03.25.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
It also highlights the fact that EPO management lied to all staff about its union-busting activities
Summary: A letter sent from Elizabeth Hardon to Benoît Battistelli shortly after her unjust dismissal, which is part of a wider-spread campaign across EPO branches to crush the unions and replace them with pseudo (management-leaning) unions
THIS morning we mentioned that the EPO ‘generously’ gave back to a staff representative her pension for which she worked and she’s totally entitled/eligible for (as per the rules). She did not get her job back (she ought to), but here is what happened behind the scenes in order to make Battistelli relent a little and then attempt to recover. There’s no generosity at all from Battistelli, just an effort (however minuscule) to salvage a morsel of credibility after making a mockery of justice itself. What do scientists and lawyers (people who work for the EPO) think of this business school graduate and his epic (mis)handling of science and law?
Here is the letter sent to Battistelli:
TO Benoît Battistelli, President of the EPO
FROM Elizabeth Hardon, Staff Representative (SUEPO, MSC)
RE Dismissal with 20% reduction of pension
DATE 28 January 2016
1. With a letter dated 15.01.2016 I was informed of the decision to dismiss me with immediate effect and to reduce my pension by 20% (ANNEX 1).
2. The above letter indicated that the legal means of redress against the decision is a request for review in accordance with Article 109 ServRegs.
3. Therefore I herewith file a request for a review of the above decision pursuant to Art. 109 ServRegs. The request is filed within 3 months of the decision and hence is receivable.
4. I file this request under protest for the following reasons.
5. According to Article 10(1) ServRegs “A request for review shall be compulsory prior to lodging an internal appeal …” Decisions following a disciplinary procedure are not subject to review by an internal appeal (Art. 110(2)(a) ServRegs) and should therefore logically not be subject to the review procedure.
6. Moreover, the review procedure is a pre-litigation dispute resolution mechanism whose claimed purpose is to come to an early, informal resolution of conflicts. This may be possible before a disciplinary procedure, but is highly unlikely after a disciplinary procedure.
7. I note in the passing that even at the best of times, the review procedure seems ineffective. The external auditors of the EPO reported that only about 4% of the requests reviewed by them were successful (CA/21/15)
8. The investigations against me were initiated by Ms Bergot, PD HR and right hand of the President. The decision after the disciplinary procedure has been taken by the President himself. Under the circumstances it seems highly unlikely that anything that I can submit will make any difference.
9. The requirement to go through a review procedure is thus procedurally incorrect and merely serves to delay my access to the Tribunal.
10. Given that there seems no chance of an impartial and objective review of the disputed issues, I will not expand on the many other formal errors made in my procedure. I merely refer to the letter of my lawyer dated 02.12.2015 (ANNEX 2).
11. The accusations against me were set out in a document sent to me on 17.11.2015, signed (on every page) by Ms Bergot, and are as follows:
(a) Acting as an accomplice in a campaign to disseminate information and opinions detrimental to the EPO, its proper functioning and its reputation as well as the reputation of its employees (based on investigation C-61b),
(b) threatening colleagues at a meeting on 10.12.2104, and at a subsequent meeting, asserting in threatening terns that those volunteering for the posts of members of the Internal Appeals Committee (IAC) would suffer serious harm (based on investigation C- 071/2015), and
(c) disregarding (i) the express instruction of my employer and (ii) my concurrent obligation under Art. 4 of Circulars No. 341 and No. 342 to keep the investigation C-011/2015 confidential.
12. Concerning the first allegation (acting as accomplice to the suspended DG3 member) it is surprising that the alleged conspiracy was only “discovered” almost a year after the investigations that led to the suspension of the DG3 member had been closed and at a moment when the initial accusations in my case (a purported harassment campaign against a staff representation colleague in The Hague) were not being confirmed by the external investigators of Control Risks.
13. The allegations in the investigation C-61b were sent to me on 09.11.2015 (at 17.44h). The summary of the findings relating to the investigation was sent to me for comment on 16.11.2015. The deadline for comments was 23.11.2015. A disciplinary procedure based on those findings was initiated on 17.11.2015, i.e. the day after I received the “preliminary” findings and well before the deadline set for my comments. Ms Bergot apparently received the “summary of findings” even earlier because the copy in my disciplinary file is dated 13.11.2015. In other words: Ms Bergot was informed of the findings barely four (!) days after I was informed of the accusations and well before I was able to comment.
14. The timing of events gives the strong impression that the additional accusations were patched together with haste in order to make up for the failure of Control Risks to confirm the earlier accusations.
15. Concerning the accusations themselves, the Enlarged Board of Appeal found in the reasoning for its decision of 17.09.2015 the allegations against the DG3 member unsubstantiated to the extent that neither the accused nor the Board could understand what exactly he was accused of (points 7.10-7.12 of the reasoning; ANNEX 3). If the “evidence” provided in the case of the DG3 member was identical or similar to mine, I understand the position of the Enlarged Board of Appeal.
16. I furthermore strongly deny “having acted as an accomplice in a campaign to disseminate information and opinions detrimental to the EPO, its proper functioning and its reputation as well as the reputation of its employees”.
17. Concerning the second allegation (threatening colleagues at a meeting on 10.12.2104) I first note that the complaint was not lodged by any of the persons allegedly affected but by Ms Bergot (PD HR), in a wider investigation targeting the staff representation and
accusing its members of harassment. The investigations were started at a time when the administration, represented by Ms Bergot, and the staff representation found themselves increasingly in conflict. This in itself raises questions about the credibility and good faith of the accusations pursued by Ms Bergot.
18. The meeting of 10.12.2014 was a meeting of the Munich Staff Committee. Policy discussions within the Committee are confidential. The investigation launched by Ms Bergot obliged the members of the Staff Committee to breach that confidentiality. This is inappropriate and in my opinion constitutes misconduct.
19. ILO-AT judgment 3106 states that the principle of freedom of association “ … precludes interference by an organisation in the affairs of its staff union or the organs of its staff union (see Judgment 2100, under 15). A staff union must be free to conduct its own affairs, to regulate its own activities and, also, to regulate the conduct of its members in relation to those affairs and activities.“ The same principle obviously applies to other staff associations, like the Staff Committee.
20. In other words: the investigation into the activities of the Staff Committee and my subsequent punishment on the basis of my alleged behaviour in a meeting of the Staff Committee are in breach of fundamental principles of freedom of association.
21. The relevant discussion within the Staff Committee was triggered by a letter of the President inviting individual members to “volunteer” as a staff representative in the Internal Appeals Committee (IAC). At the relevant time two of the previous members had been suspended and/or were facing disciplinary proceedings. With that invitation the President was trying reconstitute the IAC while avoiding any discussion with the Staff Committee concerning the problems in the functioning of the IAC. The invitation was in breach of the Service Regulations that do not foresee “volunteers” selected by the President but only nominations by the Staff Committee (Art. 36(2)(a) ServRegs).
22. The invitation of the President was controversially discussed within the Munich Staff Committee. However, the tone and contents of the discussions never went beyond what could fairly be expected from a lively policy discussion in an international environment. I emphatically deny having threatened or intimidated anybody.
23. The external investigators held that the exact wording of my allegedly threatening statement could not be determined. The wording relied on by the disciplinary committee is based on the assertions of only one (!) of the seven witnesses. The selective presentation of “facts” and the many procedural short-cuts taken by the disciplinary committee raise serious doubts about its impartiality and objectivity.
24. In that context I note that in an earlier video-conference discussing Patent Administration matter, a Principal Director who was subsequently a member of my disciplinary committee in the present case shouted at me “SUEPO is a cancer, a CANCER!” thereby making it impossible for me to speak. I left the room in distress.
25. Art. 5 ServRegs, interpreted by the administration as requiring from employees of the EPO “the highest standard … of integrity” throughout their employment in the Office, should apply a fortiori for members of the disciplinary committee who are called to judge upon their colleagues. The above mentioned aggression was not considered to disqualify the Principal Director concerned from participating in my disciplinary
committee and acting as rapporteur. In contrast, my alleged “threat”, that did not have any visible impact on the person(s) concerned, is considered to merit a severe disciplinary measure. The lack of consistency and double standard being applied here is obvious.
26. Concerning the third allegation (breach of confidentiality) I maintain that in a well-run public service organisation transparency would be the norm, and confidentiality only requested in circumstances that justify such a request. The desire of the administration c.q. Ms Bergot to cover up its wrongdoing in the form of unjustified and spurious investigations and disciplinary actions against the elected staff representation is not a valid reason for demanding confidentiality. Moreover, staff has a legitimate interest in being informed about such attacks, in particular when the administration simultaneously makes public claims to the effect that it is seeking a social dialogue.
27. The Disciplinary Committee found me guilty of the majority of the charges. It recommended the penalty of dismissal. The Disciplinary Committee explicitly stated that in view of my many years of positive contribution to the EPO there would, however, be no justification for a reduction of my pensionable rights and that the standard conditions of dismissal should be applied. The President nevertheless decided on a 20% reduction of my pension. The decision of the President to overstep the recommendation of the Disciplinary Committee is arbitrary and shows bad faith.
28. The recent investigations and the disciplinary procedure against me are not my first. I have already been investigated and downgraded for alleged harassment despite a unanimous recommendation of the disciplinary committee in my favour. At the time the alleged offense was a single sentence expressing a common opinion (belief) within the Munich staff representation that was contained in a confidential e-mail sent to a small group of people (17 persons, including myself) via a suepo.org address.
29. The repeated investigations against me (now 3 in total), the fabricated accusations and the total disproportionality of the sanctions are indicative of a process of institutional harassment against me. The permanent, unexplained and seemingly unjustified, house-ban1 further illustrates the apparent desire of the administration to inflict maximum damage upon me and to isolate me from staff.
REQUESTS
30. I request the above indicated decision as well as the earlier decision to down-grade me to be quashed. I also request full reimbursement of my legal costs as well as moral and/or exemplary damages for the prejudice suffered.
______________
1 «I remind you that you remain excluded from entering the Office premises at any time », Yann Chabod, letter dated 25.01.16
The part about “a process of institutional harassment against me” is reminiscent of older letters.
How can justice be expected to happen in secret when the EPO management shamelessly lies to the staff about the process? █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 11:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Insults which earn attention and cannot be blamed (no liability) on the attention seeker
A Donald Trump-like media strategy
Summary: The media keeps obsessing over some apparent fluke which gives Microsoft press iota/attention it wouldn’t get otherwise, but the real news is buried deeper inside the papers
WHILE the media is obsessed with a Microsoft fluke which some of our readers interpret as a clever Microsoft publicity stunt (attracting media attention) [1-3] there are much bigger things going on, other than the recent Microsoft layoffs. One reader, for instance, told us (or made claims) about Microsoft’s role in F-35 failures [4] which the media compares to BSoD, some point out that Yahoo is under attack again [5], and there is even news about Vista 10 being a total disaster [6] that’s now being compared to Vista [7] (not by us but by the British media). Don’t be misled by what’s known as the “news cycle”. There’s a lot going on at Microsoft right now that’s a lot worse than some bot (nonhuman) called “Tay”.
As one reader of ours who specialised in marketing put it, the fluke is “a win win in terms of publicity [...] publicity about making a big deal about this bot in the first place, and then after the obvious happens [...] marketing 101 [...] It’s the Trump method as well [...] if this was an “experiment” it would have more likely have been done in the way I described [...] hence why I am incredulous towards the idea that Microsoft was just naive [...] wouldn’t it be more useful to introduce this bot in an unknowing public environment to see how it interacted without interference or bias? [...] if they wanted to avoid this, they would have not advertised what this bot is in the first place, then nobody would know what it did and assume it’s just another twitter user [...] I have no doubt that some of these are done in ignorance on the company’s/organization’s part, but this one, seems too obvious [...] note that I have no proof that Microsoft knew this was going to happen, this is just an opinion based on recent trends [...] that said, it is incredulous that an supposedly-Internet-savvy company like Microsoft wouldn’t know this would happen, especially consider the amount of incidents in the past, like the Coca-Cola one where Gawker caused their campaign-bot to quote Mein Kempf [...] how do you sexually harass something that is incapable of perceiving anything, has no feelings or self-awareness, and oh yeah ISN’T ALIVE and is technology? [...] but don’t worry, money-hemorrhaging Microsoft, laying off employees and killing products and divisions, still can assign a team to address this “issue” [...] I bet those fired employees can sleep easy now [...] I think they knew this was going to happen [...] a PR stunt, so they can promote the “dangers” of AI harassment or some other nonsense [...] not that long ago there was an article about Cortana “harassment” (weird questions being asked etc) and how MS actually set up a research team to deal with the “issue” of AI “harassment” [..] so by playing the unknowing victim here, MS can promote this agenda and gain regressive-left points [...] I hypothesize that MS in addition to becoming a patent troll/fog computing company is also appealing more to the regressive left and using more PC [political correctness] tactics.”
MinceR, responding to the above, said that “playing the victim is popular among crybullies [...] PR experiment [...] Microsoft is not a tech company or a science company.” █
Related/contextual Microsoft items from the news:
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In one highly publicised tweet, which has since been deleted, Tay said: “bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we’ve got.” In another, responding to a question, the program said, “Ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism.”
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Tay, programmed as a 19 year old, was created as a machine learning project meant interact with peers between 18 and 24 years old. Users can play games with her, trade pictures, tell stories, and ping her for late-night chats. That last activity went awry Thursday when the chatbot began regurgitating inappropriate messages that skewed anti-semitic, used the n-word, and condemned feminism.
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A day after Microsoft introduced an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter it has had to delete it after it transformed into an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, ‘Bush did 9/11′-proclaiming robot.
Developers at Microsoft created ‘Tay’, an AI modelled to speak ‘like a teen girl’, in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition software. They marketed her as ‘The AI with zero chill’ – and that she certainly is.
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In another exercise, conducted by the Marine Corps in May 2015, the exercise was delayed because file formatting problems meant target information couldn’t be uploaded to the aircraft. The US Air Force had similar problems, aborting a test after none of the aircraft could fly due to startup problems requiring software and hardware shutdowns and restarts.
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Activist hedge fund Starboard Value LP, which is leading an investor revolt against Yahoo Inc’s management team, is seeking to remove the entire board of the struggling Internet company, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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AIM-listed tech distie Northamber’s sales are again withering on the vine, with blame falling on Microsoft’s Windows 10 and pesky human beings who are failing to buy more computers.
Sequestered in an industrial estate in deepest Surrey, Northamber has made a living from selling IT for the past 35 years but might just have seen its best days – peaking at £299m in the early noughties.
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So, Windows 10 isn’t the saviour of the PC industry after all – and is beginning to look more like a Windows Vista than a Windows XP.
PC growth predictions have been revised down by IDC. A range of companies including HP Ink and Northamber blame Windows 10 for flagging sales.
“We have not yet seen the anticipated Win10 stimulation of demand that we would hope for,” HP Ink’s CEO Dion Weisler told analysts in January.
Windows Vista drove Microsoft’s marketing team to despair, because when they blind tested it on users around 18 months after launch (on hardware capable of running Vista well), the users liked what they saw. They couldn’t reconcile the positive experience of using Vista with Vista’s noxious reputation. This was the Mojave Experiment, unfairly derided at the time. The lesson from Mojave was that a reputation sticks.
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 10:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
English/Original
Publicado en Decepción, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 9:07 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft esta ahora pretendiendo que su proprietario SQL Server on GNU/Linux is “abierto” (a quién quieren engañar con esas mamadas) y según los informes lo vende al gobierno como tal
Sumario: Microsoft esta implementando una estrategia del cameleon al pretender que sus stacks de software proprietario son “abiertos” y por lo tantos elegibles para integración en servicios públicos
PONIÉNDO de lado los asuntos de la EPO y ls patentes por un momento, deseamos señalar algunos de los últimos subversivos movimientos de Microsoft. No podemos simplemente ignorar a Microsoft cuando Microsoft no nos está ignorando, y ESTA CONSTANTEMENTE ATACANDONOS (FOSS) CON PATENTES.
“Es una buena manera de distraer al público y suprimir la crítica con algunas imágenes cursis de corazonsitos rojos.”Para aquellos que se la perdiéron, Microsoft está tratándo de EEE GNU/Linux servers en medio de despidos en Microsoft; egoístas intereses de ganancias, como fué notado por varios escritores [1, 2] esta mañana, de nínguna manera nada tiene que ver con FOSS (no hay aspecto de FOSS en ello de ningúna manera!) que estén guíando esos movimientos. Es sólo acerca de encadenárlos en un software proprietario que no será available por otro año de todas maneras. Es una buena manera de distraer al público y suprimir la crítica con algunas imágenes cursis de corazonsitos rojos.
La bocona de Mary Branscombe, una ayayera de Microsoft por largo tiempo quién ocasionalmente ataca a FOSS (vean sus insultos "free puppy" por ejemplo), has reciéntemente publicado un artículo con un cargado titular, “ Las razones detrás del impulso de Microsoft para el código abierto” [3] (no hay tal impulso, así que ¿porqué explorar las “razones”?). Esta cargado de tonteríás, comenzando por el sumario: “Encontrando el equilibrio entre el open source y los negocios comerciales” (Branscombe de nuevo nos muestra una falsa dicotonomíá, donde FOSS es antithetico a los “negocios comerciales” — cualquier cosa que sea – probablemente es simplemente software proprietario)
“El problema con el artículo de Wallen es que está basado en una falsa suposición de que a Microsoft le importa FOSS.”Las últimas ganancias de Red Hat [4,5,6,7] ayudan a desaprobar todas las mamadas de Branscombe, pero no es sólo Brascombe la que está haciéndo eso. Hace dias literalmente encontramos docenas de piezas de hojaldre que disfrazan de abierto a Microsoft. Todas ellas provienen de la India, donde Microsoft esta cabildeando/corrompiendo al gobierno en contra de FOSS (recuérden el enyucamiento de EDGI de hace una década). Microsoft ahora esta planeando un ´evento´ FOSS en India (vean dos diarias links resumiéndo bajo ¨Openwashing¨ in [1, 2] y esta claro que Microsoft trata de engatusar/engañar al gobierno de la India a la noción de que Microsoft es una compañía FOSS, por lo tanto elegible para cualquier contrato con el gobierno (adquisición lucrativa). Necesitámos batallar esta propaganda o simplemente seremos infiltrados por el enemigo, que nos esta atacando a la manera EEE, no simplemente con patentes, sino con todo lo que tienen a disposición.
“Esto es proteccionismo mediante el engaño de Microsoft y los que can en el juego de su campaña (o presión) están haciendo un daño al genuino/legítimo FOSS.”Un nuevo artículo de Jack Wallen [8] nota que las “gananias de licensamiento al consumidor de Microsoft ha declinado un 34 por ciento” y sigue con el titular: “Es tiempo para Microsoft de abrir el código fuente de Windows” (algunos lectores nos lo enviáron despues de que lo encontramos). El problema con el artículo de Wallen es que está basado en una falsa suposición de que a Microsoft le importa FOSS. Aparte de ello, no trabajaría. Ellos convirtieron Windows en SPYWARE (vean en lo que Vista 10 se convirtió). El licensiamiento FOSS removería toda esa porquería. Si es FOSS, a la gente le gustaría remover esos mecanismos indeseables y redistribuirlos sin ellows (FOSS verdadero/genuino significa exactamente eso). Microsoft no se puede dar el lujo de permitirse eso.
En sumario, rechazen la idea que Microsoft es de alguna manera “abierto” ahora. La Unión Europea, el gobierno Indio e incluso la Casa Blanca ahora se arriman a FOSS, así que Microsoft está pretendiendo ser FOSS. Esto es proteccionismo mediante el engaño de Microsoft y los que can en el juego de su campaña (o presión) están haciendo un daño al genuino/legítimo FOSS. █
Contenido relacinado/contextual de las noticias:
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Dada la larga espera, el apoyo a Linux del SQL Server 2016 parece reflejar una táctica de negocios más que un movimiento de amor de Microsoft hacia la comunidad de open source
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Es creído ampliamente que el SQL Server en Linux creación del CEO Satya Nadella, cuando la compañía quiere enfocarse en proveer servicio de clase superior. Más aún, algunos han ido más lejos al decir que la estrategia de la compañía acerca de SQL en Linux revela el ejemplo más fino de ir donde está el dinero, si no viene a ti.
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En otras palabras, SQL Server vendrá a Linux, pero no será una versión libre, open source.
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Red Hat, quien prometió hace unos pocos meses atras llegar a $2 billones en ganancias anuales, lo ha hecho y ahora dice ser la primera compañía de open source que alcanza este hito
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Simplemente piensa: Alguna gente todavía no cree que no puedes hacer dinero de Linux y open-source software. Estúpidos! Red Hal se ha convertido en la primera compañía de open source de hacer 2 billones de dolares.
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Imaginen un mundo en el que Windows fuese open source. Jack Wallen cree que ahora es tiempo para tal realidad.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
English/Original
Publicado en Europe, Patents at 10:04 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Esto en cuanto a la libertad de expresión o de pensamiento (el acceso a la información)…
Respuesta de la FFPE-EPO: “PS: No lean mucho [sic] Techrights”
Sumario: Los empleados de la Oficina Europea de Patentes (EPO) continúan hablándo del horrible acuerdo que la FFPE-EPO firmó con la gerencia, sirviendo a dividir y a castigar aún más a la SUEPO, la que representa a más de la mitad de sus empleados
Los tipos de la FFPE-EPO no están siendo totalmente ignoardos, parcialmente debido a sus más reciéntes acciones. Su current lider sólo tiene unas pocas semanas como tál y fuentes cercanas nos dicen que una facción de miembros de la FFPE-EPO reciéntemente se desligaron de ella en protesta. Los únicos aliados que les quedan parece ser de la gerencia de arriba. Para listar algunos artícules acerca la FFPE-EPO de nuevo:
- Enla Foto Oficial de la EPO Op, “Sólo Una de las Caras es Actualmente FFPE-EPO”
- Mayor Evidencia Sugiere y Muestra Fuerte Evidencia de que el Equipo Battistelli Usa a la FFPE-EPO como ‘Union Amarilla’ Contra la SUEPO
- “La FFPE-EPO Fué Creada Hace 9 Años Con Apoyo y Ánimo de la Gerencia”
- Secuelas de la FFPE EPO Memorando de Entendimiento Con el Círculo de Battistelli
- La Estrategia de la EPO’s en los Medios Trabajando: Peleas de Síndicatos y Fracturas de Grupos
- Caricatura del Dia: Reconociéndo a la FFPE EPO
- Unión Sindical Federal Golpea a la FFPE-EPO por Ayudar a la Abusiva Gerencia de la EPO al Firmar un Malicioso, Divisivo Documento
- La FFPE-EPO dice el MOU con Battistelli "defenderá Condiciones de Empleo"
“Aquí hay otro documento de la famosa Amarilla EPO Unión FFPE-EPO,” un lector nos dijo, habiéndonos enseñado el texto de arriba, añadiéndo: “estos estúpidos comentaron en Techrights” (dice “No lean mucho [sic] Techrights,” el que está bloqueado de todas maneres, por los sátrapas de la gerencia de arriba con los que la FFPE-EPO ha firmado un terrible acuerdo).
“Techrights nunca fue un enemigo de la EPO pero sí un enemigo de las patentes de software.”“Gracias por el trabajo y apoyo a los empleados de la EPO,” nos dijo el lector. “los empleados están contentos con tenerlos cerca.”
Techrights nunca fue un enemigo de la EPO pero sí un enemigo de las patentes de software. Es una gran diferencia. Incluso envié unas cartas a la EPO allá en los viejos días, en particular acerca de las patentes de software.
No dejen que la FFPE-EPO pinte a Techrights como un enemigo. Es una falsa narrativa y lo de arriba erróneamente characteriza a Techrights como “odio a los derechos de Propiedad Intelectual”. Bueno, nosotros NUNCA hemos usado el término “Propiedad Intelectual”; nosotros adecuadamente distinguimos entre derechos de autor, marcas y patentes, y específicamente abordamos las patentes de software. La FFPE-EPO probablemente no ha estudiado el sitio lo suficientemente para hacer tan estúpido comentario.
“…la respuesta de la FFPE es bastante hilarante, afirmando que sólo hay una diferencia entre los cuadros acuerdo de la Comisión de la UE y el memorando de entendimiento con la OEP.”
–AnonymousPara el record, Techrights no fue un enemigo de la FFPE-EPO. En realidad, los apoyamos muchísimo antes del MoU, como cualquiera puede ver en nuestros artículos pasados, e.g. este de aquí. Uno podría decir que la FFPE-EPO estúpidamente (si no intencionalmente o incluso maliciousamente) desertado. Aquí esta un nuevo comentario que dice: “la respuesta de la FFPE en vez es risíble, la respuesta de la FFPE es bastante hilarante, afirmando que sólo hay una diferencia entre los cuadros acuerdo de la Comisión de la UE y el memorando de entendimiento con la OEP.
“Ellos tienden a olvidar el artículo 9 de la” cadre acuerdo “, que trata sobre” La representatividad de las organizaciones “. La gerencia de laEPOno podría haber insistido en tal elemento, de lo contrario habrían perdido todo lo que podrían haber mostrado y jactado.
“Es una pena que los sindicatos comienzen a pelearse unos contra otros. Todos estamos en el mismo barco, y disparando el uno al otro no va a ayudar en nuestro deseo de conseguir que la EPO se ponga de nuevo en marcha, y el reconocimiento de los derechos humanos.”
Una respuesta a este comentario, dijó: “La última página (página 16) es muy informativa. Así, de acuerdo con el “acuerdo cuadre” de la UE, la SUEPO sería una organización representativa reconócida que aún no ha firmado, pero no habría conseguido pleno acceso a las habitaciones, la licencia sindical, y correos electrónicos? La FFPE-EPO no hubiera sido reconocida una organización a lo mejor y ellos no son elegibles para firmar.
“Ellos no lo hacen fácil para reconocerlos como profesionales…”
–Anonymous¿Y la FFPE-EPO vende la MoU como siendo la misma como el acuerdo cadre de la comisión European EU? (la única diferencia que ellos reconocen son los elementos de huelga en el “acuerdo cadre”)
“¿En verdad?
“Ellos no lo hacen fácil para reconocerlos como profesionales…”
“De todos maneras, estos ataques el uno contra el otro deben parar.”
La SUEPO durámente ha hecho algún comentario que ataque a la FFPE-EPO; simplemente criticó -con justa razón – al MoU. Sirve como un ataque encubierto contra la SUEPO, como la gerencia de la EPO la usa como amunición contra la SUEPO y los representántes de empleados despedidos. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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The thermal updates were submitted today for the Linux 4.6 kernel merge window and there’s a very important fix for at least some newer Lenovo laptops. The fix should end up getting backported to current stable series, but if you have a Lenovo laptop and have been seeing slower performance on recent Linux kernel versions, you’ll want to upgrade.
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While the Linux 4.6 kernel is enabling FBC and PSR by default in the Intel graphics driver, it’s only for select generations of Intel hardware for these power-saving Frame-Buffer Compression and Panel Self Refresh features. With Intel Skylake, FBC support remains a work in progress.
At least today, Intel’s Paulo Zanoni sent out his second version of patches for getting Frame-Buffer Compression support in order for the latest-generation Skylake hardware. He commented on the patch series, “The Kernel patches are mostly the same, but with the review suggestions implemented. The DDX patch is new and should really help things now.”
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Last week was the big ACPI and power management updates for Linux 4.6 that included a redesign of CPUFreq and P-State to support callbacks invoked by the kernel’s scheduler. A few more feature changes have now been queued up for pulling of the ACPI+PM work for Linux 4.6.
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Con Kolivas has released his new version of the BFS scheduler for the Linux kernel.
Brain Fuck Scheduler v0.469 is the new release out today that continues to follow a single shared runqueue O(n) strict fairness earlist deadline first design. This scheduler that’s ideal for mobile devices and desktops now supports the Linux 4.5 kernel.
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At the start of the merge window there was a proposal to land an in-kernel debugger with full x86/x86_64 disassembler support even though KDB/KGDB exists already. We’re nearing the end of the merge window and Linus Torvalds so far has decided not to pull this MDB debugger as other kernel developers are also objecting.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD Polaris is built using a 14nm FinFET fabrication process. The fourth generation GCN architecture for new Radeon GPUs brings a new memory controller, new multimedia cores, and a new geometry processor. Moreover, Polaris chips will support both HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.3, and are equally capable of encoding and decoding H.265 video up to 4K resolution.
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Last week AMD released a new GPU-PRO Beta driver stack and this Monday, NVIDIA released the 364.12 beta driver, both of which support Vulkan and meant that Phoronix had a lot of work to do. Up for testing were the GTX 950, 960, 970, 980, and 980 Ti as well as the R9 Fury, 290 and 285. Logically, they used the Talos Principal test, their results compare not only the cards but also the performance delta between OpenGL and Vulkan and finished up with several OpenGL benchmarks to see if there were any performance improvements from the new drivers. The results look good for Vulkan as it beats OpenGL across the board as you can see in the review.
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Red Hat’s Adam Jackson has taken to working on X.Org Server patches for supporting GLVND within a GLX world (rather than just EGL) via the GLX_EXT_libglvnd extension. GLVND, of course, is NVIDIA’s OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library.
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Following this week’s AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks, you may be wondering about the performance of OpenCL GPGPU performance particularly around AMD’s new hybrid Linux driver stack. So for your viewing pleasure today are some OpenCL benchmarks on AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce hardware using the newest drivers.
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Along with open-sourcing the next-gen Polaris GPU driver code yesterday, Alex Deucher of AMD laid out their plans for aiming to get the DAL display code into the Linux 4.7 kernel.
This Polaris driver code is dependent upon the massive AMDGPU DAL patches for display handling that amount to over 93 thousand lines of code (and the Polaris code is another 67 thousand lines of code). When that DAL code was sent out last month, it was quick to be critiqued by other upstream DRM driver developers.
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Benchmarks
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While the Linux 4.6 kernel is enabling FBC and PSR by default in the Intel graphics driver, it’s only for select generations of Intel hardware for these power-saving Frame-Buffer Compression and Panel Self Refresh features. With Intel Skylake, FBC support remains a work in progress.
At least today, Intel’s Paulo Zanoni sent out his second version of patches for getting Frame-Buffer Compression support in order for the latest-generation Skylake hardware. He commented on the patch series, “The Kernel patches are mostly the same, but with the review suggestions implemented. The DDX patch is new and should really help things now.”
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Applications
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Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. There’s a new release every week. Here are the highlights from 0.96 through 0.99.
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GStreamer 1.8 features initial Vulkan API support, hardware-accelerated zero-copy video decoding on Android, a new video capture source for ANdroid, a new tracing system, a new high-level GstPlayer playback API, improved Opus audio support, the GStreamer VA-API module was promoted, and asset proxy support for the GStreamer Editing Services.
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The GStreamer 1.8 open-source multimedia framework has been released today, March 24, 2016, after several months of hard work, and it appears to be a major release with dozens of new features.
According to the release notes, GStreamer 1.8 adds initial support for the new Vulkan 1.0 API, implements hardware-accelerated zero-copy video decoding and a new video capture source for the Android platform, and adds reverse playback support for Windows Media files like WMA, WMV, and ASF.
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While we continue to wait on the release of VLC 3, some improvements for the media player’s support of Google’s Chromecast devices have landed.
Arriving in Git this morning is a variety of improvements to VLC’s Chromecast code.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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I mentioned before that Knights and Merchants was coming back to Linux (after originally being ported by LGP). It is now officially available on Steam for Linux after a short beta, and it uses Wine.
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Games
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This is really great to see, and we need more of it. Amos from the game store Itch.io has written up a guide for people pushing out Linux builds of games.
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Buying the game now should be fine, and should count as a Linux sale since they have a build available for our platform.
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Ty the Tasmanian Tiger is a 3d platforming exploration game from 2002 which has recently gained an HD upgrade for Windows.
The game is by a studio from Australia named Krome studio, so there’s little wonder as to why there’s no Linux or Mac version at launch, but they’ve been asked about Mac and Linux version’s of this game several times and been very responsive.
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Now SteamOS, in contrast to the Linux itself, is on the rise. In 2013 it had 65 million users and in February 2015 it had 125 million active users.
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The frigid Canadian investigative tale, Kona will be receiving Mac and Linux support starting today.
The early access title is about solving a series of mysteries and paranormal events during a blizzard in a remote French-Canadian town.
Play as Detective Carl Faubert as he’s called up to northern Québec to look into a seemingly easy case of vandalism. But as the blizzard rolls in, Carl must brave the elements and figure just what is going on in the small frozen town and where his employer is. Search for clues and a means to survive in this icy tale.
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Parabole has announced that the Mac and Linux versions of Kona are available now at 33% off via Steam Early Access with GOG following very soon. In Kôna, private detective Carl Faubert arrives in an eerie Northern Canadian town to investigate cases of vandalism reported by W. Hamilton, a rich industrialist known to have disagreements with the local Cree community. But an unexpected blizzard is ravaging the area, and Faubert’s client seems to have missed their rendezvous. Something is definitely off…
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When private detective Carl Faubert took the case, it seemed like his simplest job in weeks. Drive north from Montreal to a small village and find out who has been vandalizing his wealthy client’s hunting manor. No sweat. But finding the area seemingly empty, Carl soon discovers that the case is much more involved than what he signed on for.
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PAYDAY 2 was released without any warning, so I’ve been putting some time into it to see how it runs on Linux.
I must say, I am pretty impressed with the port. I did a two hour livestream and it was extremely stable without a single crash. Not many bigger games are this stable right out the door for us, so I’m damn happy with that.
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Quite exciting as the game is well reviewed, it looks good and it’s yet another title I’ve personally wanted to play. I see quite a number of people from my own Steam friends list also have it on their wishlist, so hopefully it will sell reasonably well on Linux.
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Good news war fans, as Company of Heroes 2: The British Forces and Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault are now available on SteamOS & Linux.
Feral Interactive have been doing a lot of hard work for us recently, so it’s great to see more getting released. I am especially excited about playing as the British!
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Just a few minutes ago, Valve pushed version 2.67 of its Debian-based SteamOS Linux operating system for gamers to the Brewmaster Beta channel for early adopters and public beta testers.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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A basic tenet of organizational theory is that, whenever the formal structures are inadequate, other structures emerge to compensate. And that, in a sentence, may explain why KDE Neon has emerged.
KDE Neon is a project organized by Jonathan Riddell, the ex-community leader of Kubuntul. Its goal is to provide a repository for the latest KDE packages.
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The KDE community today released KDE Applications 16.04 Beta with this next spin of the KDE application set now under a feature freeze ahead of next month’s release.
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KDE today announced the release and immediate availability of the Beta of KDE Applications 16.04, the next-generation software suite for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.
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With the various applications being based on KDE Frameworks 5, the KDE Applications 16.04 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration. We’re counting on you to help find bugs early so they can be squashed before the final release. Please consider joining the team by installing the beta and reporting any bugs.
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The development team behind the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) project, an open-source desktop environment that keeps the spirit of the old-shool KDE3.5 desktop alive, have announced the Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.3 release.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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It is most likely that Polari and other GNOME 3.20 apps haven’t reached your repository yet. XDG-App to the rescue! You can check out Polari nightly by following Alexander larssons tutorial at.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps/NightlyBuilds
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GNOME 3.20 Delhi is finally released with many improvements in Web, Maps, Software, and other applications. Read more to know the best features of GNOME 3.20 Delhi and know how to get it right now.
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While at last month’s Cambridge Hackfest, members of the GNOME Documentation Project team talked with Cosimo Cecchi of Endless Mobile about the user help in their product. As it turns out, they are shipping a modified version of Yelp, the GNOME help browser, along with modified versions of our own Mallard-based user help.
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Last summer, I mentored a usability testing project for Outreachy, working with Gina to examine the usability of GNOME.
Gina did a great job in her usability work. After her internship was complete, we authored a paper together, which FOSS Force has published. Please read A Usability Study of GNOME at FOSS Force.
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New Releases
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The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.3.3 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
This is a bugfix release of the v3.3 musl based branch. It fixes a boot problem with Raspberry Pi 3.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Red Hat Family
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This afternoon, after the House voted 84–25 to legislate discrimination in North Carolina, businesses started coming out against the law—even before the Senate passed its own version of the bill.
Red Hat CEO and president Jim Whitehurst, Biogen, and Dow Public Policy all tweeted their opposition to the bills on Wednesday. Whitehurst called it a “clear step backwards,” while Biogen said the General Assembly was attempting to “undermine equality.”
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Red Hat reported $2.05B in annual revenue for fiscal year 2016, a new mile stone for an open source company, which reflects open source hybrid cloud growth.
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In a research note revealed to investors by Robert W. Baird on Wednesday, 23 March, Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) had its TP boosted to $85.00. The firm currently has Outperform rating on the stock.
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Previously in this series, we discussed Red Hat’s (RHT) recently announced fiscal 4Q16 results. Red Hat pioneered the open-source business model. Open-source software provides the foundation for Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR), and Google (GOOG) (GOOGL). Additionally, Red Hat provides the open-source-based Linux OS (operating system), which powers various corporate servers, financial trading platforms, and Android phones.
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In a report issued on March 22, Ittai Kidron from Oppenheimer maintained an Outperform rating on Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), with a price target of $88. The company’s shares closed yesterday at $72.54.
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Fedora
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Fedora 24 is back on schedule with the decision to release Fedora 24 Alpha, postponed last week because of blocker bugs. Jan Kurik, Platform and Program Manager, said Wednesday the blockers were fixed and “Fedora 24 Alpha release is considered as GOLD.” Elsewhere, the Debian project put out the call for event proposals for upcoming DebConf16 in South Africa this July.
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FOSSASIA is an annual event that focuses on showcasing free and open-source technology in Asia. The intended audience are developers, start-ups, contributors, students, and enthusiasts. It has talks and workshops that cover a wide range of topics. These include anywhere from hardware hacks to design, graphics to software.
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Debian Family
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With apologies to those Debian folks who were at LibrePlanet but didn’t make it on this picture…
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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After six long years of requests from users, the Unity 7 desktop on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS just gained a long-awaited option: You can now move the launcher bar from the left side of the screen to the bottom. It requires a hidden terminal command, but it’s now an officially supported feature!
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Today, March 24, 2016, Sergio Schvezov of Canonical announced the release of Snapcraft 2.6 for the upcoming Ubuntu Snappy Core 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.
Snapcraft is the tool that users can use to create and manage snaps for Snappy Ubuntu Core. It is popularly known as the Snappy creator tool, and it ships preinstalled in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which launches later this spring, on April 21, 2016.
Today’s release of Snapcraft comes only two days after Canonical announced Snapcraft 2.5 on March 22, a maintenance build that introduced experimental support for creating kernel snaps thanks to the implementation of the kernel and kbuild plugins.
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Canonical scored another major telecom partnership related to its open source Ubuntu Linux platform this week, when Tele2 announced that it is moving more operations to the cloud using Canonical’s Ubuntu-based OpenStack platform.
Tele2 is a major European telecommunications provider. On Wednesday, it announced that it is migrating more of its infrastructure to the cloud by adopting OpenStack and network functions virtualization (NFV).
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The final beta was pushed out this morning for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS “Xenial Xerus” release.
With this beta, the Ubuntu desktop, server, cloud, and core products are all participating. Additionally, the spins of Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu are all participating.
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Canonical has unveiled the official mascot of Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus.
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Flavours and Variants
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Today, March 24, 2016, the developers of the LXLE distribution of GNU/Linux have been proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the final LXLE 14.04.4 operating system.
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The BBC has begun shipping its open source “Micro:bit” — a microcontroller based IoT hacker board for UK schoolkids running ARM Mbed.
The BBC announced its open source, Internet of Things-focused Micro:bit hacker board for British schoolchildren a year ago, and revealed full specs in June. After some considerable delays pushing past the scheduled October debut, the COM-like SBC has now begun shipping to UK schools. Although it’s too late in the school year to be fully incorporated into the curriculum, the BBC is asking schools to give the boards away free to kids, so they can experiment on their own.
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FriendlyARM’s “NanoPi M1” SBC runs Linux on a quad-core, Cortex-A7 Allwinner H3, and offers HDMI, four USB ports, a microSD slot, and 40-pin Pi expansion.
Guangzhou, China based FriendlyARM has further accelerated the race to the bottom in the low-cost, open-spec hacker board market, delivering a NanoPi M1 SBC that costs a mere $11. That’s only $1 more than a similar, but less feature-rich Orange Pi One hacker board from Shenzhen Xunlong that launched in January. However, as noted by a CNXSoft report, which alerted us to the announcement, shipping to the U.S. costs another $10, for a total of $21. By comparison, the Orange Pi One asks only $3.77 for shipping, for a total of $13.77.
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Microstar Laboratories, a provider of Data Acquisition Processor (DAP) systems for PC-based high-performance multichannel measurement applications, has released version 1.00 of the Accel64 for Linux software.
This package builds Loadable Kernel Module (LKM) software for the GNU/Linux system, for running on 32-bit or 64-bit hardware architectures, to support the control of DAP data acquisition boards on systems using kernel versions in the 4.xx series. Accel64 for Linux is offered under the BSD license as a free download.
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Phones
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Android
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The world of Android smartphones can often be chaotic and disorganized, but this year it seems to have settled on the month of April for the debut and availability of the widest range of attractive new devices. Six months after Google’s release of Android Marshmallow, all the hardware manufacturers are now ready to deliver a deluge of phones built around the latest version of the operating system. It’s already begun with handsets like the Xiaomi Mi 5 and Samsung Galaxy S7, but next month is when the choice and variety will explode.
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Another risk organizations face when initiating a community support program is mistaking the community for a market or for customers. Although community members may also fit these roles, and traditional marketing and sales outreach techniques can be helpful at times, treating the community like anything other than a community can lead to resentment and ill-will from its members. Remember: A community is a self-organized and self-identified collection of people. Identification is a powerful thing, and treating someone contrary to their selected identification is arrogant and disrespectful. When an organization begins to think of the community it supports merely as a well-qualified market or as sales leads, it has lost connection with the community and risks public negative feedback and losing members.
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Industry participants tell WatersTechnology about the use of open source among financial services organizations. Dan DeFrancesco highlights some of the specific work firms are embarking on in the open-source space.
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The prayers of many starving animation artists out there may have finally been answered. Cartoon Brew reports that the same animation software used by Futurama and Studio Ghibli will soon be available for the low price of…nothing.
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With their special microscopes, experimental physicists can already observe single molecules. However, unlike conventional light microscopes, the raw image data from some ultra-high resolution instruments first have to be processed for an image to appear. For the ultra-high resolution fluorescence microscopy that is also employed in biophysical research at Bielefeld University, members of the Biomolecular Photonics Group have developed a new open source software solution that can process such raw data quickly and efficiently.
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Events
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This year, OSCON moves to Austin, Texas and we’ll be there! (Plus, we’re attending Community Leadership Summit the weekend before the conference.) Join us from May 16th to 19th, as we’re delighted to announce that OSI will once more have a booth in the Expo Hall. We would really love to see you there!
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Comms/Telecoms
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Telecom operators moving towards software solutions using software-defined networking and network functions virtualization technologies are finding a challenging environment. Traditional vendor support for such moves are being hindered by internal business models that are being overhauled by the move away from traditional hardware to commodity white boxes powered by software, which is forcing many telecom operators to search outside their usual vendor channels for support or turn internally to develop their own platforms.
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Implemented as a virtual machine (VM) within cloud infrastructure, Patton has tested its VNFs with VirtualBox, vmWare ESX, KVM, and OpenStack hypervisors to date.
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The Tier 1 providers use open source software. The providers use middleware to develop application for communications. Enterprises have now embraced open source software so they can create their own applications. Both providers and enterprises have realized that hardware has become a commodity, software rules.
Open-source software has its source code available with a license in that the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software can be developed in a collaborative manner.
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Databases
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When we started working on CitusDB 1.0 four years ago, we envisioned scaling out relational databases. We loved Postgres (and the elephant) and picked it as our underlying database of choice. Our goal was to extend this database to seamlessly shard and replicate your tables, provide high availability in the face of failures, and parallelize your SQL queries across a cluster of machines.
We wanted to make the PostgreSQL elephant magical.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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I’ve finally published the sponsor prospectus for LibreOffice Conference 2016.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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BSD
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Most of the attention this week has been around the release of UbuntuBSD, which in and of itself is a noble effort for those who want to escape from systemd, as the developers have dubbed it according to Phoronix. This manifestation joins Ubuntu 15.10 Wile E. Coyote — sorry, Wily Werewolf — to the Free BSD 10.1 kernel.
To its credit, UbuntuBSD uses Xfce as its default desktop. It also joins a list of other marriages between Linux distros and the BSD kernel: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, ArchBSD (now PacBSD), Gentoo/BSD and others along the FOSS highway. It’s worth a look and we’ll be giving it a test drive sometime soon.
But for now, there’s a more interesting and significant development in the BSD realm rising on the horizon.
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The DragonFlyBSD operating system with its AMD Radeon graphics driver ported from the Linux DRM/KMS code is up to a state equivalent to where it was in the Linux 3.18 kernel.
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Using OpenBSD as my operating system of choice is the conclusion of my now 20 years journey into UNIX-like systems. I’ve been using FreeBSD from 2000 to 2005 as my sole operating system at the time (both on servers and workstations), from 4.1 to the end of the 4.x series. I have fond memories of that period, and that’s probably the main reason why I’ve been diving again into the BSDs during the last few years. Prior to that, I had been running Slackware, which in retrospective was very BSD-like, since January 1996.
When I first installed OpenBSD, two things struck me. The installation process was both easy and fast, as the OpenBSD installer, a plain shell script, is very minimalistic and uncluttered. It is in fact the fastest installation process I’ve ever experienced, and it made a really positive first impression. The second one is the quality of the documentation. Not only does the OpenBSD project produces high quality code, they are also very good at documenting it. And it’s not only man pages and documentation, presentations and papers also reflect that.
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With this commit, mpi@ enabled the new ART routing table implementation, which paves way for more MP network stack improvements down the line.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software Foundation is striving to provide more and simpler ways for hackers to contribute to the GNU Project. For projects that are assigned to the FSF (such as GNU Emacs or GCC), dealing with the paperwork for assigning contributions can sometimes be a bottleneck in the process. We are always working on ways to make assignment itself simpler. Our legal counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center recently gave us the all clear to begin accepting scanned assignments for contributors residing in India. We would also like to particularly thank Mishi Choudhary of SFLC and SFLC India for providing local counsel on this issue.
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Openness/Sharing
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If you haven’t heard of Mycroft, there’s a good chance you’ve been living under a rock. And not one of those fancy under-a-rock condos either—the kind of under a rock without—horrors!—wifi! Mycroft is a project over at Indiegogo and Kickstarter that has the distinction of being the first truly open source, open hardware home AI to grace the technological landscape. And, of course, it runs GNU/Linux.
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Open Hardware
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Wevolver, a webplatform for sharing and collaborating on open hardware projects, has won the “3-DIY” Interactive Innovation Award at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Since its inception, Wevolver has helped to bring a number of 3D printing and 3D scanning projects to life.
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Although, if someone could make a version where the shoulder button position is a bit easier to reach with small hands, that would be fantastic.
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Programming
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Jenkins 2.0, an upgrade to the popular continuous integration and continuous delivery platform for software development, is due in April with improvements to the delivery pipeline and user interface.
In version 2.0, the Pipeline subsystem will enable users to automate processes and describe functions, such as for running tests and builds, said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Jenkins founder and CTO at CloudBees. Users “can describe this choreography of automation,” he said. The capability can, for example, enable users to execute tests in parallel, he said. Pipelines will be developed by writing code in a script language that serves as a DSL on top of the Groovy language.
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Two owners of a Texas duplex found their home destroyed after a demolition company accidentally tore down the wrong house. An employee of the company blamed the error on a false addressing listing on Google Maps, according to WFAA.
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Health/Nutrition
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As communities mark World Water Day, we turn to Part 2 of our extended conversation with Flint water activists Nayyirah Shariff and Melissa Mays. We spoke to them after Michigan Republican Governor Rick Snyder testified for the first time before Congress about lead poisoning in the water supply of Flint, Michigan, which began after he appointed an unelected emergency manager who switched the source of the city’s drinking water to the corrosive Flint River. Snyder testified along with EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Flint’s former emergency manager, Darnell Earley, who refused to appear at last month’s hearing despite a subpoena from the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Melissa Mays is an activist and founder of Water You Fighting For?, a Flint, Michigan-based research and advocacy organization founded around the city’s water crisis. She and her three children suffer from long-term exposure to heavy metals because of the water supply. Nayyirah Shariff is a coordinator with the Flint Democracy Defense League.
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Security
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The White House wants federal agencies to share more of their custom code with each other, and also to provide more of it to the open source community. That kind of reuse and open source development of software could certainly cut costs and provide more able software in the future, but is this also an opening for more bugs and insecure code?
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Love it or hate it, email remains a must-have tool in the modern Internet, though email isn’t always as secure as it should be. When users connect to email servers, those connections have the potential to be intercepted by attackers, so there is a need for standards, like the new SMTP Strict Transport Security (STS) standard, published March 18 as an Internet Engineering Task Force (IEFT) draft.
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Venerable net-scan outfit Netcraft has issued what cliché would describe as “a stinging rebuke” to sysadmins the world over, for ignoring HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP).
Pinning is designed to defend users against impersonation attacks, in which an attacker tricks a certificate authority to issue a fraudulent certificate for a site.
If the attacker can present a user with a certificate for fubar.com, they can impersonate the site, opening a path for malfeasance like credential harvesting.
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Oracle has released an emergency patch for Java which fixes a critical bug leading to remote code execution without the need for user credentials.
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A Kentucky hospital says it is operating in an “internal state of emergency” after a ransomware attack rattled around inside its networks, encrypting files on computer systems and holding the data on them hostage unless and until the hospital pays up.
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Earlier this month, digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a strongly worded amicus brief arguing that the warrant used by the FBI for its use of malware to identify visitors of a dark web child pornography site was “unconstitutional,” and qualified as a broad, “general warrant.”
But on Tuesday, Robert J. Bryan, the district judge overseeing the case rejected the group’s argument, saying it contained allegations of fact not supported in the record, and that it was simply repeating arguments already made by the defense.
“According to EFF, a self-proclaimed ‘recognized expert’ on the intersection of civil liberties and technology, the law enforcement techniques employed in this case present novel questions of Fourth Amendment law,” Bryan writes in his order. The brief was signed by Mark Rumold, Nate Cardozo, and Andrew Crocker from the EFF, and Venkat Balasubramani, an attorney who is representing the organization.
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Senior threat intelligence man Yonathan Klijnsma says the website of the EC-Council, the organisation responsible for the Ethical Hacker certification, is serving the dangerous Angler exploit kit to infect PCs.
Klijnsma of Dutch firm Fox-IT says the website was serving the world’s most highly-capable and dangerous exploit kit hours ago to users of Internet Explorer.
Checks by this writer appear to show it is still serving the exploit at the time of publication.
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Premature infatuation with blockchain overlooks security weaknesses in the platform that underlies Bitcoin digital currency.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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“When you destroy trust between nuclear powers you recreate the possibility of nuclear war, either by intent, or miscalculation. So this is a reckless and irresponsible act on the part of Washington….The information war that is going on now is to prepare the American population and NATO countries allies for military conflict with Russia. This is part of the preparation of that. We now have high level people in the US government and military who go to Congress and say that Russia is an existential threat. This is rubbish!…You have to remember that before the wars started in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, it was the constant demonisation of the leaders of the governments, against Gaddafi, Hussein. When you see these kinds of demonisation it fits a pattern.”
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The religious leader at Scotland’s biggest mosque has praised an extremist who was executed for committing murder in Pakistan, the BBC can reveal.
Imam Maulana Habib Ur Rehman of Glasgow Central Mosque used the messaging platform WhatsApp to show his support for Mumtaz Qadri.
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Transparency Reporting
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Conservative legal watchdogs have discovered new emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server dating back to the first days of her tenure as secretary of State.
The previously undisclosed February 2009 emails between Clinton from her then-chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, raise new questions about the scope of emails from Clinton’s early days in office that were not handed over to the State Department for recordkeeping and may have been lost entirely.
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Communications between the US National Security Agency (NSA) and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton show she repeatedly tried to obtain unsecure devices for use in government business, according to emails released by the US Department of State.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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After some 115 years, Scotland has burned its last lump of coal for electricity.
The Longannet power station, the last and largest coal-fired power plant in Scotland, ceased operations Thursday. What once was the largest coal plant in Europe shut down after 46 years before the eyes of workers and journalists, who gathered in the main control room.
“Ok, here we go,” said one worker moments before pressing a bright red button that stopped the coal-fired turbines that generated electricity for a quarter of Scottish homes.
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Finance
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Our guest suggested instead that Chicago’s dreaded, ruinous red ink should be considered a mirage. Americans seem very accepting of the idea that we’re living in objectively dry economic times, and tough choices have to be made. But that tendency is precisely why it’s so important to hold a light on what, precisely, politicians and the press mean when they talk about public money we “don’t have” or “can’t spare.” Because a whole lot of human hardship gets predicated, gets accepted and normalized, on that assumption of scarcity.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Thursday said she has no desire for Bernie Sanders’s exit from the Democratic presidential primary.
“He has put the right issues on the table both for the Democratic Party and for the country in general so I’m still cheering Bernie on,” she said while touring a community healthcare center in Quincy, Mass., according to The Associated Press.
“He’s out there,” Warren added when asked if she thinks the independent Vermont senator should suspend his presidential campaign. “He fights from the heart. This is who Bernie is.”
Warren refused comment on who she voted for in Massachusetts’s Democratic presidential primary earlier this month, AP reported. She also said she plans on making an endorsement but would not elaborate further on her pick.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Meanwhile, the report exposes the inadequacy of the current EU lobby transparency regime which is both voluntary and excludes lobbying directed at the permanent representations and the Council. The study shows that at least one in five lobby meetings at some national offices are with companies and organisations unregistered in the current EU register.
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Today, the Sierra Club Virginia Chapter and the Center for Media and Democracy released ALEC EXPOSED: Corporate Polluters Undermining Clean Power in Virginia, a report that reveals the influence that ALEC and its political allies have exerted to stymie state climate and clean energy policies.
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Bernie Sanders would have raised almost twice as much money by the end of 2015 as Hillary Clinton for his presidential campaign if the U.S. had a system of public matching funds for small donors, according to a report by U.S. PIRG, a federation of the state-level activist groups founded by Ralph Nader in the 1970s.
In addition, Sanders would also have far outraised any of the remaining Republican candidates.
The U.S. PIRG report examines how 2016 presidential candidates would fare under a campaign financing system similar to that of New York City, which matches small donations to local candidates with additional public money at a six-to-one ratio. For example, if someone gives $10 to a candidate for the New York City Council, the city provides an additional $60, so the candidate receives $70 total.
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Sen. Sanders ventured hesitantly down the scary path of criticizing Israel, but even his timid approach looked heroic compared to the pro-Israel pandering from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, says Joe Lauria.
[...]
Snubbing AIPAC requires a degree of courage in American presidential politics and almost no one dares do anything but pander to the hardest-line Israeli partisans. But Sanders, who is fighting for his political life in the campaign, hasn’t taken money from the kind of large donors that AIPAC coordinates. Plus, he could never match the other candidates’ fervor for Israel.
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Israel-AIPAC claims of ‘disputed lands’ are working
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Censorship
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The Rolling Stones prepare their historic concert in a country that once banned the Beatles, and still harasses artistic free expression
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This year brings the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death and Index on Censorship is marking it with a special issue of our award-winning magazine, looking at how his plays have been used around the world to sneak past censors or take on the authorities – often without them realising.
Our special report explores how different countries use different plays to tackle difficult themes. Hungarian author György Spiró writes about how Richard III was used to taunt eastern European dictators during the 1980s. Dame Janet Suzman remembers how staging Othello with a black lead during apartheid in South Africa caused people to walk out of the theatre. Kaya Genç tells of a 1981 production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream in Turkey that landed most of the cast in jail. And Brazilian director Roberto Alvim recounts his recent staging of Julius Caesar, which was inspired by the country’s current political tumult.
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A new report on artistic freedom by the Danish free speech advocacy group Freemuse has found that global censorship and threats on artistic freedom increased significantly in 2015, according to the Art Newspaper.
The report, which analyzes artistic freedom in over 70 countries, gathered data from media sources as well as partner organizations, such as the Copenhagen-based civil society network Artsfex. The findings show a 20 percent increase in registered killings, attacks, abductions, imprisonments, and threats related to artists worldwide, as well as a 224 percent increase in acts of censorship.
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Members of the Hong Kong performance troupe Nonsensemakers on Monday accused the Hong Kong government of political bias over demands they claimed had been placed on the group as it prepares for an event.
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Lawmakers from across the political spectrum urged Secretary for Home Affairs Lau Kong-wah to give a detailed explanation of the government’s controversial decision to prohibit a local artiste from publishing the full name of her Taiwanese alma mater in a drama programme leaflet.
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A government-sponsored cultural drama has unnecessarily been thrust onto the political stage, all because of the innocuous word “national”. A misguided sense of political correctness within the Leisure and Cultural Services Department is being blamed. Officials seem so eager to screen out perceived unacceptable content that even an artiste’s biography in a house programme is not spared. The alleged censorship is not just a threat to artistic freedom; it also undermines the city’s image as an arts hub and risks upsetting ties with other places.
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The government’s home affairs minister has continued to avoid questions over the recent controversy whereby the word “national” was removed from the names of Taiwanese institutions by a government department.
The Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) allegedly removed the word on different occasions – an act criticised by the affected Taipei National University of the Arts and by the Hong Kong Federation of Taiwan Universities Alumni Association.
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A Hong Kong alumni group of Taiwanese universities has “strongly condemned” a government department over a controversy whereby the word “national” was removed from the names of schools. The group called the incident “insulting”.
On Monday, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) was criticised for allegedly demanding the word “national” be deleted from the biography of a member of a drama company which performed at a public theatre last week. The member graduated from the Taipei National University of the Arts. Other similar cases have since emerged.
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Ministers, deputies and lawyers condemn Facebook’s ban on Turkey’s most popular newspaper pages, called on social media platform to rectify mistake as soon as possible
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EFF is pleased to announce that the U.S. Army has allowed Chelsea Manning to receive a packet of news articles, EFF blog posts, and a regulatory filing related to prisoner free speech rights that it had previously withheld. Manning is currently imprisoned at the U.S Disciplinary Barracks (USDB) at Ft. Leavenworth for her role in the release of military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks.
As we reported last month, the Army had rejected the mail from a Manning supporter citing regulations limiting printouts from the Internet. Initially, the mail had been withheld under provisions that both limited the number of pages an inmate can receive from the Internet and allowed the prison to block Internet pages that it believed may violate copyright laws. The information provided to Manning made the actual basis for withholding unclear, and EFF wrote to the Army pointing out that printing the materials for Manning would not infringe our copyright. We also sent the materials to Manning directly.
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Privacy
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Data scientists are considered to have the hottest job right now, but a new study suggests they’re little more than “digital janitors” who spend most of their time cleaning data to prepare it for analysis.
That’s according to CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing company, which surveyed 80 data scientists with varying levels of experience.
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Web users face an even greater threat to their privacy as large ISPs align themselves more closely with data brokers to track their customers, an advocacy group said.
Several large ISPs have either formed partnerships with, or acquired, data tracking and analytics firms in recent years, giving them a “vast storehouse of consumer data,” according to a report Wednesday from the Center for Digital Democracy.
“ISPs have been on a shopping spree to help build their data-targeting system across devices and platforms,” the report says. “Superfast computers analyze our information … to decide in milliseconds whether to target us for marketing and more.”
Through digital dossiers that merge all of this information, we can be bought and sold in an instant — to financial marketers, fast-food companies, and health advertisers — all without our knowledge.”
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It seems there’s a Twitter account that has been copying my tweets, along with the tweets of half a dozen other tech people who follow me. I don’t mean stealing our jokes; I mean only tweeting paraphrases of our tweets, even fairly mundane ones. It’s a shame that I can’t show you the account in full, because after an hour of our trying to figure out what was going on, I finally made a public tweet about this — and the account instantly vanished. A couple people verified by user id that the account was actually deleted, not just renamed.
[...]
It looked like the account of an average nerd named “Nikki V.” Except that it had 1600 followers, yet never garnered a single like or retweet. And seemingly everything it wrote was a paraphrase of someone else.
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H.B. 93 began with good intentions. Georgia legislators saw a need to protect privacy by regulating how law enforcement agencies use automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology and limiting how long police can store location data collected on everyday drivers.
Unfortunately, the version of the bill currently on the fast track to passage is rife with problems that would not only harm the public, but threaten security research and hinder law enforcement’s ability to ensure the integrity of ALPR systems. It could be voted upon by the Georgia Senate as early as Thursday.
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EFF, ACLU, and Access Now released a statement in support of Apple and its stance on encryption last week. We called on the President to reject any attempt to force backdoors like the one the FBI was seeking to Apple’s operating system. We asked our communities to help by tweeting at the President.
Over three thousand people have joined us, sending a stream of tweets to the President.
Since then, the FBI has at least temporarily backed off its attempts to strong-arm Apple into defeating its own security. But the backdoor battle isn’t over: Obama still must answer our petition on encryption, signed by over 100,000 people.
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Still, that outcome is not nearly as bad as the alternative. Paradoxically, things would be even worse in the universe that Richard Clarke believes we live in: the one in which NSA does, in fact, have superpowers. I turn to that world in the final post in this series.
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Turning to the intelligence community as a solution to the Going Dark problem increases the interaction between the classified world and the criminal justice system at a time when there are good reasons to support more separation, not less.
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Clarke’s allegation that the FBI is more interested in legal precedent than in solving the problem appears to have been soundly refuted by this week’s events. Not only has the FBI actively sought alternative methods to unlock the phone, but it has apparently found such a method. And it is apparently willing to use it as an alternative to compelling Apple’s assistance under the All Writs Act.
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What federal agencies cannot loan one another is legal authorities; to the contrary, in providing technical assistance, they adopt one another’s legal constraints.
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Late last year, USA Today’s Brad Heath and Brett Kelman uncovered a massive DEA wiretap program — one that was being run almost exclusively through a single California state court judge and being signed off on by a single DA’s office. The wiretaps were likely illegal, seeing as the warrants weren’t being run by federal judges. They also weren’t being signed by the top prosecutor in the area, as is required federal law.
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My written evidence to the Scrutiny Committee in the UK Houses of Parliament that is currently examining the much-disputed Investigatory Powers Bill (IP)…
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“I try to stay up with Snowden,” said Lawrence “Larry” Wilkerson. “God, has he revealed a lot,” he laughed.
A retired Army colonel who served as the chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in President George W. Bush’s administration, Wilkerson has established himself as a prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy.
He sat down with Salon for an extended interview, discussing a huge range of issues from the war in Syria to climate change, from ISIS to whistle-blower Edward Snowden, of whom Wilkerson spoke quite highly.
“I think Snowden has done a service,” Wilkerson explained. “I wouldn’t have had the courage, and maybe not even the intellectual capacity, to do it the way he did it.”
Snowden’s reputation in mainstream U.S. politics, to put it lightly, is a negative one. In the summer of 2013, the 29-year-old techno wiz and private contractor for the NSA worked with journalists to expose the global surveillance program run by the U.S. government.
His revelations informed the public not only that the NSA was sucking up information on millions of average Americans’ private communications; they also proved that the U.S. government was likely violating international law by spying on dozens of other countries, and even listening to the phone calls of allied heads of state such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who subsequently compared the NSA to the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police.
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One of EFF’s three cases against the NSA, Smith v. Obama, has been sent back to the trial court by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The lawsuit was brought by an Idaho neonatal nurse, Anna Smith, who was outraged to discover that the NSA was engaging in bulk collection of telephone records. This same program is challenged in our First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA case and has also always been a part of our long-running Jewel v. NSA case.
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The FBI announced (without going into verifiable detail) that it had implemented new minimization procedures for handling information tipped to it by the NSA’s Prism dragnet. Oddly, this announcement arrived nearly simultaneously with the administration’s announcement that it was expanding the FBI’s intake of unminimized domestic communications collected by the NSA.
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You may have heard, recently, that the guy who was apparently behind the celebrity nudes hacking scandal (sometimes called “Celebgate” in certain circles, and the much more terrible “The Fappening” in other circles) recently pled guilty to the hacks, admitting that he used phishing techniques to get passwords to their iCloud accounts. But… that’s not all that he apparently used. He also used “lawful access” technologies to help him grab everything he could once he got in.
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With companies like Google and Facebook having developed keystroke fingerprinting technology to identify users based upon how long they press keys on the keyboard and the time between key presses, this poses new challenges for those wanting to stay completely anonymous on the Internet. A developer is trying to come up with a solution down to the display server or kernel level.
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A QUESTION ABOUT the potential of Donald Trump wielding power over the country’s eavesdropping capabilities evoked nervous laughter, and eventually a careful answer from the National Security Agency’s recently installed director of privacy and civil liberties.
Becky Richards, who was appointed to the newly created position in January 2014, insists the “checks and balances” on the intelligence community are strong — to protect employees so they can brainstorm new ideas without fear of reprisal, while also being properly monitored to prevent abuse.
At an event last week on Capitol Hill hosted by the Just Security law blog and NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, a reporter for The Intercept asked Richards, “Would you trust someone — such as, let’s say, a Donald Trump — to oversee these sorts of powers?”
“I’m going to edit that question,” said Deborah Pearlstein, associate professor at the Cardozo School of Law and a moderator for the panel.
“No matter who becomes president of the United States, you would want these exact same constraints in place?” she asked.
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Civil Rights
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For many, many years interstate inmate calling service (ICS) companies have charged inmates and their families upwards of $14 per minute for phone calls. Because these folks are in prison, and as we all know everybody in prison is guilty, drumming up sympathy to convert into political momentum had proven difficult. But after decades of activism the FCC intervened last year, voting to cap the amount companies can charge the incarcerated. According to the FCC’s updated rules, ICS companies can no longer charge more than twenty-two cents per minute — depending on the size of the prison. Caps were also placed on the fees companies could charge those trying to pay these already bloated bills.
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His second wife, Christina Estrada, a Pirelli calendar model, is divorcing him because he married (concurrently) a third wife, a Lebanese supermodel. Divorce in the UK is potentially expensive to billionaires. In September 2014 Juffali therefore acquired diplomatic immunity in the UK by becoming – wait for it – the Ambassador of the Caribbean island of St Lucia to the International Maritime Organisation, a UN agency located next to Lambeth Palace.
As Juffali has no connection to St Lucia or to international maritime affairs, the High Court in London ruled that the appointment was a “transparent subterfuge” and that Juffali does not have diplomatic immunity. This incensed Philip Hammond who argued that the courts have no right to question his “actions under the Royal Prerogative”.
[...]
If the United Kingdom were a democracy, the Court of Appeal would defy Hammond and the police would be investigating him.
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This July the GOP (Gasping Old Party) is going to hold its nominating convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Given the way things are headed, this may turn out to be a contested convention, where everyone but Donald Trump tries to make sure Donald Trump is not the Republican nominee. Trump, in a classy move, has suggested if he is not anointed there will be riots.
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For example, if a country has a law against GMOs (genetically modified organisms) the US corporation Monsanto can sue the country for “restraint of trade” in a tribunal that consists solely of corporations. The country’s own courts are bypassed. In short, the TPP permits corporations to negate any law in the countries that sign the “partnership” that does not serve the interest of the corporation.
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Islamic State militants attacked a European city this week, setting off three bombs in Brussels that killed 31 and injured 260. In the United States, the response was immediate, first with the outpouring of support from the public, then, unsurprisingly, with a flurry of bellicose pronouncements from most of the remaining major-party presidential candidates.
The violence overshadowed what might well be one of the most enduring and significant accomplishments of the Obama presidency: the reopening of relations with Cuba, cemented when he became the first president in 88 years to visit the island nation.
After the bombings in Brussels, Republican candidate Ted Cruz said, “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Donald Trump told NBC regarding Salah Abdeslam, the suspect in the November Paris massacre who was captured in Brussels last Friday, “If they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding.” On CNN, Trump said, “He may be talking, but he’ll talk faster with the torture.” Give Trump credit for calling it what it is, torture. But actually advocating for torture?
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On March 13, 2016, off-duty Farmer’s Branch police officer Ken Johnson confronted two youths — 16-year-old Jose Raul Cruz and his friend Edgar Rodriguez — as they were allegedly attempting to break into a car. The youths fled, and Johnson pursued them, ramming the teens’ vehicle and forcing it to spin out of control. According to the officer’s account, an “altercation” ensued, during which Johnson drew his service weapon and fired, wounding Rodriguez and killing Cruz.
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When the police arrived, several customers explained to the officers that the bar staff were enforcing the rule against us only. Some told the police that a one-drink rule did not exist. Others even tried to buy us drinks. But the bartenders wouldn’t let them.
And still, the police forced us — two Black women in the bar — to leave.
Police departments are supposed to enforce criminal laws and threats to public safety, not enforce personal biases.
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An Israeli soldier was arrested on Thursday after a rights group published clear video images of him shooting a wounded, immobilized Palestinian suspect in the head following a knife attack in the West Bank city of Hebron earlier in the day.
The graphic, distressing video was posted online by B’Tselem, an Israeli group that provides cameras to Palestinians to help them document human rights abuses in the West Bank territory that has been under military rule since Israel first occupied it in 1967.
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In a stinging rebuke to Europe’s political leaders, four prominent humanitarian groups are ceasing operations in refugee camps on several Greek islands this week because of what they characterize as human rights violations in the wake of the controversial EU-Turkey refugee deal.
“We will not allow our assistance to be instrumentalized for a mass expulsion operation, and we refuse to be part of a system that has no regard for the humanitarian or protection needs of asylum seekers and migrants,” said Marie Elisabeth Ingres, the head of the Doctors without Borders (MSF) mission in Greece, on Tuesday.
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Somali Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke is joining a campaign to end female genital mutilation (FGM) in Somalia.
Sharmarke signed an online petition proposing a federal ban of the long-standing practice that 98 percent of Somali women undergo. Ifrah Ahmed, an anti-FGM activist, who herself underwent the procedure as a child, told the BBC she persuaded Sharmarke to sign the petition. Sahra Samatar, Somalia’s minister of women and human rights, said Sharmarke’s support is a “huge boost” to the campaign for a national anti-FGM legislation.
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But the mosque remains a concern for the Belgian government: in August, a WikiLeaks cable revealed that a staff member of the Saudi embassy in Belgium was expelled years ago over his active role in spreading the extreme so-called Takfiri dogma. The cable – between the Saudi King and his Home Minister – referred to Belgian demands that the ICC’s Saudi director, Khalid Alabri, should leave the country, saying that his messages were far too extreme, and that his status as director meant he should not be preaching anyway.
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It appeared as though Obama had drawn the conclusion that damage to American credibility in one region of the world would bleed into others, and that U.S. deterrent credibility was indeed at stake in Syria. Assad, it seemed, had succeeded in pushing the president to a place he never thought he would have to go. Obama generally believes that the Washington foreign-policy establishment, which he secretly disdains, makes a fetish of “credibility”—particularly the sort of credibility purchased with force. The preservation of credibility, he says, led to Vietnam. Within the White House, Obama would argue that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.”
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The Swedish Academy, which selects the winners of the Nobel Prize in literature, has condemned an Iranian death warrant against British writer Salman Rushdie, 27 years after it was pronounced.
Two members quit the academy in 1989 after it refused to condemn Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini’s fatwa, or religious edict, against Rushdie for allegedly blaspheming Islam in his book “The Satanic Verses.” Citing its code against political involvement, the academy issued a statement defending free expression but without explicitly supporting Rushdie.
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The British government has formally asked a United Nations panel to review its finding that Julian Assange is “arbitrarily detained” in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, calling the opinion “deeply flawed”.
In its first formal response to the finding of the UN working group on arbitrary detention, which published its opinion in February, the Foreign Office confirmed it would contest the finding, saying: “The original conclusions of the UN working group are inaccurate and should be reviewed.”
In a statement, the Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire said: “We want to ensure the working group is in possession of the full facts. Our request for a review of the opinion sets those facts out clearly.
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International Working Women’s Day was earlier this month, a day that reminds the world how far it has yet to go to achieve just treatment of women in the workplace. Obviously there are many fronts on which to fight to dismantle patriarchy, and also cissexism, and also transphobia, and also racism, and sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming just to think of a world where people treat each other right.
Against this backdrop, it’s surprising that some policies are rarely mentioned by people working on social change. This article is about one of them — a simple local change that can eliminate the pay gap across all axes of unfair privilege.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Zero-rating — the nifty trick companies use to edge around net neutrality rules — is being offered to developing countries as a way to provide cheap internet access to their citizens. There’s a bit of altruism in the offerings, but there’s also a lot of walls surrounding gardens. Facebook’s “Free Basics” is a zero-rated platform that functions like a twenty-first century AOL, funneling users into Facebook’s version of the internet.
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DRM
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The interesting thing about the EME spec is that it doesn’t describe DRM – it just seems to describe an intricately shaped hole in which the only thing that will fit is DRM.
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I participated in a rally against the W3C endorsing DRM last Sunday. I know it was recorded, but I haven’t seen any audio or video recordings up yet, and some friends have asked what really happened there. I thought I’d write up what I remembered.
First, some context: the rally (and subsequent roundtable discussion) wasn’t officially part of LibrePlanet, but it did happen right after it. This was one of the busiest free software focused weeks of my life, and just earlier in the week I had been participating in the Social Web Working Group at the W3C, trying to hammer out our work on federation and other related standards. I’m so excited about this work, that it stands out in an interesting contrast to my feelings on a different “standards in the W3C” issue: the real danger that the W3C will endorse DRM by recommending the Encrypted Media Extensions specification.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The World Health Organization has released a report on the role of intellectual property in local production of medicines in developing countries. According to the report, the way countries design their intellectual property system is key in the development of local innovation and production. However, health outcomes will depend on the accessibility and affordability of good-quality essential medicines.
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Trademarks
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The UK Supreme Court’s decision in the Trunki design dispute has generated debate among design law practitioners, concern in the design community and a reaction from the UK IPO. Kingsley Egbuonu reports
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Here’s a fun trademark tiff involving a “punk rock” flea market and the shambling, barely-reanimated corpse of a legendary band. [via Techdirt reader Cheyenne Hohman]
The Misfits were an influential punk rock band — one that dipped heavily into the murky waters of horror and featured lead singer Glenn Danzig, whose deep bellowing voice overshadowed his lifelong dream to grow up when he grew up. Over the years, the band has split and reformed multiple times when not lobbing the occasional lawsuit at each other. As it stands now, not a single original band member remains in the lineup, with bassist Jerry Only being the only long-running connection between various band mutations.
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Copyrights
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In its ongoing efforts to have pirated content removed from the Internet, the BPI is about to hit a new milestone. This week the music industry group will report its 200 millionth URL to Google. Although the takedown notices are processed swiftly, the music industry group believes “urgent reform” is needed to properly address the piracy problem.
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Despite the fact that copyright has been repeatedly extended and strengthened over the years, the thought never seems to cross publishers’ minds that they could ever have too much of it, or that the public might have some countervailing rights here. As a consequence of this insatiable appetite, there have been a number of recent moves to create an ancillary copyright, also known as a “snippet tax,” “link tax” and “Google tax,” since it aims to make it obligatory to pay for making even short excerpts or linking to copyright material — for example, in search results. Rather amazingly, publishers are still pushing for this new monopoly “right” despite abundant evidence from their own research that it harms their businesses.
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Is there anything more gloriously effed-up than IP law? I submit to you there is not. Here’s the sub-headline for Eriq Gardner’s Hollywood Reporter article, which deftly sums up the predicament facing a filmmaker looking to make a movie based on an old Buck Rogers novella.
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The legacy recording industry just has a way with attacking any new technology service that helps it adapt, doesn’t it? Whether it’s ringtones or video games or YouTube or iTunes, the industry always takes the same basic approach: denounce the new offering as evil. Threaten and/or sue. Maybe take some equity as a way to “settle” the legal threats/suits. And then squeeze the companies for more and more money until they’re dead. It’s happened over and over again, and we’re now witnessing the same thing again in streaming music — even as it’s turning into a major cash cow. For whatever reason, to make this work, the industry wants to turn this cash cow into an enemy.
And a strange enemy at that, as none of my enemies are paying me $2.4 billion a year in revenue. But that’s what the RIAA’s own data shows came in to its coffers for 2015, representing an enormous upward trend in streaming revenue for the music industry.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Servers, Windows at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“I’d be glad to help tilt lotus into into the death spiral. I could do it Friday afternoon but not Saturday. I could do it pretty much any time the following week.”
–Brad Silverberg, Microsoft, now sponsor of Mesosphere/DCOS
Summary: As foreseen by Techrights, DCOS and Microsoft climb into the same bed and help dominate GNU/Linux using proprietary software
The predictions we made are becoming a reality, based on what’s reported in the media right now. An IDG article says: “Designed to help enterprises build microservices-based applications, run big-data systems and operate massive production container environments, Mesosphere’s Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) is “the most exciting new enterprise operating system since Linux,” said Lak Ananth, managing director at Hewlett Packard Ventures, in a statement.”
“The predictions we made are becoming a reality, based on what’s reported in the media right now.”As we noted a few months back, DCOS is about control by a central authority (see “Microsoft-connected Mesosphere Threatens to Eliminate Free Software in the Datacentre”). It is connected to (and funded by) notorious thugs from Microsoft’s antitrust days, just like Xamarin before Microsoft took over [1, 2].
DCOS is proprietary, not FOSS. “In addition to forming the basis for Microsoft’s Azure Container Service,” says IDG, “DCOS will also soon run on Windows Server as well as Linux thanks to the collaboration between the two firms, Trifiro said. That technology is expected to enter beta later this quarter.”
“It doesn’t take a domain expert to foresee that. EEE in motion.”Seems like a convenient mechanism by which to make GNU/Linux subservient to (or dominated by) Windows, just like in the case of Hyper-V. It doesn’t take a domain expert to foresee that. EEE in motion. █
“What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS”
–Brad Silverberg, Microsoft
“b) put a kind gentle message in setup. like an incompatible tsr message, but not everytime the user starts windows. [...] the most sensible thing from a development standpoint is to continue to build dependencies on msdos into windows.”
–Brad Silverberg, Microsoft
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD at 4:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Still stabbing FOSS in the back
Summary: Black Duck, a company that came from a Microsoft guy, continues to generate negative publicity for Free/Open Source software (FOSS) in order to attract business
YESTERDAY afternoon I was sent this bizarre article with a rather bizarre headline. Upon closer inspection it was from IDG and I immediately suspected (based on the headline alone) that Black Duck had something to do with it. It turned out that I was right.
IDG’s Maria Korolov apparently got used by Black Duck for shameless self-promotion, weeks after all that ‘future’ of Open Source PR/publicity stunt [1, 2, 3] (all the articles about it were listed in our daily links without further comment) or the ‘rookies’ stunt [1, 2, 3]. We tried hard to ignore Black Duck, but Black Duck sure isn’t ignoring FOSS. It’s acting like a parasite feeding off FOSS news, in order to sell its proprietary software of course!
“IDG’s Maria Korolov apparently got used by Black Duck for shameless self-promotion…”As usual, Black Duck, a proprietary software company and false prophet for FOSS, interjected itself into articles about FOSS; this yielded FOSS-hostile headlines in IDG, for example “Public concerned about security flaws in government open source code.” (in CSO)
This article contains Black Duck talking points: “In addition, open source code poses two additional security problems, said Mike Pittenger, vice president of security strategy at Black Duck Software. “Open source projects are often ubiquitous, so if there’s a vulnerability it creates a target-rich environment for attackers,” he said.”
“They are trying to sell proprietary software by piggybacking FOSS.”There is also pure marketing there: “Black Duck is currently tracking more than 1.5 million different open source projects, he added.”
Remember the time Black Duck told the media that it can cost $25,000 to fix a bug in FOSS? That was just months ago. Why does the media keep entertaining these propagandists at all? They are trying to sell proprietary software by piggybacking FOSS. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The letter from Union Syndicale Federale and some news regarding the staff unions, one of which seems yellow and another genuine
EARLIER this week we published images of a letter from Union Syndicale Federale, in which FFPE-EPO was slammed for its MoU with EPO management. We’ve finally found some time to manually extract the text from it and it goes like this (with our emphasis in yellow):
Brussels, 18 March 2016
USF position on the Memorandum of understanding signed 2nd March 2016 EPO/FFPE
Union Syndicale Federale (USF) has been occasionally a partner of FFPE since the signature of the first “accord cadre” with the EU Commission decades ago.
USF is very disappointed by FFPE’s support for the EPO (European Patent Office) Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed on the 2nd March 2016 in Brussels.
In contrast with FFPE, the Union Syndicale branches at the European Patent Office (Staff Union of the EPO, SUEPO) affiliated to USF did not sign the MoU. While the signatures under the document only include FFPE-The Hague (the only FFPE branch of the EPO), FFPE officials from the federal level at FFPE attended the ceremony in Brussels (European Commission, Council of Europe). It is obvious that FFPE as a whole decided to be outspoken about the MoU submitted by the EPO president and to support it. We do not know what considerations drove FFPE at federal level to this step — perhaps the insignificance of FFPE in The Hague (a few dozen members, according to media reports, no members at the headquarters in Munich or other EPO places of employment), to be compared with more than 3000 SUEPO members may have played a role. Whatever their motivation, the FFPE signature raises questions about FFPE’s credibility as a federation of genuine staff unions.
It is our position that it is unthinkable for any union to sign a MoU with the EPO while three SUEPO leaders in Munich have been severely sanctioned, two of them being summarily dismissed in January 2016 on very questionable grounds. SUEPO participated in the early tripartite meetings with the EPO administration and FFPE to discuss a draft MoU and we can even recall from the first meeting in May 2015 everyone’s readiness to establish a MoU based on the framework agreements already in place at other EU institutions.
But the first prerequisite, of course, is that the EPO President reinstates the dismissed union officials, suspends all other cases and investigations against union representatives and submits all such sanctions to external review. Further prerequisites are that SUEPO’s claim that the severe limitations on the right to strike introduced with EPO Circular 347 (June 2013) must be removed, since they appear to violate fundamental rights and freedoms provided under ILO Conventions. The so far ignored Dutch Appeal Court’s Judgement of 2014 in favour of SUEPO-The Hague must finally be enforced by the EPO and the questionable internal EPO investigation guidelines must be removed.
Considering the disastrous HR policy at the EPO of the last three years which has been amply reported upon in the media (see the links at the bottom of this communication), signing an agreement simply on the basis of good trust should not have been possible for any staff union.
Furthermore, the final content of the MoU has some unconvincing elements: the “generous” authorization to communicate twice per year with staff members via internal e-mails (Art.16.3 of the MoU), the total absence of representativeness criteria to be met for formal recognition (Art.7 of the MoU) and the veto the EPO President may exercise over the agenda of meetings (Art.11, 12.2, 13.4 of the MoU) clearly fail to counterbalance the constraints imposed on the signatory unions elsewhere in the document (Art.13.6 of the MoU).
USF firmly believes that it is just unthinkable, even for a union like FFPE that happens to compete with USF branches, to let competition between unions prevail over their fundamental rights. FFPE members in international public service deserve a much better leadership. Consequently, 2 March 2016 will be remembered as a black day in FFPE’s history and a sad memory for all genuine staff unions serving staff in the international public sector.
Finally, we refute the EPO President’s claims that anything meaningful was achieved with the agreement of the 2nd March 2016.
The MoU is available under:
http://de.scribd.com/doc/301894955/EPO-Memorandum-of-understanding
Links to public comments on the social dialogue at the European Patent Office
http://suepo.org/public/news
(see also the TV reports in Germany and the Netherlands available as links on the SUEPO website)
Bernd Loescher
USF President
On Thursday we saw a new comment noting that the “words of USF are not harsh but they call a spade a spade: no true union would do what FFPE-EPO did whilst spending its time criticising SUEPO for years, falling in the back of SUEPO by submitting documents to the defense position of the EPO in the Office court case in TH and now signing this appalling MoU.”
“FFPE is known everywhere to be a yellow union. They are pro management at the EU too. At least they should assume they positions !”
Recall what we previously wrote on the subject.
- In the EPO’s Official Photo Op, “Only One of the Faces is Actually FFPE-EPO”
- Further Evidence Suggests and Shows Stronger Evidence That Team Battistelli Uses FFPE-EPO as ‘Yellow Union’ Against SUEPO
- “FFPE-EPO Was Set up About 9 Years Ago With Management Encouragement”
- Fallout of the FFPE EPO MoU With Battistelli’s Circle
- The EPO’s Media Strategy at Work: Union Feuds and Group Fracturing
- Caricature of the Day: Recognising FFPE EPO
- Union Syndicale Federale Slams FFPE-EPO for Helping Abusive EPO Management by Signing a Malicious, Divisive Document
- FFPE-EPO Says MoU With Battistelli Will “Defend Employment Conditions” (Updated)
- Their Masters’ Voice (Who Block Techrights): FFPE-EPO Openly Discourages Members From Reading Techrights
Problem Solved? Nope. Hardon Gets What She Worked Hard For.
Meanwhile, there are several indications that SUEPO is getting some justice (however little). Sources are telling us that in the case of Elizabeth Hardon the sanctions/dismissal was softened somewhat. It’s a symbolic token, but it might be a first step among several. “You probably already heard,” one person told us, “that the decision against Elizabeth Hardon was partially reversed by the president this week. During an internal review procedure, Mr Battistelli maintained the dismissal but he dropped the 20 percent reduction of her pension. [...] Mr Battistelli must have had a lot of pressure from the Council to make a little step back, for the first time.”
“Staff representatives enjoy some particular protections and arbitrarily punishing them for their union duties is not compatible with this century in a civilised continent.”This kind of sanction was so controversial that it’s no wonder it had to be removed. But it’s hardly enough. Based on the latest votes, Hardon remains a leader in SUEPO, so her dismissal still looks terrible and simply unjust. If Battistelli truly believes that giving people their retirement entitlement (which they worked hard for) after firing them and just before Easter can be considered a ‘gift’, then he must be assuming that concessions from him can be as “‘generous’ [as] authorization to communicate twice per year with staff members via internal e-mails,” to quote the letter above.
SUEPO has already made its demands clear on numerous occasions, both while negotiating a potential MoU [PDF] and when it later made a call for strike. Staff representatives enjoy some particular protections and arbitrarily punishing them for their union duties is not compatible with this century in a civilised continent. █
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