstation powered by a POWER8 design, I was very anxious to run some compiler benchmarks to see how these open-source compilers compete on the alternative architecture.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Mercury Splatters the Central U.S.

      Several years after scientists thought they had put the problem to rest, they have once again discovered increasing concentrations of mercury, this time in rainwater. “It’s a surprising result,” says David Gay from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who is a co-author on the new study. “Everybody expected [mercury levels] to continue going down. But our analysis shows that may not necessarily be the case.”

    • Flint’s Poisoned Children Deserve the Truth

      The Michigan Legislature must amend the state’s Freedom of Information law to include itself and the governor’s office.

      By now, you’ve surely heard about the Flint water crisis. And you probably know why it happened: After the state of Michigan suspended democracy in the impoverished, predominantly African-American city, emergency managers appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder were given absolute power to make unilateral decisions that resulted in the lead poisoning of the municipality’s water supply.

      Congress, the Department of Justice, and the FBI are all conducting investigations. And the ACLU of Michigan, along with the National Resource Defense Council, local pastors and residents, is litigating to force the state to replace lead service lines immediately.

    • US School Agrees to Pay $8,500 to Get Rid of Ransomware

      As criminal probes and lawsuits examine the Flint water crisis, some of the key decision makers have been reluctant to discuss their roles.

      But their e-mails, released under the Freedom of Information Act, offer contemporaneous accounts of the crisis as it was happening. Here are some of the e-mails exchanges that have been recently released and what they show about a crisis that has drawn international attention.

    • Russian doping official planned book before sudden death

      The former executive director of the Russian anti-doping agency planned to write a book on drug use in sports shortly before his sudden death, a former colleague and Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper reported Sunday.

      Sunday Times sports writer David Walsh, renowned for his coverage of cycling champion Lance Armstrong’s doping, reported that Nikita Kamaev wrote to him in November offering to reveal information on doping covering the last three decades since Kamaev began work for a “secret lab” in the Soviet Union.

  • Security

    • SMEs vulnerable through insufficient IT, data security

      Small businesses are particularly vulnerable to breaches of IT security, according to a newly published survey which finds that security of data and IT systems is a growing concern for business leaders across Australia.

      Despite facing the same online risks as larger corporates, research by recruitment agency Robert Half the shows that small and medium businesses typically use fewer data protection tools than large companies.

    • US School Agrees to Pay $8,500 to Get Rid of Ransomware [Ed: Microsoft Windows]

      Administrators of the Horry County school district (South Carolina, US) have agreed to make a $8,500 / €7,600 payment to get rid of a ransomware infection that has affected the school’s servers.

    • Linux Computers Targeted with Fresh Fysbis Spying Malware

      One fresh malicious program called Fysbis, whose other name is Linux.BackDoor.Fysbis has been created for targeting Linux computers through installation of a backdoor which reportedly opens the machine’s access to the malware owner, thus facilitating him with spying on the user as well as carrying out more attacks.

    • CVE-2016-2384: arbitrary code execution due to a double-free in the usb-midi linux kernel driver

      This post describes an exploitable vulnerability (CVE-2016-2384) in the usb-midi Linux kernel driver. The vulnerability is present only if the usb-midi module is enabled, but as far as I can see many modern distributions do this. The bug has been fixed upstream.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Gallup Poll Shows Americans Prefer Terrorist Nations Over Iran. Why?

      A February 17th Gallup Poll showed that Americans prefer the chief nation that sponsors international terrorism, when given a choice between that terrorist-sponsoring nation and Iran. The disapproval shown of Iran is 79%; the approval is 14%. Back in 2014, the disapproval / approval were 84%/12%. At that time, Saudi Arabia had figures of 57%/35%. Iran was seen by Americans as being even more hostile toward Americans than Saudi Arabia.

    • The Saudi Slaughter in Yemen

      Although the Saudis have promised a high-level committee to investigate civilian deaths from their airstrikes in Yemen, they continue to strike civilian targets with countless deaths and destructions.

    • Darkness at High Noon in Korea

      As the world focuses on the war in Syria, the refugee crisis in Europe, and the primary slugfest in the United States, the two Koreas are heading toward a catastrophe in the Far East.

      Although relations on the Korean peninsula have been deteriorating for the better part of eight years, the last six months have been particularly tense. North Korea recently conducted its fourth nuclear test and followed up with a satellite launch using a long-range rocket. The international community reacted in its customary fashion, with condemnations and the imposition of more sanctions. South Korea joined in the chorus of disapproval.

    • Jeb Bush Is Dropping Out of the GOP Race. Here’s Why I’ll Miss His Campaign.

      There were more than a few reasons for a libertarian (or, okay, anyone) to dislike Jeb Bush: his consistent support for his brother George W. Bush’s administration, his aggressive backing of awful government surveillance programs, his general air of hawkishness, and the easy, entitled comfort with which he slipped into his place as the early favorite of the Republican party establishment. Jeb Bush and his supporters stood for continuity with the GOP under his brother, and all that was wrong with it.

    • It Took Jeb $150 Million, 250 Days And 3 States To Figure Out Republicans Don’t Want More Bush

      The massive expenditure of funds earned him 2.8 percent of the vote in Iowa, 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire and, at the time he announced his withdrawal from the race, about 8 percent of the vote in South Carolina.

    • Uber Driver Allegedly Responsible For Kalamazoo Shooting Spree That Killed 6

      Police have arrested a suspect for a six-hour shooting spree that started in an apartment complex parking lot and ended in a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

      Jason Brian Dalton, a 45-year-old Uber driver, is suspected of killing six people and injuring two at random with a semiautomatic handgun during multiple shootings Saturday night. The shootings started around 6 p.m. when a woman was shot four times while with her three children. CNN reported the woman is in serious condition but is expected to survive the attack.

    • Kosovo Chaos Undercuts Clinton ‘Success’

      President Bill Clinton’s Kosovo war of 1999 was loved by neocons and liberal hawks—the forerunner for Iraq, Libya, Syria and other conflicts this century—but Kosovo’s political violence and lawlessness today underscore the grim consequences of those strategies even when they “succeed,” writes Jonathan Marshall.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • South Florida’s Tourist Season From Hell

      February and March are the prime times for tourists to come to Florida for a respite from cold winter weather. So imagine the panic that people who run fishing charters, paddle board concessions, beachfront hotels and restaurants are feeling as dark agricultural swill gushes from the state’s center to the east and west coasts, killing marine life.

      “It’s brown, it stinks, it’s cold,” a tourist from New Mexico told a TV reporter in Fort Myers.”It doesn’t look very appealing to get into to go swimming in.”

    • Why I Support Dr. Jill Stein for President

      The political crisis in America is severe. The old ideas that buttressed the ruling class and promised democracy, growth and prosperity—neoliberalism, austerity, globalization, endless war, a dependence on fossil fuel and unregulated capitalism—have been exposed as fictions used by the corporate elite to impoverish and enslave the country and enrich and empower themselves. Sixty-two billionaires have as much wealth as half the world’s population, 3.5 billion people. This fact alone is revolutionary tinder.

      We are entering a dangerous moment when few people, no matter what their political orientation, trust the power elite or the ruling neoliberal ideology. The rise of right-wing populism, with dark undertones of fascism, looks set in the next presidential election—as it does in parts of Europe—to pit itself against the dying gasps of the corporate establishment.

    • NOAA Forecast for Red Tide in Florida

      A red tide, or harmful algal bloom, is the rapid growth of microscopic algae. Some produce toxins that have harmful effects on people, fish, marine mammals, and birds. In Florida and Texas, this is primarily caused by the harmful algae species, Karenia brevis. It can result in varying levels of eye and respiratory irritation for people, which may be more severe for those with pre-existing respiratory conditions (such as asthma). The blooms can also cause large fish kills and discolored water along the coast.

    • Preparing for the Collapse of the Saudi Kingdom

      For half a century, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been the linchpin of U.S. Mideast policy. A guaranteed supply of oil has bought a guaranteed supply of security. Ignoring autocratic practices and the export of Wahhabi extremism, Washington stubbornly dubs its ally “moderate.” So tight is the trust that U.S. special operators dip into Saudi petrodollars as a counterterrorism slush fund without a second thought. In a sea of chaos, goes the refrain, the kingdom is one state that’s stable.

  • Finance

    • An Open Letter To My CEO

      I haven’t bought groceries since I started this job. Not because I’m lazy, but because I got this ten pound bag of rice before I moved here and my meals at home (including the one I’m having as I write this) consist, by and large, of that. Because I can’t afford to buy groceries. Bread is a luxury to me, even though you’ve got a whole fridge full of it on the 8th floor. But we’re not allowed to take any of that home because it’s for at-work eating. Of which I do a lot. Because 80 percent of my income goes to paying my rent. Isn’t that ironic? Your employee for your food delivery app that you spent $300 million to buy can’t afford to buy food. That’s gotta be a little ironic, right?

    • Bank of Finland predicts country will be cash-free by 2029
    • More Than 100 State and Local Governments Considering Anti-TPP Resolutions

      More than 100 state and local governments have introduced or passed resolutions opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In addition, more than 100 resolutions opposing the TPP were passed at recent precinct caucuses in Iowa.

    • TTIP reading room to open in the UK, but campaigners warn of lack of transparency

      The UK government has announced its plans to open a special ‘TTIP reading room’ where MPs are able to read the negotiating texts of the controversial trade deal being negotiated between the EU and the USA – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The announcement was made in response to a written parliamentary question by Caroline Lucas MP, in advance of the 12th round of the TTIP negotiations which start in Brussels on 22 February.

    • Secret TTIP talks resume Monday as EU-US rifts deepen

      EU and US resume their negotiations next week over the TTIP trade and investment deal. But deep rifts have emerged over the corporate courts in which investors can sue governments for any actions that reduce their profits. Meanwhile MPs are seething over their restricted access to draft texts and negotiating documents.

    • A New Infographic on TPP and Your Digital Rights

      Anyone familiar with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may find that it can be challenging to explain to others, in simple terms, how it threatens our rights online and over our digital devices. We often begin by describing the secretive, corporate-captured process of the negotiations that ultimately led to the final deal, then go into some of the specific policies—including its ban on circumventing digital locks (aka Digital Rights Management or DRM), its copyright term extensions that will lengthen restrictions on creative works by 20 years, and its inclusion of “investor-state” rules that could empower multinational corporations to undermine new user protections in the TPP countries.

    • Canada’s first Chinese FIPA case in the making?

      You never know where the next huge story is going to come from. I remember the first time I saw Enbridge’s proposal for a West Coast oil tanker port mentioned in a tiny newspaper article 15 years ago, and we know what happened with that.

    • Globe & Mail columnist calls for scrapping ISDS to save CETA

      The Globe and Mail’s national business correspondent Barrie McKenna has a solution to getting the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) through the European Parliament – drop the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provision.

    • In Murky 2016 Contest, Clear Opposition to Trade Agreements

      One of the few things clarified by a presidential contest where much remains unclear is the diminished support for–and, in some quarters, outright hostility toward–more trade deals. This goes beyond candidates pledging support for “fair trade” rather than “free trade,” which is par for the course during campaign season. What’s happening this cycle has implications for not only the next administration but also the global economy.

    • Obama Punts On Trade Agreement With EU

      The Obama administration has all but given up on a trade agreement with the European Union.

      Negotiations on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership continue, but the administration is so invested in saving its other free trade agreement – the Trans-Pacific Partnership – that it has punted the T-TIP to the next administration.

    • Majority of U.S. Public School Students Live in Poverty

      For the first time since the Great Depression, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

    • You Can’t Earn a Living on the Minimum Wage

      When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what are they really talking about? Whether they know it or not, it’s something like this.

    • Looking for ‘Revitalization’ in All the Wrong Places

      On the one hand, using the Kings arena as a hook to examine chronic homelessness (though the examination here doesn’t go much beyond “it exists”) isn’t the worst thing in the world, especially for local newscasts that almost never focus on the lives of the poor. But on the other, this report reveals how deeply messed up local development reporting can be.

      [...]

      The FOX40 reporters who put together this piece probably didn’t think that this was the message they were conveying, but that shouldn’t let them off the hook. If you’re going to be a journalist, it’s vitally important that you think about not only what you’re covering, but how you’re covering it, and what assumptions go into the way you frame your story.

    • Billionaire-Owned Observer Whines About Democratization of Media in 2016’s Worst Op-ed

      Second only to glib equivalencies between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, 2016’s most popular lazy media trope is the idea that rabid Sanders fans have unleashed dark populist forces that threaten our republic. Both are fairly common, and more or less write themselves if the author tosses coherence and intellectual honesty out the window. But it’s rare that both are on such stark display as with New York Observer‘s editor-at-large Ryan Holiday’s recent op-ed (2/17/16).

      The diatribe, “The Cause of This Nightmare Election? Media Greed and Shameless Traffic Worship,” poses as media criticism but is little more than petulant establishment gatekeeping. Let’s begin with the thesis, or what passes for one, which is that the democratization of media has created a “sub-prime market” for the media.

    • Presstitutes At Work

      Like the Supreme Court the presstitutes have aligned themselves with the rich and powerful. Fox “News” reported that Marco Rubio, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, declared that to make the poor rich requires making the rich poor and we shouldn’t make the rich poor. Apparently, Fox “News” believes that aligning Rubio with the One Percent is helpful to his political career. Fox showed Rubio’s audience cheering and applauding his defense of the One Percent.

      This is “democratic America” where the people have no representation.

    • ‘Nobody Asked a Worker!’
    • NYT Rounds Up ‘Left-Leaning Economists’ for a Unicorn Hunt

      With Hillary Clinton ramping up her attacks on Bernie Sanders as a budget-buster—in the February 11 debate, she claimed his proposals would increase the size of government by 40 percent—the New York Times (2/15/16) offered a well-timed intervention in support of her efforts: “Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’ Plans.”

      While the “left-leaning” is no doubt meant to suggest critiques from those who would be inclined to sympathize with Sanders, all the quoted economists have ties to the Democratic establishment. So slight is their leftward lean that it would require very sensitive equipment to measure.

      Opinion pieces critical of Sanders often begin with a pledge of allegiance to his “impracticality.”

    • Wall Street Analyst Says Hillary Clinton Would Be the Best President for Healthcare Investors

      Amidst a tense battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over competing visions for health care, a leading Wall Street analyst has put out a report saying that Clinton would be the best candidate for healthcare investors.

    • Hillary Clinton Again Declines to Disclose What She Told Big Banks in Her Paid Speeches

      The guy in the audience said it was a matter of trust. “Please just release those transcripts so we know exactly where you stand,” he said.

      But Hillary Clinton wasn’t going there. At the MSNBC town hall with the Democratic presidential candidates on Thursday evening in Las Vegas, Clinton once again refused to release transcripts or recordings of the secret speeches she was paid millions of dollars to make to Wall Street banks.

    • Voodoo Journalism: Dr. Krugman Strikes Again—Risking His Credibility

      Paul Krugman is at it again. This time, he’s using his position as the leading progressive columnist in the “nation’s newspaper of record,” to ballyhoo a letter from four former heads of the Council of Economic Advisors.

      Their letter criticizes an economic analysis of Bernie Sanders’ policies performed by University of Massachusetts economist, Gerald Friedman, which found that Sander’s platform would increase growth by 5.3%.

      Krugman’s column this past Friday suggests that the former CEA chiefs’ letter puts Bernie in the same camp as the Republicans, who’ve been spouting voodoo economics such as trickle-down and the elixir of tax cuts for decades now, complete with magic asterisks designed to make nearly $6 trillion in deficits disappear.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Hillary is the foolish idealist: Clinton derides Sanders as naive, but has no plan for battling GOP obstruction

      Throughout this Democratic primary season, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly cast herself as “a progressive who likes to get things done,” and her opponent, Bernie Sanders, as a foolish idealist whose ideas “sound good on paper but will never make it in the real world.”

      “I want you to understand, I will not promise you something I cannot deliver,” she told a South Carolina crowd last Friday. “I will not make promises I know I cannot keep.”

      But, contrary to these assurances of realism and pragmatism, Clinton has actually set forth a bold, sweeping agenda to transform America.

    • This is the key to Bernie Sanders’ political revolution: Here’s how we beat GOP obstruction

      It is my belief that Sen. Bernie Sanders will be the next president of the United States — a belief I’ve held since he first announced. Bernie is one of the most gifted politicians I have ever observed. He’s a person of great integrity and very clever. Many thought that calling himself a democratic socialist doomed his presidential candidacy, initially causing “the powers that be” to dismiss him. It turned out to have been an asset because this lack of national attention from opinion-makers permitted Bernie to grow his movement below the radar.

    • Why Bernie Can Win

      The pundits are wrong. Bernie Sanders is the most electable candidate this November.

    • Team Clinton: Fools, Damn Fools and Democrats

      However, we Americans are bombarded relentlessly with mind numbing pro-regime, pro-status quo propaganda. This is why it is always worthwhile repeating information that is out there already.

    • WATCH: Amy Goodman Critiques Media Coverage of Election 2016 on CNN’s “Reliable Sources”

      “…it is astounding that Bernie Sanders is where he is today. Look at that Tyndall Center report that found in 2015, in the months leading up to December, you had 234 total network minutes, like almost four hours, CBS, NBC, ABC, covering Trump. That’s four hours and how much got coverage? Sanders got 10 minutes. On ABC World News Tonight in that year, Sanders got 20 seconds. Trump got like 81 minutes,” said Goodman.

    • Backed by Airline Dollars, Congress Rejects Effort to Address Shrinking Legroom

      An amendment to address shrinking legroom for airline passengers was defeated recently by members of Congress fueled by campaign dollars from the airline industry.

      An amendment proposed by Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., would have required the federal government to study the issue of shrinking legroom and allowed it to set a minimum dimension for commercial airline seats.

    • Hillary Wins a Squeaker in Nevada, But It’s a Rout in the Headlines

      In case you’ve ever wondered about the value of a narrow 5-point win in a state you were expected to take easily, just take a look at today’s headlines. The margin of victory doesn’t matter. The headlines in all four of our biggest daily newspapers were clear as a bell: Hillary won and her momentum is back. That’s the story everyone is seeing over their bacon and eggs this morning.

    • Sanders: ‘We Have Enormous Momentum’ Going Into South Carolina

      Despite a narrow loss in the Nevada presidential caucus on Saturday, Bernie Sanders is not slowing down, and neither are his supporters.

      A report filed over the weekend with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) shows the senator from Vermont has received more than four million contributions, raising a total of $94.8 million through January 31st after his campaign launched last April.

    • How Hillary Clinton Won Nevada

      It might have been closer than most people would have guessed a month ago, but Hillary Clinton’s long-term investment in Nevada paid off. The former secretary of state edged out Sen. Bernie Sanders by about five percentage points in the Nevada caucuses. It wasn’t quite the 20-point edge that Clinton had in polls from late last year, but it was a decisive win that backs up the Clinton campaign’s contention that Sanders won’t be able to maintain the same level of support he enjoyed in Iowa and New Hampshire as the contest moves to more diverse states.

    • [Old but republished] Clinton’s Experience: Fact and Fantasy

      From the Archive: Hillary Clinton’s win in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses and her big lead in South Carolina restore her status as Democratic frontrunner but lingering doubts about her honesty and her coziness to Big Money continue to dog her path to the White House, a problem that Barbara Koeppel identified during Clinton’s first run in 2008.

  • Censorship

    • February 22, 1976, Forty Years Ago: Court On Censorship

      “The press is not only an instrument for disseminating information but a powerful medium for moulding public opinion by propaganda. True democracy can only thrive in a free clearing house of competing ideologies and philosophies — political, economic and social — and in this, the press has an important role to play. The day this clearing-house closes down would toll the deathknell of democracy,” says a judgment by Justices D.P. Madon and M.H. Kania of the Bombay High Court. It adds: “It is not the function of the censor acting under the censorship order to make all newspapers and periodicals trim their sails to one wind or to tow along in a single file or to speak in chorus with one voice. It is not for him to exercise his statutory power to force public opinion in a single mould or to turn the press into an instrument for brainwashing the public. Under the censorship order, the censor is appointed the nursemaid of democracy and not its grave-digger. Dissent from opinions and views held by the majority and criticism and disapproval of measures initiated by a party in power make for a healthy political climate, and it is not for the censor to inject into this the lifelessness of forced conformity.

    • A culture of silencing

      A fortnight ago I was due to chair a session at the British Houses of Parliament organised by the Labour Friends of Palestine, in which MPs would “hear directly from four young Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and a Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, live via Skype”. As a Palestinian, born in a Gaza refugee camp, this opportunity to present lawmakers with the reality on the ground was dear to my heart.

      The session was cancelled at the last minute under extreme pressure from the Labour Friends of Israel parliamentary group and a campaign waged against me in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle. This is not the first, and I am certain it will not be the last, time I have been prevented from offering the Palestinian point of view by the powerful machinations of the Zionist lobby and the propaganda department of the state of Israel known as Hasbara (‘explaining’).

    • Call For Stories: User Uploads and Takedown Abuse

      EFF is filing public comments on a series of studies initiated by the U.S. Copyright Office, and we need your help. One of the studies focuses on the notice-and takedown procedures outlined in section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). We’d like to hear from you about your experience with those procedures, and the policies and practices that platforms have implemented to comply with them.

    • Don’t censor A-rated movies: Petition filed on change.org after the beeped-up screenings of ‘Deadpool’

      With a message echoing that Indian cinemagoers can handle mature content and a plea to release A-rated movies without any cuts, a petition has been started by Change.org, a technology platform, to submit before the Shyam Benegal Committee on censorship.

    • Cairo gallery bemoans unprecedented censorship as it prepares to reopen

      The director of one of Egypt’s most respected art galleries has warned it faces unprecedented censorship as it seeks to reopen to the public next month after being shut down by the authorities in December.

      William Wells, the director of Townhouse gallery, said staff were allowed to return last week, having been given two weeks to comply with new legal restrictions, some of which amounted to state control of its work.

    • Censorship & Localisation – Reasons To Be Cheerful

      Xenoblade Chronicles X is one of my favourite games of last year. It’s a bloody great game and you should all play it. But a few outspoken gamers caused a ripple on the social media ocean when it was discovered that the Western versions of the game would be subject to some censorship.

    • Twitter Meets Orwell — an FAQ by Daddy Warpig

      Twitter has introduced a brave new way of screwing with users, which some have taken to calling shadowbanning.

      Basically, this acts like a gag: you can send normal tweets normally, but people Following you won’t see them on their timeline. (However, people reading your profile will see them.)

      The following restrictions also apply:

      Your tweets won’t show up in certain hashtags (which and why is unknown).

      Your tweets won’t show up in Search, either by keyword or by account name.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Paul Rosenberg on Antonin Scalia, Darnell Moore on Black Futures Month

      This week on CounterSpin: The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia sent shockwaves through the political and media world; but for many the real shock was hearing a man eulogized as gracious and thoughtful who called the Voting Rights Act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” complained of the law profession’s “anti-anti-homosexual culture” and argued that mere “actual” innocence is no reason for the state not to kill someone.

    • Antonin Scalia’s death during secret junket points to new ethical violations

      Antonin Scalia died as he lived, indulging behind closed doors in the largess of the very wealthy, who could depend on the right-wing associate justice to defend their interests in the United States Supreme Court.

      The nauseating praise for Scalia as a towering judicial figure is exposed as all the more dishonest and absurd by the still emerging circumstances of his passing.

      On Friday, February 12, the start of the Supreme Court’s annual week-long President’s Day recess, Scalia took a chartered jet from Washington, D.C., accompanied by an unidentified lawyer friend, to the exclusive Cibolo Creek Ranch in the Chinati Mountains of West Texas, near the Mexican border. US marshals assigned as Scalia’s bodyguards were told not to make the trip.

    • Albert Woodfox, Last of the Angola Three, Is Free After 43 Years in Solitary Confinement

      Just moments ago, Albert Woodfox, the last remaining member of the Angola 3 still behind bars, was released from prison 43 years and 10 months after he was first put in a 6×9 foot solitary cell for a crime he did not commit. After decades of costly litigation, Louisiana State officials have at last acted in the interest of justice and reached an agreement that brings a long overdue end to this nightmare. Albert has maintained his innocence at every step, and today, on his 69th birthday, he will finally begin a new phase of his life as a free man.

    • ‘Where Are Your Guts?’: Johnny Cash’s Little-Known Fight for Native Americans

      In 1964, Johnny Cash faced a backlash for speaking out on behalf of native people — and he fought back.

      In 1964, Johnny Cash released a Native American-themed concept album, “Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian.” In an incredible but little-known story, Cash faced censorship and backlash for speaking out on behalf of native people — and he fought back.

      A new documentary airing this month on PBS, “Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears,” tells the story of the controversy. For the album’s 50th anniversary, it was re-recorded with contributions from musicians including Kris Kristofferson and Emmylou Harris, and the documentary also chronicles the making of the new album.

      ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Stephen Pevar, author of “The Rights of Indians and Tribes,” had a chance to ask writer/director Antonino D’Ambrosio about the film.

    • Siding With Foreclosure Victim, California Court Exposes Law Enforcement Failure

      The California Supreme Court on Thursday ruled unanimously in favor of a fraudulently foreclosed-upon homeowner in a case that should serve as a wake-up call to state and federal prosecutors that mortgage companies continue to use false documents to evict homeowners on a daily basis.

    • 5 Questions for CIA Director John Brennan

      NPR national security reporter Mary Louise Kelley tweeted on Friday that she would be interviewing CIA Director John Brennan on Saturday. Brennan was just on 60 Minutes last weekend, where Scott Pelley tossed him softballs.

    • Labor Board Sides With Trump Hotel Workers In Union Battle

      Just days before Nevada’s Republican presidential caucus, a federal labor official weighed in on the ongoing dispute between Donald Trump’s signature luxury Las Vegas hotel and the hundreds of workers who voted in December to unionize. Trump Hotel management had asked the National Labor Relations Board to throw out the results of that election, claiming that organizers from the Culinary Workers Union intimidated and coerced employees into voting yes, which “interfered with their ability to exercise a free and reasoned choice.” But after weeks of reviewing the evidence, the labor board did not agree.

    • Albert Woodfox released from jail after 43 years in solitary confinement

      US’s longest-standing solitary confinement prisoner set free in Louisiana after more than four decades in form of captivity widely denounced as torture

    • A Hindu priest in Muslim-majority Bangladesh has been hacked to death and two devotees injured in an attack on a temple in the country’s north

      A Hindu priest in Muslim-majority Bangladesh was hacked to death and two devotees injured in an attack Sunday on a temple in the country’s north.

      Police said Jogeshwar Roy, 50, was attacked as he came out after people threw stones at the temple in the Deviganj area of Panchgarh district, on the border with India.

      Quoting local people and witnesses, police officer Kafil Uddin said the assailants on a motorbike attacked the priest with a sharp weapon, fired guns and exploded crude bombs, injuring two devotees who tried to help him. The attackers fled.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • A Tale of Two Treaties: Marrakesh and Beijing Both Make Their Way to the Senate

        The White House has submitted two copyright treaties to the Senate for ratification: the Marrakesh Treaty, which would improve access to copyrighted works for people with visual and print disabilities; and the Beijing Treaty, which could create a new layer of monopoly rights for the creators of audiovisual works. International copyright treaties move slowly, so neither of these is a surprise. For years now, we’ve encouraged the adoption of Marrakesh and the rejection of Beijing.

02.21.16

Links 21/2/2016: Linux Mint Web Site Breaches, MWC 2016

Posted in News Roundup at 8:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Tencent and Why Open Source is About to Explode in China

    One of the pioneers of the internet in China gave a highly provocative talk – asking the audience why China had yet to birth a major open source project. The consensus in the audience (polled via WeChat platform) was that China’s culture inhibited open source. I heard this in my travels throughout China.

    Frankly I can see this both ways. While I see the cultural challenges everyone was telling me about, their awareness of the challenge is so tangible that it is driving leaders in the community like Tencent’s Marty Ma and TethrNet’s Kevin Yin to try just a little harder. Even if the majority of Chinese tech workers don’t quite fully get open source now, we’re seeing leaders emerge in the country willing to invest of their time and energy to change things. I wouldn’t bet against them.

  • IoT industry leaders announce open source standard group

    On Friday, a group of industry leaders making headway in the Internet of Things (IoT) market announced a cross-industry collaboration effort aimed at unlocking the massive opportunities for consumers and business with IoT devices, and ultimately a way to quickly get everyone to adopting a single open standard.

  • Coreboot Now Supports U-Boot As A Payload
  • Coreboot Receives Initial POWER8 Support
  • New Businessweek Comic Uses Open-Source Al Jazeera Code

    Businessweek just published a comic strip online by Peter Coy and Dorothy Gambrell, which also appeared in print today. It argues against Fed Chair Janet Yellen introducing negative interest rates. For online readers that find their view of the strip too constricted, the site offers a way to focus on one digestible bit at a time. Open-source software released by Al Jazeera America (AJAM) last year under the MIT license, called Pulp, allowed Bloomberg to better the reading experience without writing new code.

  • AquaJS framework for Node.js is open source and in beta

    AquaJS is a framework for Node.js that was created at Equinix, which provides carrier-neutral datacenters and Internet exchanges for interconnection. AquaJS was developed to provide a way to start microservice-based application development. It is built with open-source modules, along with a few in-house modules, such as including architecture and design, programming best practices, technology, and deployment and runtime.

  • Learn Why Node.js is an Open Source Juggernaut

    The Node.js Foundation was created last year to support the open source community involved with Node.js, which offers an asynchronous event driven framework designed to build scalable network applications.

  • Events

    • What Should We Stop Doing? (FLOSS Community Metrics Meeting keynote)

      One trend I see underlying a big chunk of FLOSS metrics work is the desire to automate the emotional labor involved in maintainership, like figuring out how our fellow contributors are doing, making choices about where to spend mentorship time, and tracking a community’s emotional tenor. But is that appropriate? What if we switched our assumptions around and used our metrics to figure out what we’re spending time on more generally, and tried to find low-value programming work we could stop doing? What tools would support this, and what scenarios could play out?

    • Comparing Codes of Conduct to Copyleft Licenses (My FOSDEM Speech)

      I will briefly mention my credentials in speaking about this topic, especially since this is my first FOSDEM and many of you don’t know me. I have been a participant in free and open source software communities since the late 1990s. I’m the past community manager for MediaWiki, and while at the Wikimedia Foundation, I proposed and implemented our code of conduct, which we call a Friendly Space Policy, for in-person Wikimedia technical spaces such as hackathons and conferences.

    • What to expect from QCon London 2016

      Actually, it’s mostly more of the same (in a good way)… but perhaps at a slightly amplified level — the only change we have reflected here is to profile QCon London in the open source blog category.

      Okay yes there will be your proprietary players there too, but open source will be especially strong this year… as it is everywhere.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Open Source Interview: Former Mozilla President Li Gong on the HTML5 OS

        In this article, I introduce our new series—the Open Source interview—inviting you to suggest questions to ask our interviewees in a follow-up email interview. The first candidate is Li Gong, former president of Mozilla, who is now heading Acadine Technologies. They are busy launching H5OS, an open source platform for mobile and IoT.

      • Servo Lands Its New GPU-Accelerated Rendering Backend

        Mozilla’s experimental Servo web layout engine written in Rust has landed its new “WebRender” back-end that leverages GPU rendering.

        WebRender is an experimental GPU rendering back-end for Servo. WebRender tries to offload as much of the rendering work to the GPU rather than having to draw the web content via the CPU.

      • Mozilla: Real Data Encryption Requires Political Action, Not Just Code

        Mozilla took a strong stance on online privacy this week by reiterating the need for more encryption — but also noting that, in our age of government backdoors, encryption software alone may not be enough to keep data secure.

        In a blog post, Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox and other popular open source software, declares that “encryption isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity.” And it plays up the importance of projects like Let’s Encrypt, a partnership Mozilla helped launch in 2014 to create an open certificate authority for encrypting websites.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Analysts Find Hadoop Now Entrenched in Banking, Government

      The open source Hadoop Big Data platform is not only on the rise, but it is becoming more entrenched in important sectors, including business and government. That is just one of the findings in a Research and Markets report titled “World Hadoop Market – Opportunities and Forecasts, 2014 – 2021″.

      The report also finds that the global Hadoop market is expected to garner revenue of $84.6 billion by 2021, registering a CAGR of 63.4% during the period 2016 to 2021. That is nothing to shake a stick at.

      North America accounted for around 52% share of the overall market revenue in 2015, according to the report, owing to higher rate of adoption in industries such as IT, banking, and government. Europe is anticipated to witness the fastest CAGR of 65.7% during the forecast period.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Joining The Document Foundation Board

      At the end of 2015 I was honoured to be elected to serve as a director of The Document Foundation — the charity that develops LibreOffice — for two years. The new Board commenced yesterday, February 18 and immediately started conducting business by selecting a Chair – Marina Latini from the LibreItalia community – and a vice-chair, the redoubtable Michael Meeks of Collabora.

      While some doubted when it was formed, with a few even mounting campaigns to undermine it for reasons I still don’t understand, The Document Foundation has quickly developed into a model for new open source community charities.

    • Pondering the future of the Document Foundation

      This past week we had had the pleasure to welcome both our new marketing assistant and the new board of directors of the Document Foundation. I would like to say a few words on where the Document Foundation stands now – and I must stress that I’m confident the new board has the right people to handle the future of the foundation.

      The Document Foundation is still a small entity compared to the Mozilla or OpenStack Foundation. However, with several hundreds of thousands of euros/dollars of resources, it just happens to stand just behind these behemoths. It is not an easy task. Commonly held opinions often do not apply with us: “pay X to code feature Y”. That is somewhat possible, but we tend not to do it, unless there is a strategic reason (and enough money) to do it. We do fund, however, our entire infrastructure, the release management process, infrastructure and tools that help the community develop, improve and release LibreOffice. As the Document Foundation is now four years old, we are adjusting our internal processes and decision making structure in order to scale up and be more effective. There is no easy answer, because most of the ones that could be made were already found during the past four years.

  • CMS

    • Remember WordPress’ Pingbacks? The W3C wants us to use them across the whole web

      Something called Webmentions – which looks remarkably like the old WordPress pingbacks, once popular in the late 2000s – is grinding through the machinery of the mighty, and slow-moving, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

      But don’t be deceived. Lurking behind that unassuming name lies something that might eventually offer users a way of ditching not just Facebook and Twitter but also those other massive corporations straddling the web.

  • Google Openwashing

  • IBM

  • BSD

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Kuhn’s Paradox

      I believe this paradox is primarily driven by the cooption of software freedom by companies that ostensibly support Open Source, but have the (now extremely popular) open source almost everything philosophy.

      For certain areas of software endeavor, companies dedicate enormous resources toward the authorship of new Free Software for particular narrow tasks. Often, these core systems provide underpinnings and fuel the growth of proprietary systems built on top of them. An obvious example here is OpenStack: a fully Free Software platform, but most deployments of OpenStack add proprietary features not available from a pure upstream OpenStack installation.

      Meanwhile, in other areas, projects struggle for meager resources to compete with the largest proprietary behemoths. Large user-facing, server-based applications of the Service as a Software Substitute variety, along with massive social media sites like Twitter and Facebook that actively work against federated social network systems, are the two classes of most difficult culprits on this point. Even worse, most traditional web sites have now become a mix of mundane content (i.e., HTML) and proprietary Javascript programs, which are installed on-demand into the users’ browser all day long, even while most of those servers run a primarily Free Software operating system.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • GitHub is proprietary, therefore it is evil

      There has been a lot of noise recently on how GitHub is bad, and how developers should stop using it.

    • Hello, Kotlin: Another programming language for JVM and JavaScript

      Why Kotlin? JetBrains is a developer tools company whose IntelliJ IDEA IDE has been adapted by Google for Android Studio, and the short answer seems to be that the company wanted something better than Java with which to build its own products.

    • A Programmer’s Dream: This Is What Your Code Actually Looks Like On GitHub

      Codeology is an online visualization program that allows you to see your GitHub project in front of your eyes.

    • The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2016

      It’s been a very busy start to the year at RedMonk, so we’re a few weeks behind in the release of our bi-annual programming language rankings. The data was dutifully collected at the start of the year, but we’re only now getting around to the the analysis portion. We have changed the actual process very little since Drew Conway and John Myles White’s original work late in 2010. The basic concept is simple: we periodically compare the performance of programming languages relative to one another on GitHub and Stack Overflow. The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion (Stack Overflow) and usage (GitHub) in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.

Leftovers

02.20.16

Business Model of Patent Trolls Terribly Shaken as Their Weapon of Choice (Software Patents) Tackled, New Developments Emerge

Posted in America, Patents at 3:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A positive take on recent developments, impacting statistics in the United States, which serve to highlight the importance of abolishing software patents

IN THE previous post, the decline or demise of software patents was noted, backed by new examples. CAFC‘s introduction of software patents nearly 4 decades ago in the United States has reached a crossroad or a turning point. No longer are the weapons of patent trolls effective, unless the trolls manage to settle out of court (as is usually the case when they silently extort small companies). It’s nothing other than “protection money”, shrewdly disguised as “business as usual” or a legitimate “business model”. According to the EPO-funded IAM ‘magazine’, there is a “Big fall in US patent suit filings following pleading standards change” (they cite a respected data source which keeps track of the numbers). Remember that IAM ‘magazine’ is again, by its own admission (as was the case last year), being paid by patent trolls (sorry, we mean, “NPEs”). The alleged decline in lawsuits must be a cause of concern for these patent maximalists. It means less money for patent lawyers.

Alluding to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), Dennis Crouch writes that it “has released an interesting new (though non-precedential) decision on patent exhaustion – in particular the court affirmed a lower court finding of exhaustion based upon a retroactive sublicense filed after the lawsuit was filed and the patents had expired. The case offers some further guidance as to how patent licenses are treated in complex mergers.”

“No longer are the weapons of patent trolls effective, unless the trolls manage to settle out of court (as is usually the case when they silently extort small companies).”This is noteworthy as it further serves to limit passage of patents for aggression before expiry (this is where a lot of patent trolling comes from).

Another noteworthy report says that Google, which is less than 20 years old (the lifetime of a patent), is hiding software patents. Jesse Drucker wrote: “More than a decade ago, Google moved a chunk of its software patents offshore as part of a Double Irish.” Slashdot is meanwhile indicating that “Google Submits Patent Application For Online Voting”. That’s very clearly and unambiguously a software patent. To quote Slashdot: “Google has outlined a concept for real-time online voting in the Google home page in a patent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Entitled ‘Social Voting-Based Campaigns in Search’, the application proposes a voting user interface (VUI) that will enable a user to submit one or more votes in a voting-based campaign, giving the hypothetical example of a campaign to vote for the ‘Top American Singer’, with users authenticated via Google log-ins. If implemented, the system would represent a new foray for Google into generating rather than recording analytics and metrics of popularity.”

“The alleged decline in lawsuits must be a cause of concern for these patent maximalists. It means less money for patent lawyers.”It will be interesting to see if some time in the future Google might choose to disseminate patents to trolls (for attacks, or weaponisation through proxies) in the same way that Microsoft gives patents to trolls which soon thereafter attack Linux (we gave several examples of this in the past), often addressing/sending the lawsuits and letters to Red Hat and Google. Some of the above news, regarding lawsuit numbers, potency of software patents and a new decision from CAFC serve to reassure us that things may be getting better faster than they get worse. But we must all be vigilant. █

Alice Continues to Eliminate Software Patents in the United States and Even Microsoft Beats Some

Posted in America, Microsoft, Patents at 2:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: An overview of some very recent cases involving software patents and situations in which the US Supreme Court’s stance helps squash them

THE US Supreme Court‘s ruling on Alice is the best thing that ever happened regarding software patents as far as Techrights is concerned. It helped stop software patents (or significantly slow them down). The 2014 ruling exceeded our expectations in the sense that its breadth touched CAFC as well (CAFC is where software patents were originally ‘born’). Every week we learn of new cases in which Alice helps crush software patents, sending a warning sign to anyone who considers patenting software or wants to sue a company using software patents.

“I think the Supreme Court is going to be pretty sick of Apple by the end of this year,” wrote this person the other day. “Apple v Samsung also may be heard by the justices,” based on this update from SCOTUS blog. Apple apparently cannot effectively compete without suing companies using software patents and design patents, which typically resemble software patents. According to this, “Samsung v. Apple appeal to the Supreme Court: petition & response are now available.”

Patently-O, a reasonably reliable source of information on these matters, has just published a useful list of SCOTUS cases regarding patents. Will SCOTUS set even a stronger precedence regarding software patents?

According to this update, “US Pat 7,072,849, Network Comm Patent Survived Alice Attack in DE” (one of the few cases where Alice does not work in eliminating software patents). Contrariwise, according to lawyers’ media (published a few days ago), “The Supreme Court’s Decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Has Taken a Heavy Toll on Patents for Computer-Related Inventions” (even patent lawyers admit the undeniable impact on software patents). To quote the opening paragraph: “The patent statue broadly defines patent-eligible subject matter as “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter” and any improvements. But inventors cannot patent laws of nature, natural phenomena, or abstract ideas. The prohibition on patenting abstract ideas has caused federal courts to declare hundreds of patents for computer-related inventions invalid since the Supreme Court’s June 2014 decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank. After Alice, about 70% of challenges for failure to claim patent-eligible subject matter have succeeded.”

The key part is in that last sentence. We saw even worse estimates, e.g. with over 90% courtesy of Bilski Blog. John R. Harris, a patent lawyer, noted that: “Other law firm agrees that Alice decision taken heavy toll on patents for computer-related technologies” (more specifically, software patents).

The other day another lawyers’ site wrote: “The patent attorney often faces the problem that broad claims for a class can be rejected when prior art surfaces for one of the members of the class. One strategy is to exclude those members of the class found in the prior art, and to claim the rest of the class.”

Notice how patent lawyers basically tend to work, always looking for loopholes when applying for patents and suing. Here are the patent maximalists that the EPO funds saying (just a few days ago): “Two years ago the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for attacks on computer-implemented inventions in Alice Corp Pty, Ltd v CLS Bank International. The Supreme Court set out a “two-step framework” for determining whether patents are claiming laws of nature, natural phenomena or abstract ideas, as opposed to patent-eligible applications of those concepts. Under the first step, courts must determine whether the claims at issue are directed to a patent ineligible concept, such as an abstract idea. If so, the courts must look for an “inventive concept” – that is, an element or combination of elements sufficient to ensure the patent amounts to significantly more than the abstract idea or ineligible concept itself.

“Mortgage Grader joins the post-Alice wave of cases invalidating computer-implemented inventions in various forms. The court agreed that the claims were directed to the abstract idea of “anonymous loan shopping”, and that the claims as a whole recited nothing more than the collection of information to generate a “credit grading” and facilitate anonymous loan shopping. In particular, the court noted that the series of steps covered by the asserted claims could all be performed by humans without a computer.”

The noteworthy thing right here is that a lot of the worst maximalists out there have come to grips with the fact that Alice is a game changer. There’s no point denying that as anyone who does deny it simply discredits himself or herself. To IP Watchdog‘s credit, it did foresee the impact of Alice early on (shortly after SCOTUS had published the ruling), despite dissent from fellow patent maximalists. It wasn’t long afterwards that even the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) reinforced the precedence set by SCOTUS and software patents dropped like flies.

Speaking of CAFC, Secure Web has just lost to Microsoft, as this new post written by patent lawyer indicated the other day. It’s a win for Microsoft, but a loss for software patents, which Microsoft so heavily relies on. It turns out, based on this article, that the two software patents were aimed at Microsoft’s worse spyware (in some regards Skype is the worst). To quote WIPR: “Microsoft’s Skype computer program did not infringe two patents related to data encryption, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled.

“Yesterday, February 17, the federal circuit said the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas correctly constructed the claims in two patents asserted by technology company Secure Web Conference.”

In a sense, for a change, we are happy that Microsoft won this court case as it serves to show that software patents are a dying thing, or a bubble that’s busting, even in the Eastern District of Texas, patent trolls’ capital. █

02.19.16

Patent Trolls and the Rise of Non-Practicing Parasites Not Just in the US But Also in Europe

Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

It’s already happening right here in the UK…

Carnegie Mellon University

Summary: The role played by patents, increasingly bolstered by self-serving patent maximalists, outweighs actual creativity, innovation and production which patents were, in principle, supposed to encourage and advance

PATENT trolls are a huge problem, but the corporate media, owned and/or influenced by large corporations, does not pay attention to the fact that patent trolls almost always use software patents. Therein lies the bigger problem. It’s the core problem. Software patents should never have existed in the first place, as evidence always served to show that they would be counter-productive.

Here we see a new article from the British mass media, which was summarised this week (just a couple of days ago) as follows: “Apple has been told to pay a hefty fine to a small company for patent infringement. So why aren’t we celebrating the victory of a ‘David’? Because the little guy is a ‘patent troll’, stifling innovation by abusing the system, says Rhodri Marsden” (he says nothing about the nature of the patent/s or Apple‘s own patent aggression, including its 6-year patent war against Linux/Android).

As we put it earlier this month, "VirnetX Case Against Apple Shows Not the Problem With Patent Trolls But With Software Patents."

In other news, as noted here yesterday, “IV [Intellectual Ventures] Invention Fund Teams with Fraunhofer in Europe” (Fraunhofer is a notorious actor when it comes to software patents in Europe).

The EPO-funded bloggers wrote a puff piece for Intellectual Ventures, the world’s largest patent troll. This trolls-funded mouthpiece (also EPO-funded) went with the headline “The Intellectual Ventures invention fund teams up with Fraunhofer in major move into Europe”. UPC would help more such trolls penetrate Europe, giving jobs to patent lawyers who profit from an increase in litigation, or “patent warming” as the FFII’s President calls it.

Who would more likely settle with patent trolls? Take a guess. It’s European SMEs, which make up a lot of the industry here (we don’t have Googles and IBMs here, except for branches of these US firms). It makes SMEs a very attractive bunch of targets for trolls, especially in Europe. To quote United For Patent Reform (from the other day): “Did you know patent trolls are disproportionately hurting smaller, more vulnerable firms?” There is a valuable reference there with additional information and it links to this paper (published less than a year ago by James Bessen et al). Wall Street, i.e. the big businesses well past their IPOs (and with massive legal departments of their own) promotes or at least defends patent trolls in its press. Is anybody surprised by this?

“Software patents should never have existed in the first place, as evidence always served to show that they would be counter-productive.”The Computer and Communications Industry Association, which is funded by big businesses, now focuses on universities — not aggressors like Microsoft or Apple — as the problem.

“‘Innovation’”, wrote in response this one person, “is a piece of paper you can sue others with?”

“Warped mentality,” added this anonymous person.

The context for this misdirection must be reports about CMU, which not only attacked anonymity (undermining Tor for the US government) but also attacks practicing companies using patents. As WIPR put it: “Carnegie sued Marvell at the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania in 2009, claiming the company had sold billions of chips using the technology.”

This is likely to become a sort of ‘tax’ on products that almost everyone buys. See parts of a longer discussion with Patent Buddy about the funding of US universities and how it now relates to such legal battles over patents. “Carnegie Mellon,” as it was put at one stage, “has transformed US universities in[to] patent trolls” (link to CMU).

“These days in the US,” Patent Buddy told me, “patent attorneys make about as much as engineers.”

What about the externalities? They’re everyone except patent lawyers.

“It makes SMEs a very attractive bunch of targets for trolls, especially in Europe.”The response to him was that “in a better world they should do another more useful job.” And on it goes (details in Twitter)…

Looking at some press coverage we find that, based on the formal statement, “Marvell Technology Group Ltd. (NASDAQ: MRVL), a global leader in integrated silicon solutions, and Carnegie Mellon University, a private research university, today announced that, pursuant to a court-ordered mediation, the Company and University have settled their patent infringement lawsuit. The parties have resolved the case on mutually acceptable terms, including an aggregate payment by Marvell to CMU of $750 million, with no ongoing royalty payments.”

Here is what patent maximalists wrote: “Court-ordered mediation ends in $750m agreement to settle the seven-year-long patent infringement lawsuit between Marvell Technology Group and Carnegie Mellon University” (see CMU background).

“CMU does not actually produce anything.”This is not a software patent, but the issue here is different. CMU does not actually produce anything. The source of CMU’s funding, as noted above, is also relevant to this. From an economic perspective, the public only loses.

Incidentally, as pointed out by the FFII’s President the other day, “Olimex [is] forced to file software patents are required in order to get EU funding,” which is an “insane waste of public money” (it can also be used to tax the public later).

Here is the relevant bit of a blog post published two days ago:

This gives amazing opportunities to Bulgarian companies to become globally competitive.

Unfortunately the most interesting area the innovation is burden with most paperwork and some things which are totally unacceptable with our Open Source way of thinking. For instance one of the requirement is to fill file patents for the innovation, which to protect the EU investment in your company. Looks logically, but this effectively cut off all companies which work with Open Source Technologies.

What is the EU coming to? Is it trying to impede a FOSS spirit and a sharing culture by urging people to get software patented, despite the rules (as per the EPC) not allowing it? Something sure is rotten at the EPO, which urgently needs to be fixed. █

A Preview of Injunctions/Raids Heaven in Europe With the Unitary Patent (Continent-Wide Bans and Embargoes by Patent Lawyers)

Posted in America, Asia, Europe, Patents at 10:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

No safe haven for European SMEs, which may be innocent but not affluent enough to prove it in a so-called ‘unitary’ court

Croatian flag
Whose regime is the EU striving to imitate?

Summary: Injunctions and raids in the United States (increasingly affecting small Chinese companies as well) serve as a reminder of the increasingly-aggressive borderless patent regimes (like the Unitary Patent Court)

ONE of our arguments against the Unitary Patent Court (UPC) is that it would not only increase damages, affecting a lot more European companies (as the accused/defendant/extorted for settlement), but that it would also cause bans on products from Europe, especially products that come from small companies that don’t have a legal department. China’s SIPO, as we showed here many times over the past year, increasingly adopts a USPTO-like model (where patent quantity, not quality, is emphasised, leaving all the actual examination work for courts to deal with at the price/cost/expense of thousands of dollars per day) and there are product bans too, based on EPO-funded media. It brags about “quick injunctions” as if banning a product before properly engaging in juridical review/overview is somehow great (it’s great for patent lawyers).

Last month we showed how a Chinese company had its products confiscated by a bunch of goons when they went to an expo in the US (CES) [1, 2, 3]. US Marshals raided a booth at a notoriously high-security (military-grade) event. Now, as it turns out, the process was somewhat of a sham. TechDirt explained it with the headline: “Remember How US Marshals Seized All Those ‘Hoverboards’ At CES In A Patent Dispute? The Company Has Now Dropped The Case” (probably because it lacked merit).

“Last month we showed how a Chinese company had its products confiscated by a bunch of goons when they went to an expo in the US (CES).”“Back in January,” explained TechDirt, “we wrote with some concern over the news that US Marshals had seized a bunch of one wheel scooters that everyone wants to call hoverboards, even though they don’t hover. The case involved a US company, Future Motion, that had gotten a lot of attention (and a utility patent and a design patent) on such single-wheel balancing scooters. Future Motion then sued a Chinese firm, Changzhou First International Trade Co., that was making a product that certainly looked similar. Changzhou was demonstrating its product at CES in Las Vegas, only to have the US Marshals raid its booth and seize all its products based on a 7 minute hearing in front a judge where Changzhou didn’t even get to present its side.”

Well, we too covered this at the time. The EPO-funded media (IAM) actually celebrated it, much as we have come to expect (we took note of this at the time). IAM will soon organise its EPO-funded pro-UPC event in the US. It’s an EPO project which broadens injunctions and makes these more severe. There are other associated issues, such as patent trolls, but this will be the subject of our next post. █

Source: EPO’s Administrative Council Not Pursuing Battistelli’s Witch-hunt Against a Judge Anymore

Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Killing the messenger?

Killing the messenger
When the system which protects its own power deals with those who report abuses as the cause of all problems and the sole instance of abuse

Summary: The efforts to undermine communication of internal issues inside the EPO are no longer assisted by the Administrative Council, unlike several months ago

THE Administrative Council of the Organisation is finally growing a pair. It is willing to say “No” to Battistelli, so it’s not just the Enlarged Board of Appeal saying “No” to the Administrative Council after the Council had said “Yes” to Battistelli. It’s an important sign of progress which may also mean that the suspended judge has his job secured (at least until cutoff/nomination stage). After all, allegedly blowing the whistle on abuses by Team Battistelli shouldn’t be a crime, should it? Based on what we know about the story (which is quite a lot), the judge is likely a whistleblower. This is why Battistelli and his inner circle felt so afraid, even intimidated. Knowledge or information is a great danger to them.

As pointed out this morning, the latest rumour is that Battistelli might be on his way out and only the details are up for (private) negotiation at this stage or at some later stage (some say in a March meeting). We hear several different stories from different people, but rarely do these stories contradict one another, so while no single story is necessarily 100% accurate, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. These rumours don’t come from a vacuum and it’s possible for Battistelli to try hard to change course of action to ‘prove’ (by intervention) the rumours ‘wrong’, though not totally unsubstantiated at the time they were spread.

“Presumably, since the President’s immunity as recited in A.13, Protocol on Privileges and Immunities, refers to privileges accorded to diplomatic agents, he is not subject to immunity in his home country and so the innocent judge could sue him there for defamation.”
      –AnonymousAccording to this new comment: “At the protest held this Wednesday in Munich, it was announced that the Administrative Counsel [sic] had recently withdrawn its second request to the Enlarged Board of Appeal that a patent judge be dismissed. The AC seems to have finally understood that the accusations brought forward by the President and his minions were unsubstantiated, as had been ruled by the EBA in relation the first request, and that it had been manipulated by the President. Not good for him.”

Another person later chimed in with: “I’m sceptical about words like “announced” and “withdrawn” but, if there is substance to this, it could be the moment (had to discern) when the tide turns. But as we all know, if the tide has actually turned, what a momentous event that can be.”

Some believe that the judge might later wish to pursue defamation claims against Battistelli et al, in particular because of October's attacks through German and Dutch media, including Süddeutsche Zeitung with its baseless personal attack.

“This time around it might be Battistelli and Željko Topić — not Croatian journalists — who need to issue a public apology.”“Presumably,” said this person, “since the President’s immunity as recited in A.13, Protocol on Privileges and Immunities, refers to privileges accorded to diplomatic agents, he is not subject to immunity in his home country and so the innocent judge could sue him there for defamation.”

Another person clarifies that “the EBA’s [Enlarged Board of Appeal] response to the first request. They didn’t make a decision either way about the accusations. They just ruled that the request was inadmissible, because there was no proper statement of case setting out the grounds. This says nothing about the guilt or innocence of the accused board member, but it does say something about the competence of those making the request.”

One way or another, one day the public may find out the truth. This time around it might be Battistelli and Željko Topić — not Croatian journalists — who need to issue a public apology. █

Links 19/2/2016: Samsung’s ARTIK, ZFS in Ubuntu 16.04

Posted in News Roundup at 8:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Power Of Open Source To Solve The Data Fragmentation Challenge

    Apache Arrow is a new open-source project that helps data analysts wrestle diverse data sets into a single format. Apache Arrow is a collaborative effort that spans many of the largest providers and users of data infrastructure today including Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Cloudera (Private:CLOUD), Databricks, DataStax, Dremio, Hortonworks (NASDAQ:HDP) MapR, Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), Trifacta and Twitter (NYSE:TWTR). That so many different companies can collaborate on one initiative to improve data analysis industry-wide is a testament to the power of open source to inspire and engender great change.

  • Events

    • Akademy 2016 part of QtCon
    • Program Announced for Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today is announcing its full schedule of keynote speakers and conference sessions for Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit, taking place April 4-6 in San Diego, Calif. These events are co-located, and one registration provides access to all sessions and activities for both events.

    • Embedded Linux and OpenIoT conference details emerge
    • Flock 2016 update: Submissions and lodging

      The call for submissions for talks and workshops is also open, and contributors may submit at the same registration site. The deadline for call for submissions is Friday, April 8, 2016. In a change from previous Flocks, talk and workshop selection will be driven by a Flock Scheduling panel. The panel members will work with the Flock staff and the Fedora Council to determine which talks and workshops are accepted.

    • DevConf 2016: community and containers

      This year it was even more difficult to decide how to spend my time at DevConf, the annual Fedora, Red Hat, JBoss developers’ conference in Brno. There were several good presentations in parallel, often I wished I could be in two separate rooms at the same time. There were also developers from all over the world, and I have missed quite a few talks due to some very good in-depth discussions about syslog-ng. As a community manager for syslog-ng, I have tried to focus on community-related presentations and on technologies related to syslog-ng: containers, security and packaging.

  • Web Browsers

    • The future of loading CSS

      Chrome is intending to change the behaviour of link rel=”stylesheet”, which will be noticeable when it appears within body. The impact and benefits of this aren’t clear from the blink-dev post, so I wanted to go into detail here.

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox for iOS is Faster with 3D Touch and More

        We recently released the first version of Firefox for iOS. It’s a great browser and we’re excited to bring you more new features today. The latest release of Firefox for iOS brings improvements to make browsing simpler and more fun by taking advantage of the latest iOS hardware and software features.

        Firefox for iOS on iPhone 6S and 6S Plus now offers 3D Touch to help you access commonly used features faster than ever before. Simply press the Firefox app icon to open the Quick Access menu which has shortcuts to Open Last Bookmark, open a New Private Tab or a New Tab.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Apache Arrow to Accelerate Open Source Big Data Analytics

      The Apache Software Foundation is rolling out a new top level project this week, and it’s one that didn’t first have to undergo the typical project incubation phase. Apache Arrow, an effort to build columnar in-memory analytics technology that could dramatically accelerate Big Data analytics, is launching with support from 13 major open source Big Data projects.

    • Spark 2.0 will offer Interactive Querying of Live Data

      The next version of Apache Spark will expand on the data processing platform’s real-time data analysis capabilities, offering users the ability to perform interactive queries against live data.

      The new feature, called structured streaming, will “push Spark beyond streaming to a new class of application that do other things in real time [rather than] just analyze a stream and output another stream,” explained Matei Zaharia, Spark founder and Databricks chief technology officer, at the Spark Summit East, taking place this week in New York. “It’s a combination of streaming and interactive that isn’t really handled by current streaming engines.”

  • CMS

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD, Variants Not Affected by Recent GNU Bug

      Much has been made about a vulnerability in a function in the GNU C Library. And searching far and wide over the Internet, there was little — actually nothing — I could find regarding how this affected BSD variants.

      However, you can rest easy, BSDers: Not our circus, not our monkeys.

      Dag-Erling Smørgrav, a FreeBSD developer since 1998 and the current FreeBSD Security Officer, writes in his blog that “neither FreeBSD itself nor native FreeBSD applications are affected.”

  • Public Services/Government

    • Dutch Gov: ‘Our lack of knowledge hinders open source’

      A lack of understanding of free and open source software is hindering its uptake by Dutch public administrations, writes Minister for the Central Government Sector Stef Blok in a letter to the country’s House of Representatives. Not knowing how to deal with software errors, is a service risk that “multiple organisations have experienced”, the minister says.

    • Govt’s Move To ‘Open Source’: Firm support system a necessity for adoption

      Switching over to open source software across all Central departments, as per a policy decision taken by the NDA government last year, could entail substantial savings on the Centre’s software expenses as most open source alternatives are free. Experts, though, caution that the obvious financial advantages of adopting open source notwithstanding, concerns pertaining to security and operational efficiency may have to be addressed concomitantly.

    • France involves public to draft support contract

      France’s ministries are involving free software communities and the public in writing their next multi-year framework contract for services and support on free and open source software. It is the first time that an IT services support contract will be co-written by administration and citizens.

    • Tallinn Saves A Bundle Using GNU/Linux

      Schools in the city of Tallinn (Estonia) are gradually moving to PC workstations running on free and open source software. A pilot in March 2014 switched 3 schools and 2 kindergartens. Students, teachers, school administration and kindergartens’ staff members are using LibreOffice, Ubuntu-Linux and other open source tools.

  • Licensing

    • Canonical Says There Is No ZFS and Linux Licence Incompatibility

      Canonical announced that support for the ZFS (Z File System) will be available in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but a lot of users have been asking about a possible license conflict. Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland explained why that’s not a problem.

      ZFS (Z File System) is described as a combination of a volume manager (like LVM) and a filesystem (like ext4, xfs, or btrfs), and it’s licensed under CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License). Don’t worry if you didn’t hear about it. It’s not something that’s commonly used.

    • ZFS Licensing and Linux

      We at Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the industry’s leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS.

      And in doing so, we have concluded that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with their terms of both of those licenses.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Google green-lights Go 1.6

      In a blog post, Google’s Andrew Gerrand called the HTTP/2 support “the most significant change” in the release, with the revision bringing the new protocol’s benefits to projects like the Go-based Caddy Web server. He otherwise described the upgrade, the seventh major stable release of the language, as more incremental than Go 1.5, which was released last August.

      The team has tinkered with garbage collection, featuring lower pauses than version 1.5, particularly for large programs, but programs may not necessarily run faster. “As always, the changes are so general and varied that precise statements about performance are difficult to make. Some programs may run faster, some slower,” according to release notes.

    • Version control isn’t just for programmers

      So that’s why I’ve personally chosen Mercurial. That said, there’s an analogous process in most of these other systems for what I’m going to describe here. So if you’d prefer to use Git or Fossil, I say that’s great. At least you’re using something. That puts you a step ahead of most other creatives.

    • Supporting Beep Beep Yarr!

      Some of you may be familiar with LinuxVoice magazine. They put an enormous amount of effort in creating a high quality, feature-packed magazine with a small team. They are led by Graham Morrison who I have known for many years and who is one of the most thoughtful, passionate, and decent human beings I have ever met.

      Well, the same team are starting an important new project called Beep Beep Yarr!. It is essentially a Kickstarter crowd-funded children’s book that is designed to teach core principles of programming to kids. The project not just involves the creation of the book, but also a parent’s guide and an interactive app to help kids engage with the principles in the book.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • EU Parliament Members Seek To Curb Antibiotics In Animals, Boost New Research

      In the fight against antimicrobial resistance, members of the European Parliament’s Environment and Public Health Committee have advocated banning collective and preventive antibiotic treatment of animals, and supported measures to stimulate research into new antibiotics, including longer data protection.

      Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have been working on the update of a European Union law on veterinary medicine. According to a European Parliament press release, MEPs took a vote yesterday on draft plans for legislation on antimicrobial resistance.

    • Voices From the Front Lines of the Flint Water Crisis

      Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s successive emergency managers are now gone from Flint, but the wreckage of their rule there still pollutes many homes. The crisis in Flint is, on the surface, about water. In April 2014, the city switched from the Detroit water system, which it had used for more than 50 years, to the Flint River, ostensibly to save money. The Flint River water made people sick, and is likely to have caused disease that killed some residents. The corrosive water, left untreated, coursed through the city’s water system, leaching heavy metals out of old pipes. The most toxic poison was lead, which can cause permanent brain damage. The damage to the people of Flint, the damage to the children who drank and bathed in the poisoned water, is incalculable. The water is still considered toxic to this day.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Nitro Zeus: USA’s Secret Cyber War Plan To Destroy Iran’s Complete Infrastructure

      Alex Gibney is known for his investigative documentaries that garner a unanimous applause from the critics. During the reporting for his latest cyber warfare-focused film Zero Days, the US government’s secret plan called Nitro Zeus was uncovered. This plan deals with a massive cyberattack on Iran’s infrastructure if the nuclear negotiations with Iran would have fail.

    • FBI Won’t Explain Its Bizarre New Way of Measuring Its Success Fighting Terror

      The Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly developed a new way to measure its success in the war on terror: Counting the number of terror threats it has “disrupted” in a year.

      But good luck trying to figure out what that number means, how it was derived, or why it doesn’t jibe with any other law-enforcement statistic, most notably the number of terror suspects actually charged or arrested.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Climate Change Panel Seeks To Improve Communication, Open Doors To Private Sector

      The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seeks to improve its communication to promote its reports, its chair said at a briefing yesterday. Working on its next assessment report expected to be released in five or six years, the IPCC seeks to increase participation of the private sector as a major stakeholders upon which depends the investment to find solutions to climate change he said.

    • Indonesia to continue easing restrictions on foreign investors: President Widodo

      Indonesia will continue opening up its market, making it easier for foreign investors to enter the country.

      Speaking to about 300 business leaders and other stakeholders at an ASEAN Economic Community conference in San Francisco on Wednesday (Feb 17), President Joko Widodo said even though Indonesia is doing more to attract investments, and announced a number of deregulation packages, he is still not satisfied.

      “I’m not satisfied; please understand we are still only at the beginning,” he said. “We will continue to simplify, continue to open up, continue to modernise our rules and regulations. There are still many excessive permits, licenses, and protections.”

      Mr Widodo gave a key note address at the conference after attending the US-ASEAN Leaders Summit in Sunnylands which ended on Tuesday. He said Indonesia’s investment climate is still not conducive enough and the country needs to deregulate more.

    • Shockingly, authorities arrest activists instead of people responsible for the Aliso Canyon methane gas leak

      The California State Patrol has arrested two people in connection with the massive methane leak in Southern California’s Aliso Canyon, but many residents who had to leave their homes near the leaking underground gas storage site think the wrong people are in custody. Instead of busting company executives and engineers who are responsible for the massive methane gas leak, the CSP arrested two protesters who draped banners on the headquarters of the California Public Utilities Commission. The protesters draped banners to highlight the lax regulatory environment that enabled the spill — similar to the political culture that enabled the water poisoning in Flint. But unbelievably, the activists are now the ones going to jail.

  • Finance

    • Minimum wage, minimum chance of a future: This is how horrible living on the minimum wage has become

      When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what are they really talking about?

    • Listen to interviews with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples discussing the Trans Pacific Partnership

      The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, if approved, would be the largest trade agreement in history involving 11 countries including the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru Singapore, and Vietnam.

      Cultural Survival staff caught up with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, to discuss the trade deal’s implications for Indigenous Peoples in these countries, based on her recent research and report on this topic.

    • TTIP: Alternative ISDS No Real Alternative, NGOs Warn

      Malmstroem’s ICS proposal did not address most of the problems of the extra-judicial redress mechanisms for foreign investors, the study explains in a detailed comparison of ISDS and ICS. Instead, “it arguably grants investors even more rights than many existing investment treaties, which have already led to hundreds of investor-state lawsuits around the world,” the study states.

      A specific provision (section 2, article 3.4) of the proposed new system would allow for complaints when investors feel their “legitimate expectations” have been violated by regulatory acts of states. But “explicit protections of investors’ legitimate expectations are generally not part of existing treaties,” CEO and its partners warn.

      [...]

      Nevertheless, ISDS is expected to be back on the agenda of negotiators next week after the EU Commission’s DG Trade after Malmstroem had taken it off the agenda while the public consultation in the EU was ongoing.

    • MPs can view TTIP files – but take only pencil and paper with them

      MPs have won access to documents covering controversial and secretive trade talks between Brussels and Washington, but can only take a pencil and paper into the room where the files can be viewed.

      Confidentiality rules mean no electronic devices – including phones, tablet and laptop computers, or cameras – are allowed in the room at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in Westminster. This is fuelling concerns about a “cloak of secrecy” surrounding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations between the EU and the US government.

      UK business minister Anna Soubry agreed to provide the room in BIS’s offices on the condition that MPs keep the TTIP documents private. Soubry said pressure on Brussels officials from EU governments had won the concession, but the department was obliged to maintain secrecy.

    • Expanded Version: The Us Economy Has Not Recovered and Will Not Recover

      Jobs offshoring benefitted Wall Street, corporate executives, and shareholders, because lower labor and compliance costs resulted in higher profits. These profits flowed through to shareholders in the form of capital gains and to executives in the form of “performance bonuses.” Wall Street benefitted from the bull market generated by higher profits.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Sanders tops Clinton in a national poll for the first time

      Bernie Sanders has passed Hillary Clinton at the top of a national poll for the first time in the 2016 race.

      A Fox News poll of the Democratic presidential race released Thursday shows Sanders with 47 percent support to Clinton’s 44 percent.

      That’s a gain of 10 percentage points for Sanders a January version of the poll. Clinton’s support declined 5 points.

      Clinton posted leads as high as 30 points over the summer, but Sanders has been steadily closing the gap. While no other poll of the race going back to 2014 has ever showed Clinton trailing a rival, she led Sanders by just 2 points in the last two Quinnipiac University tracking polls.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • FCC votes to “unlock the cable box” over Republican opposition

      The Federal Communications Commission today approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that seeks to give consumers more choices in the set-top boxes they use to watch cable TV.

      The vote was 3-2, with Chairman Tom Wheeler and fellow Democrats Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel voting in favor of the proposal, while Republicans Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly voted against. An NPRM is not a final vote. Instead, this will kick off a months-long public comment period leading up to a final vote that is likely to happen before the end of this year.

      The FCC is essentially trying to create a software-based replacement for CableCard. Pay-TV operators from the cable, satellite, and telco industries would have to provide content and programming information to makers of third-party hardware or applications. Theoretically, customers could then watch their TV channels on various devices without needing to rent a set-top box from their cable company and without buying equipment that is compatible with a physical CableCard.

    • FCC Votes to Dismantle Cable’s Monopoly Over The Set Top Box

      The FCC voted 3-2 today to begin dismantling the cable industry’s long-standing monopoly over ye olde set top cable box. As noted previously, the FCC is pushing a proposal that would require cable operators make their programming accessible to third-party set top manufacturers, without requiring the use of a CableCARD. The goal is to create competition in the set top box market, giving consumers a choice of better and cheaper gear, in the same way consumers can buy their own cable modems. 99% of consumers currently pay about $231 annually in rental fees for hardware that’s generally worth about half that much.

    • AT&T Makes It Clear: It Bought DirecTV So It Doesn’t Have To Upgrade Its Lagging Networks

      When AT&T originally announced the company wanted to spend $69 billion on a satellite TV company on the eve of the cord cutting revolution, even M&A bullish Wall Street thought AT&T was a little nuts. After all, AT&T’s refusal to seriously upgrade its aging DSL networks to full fiber have left it at a serious disadvantage to faster cable broadband. Given Verizon’s FiOS fiber build clocked in somewhere around $24 billion, the $69 billion AT&T spent on DirecTV could have gone a long way toward bringing those customers into the modern fiber to the home era.

    • AT&T, Time Warner Cable Hope Incessant Whining Will Keep Google Fiber From Louisville

      For fifteen years now, companies like AT&T and Time Warner Cable (and their various PR and policy tendrils) have whined incessantly about the “burdensome regulations” that saddle the U.S. broadband industry. Less regulation, they argue, will pave the path to broadband nirvana, opening the door to immense innovation and more competition in the sector. So Louisville recently set about reworking its city broadband ordinances to streamline both the pole attachment and franchise agreement processes dramatically, something you’d assume would thrill both companies.

    • Zero Rating: What It Is and Why You Should Care

      Zero-rating has become the bleeding edge of the net neutrality debate. India recently decided to reject zero-rating plans such as Facebook’s Free Basics, while in the United States carriers push boundaries with zero-rating experiments such as T-Mobile’s Binge-On plan (which led to a public spat with EFF over our criticism of the service, for which Legere has since apologized), as well as AT&T’s Sponsored Data, Verizon’s FreeBee, and Comcast’s Stream TV.

      What is zero-rating and why should you worry about it? In a nutshell, zero-rating plans exempt particular data from counting against a user’s data cap, or from accruing any excess usage charges. The most dangerous of these plans, such as the AT&T and Verizon offerings, only offer their users zero-rated data from content providers who pay the carriers money to do so. Such “pay for play” arrangements favor big content providers who can afford to pay for access to users’ eyeballs, and marginalize those who can’t, such as nonprofits, startups, and fellow users.

  • DRM

    • Let’s Unlock the Set-Top Box–For Real

      Imagine traveling back to 1996 in a typical American living room. What’s changed? The TV is three feet thick and weighs 150 pounds. There’s a VHS videocassette recorder underneath, but no Internet-connected devices to be seen.

      Now, what hasn’t changed?

      The cable or satellite tuner box. It’s a black or grey plastic slab. You have to lease it from your pay-TV provider for a monthly fee. It doesn’t add much functionality to your living room setup, except that your TV subscription doesn’t work without it.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Disclosure Requirement In IP Applications Necessary To Comply With Obligations, Speakers Say

      Carlos Correa, special advisor on trade and intellectual property at the South Centre, said the obligation to disclose the source of genetic resources is necessary if the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity are to be implemented.

    • Trademarks

      • The Indonesian IKEA case: what happened and why it might actually be good for foreign companies

        Based on a literal interpretation of the Trademark Law’s non-use provisions, the decision appears to have a sound basis in law: while IKEA’s two original applications were registered in October 2006 and 2010, the first IKEA store selling Class 20 and 21 goods did not open in Indonesia until October 2014, with no ‘acceptable reason’ to excuse the non-use. Interestingly, the Supreme Court’s ruling was a 2-1 decision, with Judge I Gusti Agung Sumanatha filing a rare dissent, arguing that because IKEA had proven that it was the owner of a legitimately registered well-known trademark, the non-use provisions should not apply. While not explicitly supported by the Trademark Law’s text, Judge Sumanatha’s dissent speaks more to the spirit and purpose of the Law and is a welcome development. Troubling, however, is that both courts ruled PT. Ratania’s applications for the mark “IKEA INTAN KHATULISTIWA ESA ABADI” were “legitimate” (“sah”). Such a ruling is as unclear as it is unnecessary and ignored clear evidence presented during the trial that PT. Ratania knew about IKEA prior to filing their own applications, strongly implying that the applications were impermissibly filed in bad faith. While the courts’ unclear language and meaning likely lead to the confusion in reporting on this case, neither the Commercial Court nor the Supreme Court said that PT. Ratania is now the true and legitimate owner of the IKEA mark in Indonesia.

    • Copyrights

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