12.14.15
Posted in Finance at 5:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“The taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.”
–Will Rogers
Summary: Microsoft’s long history of tax evasion is finally taking some toll as the US tax authority, the IRS, is going after Microsoft and unravels its international network (or syndicate) of tax avoidance
WE find it amazing (not just interesting) to see a branch of the US government, the IRS, going after ‘big fish’ (for a change). These bodies or branches of government are usually corrupted enough to overlook abuses of powerful entities that are closely connected to the government and thus pose a threat to the career of anyone ‘daring’ to expose and litigate. Remember what happened to the judge who threatened to split Microsoft?
“Remember what happened to the judge who threatened to split Microsoft?”Microsoft is not an ordinary company. Remember that Microsoft actually threatened the IRS [1, 2] for merely ‘daring’ to look into (and potentially expose) organised tax evasion by these arrogant thugs at Microsoft. Microsoft’s avoidance of taxes is a long-explored subject at Techrights, so we are delighted to see the IRS finally tackling the issue. It’s well overdue and belated (by several decades). Never forget that Microsoft literally threatened the IRS for merely doing its job, which was to expose tax evasion. The poor little IRS thought it was big enough to take on Microsoft (like DOJ taking on Wall Street), whereupon Microsoft bullied it with deterrence lawsuits. Interestingly enough, please note that the same legal firm which lobbies alongside Microsoft on the patent front is the same one threatening to sue me over EPO coverage. The EPO started sending threatening legal letters only after (and only regarding) EPO abuses implicating Microsoft. How will Microsoft respond to the IRS other than threaten the IRS with lawsuits?
“Microsoft’s avoidance of taxes is a long-explored subject at Techrights, so we are delighted to see the IRS finally tackling the issue.”Matt Day’s detailed article about it (in the Seattle Times) says: “Court documents in a case between Microsoft and the IRS provide a detailed look at how the company, like other multinational corporations, has created a complex structure that allows it to minimize its tax bill.”
It is worth noting that the Seattle Times was paid by Bill Gates and it showed, so this article may be ‘risky’ for their financial lifeline. We have already shown how sites which receive Bill Gates’ money shortly thereafter remove criticism of Microsoft (even retrospectively!).
There’s a spurious part about “other multinational corporations”. Saying that a lot of other companies (not under IRS probe) evade tax is a Microsoft-serving evasion tactic. Microsoft is, in our experience, more criminal and corrupt than counterparts. We have provided ample evidence of this over the years.
“Remember when a whistleblower exposed Microsoft corruption (financial fraud to be precise) and Microsoft paid him $4 million to shut up and then scuttled the investigation with the SEC?”What the IRS says about Microsoft isn’t a shocking revelation but perhaps the first time (in recent history) that those in positions of (relatively) high power are “brave” enough to say the truth. Remember when a whistleblower exposed Microsoft corruption (financial fraud to be precise) and Microsoft paid him $4 million to shut up and then scuttled the investigation with the SEC? That was back in the late 90s. Microsoft’s financial situation isn’t what it seems and the company does not operate like it publicly claims. Microsoft has been mostly a piggy-bank for Bill Gates, who himself does not pay tax. Bill Gates is avoiding billions in taxes by pretending he runs a charity. Mark Zuckerberg is to latest to imitate this nasty PR ploy and Microsoft was perhaps one of the earliest software giants (if not the pioneer) when it comes to massive-scale tax evasion. Many software companies just thought, “hey, we can do this too.”
“From 2001 to 2006,” Day explains, “Microsoft completed a series of intracompany deals that, in exchange for upfront payments, shifted the rights to software code and other assets developed largely in the U.S., to subsidiaries in Bermuda, Ireland, Singapore and Puerto Rico.
“When Bill Gates bribes large newspapers they just tend to focus on tax avoidance by companies other than Microsoft.”“Those deals reduced Microsoft’s cumulative tax bill in future years by tens of billions of dollars, according to court documents and an analysis of the company’s filings.”
Read it again: “tens of billions of dollars” (and the IRS usually just cracks down on businesses over a few thousands of dollars).
Singapore, as it turns out, continues to enrich itself (by “itself” we mean few corrupt politicians and businessmen) by facilitating such tax evasion, much like Switzerland (Singapore seems to have become the Zurich of Asia, and that’s not meant to be a compliment).
Day has posted some short summaries of his article in Twitter, noting that “on taxes, Microsoft behaves like much of the rest of big Corporate America: they’ve tried to limit the cash they send to governments.”
“Why did it take two decades for the IRS to do something about it?”No, as explained above, Microsoft is quite unique. When Bill Gates bribes large newspapers they just tend to focus on tax avoidance by companies other than Microsoft. We have given examples of this, e.g. The Guardian.
Day says that “Microsoft spent 20 years building a network of subsidiaries that, among other things, avoided a lot of taxes.”
Why did it take two decades for the IRS to do something about it? Could it be Microsoft’s influence in the US government? If it wasn’t a government-embedded company like Microsoft, one would call it organised crime and it would be front page news (many tens of billions of dollars in tax evasion).
“If it wasn’t a government-embedded company like Microsoft, one would call it organised crime and it would be front page news (many tens of billions of dollars in tax evasion).”Day says that “Microsoft officially sells most products from Ireland, Puerto Rico or Singapore. In the U.S., most sales start in Nevada (few biz taxes).”
Yes, and guess who’s facilitating this. It is well documented, as some people have shown for many years, that Microsoft put former executives as moles inside the local government, perhaps in order to facilitate tax-related crime and send everything from Washington to Reno. We named the people involved about half a decade ago. Where was the IRS all this time? It couldn’t defend itself by saying that it hadn’t noticed. People from inside Microsoft complained about this.
Day says: “Each of Microsoft’s global hubs is designed to place some profit in Bermuda, the island tax haven. It’s unclear how much.”
“We named the people involved about half a decade ago.”Well, it’s time to investigate. This is a big case implicating “big” people and involving a lot of money. Don’t expect any arrests though. Rich people rarely go to prison.
Day adds: “That structure, created ~2001-2006, saved Microsoft tens of billions of dollars in taxes. Likely 100s of mill saved in Washington state.”
According to a campaigner from Microsoft — one who left Microsoft and then became a vocal critic of Microsoft’s tax evasion (he even created a whole Web site about it) — we’re talking about well over a billion, not “100s of mill”, ‘saved’ (means evaded) in Washington state. Half a decade ago it was estimated at well over a billion, so maybe it’s already $2 billion.
“It’s a massive international racket and we hope that the IRS will get to the bottom of it rather than spend a lot of time going after “easy” cases and crushing relatively poor people.”As we have said here before, based on over a decade of research, Microsoft is not an ordinary company. It’s more like a clique of power-hungry people. Microsoft continues to conveniently masquerade as “software company” when in reality it has patent trolls (satellites) bullying practicing firms and funneling untold amounts of money to offshore divisions and subsidiaries such as “licensing” (e.g. Android licensing). It’s a massive international racket and we hope that the IRS will get to the bottom of it rather than spend a lot of time going after “easy” cases and crushing relatively poor people.
Apple, to its ‘credit’ [pun intended], seems to have learned Microsoft’s dirty tricks and a new article from the financial press suggests that Apple too is in trouble over taxes, at least in Europe. Well, are governments around the world strong enough to tackle the Big Evaders? As in Big Business? Whose side are they on? Let’s see if we have a real functioning democracy.
The financial crisis of 2008 showed whose side governments tend to be on when they not only failed to arrest a lot of (likely) guilty bankers but actually took taxpayers’ money and gave it out to these bankers as a “bailout” gift. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The latest media strategy on the face of it…
See this classic old article for parallels
Summary: Benoît Battistelli’s EPO uses a propaganda strategy which we are very much familiar with (like Microsoft trying to cast other companies, e.g. Google in the Scroogled PR/lobbying campaign, as ‘equally evil’)
LAST week we warned about the greenwashing spin from the incredibly unpopular EPO (it continues even this week), but a more disturbing spin that we are seeing right now, both in press articles and in mysterious anonymous comments, is that SUEPO is basically “as bad as” (or as violent as, e.g. "armed" "Nazis", "snipers", or Mafia) the EPO’s management. That’s laughable, but if this kind of spin is repeated often enough, then some people might actually believe it.
“That’s laughable, but if this kind of spin is repeated often enough, then some people might actually believe it.”We don’t know if this is some kind of a plot which came about in boardroom brainstorming with FTI Consulting (a nasty US-based firm that is paid a obscene amount of money from the EPO right now to poison the media), but let’s just say that this kind of spin warrants a rebuttal.
Junge Welt published an article on the 11th of December (Friday), a day after the latest Munich protest, and it is titled “Unrechtsstaat im Staate”. We still hope that a translation will turn up as the article is in German, but we imagine that it also airs the EPO’s spin, supposedly for ‘balance’.
“Is this related to the EPO’s PR campaigns, coinciding with threats to sue publishers?”One person in Twitter says “take some popcorn and enjoy reading the comments” in IP Kat, but as we noted about a week ago, there is an increasingly-distracting element in these anonymous comments. It is discrediting critics of the EPO and distracting readers from the real issues and the real scandals. Is this related to the EPO’s PR campaigns, coinciding with threats to sue publishers? Again, we can’t tell for sure, but it seems quite probable.
The one downside of comments is that there is no quality control, not even a scoring system. IP Kat has a lot of factually-incorrect comments, usually the pro-EPO ones. Well, we don’t want to repost too many comments from there, but there is clearly some kind of spin going on (whether paid-for or gratis), culminating this morning with the following two responses. The first one says (responding to the pro-EPO “nero”):
The “dental non-issue” is only a “non-issue” inside nero’s head.
The ostensibly innocuous “top-up insurance” is very clearly a “sweetener” for the members of the smaller Eastern European delegations. The fact that nobody had needed it for the last 40 years and that it was introduced at a time of “austerity” and “cutbacks” (for EPO staff) should be enough to make any objective observer suspicious. Not to mention the fact that it was introduced by VP4 who has quite a reputation as a confectionary expert from his previous career in the Croatian State Intellectual Property Office.
If there really is nothing to hide then I’m sure that we can look forward to publication in due course of the figures of the number of incidents of “urgent dental treatment” of AC members and the costs involved. All in the interests of transparency …
nero is doing a good job as a presidential sock-puppet but like BB he has obviously never heard of the “Streisand effect”.
Here is another:
I am very sad, I would even say exasperated when reading comments that tend to imply that BB and SUEPO are behaving in a similar (bad) manner. This appears to be an absurd attempt to prove that, if BB is behaving in a poor fashion the same applies to the trade union.
Well, may be there are just a couple of heartless persons out there not aware of what is going on at epo.
The union SUEPO, set up about 4 decades ago, is committed to defend the interests of the staff and by the very same way the interests of the epo. Remember the epo would be nothing without his highly skilled staff. A couple of persons, team BB, is systematically and fiercely attacking the epo staff. Team BB started with SUEPO, imposing new rules for strikes, for electing Staff reps, then continued harassing sick staff, imposing an infamous ” house arrest”, and subsequently attacks the benefits of the pensioners and imposes unachievable working conditions for examiners etc….This being just a short list of the “achievements”.
Now please tell me, who is behaving in a poor manner?
SUEPO is trying to counter the systematic destruction of the EPO by team Battistelli. In my opinion it his an honourable task for a trade union. As a reward 3 leading members are on the runway to be fired.
Therefore putting the leading team of the epo and the trade union on the same level is mala fide
Last but not least: the “non dental issue” is a mere statement of facts: SUEPO didn’t write the minutes of the quoted AC session. AC members get free dental treatment. Fact! Whether AC members misuse this benefit is not the point here. Why should they, anyway?
Notice how the pro-EPO snippets are nitpicking the 'dental' issue, which is far from the main scandal anyway. It’s not entirely new, either. Florian Müller mentioned it last week when he wrote: “The closest thing to corruption–and “closest” is an overstatement–that I wrote about was that the EPO allegedly pays for the visits of its supervisors (especially those from relatively poor countries) to Munich doctors.”
“Watch out for two kinds of very similar spin.”This links to something he wrote about it a year ago, titled “European Patent Office pays for health insurance of members of its oversight body, staff union says”.
Watch out for two kinds of very similar spin. One is about “similarly bad” arguments from SUEPO and another about “similarly violent” SUEPO. Well, for a number of days now (if not a few weeks), the EPO’s spokespeople too have been trying to portray the biggest staff union as aggressive or at least equally aggressive (as the EPO’s management), even though its actions are largely reactionary. They’re reactions to the management’s attacks on staff (humans) and on human rights themselves. █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 2:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
There is a clever and nasty new media strategy, aided by evil peripheral firms
Summary: Benoît Battistelli’s EPO is engaged in an information war — a war of spin and deception in the mass media (a new media strategy on the face of it) and we respond to it below because many of the EPO’s arguments are either fictional or defamatory (or both)
AN EPO article which we mentioned here the other day, an article from Heise (largest news source in Germany, at least for IT), has just been translated. An accurate English translation is formally published by SUEPO, the largest EPO union whose existence predates even mine and the EPO’s (almost my parents’ existence too, if SUEPO’s predecessor/previous identity is also considered). SUEPO (SU stands for Staff Union) isn’t some “new union on the block”, it has a very long history and a huge number of members, who make it a legitimate representation of staff’s views. Its members are very well educated; many are doctors from all across Europe. There is a very well-funded (about €73,000 per month) reputation laundering campaign going on (in conjunction with union-busting with outside consultants), so we expected to see some myths making their way into the article. We hereby rebut several such myths, having researched this topic for many hundreds of hours (if not more than a thousand hours).
For completeness and for future reference we decided to make an HTML copy of the translation and highlight the curious (or relatively new) bits — those that add crucial and/or new information. Our response is at the bottom.
European Patent Office: Conflict between Management and Staff rapidly coming to a Head
The European Patent Office has suspended the Staff Union leadership; now the situation threatens to escalate. The Office President has branded the staff representatives as “Mafia”; they speak of “institutional violence”.
The atmosphere between the management cadre and the staff union at the European Patent Office (EPO) is getting more and more toxic. In the dispute over the efficiency drive by Office President, Benoît Battistelli, he has now launched a venomous flood of rhetoric on the international staff union of the institution (SUEPO) and challenged their legitimacy.
Atmosphere of Terror
Frenchman Battistelli is quoted by the online service “Politico” as insisting that the union is not a representative body but a “Mafia-like” organization. At the same time he refutes the allegation that he himself has created an “atmosphere of terror”. One member of staff had anonymously claimed that the staff felt they were being “squeezed like lemons”, which was affecting their health.
Over the past three and a quarter years, five of the around 7000 staff members have committed suicide, the last incident being in August. Suepo are insisting that the deaths should be independently investigated, in the light of the changed working conditions. Battistelli has been the chief executive of the Office since 2010.
An EPO spokesperson has complained to the WIPR service that, on a lower level, leading management and executive personnel have been increasingly confronted with “personal attacks”, excessive references in blogs and leaflets, and even “calls for violence”.
Cheap accusations
Of course, the union is not going to take this lying down. These “cheap accusations” are blatant inventions to arouse sympathy for the Office leadership, now that it is increasingly coming under closer scrutiny by the media. But it is not the managers who are the victims; on the contrary, it is they who are introducing “institutional violence”, in particular against those who have not declared themselves to be in agreement with “certain regulations”. Overall, this tactic is said to be being used to challenge the integrity and worth of honest employees, who have in no way deserved this.
Suepo has again called for a “peaceful demonstration” on Thursday at the Office headquarters in Munich. The protest is aimed in particular at the “sustained attacks” against staff representatives, which are said to have now reached a peak with the suspension and the initiation of disciplinary measures against the union executive.
Last Thursday, and the week before, according to figures from Suepo and the police, some 2000 staff members have already taken part in similar gatherings. The EPO union has support from colleagues at the Office for the Harmonization of the Internal Market (OHIM), the counterpart to the Patent Office in matters relating to Community trademarks. In a press release the staff representatives there expressed their “deep concern” about the situation at the EPO, which needs to be addressed urgently.
Fear of retribution
The Administrative Council of the Office is apparently now being approached, so that union officials can once again address the concerns of the staff members without fear of repercussions. The additional protection of their votes, which are critical to the issue, is said to be essential if an abuse of power is to be prevented. The EPO leadership is accusing the suspended Chair of the Union, Elizabeth Hardon, among other things, of having talked too much, and to have threatened and bullied Union members.
In the local (heise) online “Accusation letter”, the talk is of “sniper” methods, said to have been used against Hardon. As well as that, it seems evident that even the private E-mail accounts of the SUEPO executive have been monitored.
There had already been earlier complaints of a comparatively new “Investigation Unit” of the Office having used keyloggers and cameras and of having worked with somewhat murky service providers such as the British “Control Risk Group”, to spy on staff members. Hardon herself refutes the accusations against her entirely, and has lodged an appeal with the EPO data protection supervisory authority.
Waving patents through in a rush
Battistelli has meanwhile lavished praise in a local (heise) online circular on the ongoing efforts by the employees, which he claims have led to increasing effectiveness and greater productivity. In concordance with the new performance-based assessment system, in 2015 a total of 18.4 million Euro was distributed by way of bonus payments to the workforce. This is said to be 20 percent more than in the previous year. Suepo contends that the remunerations are hardly an issue, and in any event are only a “perverse incentive” not to examine patent applications adequately and wave them through as rapidly as possible. (kbe)
Points that Techrights wishes to make very briefly about this article:
- It’s not SUEPO that’s “Mafia”, Battistelli is merely projecting to give an illusion of parity (as if both sides are aggressive and subversive). This seems like the latest PR/media strategy as we’re seeing it quite a lot these days.
- The incredibly cliquish Team Battistelli challenges the legitimacy of SUEPO simply because, by Battistelli’s warped standards, opposition is neither warranted nor allowed. He is a spoiled brat from a rich people’s school and it still shows. Contrast that with Alison Brimelow. What a spectacular difference!
- Team Battistelli has been trying to paint itself as preventer of suicides and blame such tragedies on SUEPO; what a nerve they have…
- The “calls for violence” which Team Battistelli speaks of are fictional. There is no evidence of them. We wrote several articles about this and it is conveniently related to point (1) above. Journalists oughtn’t print such nonsense without fact-checking.
- The "sniper" narrative is a shameful personal attack, intended to bias or incite the reader of a poor (and otherwise very narrow/limited) set of accusations against Hardon
- With Control Risks Group in the mix, we urge people to encrypt or use Tor. Control Risks Group isn’t just some ordinary company/firm; it’s now a military-grade union busting-service (with reputation for that in Europe).
- SUEPO is right to suggest that patent applications are now being examined rather poorly. Staff is put under pressure to grant in bulk or otherwise risk losing the Christmas vacation
The last point suggests to us that the Team Battistelli-led EPO is gradually emulating the notorious USPTO (very deeply involved in and dominated by large corporations, with terrible grant rates).
“We wrote thousands of articles about the USPTO and we have great (and growing) fear that those same disasters (and patent predators) will reach Europe.”This new blog post titled “Another depressing year for patent law?” says a lot about how practitioners in the US view the USPTO. Watch how this US patent lawyer, Lawrence B. Ebert, quoting Larry Downes as saying: “On just one day in November, for example, over 200 new patent lawsuits were filed, as plaintiffs rushed to beat a change in federal procedure that could require more specific claims. Most were from companies that buy up patents of dubious quality and use them to extract nuisance settlements from actual innovators.”
Is this what Europe is hoping to achieve? We wrote thousands of articles about the USPTO and we have great (and growing) fear that those same disasters (and patent predators) will reach Europe. Some already do. █
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Posted in Europe, Finance, Patents at 8:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Who can possibly stop such a sloeber?
Summary: Benoît Battistelli’s connections to rich and powerful people in France (and also internationally) are explored, with the aim of explaining the EPO’s current sordid state of affairs, which sometimes seems uninterruptible, no matter the severity of EPO abuses and respected courts’ rulings on them
Several days ago we dropped some hints about this new long series about the EPO's current President. He is connected not just to Christine Lagarde but to a wide array of people whose power is beyond doubt and by far exceeds Lagarde’s. A year ago, on December 12th (2014) to be precise, we mentioned Battistelli’s roots at École nationale d’administration, which was created in 1945 by Charles de Gaulle and boasts a lot of powerful people. François Hollande, Emmanuel Macron, Jacques Chirac and many others are among the better known alumni.
“Our story begins with Battistelli and Lagarde.”In order to understand the EPO‘s ability to get away with almost every conceivable abuse (quite the sloeber as Belgian TV put this) it is imperative that we speak about who it is really serving and who it is run by.
Earlier this month we started to research the sloeber’s background — that’s Battistelli by the way — and investigated various allegations, asking numerous sources around the world in order to verify and ensure nothing leaves leeway for the EPO to threaten me again. We now feel ready and comfortable enough to publicly comment on this sloeber’s past.
In order to add some context to this series, we shall begin with Battistelli’s recent past in INPI, before the suspicious diaspora from INPI to the EPO.
Our story begins with Battistelli and Lagarde. The link between Lagarde and Battistelli is relatively easy to explain. Lagarde was the Minister of Economic Affairs, Finance and Employment from 2007 to 2011 serving in the government of the Prime Minister Francois Fillon. The French National Intellectual Property Office (INPI) came under her ministerial remit so she would have been Battistelli’s political “boss” in his then role of Director-General of the INPI.
“Some background information about Lagarde may be needed for the uninitiated.”Lagarde supported Battistelli’s candidacy as EPO President and issued a congratulatory press release following his election in 2010. See “Christine LAGARDE se réjouit de l’élection de Benoît BATTISTELLI à la présidence de l’Office européen des brevets”.
Some background information about Lagarde may be needed for the uninitiated. Lagarde was appointed as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the 5th of July, 2011. Previously she had been Minister of Economic Affairs, Finance and Employment serving in the government of the Prime Minister Francois Fillon from 2007 to 2011. Before pursuing a career in French politics she had worked for about 25 years in the United States for the international law firm Baker & McKenzie (from 1981 to 2005).
French critics of Lagarde considered her to be a promoter of US and multinational corporate interests in France and Europe rather than a defender of French or European interests. See for example the following article (in French) which was published on Réseau Voltaire in 2005. It says: “En supposant que Christine Lagarde ait abandonné ses fonctions précédentes sans l’intention d’y retourner, on pourrait admettre qu’elle ne se place pas dans un conflit d’intérêts. Cependant, au vu des positions politiques défendues par les groupes de travail qu’elle a présidé, on ne peut que constater qu’elle est en totale opposition avec la position française défendue par Dominique de Villepin à l’ONU.”
“French critics of Lagarde considered her to be a promoter of US and multinational corporate interests in France and Europe rather than a defender of French or European interests.”Well, here is a link to an English version of the “Voltaire Network” article from 2005 about Lagarde. In English it says: “Only supposing that Christine Lagarde abandoned her former duties and that she has no intentions of going back to them, would it be possible to admit that we are not witnessing a case of conflict of interests. However, when the political positions defended by the groups she presided over are analyzed, it is impossible to ignore that they are completely against the French position defended by Dominique de Villepin before the United Nations.”
There is a lot more in that article.
Lagarde appears to have been a regular attendee of the annual Bilderberg Conference from about 2009 onwards when she attended as a member of the French government. More recently she has attended in her capacity as Managing Director of the IMF [1, 2].
In part two we will proceed to speaking more about Lagarde and the current EPO President. It may well go back to INPI. Anyone who can provide additional input as this series proceeds, please come forth… █
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Posted in OIN, Patents at 7:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Open Invention Network’s latest addition and resultant publicity calls for a timely explanation of its goals and its inherent weaknesses
THE Open Invention Network, or OIN for short, recently did a publicity stunt because it had turned 10. I spoke to the OIN on numerous occasions (phone, E-mail), but I was never able to see the logic of their strategy, nor was I able to see a single example where they foiled a patent attack on Linux. They might argue that they are merely a deterrent, but with only barks and no bites, how much of a deterrent can they ever be? They’re 100% ineffective against patent trolls, including satellites of aggressors such as Microsoft. They weren’t even effective against Oracle’s patent aggression (direct action).
“As longtime readers may know too well, we’re not against patents but against software patents.”A few days ago I found this article/press release which said: “Today Hyundai Motor Company and Kia Motors Corporation are joining the Open Invention Network as community members. Linux and Open Source software are becoming a mainstay in automotive computing. With the first global automotive companies joining OIN, a trend has been set towards Open Source collaboration and patent non-aggression in the automotive industry. The news is in the press here on Yahoo Finance, here on Fortune.com and in many other places.”
As we have pointed out numerous times over the years, among OIN backers there are many software patents proponents, and it’s not just IBM. They serve to legitimise these patents rather than battle to put an end to them. That’s what OIN is often all about. It sets apart so-called ‘good’ software patents — ones that are supposed to be incapable of attacking Linux (Oracle refuted this claim when it attacked Android despite its OIN membership).
As longtime readers may know too well, we’re not against patents but against software patents. This positions of ours is supported by the vast majority of software professionals. Surely there are some problems with today’s patent systems as a whole (scope and motivation gone awry), but this oughtn’t be interpreted as a case for abolition of all patents. The Onion has this new satire on “How To File A Patent”. It has some funny bits in it like “Wait one to two decades” (for A patent to be granted) and “carefully review patent legal documents, occasionally stopping to nod your head as if you understand what they mean” (if they’re written in legal terms, patent lawyers sometimes become necessary, i.e. a tax).
We hope that patent examiners too will agree with us that not all domains should have patents in them, e.g. genetics and software. Over-patenting leads to devaluation, cheapening, self-discretisation, and retardation of innovation. We don’t expect patent lawyers — collectively speaking — to ever agree with us because to them it’s clearly a case of the more (patents), the merrier. Thankfully, there are some patent lawyers who have been enlightened by the former group, especially after decisions such as Alice in the United States. Some of our sources in the campaign to change the EPO are actually patent lawyers. █
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Posted in Europe at 6:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The European Patent Office became a political-corporate body
Summary: An interpretation of the EPO’s ambitions (at the managerial level) and how it relates to its bizarre role inside the EU (back in the latter’s infancy)
OVER the weekend, due to an unprecedented backlog (we receive a lot of material), we published almost a dozen articles, mostly about the EPO (see our Wiki for a complete list of these articles). Both on Saturday and on Sunday we took note of UPC lobbying by Battistelli, which wasn’t exactly news to us. We wrote about EPO lobbying for the Unitary Patent several times before, e.g. [1, 2], and this previous lobbying served to show that — to use SUEPO’s older words — the EPO is "out of control".
“The I.U. or Control Risks might be exempted from these Office-wide bans and we already know, based on accusations against staff representatives, that Techrights is really worrying to both the I.U. and Control Risk.”Just before the weekend we implemented new anti-DDOS (or DDOS prevention/mitigation) techniques and this morning, despite the fact that Techrights has been banned from inside EPO networks, IP addresses from inside the EPO (unambiguously registered as “European Patent Office”) got banned for traffic floods. The I.U. or Control Risks might be exempted from these Office-wide bans and we already know, based on accusations against staff representatives, that Techrights is really worrying to both the I.U. and Control Risks. The latter might be able to use parallel construction to gather ‘evidence’, in our humble assessment — a subject of ongoing discussion [1, 2]. If these aren’t the symptoms of a out-of-control public service, what is?
Someone has sent us several pointers suggesting that the EPO has been out of control for quite a long time.
To quote Jean-Dominique Giuliani, président de la Fondation Robert Schuman:
On ne peut donc exclure de voir se développer, sous le contrôle de la Cour de justice, voire du Parlement ou de la seule Cour des Comptes européenne, des Autorités indépendantes qui réguleraient le marché intérieur ou même qui jugeraient des contentieux spécialisés en première instance. C’est une évolution qui a commencé. Déjà la Banque centrale européenne échappe au contrôle de la Commission. L’Office européen des Brevets ne relève pas de sa compétence. Sur les 31 agences de l’Union, trois seulement relèvent de programmes communautaires, 6 dépendent du « troisième pilier », c’est-à-dire de la coopération intergouvernementale et les 22 autres « agences communautaires » disposent, pour certaines d’entre elles, d’une quasi-indépendance comme l’Agence européenne des médicaments.
Il y a de fortes probabilités pour que les nouvelles compétences européennes, et même certaines plus anciennes, relèvent dans un avenir proche de régulateurs européens. Pensons à l’énergie, à la télévision, aux télécommunications. Ces évolutions conditionnent les changements qui pourraient intervenir dans ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler la « méthode communautaire ».
Here is one in English. Herein (Internet/Web Archive) Richard Poynder discusses the European patent system with Gert Kolle, Director for International Legal Affairs at the European Patent Office in May 2000:
RP: I have seen it suggested that the Community patent should be combined with the EPO system, and the EPO made an EU organisation. Is that a likely way forward?
GK: This is of course a highly political question. Certainly so far no such proposal has been made officially. Rather it is likely there will be an agreement between the EU and the EPO, which would specify what our tasks were in carrying out the regulation of the Community patent.
Alfons Schäfers, German lawyer and representative of Deutsche Vereinigung für gewerblichen Rechtsschutz und Urheberrecht (GRUR), was interviewed [PDF]
by SUEPO and said:
Suepo: What should the relationship between the EU and EPO?
Alfons Schäfers: The EPO should become part of the European Union, like the OHIM in Alicante. To keep the EPO outside that framework is quite ridiculous at a time when the EU is expanding to the political and historical boundaries of Europe. The EU institutions — especially the European Parliament, must be given the wherewithal to exercise firm democratic control and to frame and implement European patent legislation. That is the only way to overcome the European Parliament’s growing suspicion of patent law.
Regarding the European Patent, as it was known at some point (the name changed many times over the years), here is a classic:
5.1. General structure of the European patent
Do you share the view that the current structure of the European Patent Office, a body which is independent of the Community institutions, does not entail disadvantages for users which should be overcome through a different legal structure which is more closely integrated into Community law?
No, the chemical industry does not share this view, as the current structure is wrong. The EPO should become an EU Institution, and pursue its task to manage the European patent, which is a bundled one, and run as well the new Community unitary patent. It should be run efficiently and at running costs. Arrangements should be made with those countries which are not member of the EU so that they still have access to the European patent.
Source: Web Archive [PDF]
Notice just how far back it all goes.
“Who needs ludicrous stuff like I.S.D.S. when you have the EPO Trojan horse right inside the government, complete with politicians and political connections, not to mention spies (like covert operations), immunity from the law, and exemptions from basic human rights?”From being merely a quasi-private institution (we have future articles about it) the EPO has become part of the state and now serves multinational corporations. Who needs ludicrous stuff like I.S.D.S. when you have the EPO Trojan horse right inside the government, complete with politicians and political connections, not to mention spies (like covert operations), immunity from the law, and exemptions from basic human rights? Remember that, moreover, the EPO is a state-mandated monopoly, so it’s effectively “too big to fail”.
The EPO is worse than the Vatican. At least the Vatican isn’t a corporate entity but a religious one. The Vatican does not have a suicides epidemic, either. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Suman Chakravartula informed us this weekend that he and his team of hard-working developers managed to release a new stable update for their Rockstor Linux-based NAS (Network-attached storage) solution.
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Desktop
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As you may know, Google has created the Chromebooks, their own cloud-based laptops, that use Chrome OS as default, which is a lightweight and fast Linux system.
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Chromebook sales now account for more than half of all devices sold for U.S. classrooms, up from less than 1 percent in 2012, according to a new report from Futuresource Consulting. (The sales figures do not include desktop computers.) To analysts, this comes as a big surprise.
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HP Envy 13 is a promising great laptop that’s being let down by the short battery life and above the average temperature when it operates. It can run Linux (Ubuntu) with limitation, the non working fingerprint scanner is to note if you need this feature to work.
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Server
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A recent report by O’Reilly Media and Ruxit presents interesting findings on the adoption and use patterns of containers and Docker.
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Docker was released as open source in March 2013, so in software terms it’s relatively new. As always with shiny things, nerds like me see their potential and start thinking of ways of using them everywhere.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation offers many resources for developers, users, and administrators of Linux systems. One of the most important offerings is its Linux Certification Program. The program is designed help you differentiate your job skills in a competitive market.
How well does the certification prepare you for the real world? To illustrate that, the Linux Foundation will be featuring some of those who have recently passed the certification examinations. These testimonials may help decide if either the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator or the Linux Foundation Certified Engineer certification is right for you. In this latest installment of our continuing series, we talk with Ariel Jolo, who recently became a Certified System Administrator.
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If the suits who sit in the boardrooms of corporate tech think they need Microsoft — quite frankly, at this stage of the game they do — then the Linux Foundation will continue to put lipstick on a pig and declare there will be peace in our time, even as Microsoft continues practices like extorting money from manufacturers of Linux devices for patents it may or may not have.
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Linus Torvalds has just tagged the fifth weekly release candidate for the Linux 4.4 kernel.
Linus has yet to send out his usual weekly RC release announcement but in monitoring the activity over the past week, it’s been a fairly normal week of bug fixing and related changes.
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Linux Lord Linus Torvalds says the fourth release candidate of Linux 4.4 contained “a fairly bad core bug” that’s since been squashed, but may not have rung many alarm bells anyway.
“Another week, another rc,” Torvalds writes on the Linux Kernel mailing list, before going on to say that development work is progressing as usual save for “… a fairly bad core bug that was introduced in rc4 that is now fixed in rc5”.
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Graphics Stack
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Benchmarks
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If you are thinking of buying a low-capacity, affordable solid-state drive (SSD) as a stocking stuffer this holiday season or just looking for a new SSD without breaking the bank, here are benchmarks from eight different low-cost solid-state drives done on Ubuntu Linux with the EXT4 file-system.
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Applications
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`Take a Break` is a small application which can be used to (more or less) force users to take a break after a configurable work time, useful if something like a popup reminder is not effective for you.
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We’re proud to announce the first stable release of the KeePassX 2 series after several years of development.
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As you may know, PhotoFlow is an open-source, non-destructive photo editing software for adjusting photos from RAW images to high-quality printing.
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If you haven’t already come across it, diffoscope is a tool reveal what makes files or directories actually different. It recursively unpacks archives of many kinds, transforming various binary formats into more human-readable form in order to to compare them. It can compare two tarballs, ISO images, PDF, etc. just as easily.
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The new Kodi 16.0 Beta 4 has been released today and is now ready for download and testing. It looks like the developers are putting the final touches, and we should see the first Release Candidates very soon.
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In the past few years there has been a huge increase of Rogue-like games, especially thanks to the indie scene. Today, it is very fitting to point out one of the most important representatives of this genre.
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It’s been just one week since the last beta update of Kodi 16 but its development steam is sticking to the “release early, release often” and this morning shipped beta #4.
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The developers of the MPlayer-based MPV open-source and cross-platform video player software announced this past weekend the release and immediate availability for download of MPV 0.14.0.
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Sys admins, no matter what platforms they work on, are awash in great open source software tools. In this article, we highlight well-known—and not-so-well-known—tools that have released new versions in 2015.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Open Broadcaster Software, or OBS for short, is a pretty amazing project. Used extensively within the Gaming/Youtubing/Twitching community, OBS allows you to set up a virtual TV studio, combine a variety of video, audio and image sources into one or several “scenes”, and save them or stream them to the Internet.
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I was all set to write a somewhat grumpy blog entry about getting xterm and Chrome to play nice with each other for cut and paste when I decided to re-test this systematically. Let me tell you, systematic testing and investigation changes quite a lot of blog entries around here, and this one appears to be no exception.
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My inspiration came from his noting that happification could be done on numbers in bases other than 10. I immediately thought of hexadecimal, base-16, since I’m a programmer and that’s what I think of. I also was trying to think of how one would graphically represent a large happification tree, when I realized that hexadecimal numbers are colors, and colors graphically represent things nicely!
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Wine or Emulation
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The Wine development release 1.8-rc4 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
- Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.
The source is available from the following locations:
http://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/1.8/wine-1.8-rc4.tar.bz2
http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/1.8/wine-1.8-rc4.tar.bz2
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
http://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on http://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git
repository. Check http://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
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The Wine developers, through Alexandre Julliard, have announced the release and immediate availability for download of the fourth and probably one of the last RC (Release Candidate) builds of the upcoming Wine 1.8 software.
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If you still depend on a few Windows programs, or you want to help newbies make the switch to Linux, Wine is mightily useful.
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Games
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Yesterday’s article titled Are Open-Source Games and Community Game Engines Fading Away? continues to be one of the most-discussed threads in the forums this weekend.
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Is it just me or are open-source games faltering? While open-source, community-based games really aren’t mainstream and really never took off, it seems these days there’s a lack of good open-source games more so than in past years as well as diminishing open-source game engine projects.
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Oh boy, here we go. SMACH Z is a portable Steam Machine running SteamOS that will be powered by an AMD embedded low-powered SoC.
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Poi is the latest of a small handful of 3D platformers to release for Linux these last couple of months, and is worth a look for fans of 90s era 3D platformers.
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Wow. Haven’t booted to Windows in a long time. Had to run a bunch of updates that took almost a whole day, and then on top of that, the game wouldn’t even launch, so I had to have Steam verify the game cache. But now I’ve finally got a comparison between the ports.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Since i3 is mostly aimed at advanced computer users, it’s highly customiseable.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Hello folks, it’s Season of KDE!
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It offers a convenient, KF5 and Qt5-based GUI coupled with a QML image view to browse, view, and download images hosted in two of the most famous Danbooru boards (konachan.com and yande.re).
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Gabriele Musco ask me to express some thoughts about KDE in mobile world. I tried to make some clarifications about the topic, anyway the video is very long although the author cut some parts. He also asked if we will see a KDE distro in future, I replied that as a user I’d like a distro made by KDE, but currently there aren’t plans about it. Instead I happily mentioned the efforts in bringing mobile components also to the Android world
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Today, December 12, the Krita developers have announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the second Beta build of the upcoming Krita Animation Edition digital painting software.
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I had no idea what to expect, but I learned how to use the Adobe Creative Suite, and they introduced tablets and digital painting to me. I took to it immediately and asked my parents for a tablet for Christmas. Before I got a tablet, I used Gimp to color sketches. My dad was and still is an avid Linux user, and he was the first to introduce me to open source programs.
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December 12, 2015. KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.17.0.
KDE Frameworks are 60 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
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KDE has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of KDE Frameworks 5.17.0, a set of add-on libraries for the Qt5 GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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We are coming up on the 3.19.3 release this Monday and 3.19.4 will be January 14th which will also be the start of the UI freeze.
I wanted to take some time and give an update on what we have done for Maps this cycle and what we can expect in Maps 3.20.
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Zbigniew Konojacki, the creator and lead developer of the 4MLinux project, who is responsible for various Live CDs and GNU/Linux distributions, including 4MRescueKit, Antivirus Live CD, and BakAndImgCD, has informed us about the release of 4MParted 15.0 Beta.
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Reviews
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The Chakra GNU/Linux project produces a Linux distribution with a strong focus on the KDE desktop and software which uses the Qt development libraries. Chakra maintains a semi-rolling release where the core components of the operating system remain fairly stable while desktop software is updated frequently.
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New Releases
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A few hours ago, December 13, Josh Strobl from the Solus Project had the great pleasure of publishing the fourteen installment of the awesome This Week in Solus newsletter.
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Arch Family
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We are happy to announce another review of Manjaro 15.12 (Capella)!
This is one of the biggest updates we did so far. Mostly due the C++ 11 ABI change within gcc. It is recommended to rebuild your AUR packages for this ABI.
With this we finally dropping KDE4 for good. All users of this desktop should either switch over to Plasma 5 or any other maintained desktop, like LXQt.
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This past weekend, the developers of the Manjaro Linux operating system announced the general availability of Manjaro Update 2015-12-13, which is now in the testing repositories of Manjaro Linux 15.12 “Capella.”
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The Arch Linux developers, through Antonio Rojas, published a brief announcement on the project’s website to inform all users of the lightweight and highly customizable computer operating system about some modifications in the KDE packages.
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Red Hat Family
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“Ultimately, we believe there are more winds at Red Hat’s back than in its face,” wrote Ader in a Dec. 8 research note.
[...]
Piper Jaffray analyst Katherine Egbert does “worry” in a research note issued Thursday: “Like with other high-multiple cloud vendors, anything but a large upside to revenue and billings upside may disappoint.
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Jennison Associates reduced its position in Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) by 2.4% during the third quarter, according to its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The institutional investor owned 15,549,632 shares of the open-source software company’s stock after selling 386,599 shares during the period. Red Hat comprises about 1.1% of Jennison Associates’ investment portfolio, making the stock its 22nd largest position. Jennison Associates owned about 8.47% of Red Hat worth $1,117,708,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.
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Fedora
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Today, December 12, we’ve been informed by the developers of the Linux AIO project about the release and immediate availability for download of Linux AIO Fedora 23 Live DVDs.
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First of all, sorry my last post was about Flisol 2015 in Panamá, while many things had happen since then, many words and thoughts never become a post. Therefore here we go.
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The main reason why I’m running for it is to give more community ideas to the actual body, which is composed mainly by US guys and RedHat employees or at least RH involved. I had the great opportunity in the last couple of years to attend all main events in our regions, from Beijing to Managua, through Rochester and Cordoba. This gave me the chance to get in contact with all local communities, much more than it’s possible just by writing mails or chatting on IRC. Furthermore I’m the founder of the italian Fedora community ten years ago, so I feel when it comes to end users I have many stories I can tell.
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Few days ago, on November 23, we have had a Fedora 23 release party in Milan, as we announced in the wiki.
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Let’s divide the post in two parts, the short history if you want just try out the packages and don’t care about the gross details and the long history, explaining the rocks we met in the path.
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Debian Family
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New hardware was installed into a Debian workstation with minor issues.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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upebble is a new application currently being developed by the community that allows users of Ubuntu Touch to connect to their Pebble watches.
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With Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the Dash online search feature will be disabled by default.
The online search feature won’t be removed and users will be able to re-enable it via System Settings > Security & Privacy.
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Scopes are a leading feature of the Ubuntu Phone and of Unity 8 in general. That concept, the story of scopes, started out in Unity 7 and in 12.10 when we added results from online searches to the dash home screen.
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Flavours and Variants
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The developers of the Linux Mint project published earlier, December 12, their report for the month of November 2015, to inform all users of the popular GNU/Linux distribution about the work done in the last month, as well as about upcoming events.
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Just in time for the holidays, it’s a new release of elementary OS! Freya 0.3.2 is a minor release, mostly focused around solving some issues folks have had with UEFI & SecureBoot, but we’ve also managed to sneak in some internationalization updates and a couple new features.
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Today we pushed the elementary icon set to GitHub to encourage collaboration and reuse. Read on to learn more about the decision and what it means for the future of the elementary code base!
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The Linux Mint team has just announced that the OEM images for Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” Cinnamon and MATE have been released and are now available for download.
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The main Linux Mint flavors are based on Ubuntu, but the developers are also working on another version based on Debian. It’s not the main focus of the team, but from what they are saying, it’s already catching up with the Ubuntu version.
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Today we’re continuing our “Watch” series of articles with something a little different, a video tutorial that tries to teaches those who run the Ubuntu MATE operating system on their Raspberry Pi 2 devices how to expand the filesystem.
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An autonomous, Linux powered, indoor-friendly “Fleye” drone is available on Kickstarter for $742, featuring a protective hull, an HD camera, and 15km/h speed.
Belgian startup Fleye, newborn from The Faktory tech incubator, is close to its $185,837 Kickstarter goal for the programmable, autonomous Fleye, billed as the world’s safest drone. Videos show people gently shoving the drone away when it strays too close.
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This cute, safe, hovering robot that looks like a flying marshmallow is going to reinvent drone design, its creators say.
It’s called Fleye, and it’s the exact opposite of “classic” drones, according to the Belgian engineers behind the bot. There’s no huge propeller, no clunky frame, and no heavy crashing into bleachers at sporting events. It’s being billed as a personal, autonomous robot.
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The market has boomed with small computing boards ever since the Pi was originally introduced, and the PINE looks best suited to be the king of cheap and powerful.
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Chirimen is a development board powered by Firefox OS. Co developed by Mozilla Japan & community, aimed at using browser technologies in science projects. Chirimen simply extends GPIO/I2C WebAPIs to control devices with Firefox OS 2.0 or later installed.
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This impressive show was created using Open Source software and runs entirely off a Raspberry Pi.
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The network provides free access for IoT devices, to communicate with internet applications and each other. Since LoRa networks can operate over longer distances but only for slow data transfer rates, they are typically used by tiny, battery-operated systems. This allows you to build sensor networks based on low-power devices that periodically send small amounts of data. The network can be used to connect boats, cars, lamp posts, dumpsters, and road and traffic systems, for example, allowing these to send information (i.e. measurements) and receive commands.
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According to Leon Gommans, a leading figure in the development of open data in both the city and the port of Rotterdam, and co-owner of PlaySpace and Teqplay, this is only the first phase. “The Kickstarter project for The Things Network will make access points based on open hardware available at a price of 200 euro. That’s only one fifth of any currently available LoRaWAN gateway.” The goal of 150,000 euro was met in less than ten days. One month after the start of the project, almost 300,000 was pledged by over 900 backers.
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Phones
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Android
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Adding teeth to its growing internet and social media presence, the ISIS terrorist group has reportedly launched an app that features news and videos showing executions and battlefield victories and propagates its agenda, the media reported.
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Android has made two recent strides forward that are huge for app developers: the release of the Marshmallow update and the newly minted Android Studio 2.0. Both of these technological advances signal Android’s commitment to making it easier for companies of all types to publish and update apps. At the same time, the privacy changes that accompanied Marshmallow give consumers more room to decide what type of personal data they are willing to share with app developers.
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It’s been only two months since Google rolled out Android 6.0 Marshmallow, but some Googlers are already hinting at some new features that might arrive with Android N, the next update to the operating system. One of those features might be support for a split-screen to enable easier multi-tasking on tablets.
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A new set of images has hit the internet after first showing up on Weibo (China’s Twitter equivalent). There’s not much to see in most slides, but one of the shots did capture an update roadmap depicting when specific Lenovo handsets will get the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update. It looks like they come from a meeting. Let’s take a quick look at it.
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BlackBerry Priv Android phones are flying off shelves more than a month after its release. According to CNN Money, Walmart and Best Buy had to restock shelves in the past week due to high volume BlackBerry Priv sales. CNN Money reports that the company’s stock price (BBRY) jumped by 7 percent on Thursday, Dec. 10, to $8.05 in response to the Priv’s surprising demand. That said, BlackBerry stock had fallen slightly to $7.68 per share by Friday end-of-day.
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Amid talk that the honor brand will be coming to the U.S., an enhanced version of the honor 7 has been announced. The honor 7 Enhanced Edition will come with Android 6.0 right out of the box, and Huawei’s EMUI 4.0 skin will be running on top.
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Frame rate is a term that gamers should be well familiar with. For those who aren’t, a bite-sized explanation follows. In the context of gaming, the frame rate indicates how many frames per second are being drawn on the screen while a game is running. The higher the number, the smoother the video looks, with 60 fps considered an ideal figure. No less importantly, the framerate is a good indicator of a device’s graphics performance. It is what most graphics benchmark test scores are based on.
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With my previous post about killing the back button I got a some scepticism about it from some users, but what was common in all those feedbacks was the approach to manage different apps: yes killing the back button breaks some things, but I wrote it mainly to introduce the real idea: new approaches to task managing on mobile devices.
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Cupcake. Donut. Eclair. Frozen Yogurt. Gingerbread. Honeycomb. Ice Cream Sandwich. Jelly Bean. Kit Kat. Lollipop. Marshmallow. This isn’t a litany of looks Derek Zoolander is going to unveil on the silver screen next year. Google fans know these are the tasty treats Mountain View has chosen to name its major Android builds after. The question, however, is just who else knows this.
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This week Google released their first Android tablet , the Pixel C . While the device has decent hardware specs and a full size keyboard accessory, it does not have the productivity capacity of other tablets like the Surface Pro or iPad Pro.
In a recent Reddit conversation , user experience director of Android and Chrome Glen Murphy revealed Google is working on enhancements to make the Android OS better compete with tablets running Chrome OS, Microsoft Windows and Apple’s iOS 9 which have better multitasking features. “ There are many things, like multi-window, that we’ve been spending a lot of time on–hopefully we can share more about this soon.”
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For the first time Google chose to collaborate with Huawei to manufacture the Nexus 6P smartphone. Now, fresh rumors suggest that both companies again will work together in building the Google Nexus 6 (2016) smartphone.
According to Gizmo China, industry expert Pan Jiutang has revealed that the alleged Google Nexus 6P successor will be a Huawei product. However, since it will be a flagship smartphone, it is likely to be powered by Snapdragon 820 chipset.
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Today I want to change things a bit: instead of covering a technical subject, I want to share with you what it means to run an open source project
For more than two years, my friend David Rousset and I have led Babylon.js. We started the project after hearing that IE11 would support WebGL and we wanted to make it easier for people to build 3D scenes and games. For the following two years I spent all of my spare time making Babylon.js a simple and powerful 3D engine for web developers.
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Year 2015 ends. Taking time to honor those peoples who work in Linux and Open Source community and don’t have deserved popularity. Maybe you use everyday several products from these peoples – this is your personal chance to say “thank you”.
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William Hill is moving away from traditional IT vendor relationships as it seeks to modernise its business, choosing to build applications internally using open source technologies pioneered by internet giants such as Google and Facebook.
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I have enjoyed reading the stories others have shared about how they got started with open source software, so I thought I’d add mine. It is different in that I came to open source purely for business reasons. While I later embraced the open source way for reasons such as personal freedom and community, my initial exposure to it came from trying to find the best solution to a business problem.
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Events
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The FOSDEM Organization has graciously given devroom organizers a little extension. We are therefore extending our own deadline for the Desktops DevRoom: the new deadline is December 14th. There will be no further extensions.
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I’m currently in Paris for TADHack, an opportunity to collaborate on a range of telephony APIs and services. People can also win prizes by doing something innovative with the platforms promoted by the sponsors.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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We are delighted to announce the first set of awards in the Mozilla Open Source Support program’s “Foundational Technology” track, which supports projects that Mozilla uses or relies upon.
We have been greatly helped in evaluating applications and making awards by the MOSS “Foundational Technology” Committee – many thanks to them.
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Along the internet browser business, Mozilla has been also working at Firefox OS, their Linux-based mobile operating system built in HTML5, for the low-cost phones.
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Databases
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Google has unveiled the next gen of its Cloud SQL service, a hosted version of the MySQL database.
The second generation Beta Cloud SQL is more than seven times faster than the first generation of Cloud SQL. And it scales to 10TB of data, 15,000 IOPS and 104GB of RAM per instance.
The first generation of Cloud SQL was launched in October 2011 .
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Education
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A 16-year-old boy recently asked the r/Linux community for advice. When his parents discovered that he’d reloaded his laptop with Linux, they were horrified—after all, this “free” software must certainly be riddled with viruses and/or hackers. It didn’t help matters any that he’d “ruined” an expensive gift, and was no longer using some of the expensive software that had been purchased with it. He tried to talk to them about it, but it was tough—he was the teenager; they were the adults.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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While most artificial intelligence is powered by software, as the software gets more sophisticated, it relies on more powerful and sophisticated hardware to execute its needs. The social network will reportedly submit all the relevant design materials to the Open Compute Project, an organization that manages the sharing of datacenter infrastructure designs. “They’ve designed quite an elegant solution that can fully power and cool that number of GPUs and deliver maximum performance”.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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One of the key provisions of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is that derivative products must also be released under the GPL. A great many companies rigorously follow the terms of the license, while others avoid GPL-licensed software altogether because they are unwilling to follow those terms. Some companies, though, seem to feel that the terms of the GPL do not apply to them, presenting the copyright holder with two alternatives: find a way to get those companies to change their behavior, or allow the terms of the license to be flouted. In recent times, little effort has gone into the first option; depending on the results of an ongoing fundraising campaign, that effort may drop to nearly zero. We would appear to be at a decision point with regard to how (and whether) we would like to see GPL enforcement done within our community.
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So, who *does* use xz? kernel.org. Also, the linux kernel itself optionally supports xz compression of initrd images. Vendors just need to pay attention and turn the flags on. Anyone else want to be part of the elite field of people who use xz? Please?
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Openness/Sharing
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Eight years ago, Morgan Quigley, Eric Berger, and Andrew Ng published a paper that was not about ROS. It was about STAIR, the STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, which used a library called Switchyard to pass messages between software modules to perform complex manipulation tasks like stapler grasping. Switchyard was a purpose-built framework that was designed to be modular and robot-independent, and it was such a good idea that in 2009, “ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System” was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Japan. As of this month, the paper introducing ROS has been cited 2,020 times, an increase of more than 50 percent over last year.
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The API economy is the reality we live in and it’s an enormous one that, once the Internet of Things kicks into full gear, will feature an infinite number of API calls a day. But as we globalize, the world and the products—in this case APIs—we sell in it become more complicated and often more expensive as we factor in all the friction of exchange rates and credit card micropayments. It’s in everybody’s interest to smooth over that friction so developers can access our APIs or application programming interfaces more easily.
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Open Hardware
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If you are a soldering ninja with a flair for working with tiny parts and modules, check out the Open Source Watch a.k.a. OSWatch built by [Jonathan Cook]. His goals when starting out the project were to make it Arduino compatible, have enough memory for future applications, last a full day on one charge, use BLE as Central or Peripheral and be small in size. With some ingenuity, 3d printing and hacker skills, he was able to accomplish all of that.
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Programming
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We’ve been awarded $150,000 to help fund the development of Channels, the initiative to rewrite the core of Django to support (among other things) WebSockets and background tasks, and to integrate key parts of the Django REST Framework request/response code into Django, such as content negotiation. Together, these projects will help considerably improve Django’s role of backing rich web experiences as well as native applications.
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Some days ago ago Apple released Swift as open source language with instructions for Ubuntu Linux 15.10. So I decided to do a couple of simple benchmarks just to test some basic general purpose things like cpu, functions, read/write and not sequential access to arrays, concurrent parallel execution where possibile.
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Standards/Consortia
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“F.D.R.’s War Plans!” reads a headline from a 1941 Chicago Daily Tribune. Had this article been written today, it might rather have said “21 War Plans F.D.R. Does Not Want You To Know About. Number 6 may shock you!”. Modern writers have become very good at squeezing out the maximum clickability out of every headline. But this sort of writing seems formulaic and unoriginal. What if we could automate the writing of these, thus freeing up clickbait writers to do useful work?
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Twitter has long argued that its reach and influence extends far beyond the 320 million people who log into its social media service at least once a month. Tweets are embedded on thousands of other websites and apps, emailed, displayed on television and published in newspapers.
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Sorry may be the hardest word, but it seems to be tripping off Microsoft’s tongue quite freely at the moment. Maybe it’s the holiday season making the company look at itself, but we’ve had two apologies in recent days — first, a semi-apology for stealing OneDrive storage from people, and now it’s sorry about the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4.
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Science
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In the 1950s, a group of scientists spoke out against the dangers of nuclear weapons. Should cryptographers take on the surveillance state?
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Health/Nutrition
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Despite recent efforts by health experts, doctors, and the Food and Drug Administration to pull the meat industry away from its heavy use of antimicrobials, livestock producers seem to have dug in their heels.
From 2009 to 2014, the amount of antimicrobials sold and distributed for use in livestock increased by 22 percent, according to an FDA report released Thursday. Of the antimicrobials sold in 2014, 62 percent were related to drugs used in human health, also called medically important. From 2009 to 2014, sale and distribution of medically important antimicrobials used on farms also jumped—an increase of 23 percent.
That brings the 2014 total of antimicrobials sold for US livestock to 15,358,210 kilograms, including 9,475,989 kilograms of medically important drugs, according to the report.
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Security
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Two weeks ago, the server I host all my personal projects on was hacked by some guy in Ukraine.
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We’re all anxiously awaiting the day that Windows 10′s new Edge browser becomes usable. That hasn’t happened yet, but it will some day next year. Microsoft Edge should represent a huge improvement in browser security, particularly when compared with the ancient, creaking, and leaky Internet Explorer. Recent events, though, have me wondering if Edge really represents that big of a step forward.
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TrackingPoint is an Austin startup known for making precision-guided firearms. These firearms ship with a tightly integrated system coupling a rifle, an ARM-powered scope running a modified version of Linux, and a linked trigger mechanism. The scope can follow targets, calculate ballistics and drastically increase its user’s first shot accuracy. The scope can also record video and audio, as well as stream video to other devices using its own wireless network and mobile applications.
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An RFC patch from Dave Watson at Facebook proposes moving the bulk of Transport Layer Security (TLS) processing into the kernel. There are a number of advantages he sees for doing so, but most of the commenters on the patch set seem a bit skeptical about the idea. TLS is, of course, the encryption layer that protects HTTPS and other internet protocols.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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It is important to understand that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not at war with Daesh (ISIL). He is waging war against the Syrian government over the Kurdish problem, said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.
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When Anne Arundel County police responded Saturday to a grocery story in Edgewater, officers said they found a man who was threatening people’s lives and claimed to “own” the government.
Officers detained the man, 56-year-old Kirk Green of Edgewater, and later found guns, ammunition and plans to attack government agencies in his vehicle, police said.
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The CIA analyst is confident about what is likely to happen in Syria. He says that “Assad is playing his last major card to keep his regime in power”. He believes that the Assad government will step up its efforts to prove that its enemies “are being manipulated by outsiders”. The probable outcome is a split within Syria’s ruling elite leading to Assad being ousted, though he admits that there is no obvious replacement for him.
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Afghan Govt: Six Civilians Killed in Home Raids Last Month
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Raging fires in Indonesia’s forests and peat lands since July this year are precipitating a climate and public-health catastrophe with repercussions across local, regional and global levels, experts told IndiaSpend.
Acrid smoke and haze have enveloped Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, and have reached Thailand, choking people, reducing visibility and spiking respiratory illnesses, according to Susan Minnemeyer, Mapping and Data Manager for Washington-based World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Global Forest Watch Fires initiative.
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When I landed in Palangkaraya, the capital of the Indonesian province of central Borneo, in early September the smoke was already fairly thick. I was surprised they hadn’t cancelled the flight on seeing the ground suddenly come into view what seemed like a few seconds before landing.
The smoky smell and thick warm air was something I recognised from 2011, the last El Niño year to hit the region (causing an extended dry season). There was definitely something of a “here we go again” sentiment from the locals I knew there too. My friend Yuyus texted: “selamat datang di kota asap” when I told him I’d arrived – welcome to smoke town. Within the next two days, all flights to and from the town had been grounded.
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Tens of thousands of wildfires ravaged Indonesia in September and October. A sizable portion of these blazes was smoldering subterranean peat fires, which sent toxic gas and particulate matter into the atmosphere. This new map shows the extensive spread of one particularly nasty gas: carbon monoxide.
Wildfires in Indonesia are particularly troublesome. Unlike “conventional” forest fires, these fires smolder under the surface, making it extremely difficult to extinguish; it usually takes a good downpour during the rainy season to put them out. Making matters worse, these peat-fueled fires release far more smoke and air pollution than most other types of wildfires.
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Two decades ago, the rolling hills of Paso Robles were mostly covered with golden grass and oak trees. Now the hills and valleys are blanketed with more than 32,000 acres of grapevines.
Surging demand for wine has brought an explosion of vineyards, and along with it heavy pumping of groundwater. With the water table dropping, many people have had to cope as their taps have sputtered and their wells have gone dry.
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Finance
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The act creates a new Sec. 7345 that requires the secretary of State to deny, revoke, or limit the passport of any person who the IRS certifies has a seriously delinquent tax debt. “Seriously delinquent tax debt” is defined as an outstanding tax debt in excess of $50,000 (adjusted for inflation) for which a notice of lien or a levy has been filed, unless the individual is making timely payments under an agreement with the IRS or collection is suspended because a Collection Due Process hearing or innocent spouse relief has been requested or is pending. This provision is effective upon enactment.
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In 2008, someone calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto posted a paper describing the workings of what would become the world’s most important digital cryptocurrency, bitcoin. Two months later, he posted the code for the first version of the software that would allow people to create and exchange the currency.
The paper was revolutionary because it brought together ideas that people had been working on in the area of digital currencies. It solved the problem of exchanging money in a safe and secure way, without having to trust third parties or even the other person in the deal.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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A mother and father in Rosemount were alarmed by what their 11-year-old daughter brought home from school: A novel about how a one-day fling in Paris with a Dutch hunk changed an American teenager’s life.
Gayle Forman’s 2013 work of fiction, “Just One Day,” has received critical acclaim for its depiction of a young woman taking control of her life from overprotective parents. Yet Ben and Kandi Lovin of Rosemount seized on the pages that for them went too far: an f-bomb dropped on page 261, the b-word on page 274, clothes being shed and a condom appearing in the brief sex scene on page 128.
Unhappy with the response from the principal, vice principal, librarian and teacher, the Lovins filed a formal request in October to the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan district to remove the book from the district’s middle and high school libraries. “It is a novel that has no life lesson to be learned from at this age level that cannot be learned from any of many quality books available,” they wrote.
The life lessons of this episode are many. Books are far more than the sum of their pages. Due process still exists. And librarians matter.
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A senior Chinese official known as the “gatekeeper” of the country’s internet has denied that the country censors online information.
Lu Wei, chief of the State Internet Information Office, said China does not censor but “manages” internet content in Zhejiang on Wednesday.
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For a little clarity on Iran’s often combustible—and always confusing—combination of religion and politics, it might help to watch two big-budget movies about Shia Islam’s holiest figures, released within weeks of each other this summer.
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Nudity in art has been around for thousands of years, but Facebook still can’t take it. The social media site has deleted pics of artworks by people like Kate Durbin and Erika Ordosgoitto. It has blocked users like Frédéric Durand-Baïssas for sharing paintings including Gustave Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde.” And though some people have protested by creating Facebook groups like Artists Against Art Censorship, recording every instance of censorship — let alone fighting back — is next to impossible.
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It’s been a bad few weeks for the people of Bangladesh, made worse by the ham-handed internet censorship of its government. Their decision to block some online messaging services was a disproportionate and unnecessary attempt to silence all speech on a slapdash list of messenger applications.
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PINAC reporter Jeff Gray received 38 “school safe zones” / trespassing warning letters from the Superintendent of St. Johns County schools and every single principal of every single school in his home county, where his children are enrolled.
The letters were dated December 7th, a day that will now live in censorship infamy.
Jeff Gray aka HonorYourOath was at the receiving end of a (poorly drafted) retaliatory lawsuit by the St Johns County School Board, as we reported earlier this week.
Now, a certified letter containing 38 blanket trespassing warnings arrived too.
Even the St. Johns Virtual School dutifully delivered a trespass warning, though it’s uncertain how the school board intends to keep Mr. Gray from enjoying their website.
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As deadline descended on El Mañana’s newsroom and reporters rushed to file their stories, someone in the employ of a local drug cartel called with a demand from his crime boss.
The caller was a journalist for another newspaper, known here as an enlace, or “link” to the cartel. The compromised journalist barked out the order: Publish an article saying the mayor in Matamoros had not paid the cartel $2 million a month in protection fees, as an El Mañana front-page story had alleged the day before.
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When the topic of conversation shifts to the most iconic comedy films of all time, Monty Python and the Holy Grail almost always rears its head. The 1975 film from the British comedy troupe has become famous for its employment of silly humor set against the backdrop of the Middle Ages. While relatively tame by today’s standards, the film evidently went through the wringer with censors back in the 1970s.
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We’ve heard it many times before: college students are coddled, politically correct children who can’t take a joke, enjoy a holiday or even fulfill the requirements of a class without wanting professorial hand-holding. The proof of this round generalization of an entire generation? Trigger warnings.
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Jonathan Heawood, director of English PEN, a charity supporting free expression, told the inquiry co-regulation was a veiled form of statutory regulation, and said he had never seen a model incorporating the best of self-regulation and state intervention.
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The ACLU contends BART engaged in political censorship. BART officials, though, said they didn’t object to the topic of gentrification, but found one of the pieces too profane and mean.
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The Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) has called on the Film and Publications Board (FPB) to publish public comments made in response to the Draft Online Regulation Policy.
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Earlier this year, the FBP unveiled the draft Online Regulation Policy to enable the effective regulation and speedy classification of digital content in SA.
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The figures place Poland third in the EU in its support of the government censoring “free speech”. Germany led with 70 percent being for government censorship and 27 percent being against. Italy was a close second with 62 percent and 32 percent in both categories respectively.
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In an op-ed for The New York Times (paywall), Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, inserted himself directly into the middle of a heated debate about the line between fighting terrorism’s online reach and internet censorship.
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Technology companies should work on tools to disrupt terrorism – such as creating a hate speech “spell-checker” – Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt has said.
Writing in the New York Times, Mr Schmidt said using technology to automatically filter-out extremist material would “de-escalate tensions on social media” and “remove videos before they spread”.
His essay comes as presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton again called on Silicon Valley to help tackle terrorism, specifically seeking tools to combat the so-called Islamic State.
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When my older kids were little, before my youngest was born, my then-boyfriend now husband sculptor Sabin Howard and I took them, and his daughter, to Rome. A few days into our jaunt, we climbed the Capitoline Hill and went to the museum there. My middle daughter ran around the great gallery of sculptures, pointing and yelling, “Peeny-weeny!” wherever the male genitalia were intact.
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The hundreds of thousands demanding that Britain ban Donald Trump should ask themselves if they would be happy about America banning Jeremy Corbyn. The answer you give will show whether you understand how to fight the illiberal ideologies that are flourishing across the western world.
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However, it is not just those most-dedicated free-speech campaigners who worry that censorship weapons unleashed against the cyber-jihad could run out of control.
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In India, online content can be blocked according to Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Directions for blocking of unlawful content may be given by the government on its own accord, or upon complaints made by individuals, as long as the directions fall within the reasonable restrictions that can be imposed on free speech according to the Indian Constitution. Instances of Internet censorship in India range from Internet shut-downs in various states, mass URL blocking as well as complete shut-down of websites.
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For weeks, Rome has been transfixed by the spectacle of the “Capital Mafia” trial, which began on 5 November. The prosecutors are laying bare an alleged network of corrupt relationships between politicians and criminal syndicates in the city. The scandal involves the misappropriation of funding that was destined for city services, according to prosecutors.
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The rights of a 23-year-old accused murderer to get a fair trial could be torpedoed by Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Jack Schramm Cox’s order that keeps key records in his case from being made public, his attorney and the Palm Beach County Public Defender’s Office said in separate motions filed Thursday.
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A GROUP opposed to a plan to store nuclear waste on the Darling Downs is calling for officials to stop censoring proceedings from the media.
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The poet’s announcement comes as the latest reaction to a debate over censorship and how state funding is allocated to the arts following a speech from NAC Chairman Professor Chan Heng Hee late last month.
“In short, she [Chan] claimed that the state has the right and the obligation to decide on what to fund, based on other considerations besides the artistic merit of the application,” Koh noted in his post.
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A perennial silly season story has resurfaced for the umpteenth time, with a cross-party gaggle of Australian senators fretting about Internet pornography.
A motion passed nearly unnoticed by the Senate last week will establish an inquiry into the impact of pornography on Australian children. The full motion, here, was backed by the Australian Labor Party’s Senator Joe Bullock, the Democratic Labor Party’s John Madigan, and Liberals Joanna Lindgren and Chris Back.
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A new rule enabling third parties to request reviews of defamatory online postings for removal is igniting dispute.
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A 17-year-old Singaporean is being investigated by the police for allegedly making religiously offensive remarks online.
In a statement yesterday, the Singapore Police Force said that reports had been lodged against the youth, in connection with certain religiously offensive remarks posted online.
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In a news release, police said the teenager is under investigation in connection with the case. No further details were given.
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A 17-year-old male, believed to be teen blogger Amos Yee, is under investigation for allegedly making offensive remarks about religion online.
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Privacy
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In September, I spent a day at the United States military academy at West Point, an elite, 213-year-old academic institution. I’d been invited to lecture by the Army Cyber Institute, a new academic department that focuses on cybersecurity and policies related to the military implications of attacking and defending electronic infrastructure.
It’s not my usual speaking gig. I grew up as an organiser in the anti-nuclear-weapons movement; my experience of the military mostly revolves around protesting outside bases, not being invited inside them. West Point was the first military audience I’d ever addressed, yet I’d heard that they have used my young-adult novel Little Brother, which concerns net-savvy kids in San Francisco who form an underground movement to resist Homeland Security incursions on civil liberties following a terrorist attack.
West Point is an American oddity: a leafy, ancient (by US standards) campus on a lazy river with academic standards to match any Big Ten or Ivy League university, but with a student body that is far more likely to come from racial minorities and poor people than any of America’s notoriously high-ticket educational institutions. I’ve done teaching stints at American universities where annual tuition ran to $50,000, and the contrasts between the student body at those schools and West Point could be the subject of a dissertation on American history, sociology, race relations or economics.
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In the wake of the California shootings, Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham are complaining that U.S. intelligence agencies have lost their authority to collect phone records on Americans under a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program. They want the government to bring that program back.
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Florida Sen. Marco Rubio amped his criticism Friday of the Obama administration’s support for restrictions to a major National Security Agency surveillance program, and joined with fellow Republicans to call for increasing the agency’s powers in the wake of recent deadly shootings in Paris and California inspired by the Islamic State.
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Taking on critics in his own party, Republican presidential contender Ted Cruz on Thursday defended Middle East dictators as useful allies against Islamic extremists during a Washington address decrying political correctness and stricter gun laws as an impediment to national security.
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Ted Cruz has launched a stinging attack on fellow Republicans who have demanded the return of mass telephone surveillance in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack.
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It’s more than a little odd seeing the world hail their libertarian hero, mourn that he was “arrested for inventing Bitcoin”* (as is being claimed on Twitter), and find that he ate government money like a horse.
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As the old adage has it, never meet your heroes. If Craig Steven Wright, an Australian serial entrepreneur, really is the creator of Bitcoin, then lovers of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency are going to be a little disappointed: Satoshi Nakamoto is not the man you thought he was.
Reporters from Wired and Gizmodo have unmasked someone who has been a long-time purveyor of business cliches, someone who claims to be one of the most certified security professionals on the planet, and, rather than working against government, appears to have done plenty of work for the establishment. He even claimed to have relationships with employees at the NSA. As both publications admit, however, it could all be one elaborate ruse.
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If news goes unnoticed for years, is it still new news, especially if the present brings new perspectives to light? While researching another article I came across an internal NSA document that was written in 1995 and declassified in 2008, not long before the invention of Bitcoin. The document, which is publicly available on the NSA website, is a weekly internal newsletter for NSA employees called Communicator and in it, they discuss the early iterations of digital currencies that were make headway at the time, specifically David Chaum’s Digicash.
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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper now has a fifth reason for why he lied to the US Congress over the NSA’s spying program: he just plain forgot it existed.
Speaking during a panel discussion last week, Clapper’s general counsel Robert Litt said that Clapper had not had time to prepare an answer to the question posed to him by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) about storing data on Americans.
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The terrorist attacks in California and Paris should not spur Congress to reinstate the mass surveillance of Americans’ phone records, House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul said Wednesday.
But McCaul, R-Texas, said phone companies may need to keep customer data longer to help federal agents investigate terrorists such as the couple that carried out the mass shooting last week in San Bernardino. Federal agents have complained that a new law reining in the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone data limited how many years of phone records they could analyze in the San Bernardino case.
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NSA’s one of the known snooping tactics is installing a malware into hard drive’s firmware which makes the deletion of the malware nearly impossible even the malware can avoid formatting of the hard drive.
Nemesis is a malware that can be used for similar purposes as it can avoid clean-up software and can even avoid reinstalling of windows altogether by hiding behind boot records, according to FireEye.
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When America’s premier federal security recruiters go fishing for new technical talent, they have plenty of lures to dangle. There’s the patriotic mission; the promise of a government salary; the thrill of working under the hood on the country’s classified cyber mechanics.
And then there’s the pile of free purple and orange pens.
At a recent job fair in this city’s cavernous convention center, the National Security Agency set up an eight-foot-long folding table and covered it with a black cloth and assorted pieces of schwag, trying to rope in coders and tech experts. “Push the limits of innovation,” read one of its posters. Brochures touted a mission producing results “that you might see on the nightly news,” like disrupting a terrorist attack, catching international drug traffickers or preventing a crippling cyberattack.
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Tice stated that the NSA is lying that they are only collecting the meta-data of USA citizens, and that the entire contents of every single form of communication in the United States is illegally and unconstitutionally spied upon and recorded by the NSA.
Tice made the shocking allegations that the NSA is specifically targeting Congressmen, Supreme Court Justices, and that the NSA has targeted and wire-tapped President Obama while he was campaigning prior to being elected!
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I’m flopping in my fins toward my first scuba dive in the ocean, accompanying artist Trevor Paglen on a mission to the ocean floor. We’re heading 70 feet down off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The captain asks me how I’m feeling.
“Scared,” I say with a shrug, as if to say, How else would I feel?
“Remember,” he tells me, “Jacques Cousteau did not die from diving. He died an old man.”
When I hit the water, though, the anxiety is gone, and I am going slowly into the deep, hand over hand along a yellow rope.
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Asheem and Jelani, were born exactly one year apart to the day, in the warm Junes of 1991 and ‘92. “I always felt there was something special about that,” says their mother Alethia. “A little bit of magic.” The two grew up together in their mother’s small apartment on the corner of 129th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in New York’s Harlem neighborhood.
As young children, the brothers were good friends with kids from all over Harlem. But as they matured into adolescent young men, a set of once-invisible rivalries began to surface. The True Money Gang from the Johnson Houses was at war with the Air It Out crew from the Taft Houses. Crews from Grant and Manhattanville projects exchanged gunfire in the streets. As he grew up, Jelani looked forward to leaving the neighborhood for school, “So I didn’t have to look behind my back every two seconds to see if someone about to bash me in the head,” he says.
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Vandals have damaged the entrance to a building in Hamburg that houses the offices of social network Facebook, smashing glass, throwing paint and spraying “Facebook dislike” on a wall, according to police in the northern German city.
Police said in a statement on Sunday that the overnight attack was carried out by a group of 15-20 people wearing black clothes and hoods. An investigation has been launched. Facebook was not immediately available to comment.
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Privacy advocates are leaning on the White House to counter lawmakers’ renewed efforts to pass encryption-piercing legislation in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.
Despite a lack of direct evidence the technology played a role in either incident, lawmakers continue to use both deadly plots to promote a bill that would force companies to decrypt data upon request.
The tactic has left technologists and privacy advocates frustrated, even outraged.
In a meeting with privacy and civil liberties groups on Thursday, the Obama administration said it was preparing to issue an updated stance on encryption policy in the coming weeks, giving the pro-encryption community hope it might have a new ally in its fight.
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The FBI still wants backdoors into encrypted communications, it just doesn’t want to call them backdoors and it doesn’t want to dictate what they should look like.
FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he’d been in talks with unspecified tech leaders about his need to crack encrypted communications in order to track down terrorists and that these leaders understood the need.
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A Congresswoman from California is questioning Department of Homeland Security officials who put pressure on a local public library to take down the relay node it had set up for the anonymity network Tor.
You may recall back in September, when the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire briefly disabled its Tor relay after meeting with local police, who had received a tip from agents with Homeland Security’s investigations branch warning that the network can be used by criminals. Relay nodes act as the middle points of the Tor network, whose layers of encryption allow activists, journalists, human rights workers, and average citizens (and, yes, criminals) to access the Internet anonymously. The more nodes, the faster the network becomes.
The fearmongering backfired spectacularly: the Lebanon library unanimously voted to restore its Tor relay and announced plans to convert it into a Tor exit node, one of the essential gateways which provides the last “hop” allowing Tor users to anonymously connect to Internet sites and services. More than a dozen other libraries around the U.S. also piled on, declaring their intention to run Tor nodes of their own in defiance.
Now Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren is asking just what the hell compelled the DHS to intervene.
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A mysterious AT&T relic reveals connections between telecommunications infrastructure and the Cold War.
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In an interview following the launch of OpenAI, Musk explained how his new nonprofit was designed to help.
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Digital rights advocates are in an uproar as the final text of a major cybersecurity bill appears to lack some of the privacy community’s favored clauses.
In the last few weeks, House and Senate negotiators have been working unofficially to reach a compromise between multiple versions of a cyber bill that would encourage businesses to share more data on hacking threats with the government.
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President could be referring to encryption debate
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Since Edward Snowden revealed the federal government’s unlawful and unconstitutional use of federal statutes to justify spying on all in America all the time, including the members of Congress who unwittingly wrote and passed the statutes, I have been arguing that the Fourth Amendment prohibits all domestic spying, except that which has been authorized by a search warrant issued by a judge. The same amendment also requires that warrants be issued only based on a serious level of individualized suspicion backed up by evidence — called probable cause — and the warrants must specifically identify the place and person to be spied upon.
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Earlier this week, we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous Associated Press story by reporter Ted Bridis, claiming that law enforcement investigating the San Bernardino shootings are being somehow held back because of the close of the NSA’s Section 215 phone records program. There were all sorts of problems with that story, so it’s great to see the Associated Press ask one of its enterprising young reporters — a guy who goes by the name Ted Bridis — to do a “fact check” piece on Republican Presidential candidates who are now repeating the very claims that Bridis himself made earlier in the week.
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Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist will moderate the February 16 event from the Macky Auditorium. Attendees will be able to ask Snowden questions, but details about that process have not been released.
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The FBI has used a secretive authority to compel Internet and telecommunications firms to hand over customer data including an individual’s complete web browsing history and records of all online purchases, a court filing shows.
The NSA is violating the Fourth Amendment: Reasonable search and seizure. They’re providing none. They have no reasonable warrant to do this.
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TOR is an encryption network developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in the 1990s. The military’s hope was to enable government workers to search the web without exposing their locations and identities. The system today is widely available, runs on open-source code, and is popular among privacy advocates as a more secure alternative to open Internet surfing, particularly in countries with repressive regimes. It works by encrypting the user’s address and routing the traffic through servers that are located around the world (so-called “onion routing.”) How does the NSA access it? Through a computer system called XKeyscore, one of the various agency surveillance tools that NSA leaker Edward Snowden disclosed last summer.
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Wheeler writes widely about the legal aspects of the “war on terror” and its effects on civil liberties. She blogs at emptywheel.net. She just wrote the piece “6 Responses to Why the AP’s Call Record Article Is So Stupid,” about the NSA’s monitoring of San Bernardino shooting suspect Tashfeen Malik which states: “The AP engaged in willful propaganda yesterday, in what appears to be a planned cutout role for the Marco Rubio campaign. Rubio’s campaign immediately pointed to the article to make claims they know — or should, given that Rubio is on the Senate Intelligence Committee — to be false, relying on the AP article. That’s the A1 cutout method Dick Cheney used to make false claims about aluminum tubes to catastrophic effect back in 2002.
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The takeaway from the AP story is that investigators lost out on the NSA’s phone record dragnet when one of the NSA’s bulk collection programs expired, which would have allowed them to access five years of phone records on shooters Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. Now, the AP story implies, they’re stuck obtaining records directly from phone companies under the USA Freedom Act.
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Host Chuck Todd said, “Senator, respond to something Marco Rubio said. He said the following a week ago, ‘We were still able to see the phone records of a potential terrorist cause, we held them, now you have to hope the phone company still has them, you have to argue with their chief counsel by the time you get access to it and find out who they’ve been talking to before it’s too late.’ You were on the forefront of trying to change this law. Any second thoughts?”
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Kentucky Senator Rand Paul says the US National Security Agency’s program of collecting US citizens’ phone metadata has failed to thwart terrorist attacks or help detain criminals as had been claimed by the United States authorities.
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Nov. 29 was the deadline for the end of NSA bulk collection of telephone records as established by the USA Freedom Act six months ago. This ended the Patriot Act, revealed by Edward Snowden, to have been the authority used to collect the bulk phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans, a certain big government invasion of privacy, which incensed civil libertarians. Libertarians and Constitutionalists, on Fourth Amendment concerns, led by Sen. Rand Paul brought the demise of the hated Patriot Act. This ends government surveillance of its citizens. Or does it?
The USA Freedom Act called for a six-month transition period allowing NSA to continue bulk collection as before, but at its end NSA must only access targeted data from telephone providers with judicial approval. Unfortunately for Constitutionalists it, like its predecessor the Patriot Act, nullifies the 4th Amendment requirement of “probable cause” and thus is as unconstitutional as the law it replaced.
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Civil Rights
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President Obama and Hillary Clinton made statements on Sunday indicating that the post-San Bernardino focus on rooting out radicalized individuals is going to lead to heightened pressure on social media sites and tech companies that provide unbreakable end-to-end encryption.
In his Oval Office speech on Sunday night about the fight against ISIS, President Obama devoted one line in his speech to the topic. “I will urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice,” he said.
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Today Freedom of the Press Foundation is proud to announce a new crowd-funding campaign that will fund local journalists around the United States to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other transparency lawsuits aimed at uncovering video evidence of police misconduct and brutality against unarmed men and women. You can donate to the fund here.
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However one assesses that chain and its consequences, it seems clear that the large majority of legal immigrants choose to come—or, more exactly, are chosen by their relatives—for their own reasons. They are not selected by the United States to advance some national interest. Illegal immigrants are of course entirely self-selected, as are asylum seekers. Even the refugee process, reportedly the most tightly screened, operates to a considerable extent outside national control: The first assessment of refugees is typically made by the UN High Commission on Refugees from within camps it operates. That explains why, for example, Christian Syrians make up only about 3 percent of the refugees admitted to the United States, despite accounting for 10 percent of the country’s population: Fearing violence from Sunni Muslims, they apparently hesitate to enter UN camps in the first place.
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The Society for the German Language (GfdS) placed “refugees” at the top of its list of the ten most important words of 2015 released on Friday.
“What’s decisive in choosing the Word of the Year isn’t how often it’s used, but much more its significance and popularity,” the GfdS said in its announcement.
“The list hits the linguistic nerve of the year as it nears its end and is a contribution to contemporary history.”
The Local looks at the top ten words that defined 2015, according to the GfdS.
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Millennials are disillusioned about the American dream, don’t trust the government and don’t think much of the current presidential candidates. They also want more boots on the ground to fight Islamic State… but they want other Americans to serve.
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You have a 1 in 85 chance of being killed in a vehicle accident, and a 1 in 115 chance of suicide — one U.S. resident every 15 minutes.
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Those responsible for the torture of suspected terrorists in the wake of the September 11 attacks cannot dodge justice forever, a top UN human rights official, Juan Mendez, told Middle East Eye.
Mendez criticised US officials for not prosecuting intelligence agents for a widespread use of torture that was detailed in the US government’s own report – a damning probe that was released a year ago this week.
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Thanakorn Siripaiboon was arrested at his home in Samut Prakan province for sharing the doctored photo of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, as well as an infographic on a Thai corruption scandal, with around 600 friends.
Under Thai law, anyone convicted of insulting the revered but ailing 88-year-old king can face up to 15 years in jail on each count.
“On December 2, he clicked the ‘like’ link on a doctored photo of the king and shared it with 608 friends,” said Colonel Burin Thongprapai, a military junta legal officer.
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Negotiations began in June and the agreement was reached on Thursday, Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that it will enter into force “in the coming days.”
Sweden wants to question Assange on a rape allegation dating back to 2010.
Assange, an Australian citizen, sought refuge at the Ecuadorian mission in June 2012 after losing a long battle in the British courts to avoid extradition to Sweden.
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When it comes to thwarting and persecuting dissenting voices, the strategy of hiding real, often political motivations behind a false facade of allegations has always been a common practice since antiquity — Socrates is blatant and clear example of this. It’s an easy process, if you have enough money or power to bribe or scare a sufficient number of people: you just need to find a trick — usually a highly defamatory accusation, for example one concerning widely-recognized taboos, disgusting crimes or perhaps… the sexual sphere — to start the character assassination of the thorny guy in question. Then, you will simply need to keep it up as long as possible, leaving the rest to the (manipulated, fooled and unaware) public opinion, which will abandon the person with cynicism and conformism.
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A heavily redacted report on CIA torture that Senate investigators released one year ago today shows that Rahman was dead within three weeks, having succumbed to hypothermia.
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A year after the release of a sweeping United States Senate Intelligence Committee report on Bush-era torture practices, the international nonprofit NGO Human Rights Watch is demanding a raft of former top officials be subject to prosecution.
The 159-page report, issued Dec. 1, said the U.S. government “has an obligation under international law to prosecute torture where warranted and provide redress to victims, but it has done neither.”
HRW targeted 16 government officials and contractors for “conspiracy to torture,” including former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Also among the names were former CIA-contracted psychologists James Mitchell and Idaho native Bruce Jessen.
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A year after the US Senate published a major report into the CIA torture programme (9 December 2014), there is still no sign of either the UK’s own inquiry or a decision from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) regarding the role the British Government played, says the legal and human rights organisation Reprieve.
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When the CIA met with party-boy, explosion-obsessed Hollywood filmmaker Michael Bay earlier this year, the agency said it was on a matter of national security.
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Big data analytics company Palantir has been valued at around $20bn following a large boost in funding.
The company, which provides tools around areas such as cyber security, crisis response and military intelligence, raised $129 million in new funding.
This latest funding forms part of a round that has seen it raise close to $680 million. Investors have included Founders Fund and In-Q-Tel, which is a non-profit venture capital firm that focuses on investing in technology companies that help the Central Intelligence Agency.
Palantir, a 12 year-old company from Palo Alto, has clients such as the U.S. government and deals with other companies in finance and legal research.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Copyrights
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“The internet is shit today. It’s broken. It was probably always broken, but it’s worse than ever.”
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The United Kingdom is holding a consultation as to when a provision of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 should take effect. Copyright in works of artistic craftsmanship—utilitarian objects (even if mass-produced) which are deemed artistic—shall be extended. Currently, the copyright lasts for 25 years after an item is first offered for sale; the new term will be for the life of the creator, then another 70 years. This means that some works which are now in the public domain will become copyrighted. Publishers of derivative works of such items, for example a book or film in which a work of artistic craftsmanship was photographed, will be obliged to obtain permissions, except for uses which fall under fair dealing.
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A pirate ordered to get 200,000 YouTube views or risk getting sued by companies including Microsoft has smashed his target. Against the odds Jakub F’s anti-piracy video now has more than a million views. Could it be that everyone involved – from corporations to pirates – have benefited from this exercise?
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