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11.04.16

Techrights Turns 10 This Monday

Posted in Site News at 5:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Ten

Summary: Tenth anniversary for Techrights when this weekend ends; plus, some statistics…

STARTING with focus on Novell and its patent deal with Microsoft, the site was registered and born 10 years ago (not exactly today but a few days from now).

Perfect record of never exposing or causing problems for our sources (of which there were plenty) is something we take pride in. We value and protect our sources. We intent to maintain this perfect record.

“Perfect record of never exposing or causing problems for our sources (of which there were plenty) is something we take pride in.”Never publishing anything fake is another achievement of ours. We do verify the credibility of sources and authenticity of material we receive. We also anonymise everything and strip metadata all the time. We thankfully have the technical skills and we don’t rely on a third party or Big Company for hosting (these can leak/spill out IP addresses to unwanted hands). We never retain logs older than 4 weeks. They get deleted for good.

In that sense, we have done better than Wikileaks (another kind of site) where sources like Elmer and Manning got caught but nothing fake was published in 10 years. Their site is only about a month older than Techrights.

Techrights officially turns 10 on the 7th of this month and is actively or passively pursuing new leaks which can be sent anonymously.

We don’t plan anything big for the anniversary; we’ll probably just do a small wine celebration in the house (wife and I).

“We never retain logs older than 4 weeks.”Regarding statistics, there are nearly 30,000 pages in the site now, aside from attachments, multimedia and various documents. The site is about 40 GB in ‘weight’ and is powered by several servers with 8 cores each. We recently had to make expensive upgrades in order to better cope with attacks.

We are not actively asking for donations (which are possible) because we wish to maintain 100% financial independence. This means that I run this site at my own expense, for no profit, only loss (because it’s the ethical and moral thing to do). I separately work full time in order to earn money and pay the site’s bills. This has always been the case. █

Links 4/11/2016: Qt 5.8 Beta, New Systemd

Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Linux-based personal micro PC Panther Alpha launches on Kickstarter

      We cover a lot of macOS and Windows 10 news here on the site but we don’t always cover Linux as much as we should. Part of that is because we don’t have anyone on staff who uses the OS on a daily basis. There was a time though that I used Linux extensively when I was dead broke. I built my PC’s out of spare parts and installed Linux on them to get things working.

      Back then it was a chore to get just about anything to work properly, finding the proper drivers, or even finding the right programs to open certain files took time to put together. Linux has evolved a lot over the years and many distros offer out of the box functionality that I never knew. Panther is launching a Kickstarter for a personal micro PC that is Linux-based and very affordable. Check out the full press release below and hit the Kickstarter link below to support the project if you find it may fit your needs.

    • Panther Alpha Super Mini PC Hits Kickstarter For $79 (video)

      A new Linux powered “super mini PC” has been launched by Kickstarter this week in the form of the Panther Alpha, which is looking to raise $79,000 over the next 45 days to make the jump into production.

      The Panther Alpha is being marketed as the most efficient desktop computer currently available allowing you to do more with less. Watch the promotional video below to learn more about its construction, integrated technology and operating system.

    • Lenovo issues fixes for laptop Linux installs [Ed: thanks to Techrights]

      The world’s biggest PC seller Lenovo has announced that it will be releasing a series of updates to the firmware in some of its signature laptops so that Linux can be installed on them.

      Some of the models, as released originally, could only run Windows 10.

      The models in question were unable to see Linux installed on a proprietary RAID mode that was locked by the UEFI of the laptops in question.

  • Server

    • Running MongoDB and Other Open Source Apps on the Mainframe

      Open source software is increasingly becoming available on the mainframe. MongoDB is among the most popular of several programs supporting Linux for mainframe. Yes, the mainframe. Surprisingly to some, mainframe computing is still in heavy use in large organizations. Indeed, 92 of the top 100 banks still run critical data on the mainframe, as do many top retailers, airlines and government organizations.

      But that’s not to say that over all these years, mainframe computing has remained the same. Earlier it was primarily run over IBM’s own z/OS operating system with databases such as DB2 and IMS, but also with a smattering of other vendor products such as CA’s and their IDMS and Datacom offerings. However, over the past several years, there has been a mainstream shift to Linux on the mainframe, and that trend is continuing.

    • Apache Mesos users focus on big data, containers

      Mesosphere, the main commercial outfit behind the Apache Mesos datacenter and container orchestration project, has taken a good look at its user base and found that they gravitate toward a few fundamental use cases.

      Survey data released recently by Mesosphere in the “Apache Mesos 2016 Survey Report,” indicates that Mesos users focus on running containers at scale, using Mesos to deploy big data frameworks, and relying heavily on the core tool set that Mesos and DC/OS provide rather than using substitutes.

    • AWS launches Linux container image for on-premise

      AWS has launched a new Linux Container Image in response to customer demand, designed for use with cloud and on-premise workloads.

      Linux AMI is a secure environment for firing up applications running on EC2, but due to customer demand, AWS has now made the image available for on-premise as well as cloud infrastructures, addressing more businesses’ needs.

    • Secured DevOps for microservices

      Containers and microservices have revolutionized application development and infrastructure management. They have also introduced new security challenges without solving the old ones. What are some of the new security challenges, and what can you do about them?

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • WikiToLearn Reaches 1.0

        WikiToLearn is KDE’s project to create textbooks for university and school students. It provides free, collaborative and accessible text books. Academics worldwide contribute in sharing knowledge by creating high quality content.

        One year after founding WikiToLearn, the love for sharing knowledge helped our community to grow stronger. During this year a lot of great things happened, but we also had to face some technical and organizational problems.

      • Qt 5.8 Beta Released

        I am pleased to announce that Qt 5.8 Beta is now released. Containing all-new configuration system, new graphics architecture with integrated Qt Quick 2D Renderer for devices without OpenGL, build in QML cache for improved startup and many other new features, Qt 5.8 will be a very interesting release. I hope many will take the Qt 5.8 Beta release, test it and provide feedback for us to complete Qt 5.8. For the big picture of the release, see the alpha release blog post.

      • Qt 5.8 Now In Beta Form

        Qt 5.8 Beta is now shipping with their new configuration system, their graphics changes for the Qt Quick 2D renderer, built-in QML cache, and much more. As covered previously, some of the other work includes an experimental Direct3D 12 back-end for Qt Quick, new Qt Quick Controls 2 additions, Qt WebEngine upgrades, Bluetooth Low Energy improvements, Qt Network improvements, embedded support improvements, and more. New modules for Qt 5.8 coming are the Qt Wayland Compositor, Qt SCXML, Qt Serial Bus, and new platform support is for Apple tvOS and watchOS. There are also technology previews of Qt Gamepad, Qt Speech, and Qt Network Authentication.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Searching in GNOME Software

        I’ve spent a few days profiling GNOME Software on ARM, mostly for curiosity but also to help our friends at Endless. I’ve merged a few patches that make the existing –profile code more useful to profile start up speed. Already there have been some big gains, over 200ms of startup time and 12Mb of RSS, but there’s plenty more that we want to fix to make GNOME Software run really nicely on resource constrained devices.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Vs Closed Source

    There are many differences between open source operating system and closed source operating system. Here we have written few of them.

  • Four Node.js Gotchas that Operations Teams Should Know about

    There is no doubt that Node.js is one of the fastest growing platforms today. It can be found at start-ups and enterprises throughout all industries from high-tech to healthcare.

    A lot of people have written about the reasons for its popularity and why it has made sense in “digital transformation” efforts. But when you implement Node.js, do you have to replace your mainframes and legacy software with a shiny new Node.js-based microservice architecture?

  • Automating Infrastructure Deployment for Kubernetes

    Many organizations run Kubernetes clusters in a single public cloud, such as GCE or AWS, so they have reasonably homogenous infrastructure needs, says Alena Prokharchyk, Principal Software Engineer at Rancher Labs. In these situations, deploying Kubernetes clusters is relatively straightforward. Other organizations, however, may need to deploy Kubernetes across multiple clouds and data centers, which can lead to challenges.

    Prokharchyk, who will be speaking along with Brian Scott of The Walt Disney Company at KubeCon in Seattle, shared more about these challenges and how Rancher Labs has worked with various organizations to solve them.

  • Internet-based and open source: How e-voting works around the globe

    I live in one of the most wired parts of the United States—the San Francisco Bay Area—but for the presidential election, I’ve already voted by mail. On a piece of paper. From the comfort of my living room. Between folks like me who vote by mail and everyone else who votes by marking paper in some way, we comprise about two-thirds of all American voters. Approximately 25 percent of all Americans, however, will use paperless and electronic voting machines to cast their ballots on November 6.

    Around the world though, these percentages don’t hold. An increasing number of countries are beginning to tackle e-voting with gusto. Estonia, Switzerland, Spain, Brazil, Australia, India, Canada, and a handful of other countries have all held elections through the use of electronic voting machines in recent years.

  • Events

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.2.3 Arrives with over 80 Fixes, LibreOffice 5.3 Lands January 2017

      Today, November 3, 2016, we’ve been informed by Italo Vignoli from The Document Foundation about the general availability of the third maintenance update to the LibreOffice 5.2 “Fresh” office suite series.

    • Announcement of LibreOffice 5.2.3

      The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.2.3 “fresh”, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family, representing the bleeding edge in term of features and as such targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.

      For all other users and especially for enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.1.6 “still”, with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

    • Red Hat 7.3, LibreOffice 5.2.3 Released

      The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 5.2.3, “representing the bleeding edge in term of features and as such targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.” This release represents 81 squashed bugs. Some of the more interesting include:

      * some hidden text not imported as hidden correctly
      * unable to undo formatting in master slide placeholder textboxes
      * Deleting all content from a cell changes font formatting
      * copying a single sheet with a chart on it garbles the chart
      * writer cannot save 3d shape inserted from draw
      * opencl: don’t initialize OpenCL when disabled

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • No, Microsoft does not love open source

      I used to follow Microsoft’s intellectual property Twitter account in order to see exactly how much Microsoft loved open source as it bragged about all the people it had coerced into signing patent agreements. I guess someone realized that crowing about that was not a great idea, because today the feed tweets puff pieces about how great software patents are and how they drive innovation (through litigation).

      The truth is that Microsoft’s principal open source strategy hasn’t changed and probably never will. The point of open source to Microsoft (or any other company) is to give you an on-ramp to its platform. For Microsoft, that platform is morphing from Windows to Azure, so of course Microsoft has dialed back its rhetoric toward Linux. If you read Microsoft hates Linux, then you probably won’t host your VMs on Azure — same deal if you have a choice between two virtual private clouds. Duh, Microsoft loves Linux … on Azure. Why wouldn’t it?

      Microsoft may even be willing to accept open source that’s tied to its technologies, but not directly to its platform. Generally these will be “children’s edition” versions like .Net Core. I’m not saying Visual Studio for Linux isn’t progress, but is anyone really itching to run .Net on Linux? I mean, after the outrageous commercial success of Mono (/sarcasm), are any of you going, “Woo-hoo, I want to write .Net code and run it on Linux”? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?

      Now, about those lawsuits — Microsoft likes it both ways: Embrace on one hand, and get tidy patent settlements on the other. People who work at Microsoft say it’s a big company, and as with all big companies, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Actually, that would be dismal management — if “we love open source” was really part of Microsoft’s strategy.

      As evidence that Microsoft loves open source and Linux, last year Microsoft noted some long-running lawsuits that it wasn’t really winning and dropped them. Repositioning “we cut our losses” to “because we love you” is good PR. Respect! But let’s talk about real change.

    • Hard ‘committals’, Microsoft open sources cloud hardware [Ed: Yet more openwashing of Microsoft; this is NOT "Open Source" (as per OSI licences)]
    • Microsoft Contributes a Next-Generation Cloud Hardware/Software Concept

  • Public Services/Government

    • U.S. government launches Code.gov to showcase its open-source software

      The White House today is announcing the launch of Code.gov, a website that shows off U.S. government open-source projects and offers relevant resources for government agencies. By launching this site the White House is hoping to improve public access to the government’s software and encourage the reuse of software across government agencies.

      The launch comes four months after the White House introduced the Federal Source Code policy, which specifically mandates that government agencies “make custom-developed code available for Government-wide reuse and make their code inventories discoverable” at Code.gov, with certain exceptions.

      The new site already has almost 50 code repositories from more than 10 agencies, U.S. chief information officer Tony Scott wrote in a blog post.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Git for data is here: Announcing FlockerHub and Fli

        We are very excited to announce the upcoming release on November 8th of two major new products designed to make running stateful apps in containers easy–FlockerHub and Fli. FlockerHub will be released in beta on November 8th. During the beta, users can store up to 5GB of data volumes and share with an unlimited number of other users for free. Fli will be released as an Apache 2.0 licensed software project.

        FlockerHub is like GitHub® for data. With FlockerHub, teams can store and share any Docker data volume with access-controlled users or servers.

        Fli is like Git for data. It is command line interface that runs on any Linux server or laptop, and lets developers snapshot, clone, push and pull data volumes to FlockerHub.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Mellanox Open-Sources Its Network Processor Platform

        In a move designed to seed a new ecosystem around its line of NPS line of network processor units (NPU), including its 400 Gbps NPS-400 model, Mellanox Technologies on Wednesday announced its launch of an open source initiative, and the release of an SDK, called OpenNPU. After wallowing in the shallow end of open source development for the past two years with the Open Compute Project, now the company seems ready to dive deeper.

        The NPS series is already programmable using the classic C language, and features a built-in Linux operating system. Mellanox has been pushing NPS as a platform for network functions virtualization (NFV) — for virtualizing the class of functions required to run applications and customer services on networks themselves.

  • Programming/Development

    • The Vulkan Programming Guide Has Begun Shipping
    • App developers spend too much time debugging errors in production systems

      According to a new study 43 percent of app developers spend between 10 and 25 percent of their time debugging application errors discovered in production, rather than developing new features.

      The survey carried out by ClusterHQ found that a quarter of respondents report encountering bugs discovered in production one or more times per week.

      Respondents were also asked to identify the most common causes of bugs. These were, inability to fully recreate production environments in testing (33 percent), interdependence on external systems that makes integration testing difficult (27 percent) and testing against unrealistic data before moving into production (26 percent).

      When asked to identify the environment in which bugs are most costly to fix, 62 percent selected production as the most expensive stage of app development to fix errors, followed by development (18 percent), staging (seven percent), QA (seven percent) and testing (six percent).

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Design for the present

      The new MacBook Pro is probably great, and most of the initial skepticism probably won’t age well. But I want to pick on one aspect today.

      Having four USB-C ports is awesome.

      Having only four USB-C ports is going to hurt the versatility requirement of pro gear, because there’s a very real chance that you won’t have the right dongle when you need it.

      This is going to happen a lot, because even though USB-C is the future, it’s definitely not the present. We’ve had the standard USB plug (USB-A) in widespread use for 18 years, and it’s going to take a few more years for USB-C to become so ubiquitous that we can get away without USB-A ports most of the time.

  • Security

    • Thursday’s security updates
    • Why I don’t Use 2048 or 4096 RSA Key Sizes

      I have used non-standard RSA key size for maybe 15 years. For example, my old OpenPGP key created in 2002. With non-standard key sizes, I mean a RSA key size that is not 2048 or 4096. I do this when I generate OpenPGP/SSH keys (using GnuPG with a smartcard like this) and PKIX certificates (using GnuTLS or OpenSSL, e.g. for XMPP or for HTTPS). People sometimes ask me why. I haven’t seen anyone talk about this, or provide a writeup, that is consistent with my views. So I wanted to write about my motivation, so that it is easy for me to refer to, and hopefully to inspire others to think similarily. Or to provoke discussion and disagreement — that’s fine, and hopefully I will learn something.

    • Black Hat Europe: IoT devices can hack phones

      The Internet of things (IoT) has already been used to launch the biggest DDoS attacks ever, but now it represents a potential path for attackers to compromise cell phones.

      Flaws in Belkin WeMo devices – electrical switches, cameras, light bulbs, coffee makers, air purifiers, etc. – enabled Invincea Labs researchers to not only hack into the devices, but to use that access to attack an Android phone running the app that controls the WeMo devices.

      “This is the first instance we’ve seen of IoT hacking something else,” says researcher Scott Tenaglia, who pledges to look for other vulnerable devices that might be abused to carry out similar attacks.

    • Why Light Bulbs May Be the Next Hacker Target

      The so-called Internet of Things, its proponents argue, offers many benefits: energy efficiency, technology so convenient it can anticipate what you want, even reduced congestion on the roads.

      Now here’s the bad news: Putting a bunch of wirelessly connected devices in one area could prove irresistible to hackers. And it could allow them to spread malicious code through the air, like a flu virus on an airplane.

      Researchers report in a paper to be made public on Thursday that they have uncovered a flaw in a wireless technology that is often included in smart home devices like lights, switches, locks, thermostats and many of the components of the much-ballyhooed “smart home” of the future.

      The researchers focused on the Philips Hue smart light bulb and found that the wireless flaw could allow hackers to take control of the light bulbs, according to researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science near Tel Aviv and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.

    • Microsoft extends EMET end of life date

      Microsoft will continue to support and provide security patches for its Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit security software for Windows until July 31 2018, after taking customer feedback into account.

      EMET is a security utility software popular with enterprise customers running supported versions of Windows. It uses mitigation techniques to block attackers from exploiting vulnerabilities in software.

    • Linux/Moose is loose: Analysis finds IoT botnet malware favors Instagram fraud
    • DKIM Verification

      Domain Keys Identified Mail, or DKIM, is a highly regarded email security system that can be used to independently authenticate the contents and sender of an email that uses it.

      DKIM was developed and is widely deployed as an email server anti-spam mechanism, including on Gmail.com and HillaryClinton.com. DKIM-enabled mail servers cryptographically sign the emails they relay so that the recipients’ mail servers can authenticate them. DKIM has the beneficial side-effect of causing messages to become “cryptographically non-repudiable”; that is, after the email has been sent, the sender cannot credibly repudiate the message and say that it is a forgery. A DKIM mail server creates a cryptographically strong proof attesting to the authenticity of the email, which it adds to each of the headers of each email it sends. This cryptographic proof can then be tested by anyone who obtains a copy of the email.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • How Sweden develops cyber war methods at Nato’s centre

      Sweden is developing methods for cyber defence and offence in Nato’s cyber warfare centre, says the Ministry for Defence.

      As hacking and threats of “cyber attacks” play a bigger role in the worsening relations between the USA and Russia, Radio Sweden hears how Sweden is part of the Nato Centre for Cyber Defence Cooperation in Tallinn, and speaks to the Swedish expert who now works there.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate Change Is Already Forcing Americans to Move

      Loraine Helber runs the public housing authority in Punta Gorda, Florida, a city of 18,000 just north of Fort Myers at the mouth of the Peace River. In March, she hopes to celebrate a milestone: the opening of new apartments for the elderly, replacing about 80 units destroyed by the hurricane.

      But the storm that destroyed the original public housing wasn’t Hurricane Matthew; it was Hurricane Charley, 12 years ago. Neither the insurance company nor the federal government provided enough money to rebuild what was lost. Construction could proceed only once Bank of America, through a subsidiary, invested in the new building to get a tax write-off.

      None of the people forced to leave their homes will be there to move back in. Many of them left Punta Gorda altogether; there was nowhere for them to stay. Helber thinks most went to Tampa. Yet she says Punta Gorda fared better than most housing authorities, because the units got rebuilt at all. “We refused to give up,” Helber told me.

    • Finland on its way to become world’s first country to ban coal use in energy production

      The Finnish Government has announced that it is mulling over prohibiting the use of coal in energy production by 2030.

      Olli Rehn (Centre), the Minister of Economic Affairs, revealed in an interview with Helsingin Sanomat on Wednesday that the energy and climate strategy currently under preparation recommends that the use of coal be stopped by 2030 – possibly by means of a statutory prohibition.

    • You no longer need to own a solar panel to reap the financial benefits of solar energy

      For Americans, solar power can now come without the panel.

      Solar energy isn’t an option for millions of people living in cities—who have no rooftop to call their own—or without reasonable solar prices. There are 113 million homeowners in markets with competitively-priced solar power—but because of poor credit scores, 90% of them can’t get solar panel installation loans at terms favorable enough to make the panels financially viable, reports Greentech Media.

      A startup is now separating solar from the rooftop. Arcadia Power launched a community solar program Nov. 3 that lets customers buy solar panels anywhere in the US—technically, they buy a tiny share of a Power Purchase Agreement from a solar project—and pay their energy bills with sales from its electricity.

    • 2 Police Officers Turn In Badges In Support Of Standing Rock Water Protectors

      North Dakota water protector Redhawk reported today at Standing Rock that two police officers just turned in their badges to show their support for the water protectors.

      “There have been at least 2 reports of police officers turning in their badges acknowledging that this battle is not what they signed up for,” Redhawk writes.

      “You can see it in some of them, that they do not support the police actions,” he continues.

      “We must keep reminding them they are welcome to put down their weapons and badge and take a stand against this pipeline as well. Some are waking up.”

      While most of the police officers at the scene of the DAPL protests have been brutal, violent, and unconstitutionally-militarized, it is clear from this recent act of solidarity that some of their hearts can be turned to the cause of justice.

      This recent incident is reminiscent of what happened in Frankfurt, Germany in May of 2012, when police removed their helmets and began marching with the people protesting big banks.

  • Finance

    • Chinese Innovation: Nude Photo Loan Platform Adds Uber-Style Debt Collectors Feature

      Some may applaud Jiedaibao’s idea of creating an Uber-like crowd of private debt collectors, but the scope for abuse is clear. And those suddenly finding themselves on the receiving end of these amateur debt collectors are unlikely to be so enthusiastic about Jiedaibao’s innovative approach.

    • Loans secured against nude photos stir debate

      A number of female college students were requested to send their nude photos in exchange for usury loans on an internet lending platform, Beijing Youth Daily reported.

    • CETA Implementation Bill Provides Reminder of the IP Cost in the Canada – EU Trade Deal

      The Canadian government moved quickly from signing the trade agreement between Canada and the European Union on Sunday to tabling Bill C-30, the CETA implementing legislation, on Monday. While most of the attention has focused on the political issues surrounding CETA in Europe and the potential gains for Canadian exporters due to tariff reductions, the implementing bill provides a reminder that there are significant costs associated with CETA that have generated far less discussion. In fact, the majority of the 140-page bill features changes to Canada’s intellectual property rules, requiring changes that largely serve European interests.

      Mandated reforms to patent protections (in the form of term restoration provisions) and the expansion of protections for dozens of European geographical indications was always part of the price to be paid for CETA. There were concerns expressed throughout the negotiations on both issues. Geographic indications rules grant protections to foods widely produced around the world and establish new marketing and naming restrictions on Canadian food producers. Meanwhile, the patent term restoration provisions are likely to increase health care costs in Canada by delaying the availability of generic pharmaceuticals due to the extension in the term of protection for patented pharmaceuticals.

    • The vicious assault on UK judges by the Brexit press is a threat to democracy

      The Brexit-supporting press has mounted a vicious assault on the three high court judges who ruled in the article 50 case. And it has undermined our constitution in the process. The government appears to be fuelling this attack. Sajid Javid, the local government secretary, described the judges as seeking to “thwart the will of the people”.

      The judiciary is a pillar of our constitution. Allow faith in the judges to be eroded and that pillar is eroded at a huge cost to our freedoms.

      The front page of the Daily Mail labelled the three judges “enemies of the people”. It described Sir Terence Etherton as the first “openly gay” judge, detailed Sir Philip Sales’ earnings when he was a barrister and worked for the government and captioned a photograph of the third judge “The Europhile: Lord Chief Justice Thomas”. The Sun and the Daily Telegraph stooped to spraying abuse with the same lack of concern for the constitutional place of the judiciary in our democracy.

    • Sturgeon says Holyrood might join Brexit court case

      Scotland could join the Brexit court battle to make sure Theresa May does not win back the power to trigger Article 50, Nicola Sturgeon has said.

      The First Minister says that Holyrood could join businesswoman Gina Miller and hair dresser Deir Dos Santos as “participants in that case” when it goes to the Supreme Court in early December.

      A High Court ruling on Thursday morning handed victory to campaigners who said the Prime Minister did not have the right to set in motion the official notice of divorce from the European Union without consulting parliament.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Presidential Candidates Dr. Jill Stein & Gov. Gary Johnson [Pt. 2]

      Dr. Jill Stein is a mother, physician and longtime teacher of internal medicine. Also the co-author of two major environmental reports — In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development and Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging — Dr. Stein has dedicated years of public service as an environmental-health advocate. She has testified before numerous legislative panels as well as local and state governmental bodies, playing a key role in the effort to get the Massachusetts fish advisories to better protect women and children from mercury contamination. Her first foray into politics was in 2002, when she ran for Governor of Massachusetts. Dr. Stein is again running to be the Green Party nominee for President in 2016.

    • Sweden’s business with Clinton Foundation in a geopolitical context

      Ensuing a brief characterization of ties maintained between Sweden and the Hillary Clinton-led US Department, and summarily reviewing the Swedish political and media consensus on this and related issues, I present a list of Swedish state-owned and private companies contributing in the monetary transactions of the Clinton Foundation. The question being is whether those were always ‘donations’ from the Swedish government, or corporations, or if it was an exchange of favors that resulted in investments for both sides. One illustration of the geopolitical/financial quid pro quo arising between the Swedish donors and the Clinton Foundation (or US State Department at the time) is provided by the deal represented by the giant Swedish company Ericsson. The company Ericsson paid nearly six million dollars to Bill Clinton for one speech, and, coincidentally, the US government excluded Ericsson from the list of companies banned for doing business with Iran. Another main ‘donor’ is the Lundin Foundation (Lundin Oil). The Lundin Oil Company, where Carl Bildt was a board member 2000-2006, operated mining exploitation in South Africa in spite the UN boycott against the apartheid regime [See “A Nigger is a Nigger and a Swede is a Swede…“]. Adolf H. Lundin was once asked if he would have done business with Hitler, he replied, “That I certainly would have done.” Adolf H. and Mrs Lundin were first-row guest at the White House in an older presidential installation.

    • The Dallas IRS Office That’s Quietly Determining the Fate of the Clinton Foundation

      The Earle Cabell Federal Building in downtown Dallas is an all purpose office complex, a bastion of federal bureaucracy located at 1100 Commerce St. Most people come for a passport or to get business done in front of a federal judge. But inside, a quiet review is underway that has direct ties to the raging presidential election: The local branch of the IRS’ Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division is reviewing the tax status of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

      This IRS review has not generated similar waves as Department of Justice probes into the foundation, and has largely been forgotten in the campaign’s melee. It’s just not as sexy as private email servers, FBI infighting and charges of political pressure applied to law enforcement.

      But even though this examination is less scrutinized and is harder to conceptualize, it’s impact may be important. The report won’t likely be done in time to influence the presidential campaign — even though the review started more than four months ago — but it could certainly influence the first term of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

      As with anything tax related, the status of the foundation may be determined using rules few understand. And that makes understanding the work at 1100 Commerce St. in Dallas that much more important.

    • Trump Versus Clinton: How the Hell Did We End Up Here?

      You hear the expression “lesser of two evils” when people talk about how they will vote in November. Poll after poll shows a growing number of voters saying they will vote negatively – they’re against Hillary, so they’ll hold their nose and vote Trump, and vice-a-versa.

    • Hillary unfiltered

      “We view this not as a ‘clever game’ of wiki leaks [sic] but rather as a ‘criminal act’ against the United States of America,” Abedin wrote in a previously unreleased December 2, 2010 email to Clinton that laid out a suggestion for how to respond to the leak. “He might think this is a clever game today but when he is prosecuted and if convicted he will move from being a clever cyber thief to a convicted criminal and -will find out that’s a whole different kind of game.”

    • FBI Clinton Foundation probe finds ‘avalanche’ of corruption evidence against her – but agents fear Justice Department will stop her going on trial

      An FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation is likely to lead to an indictment unless the Justice Department interferes, two sources familiar with the probe told Fox News.

      The Clintons are accused of running a pay-for-play operation out of the State Department that favored donors to their charity – a charge they have denied.

      But the feds are ‘actively and aggressively pursuing this case,’ Fox’s Brit Hume said Wednesday, and they have an ‘avalanche’ of evidence.

      A Wall Street Journal report says the FBI’s pursuit of the case is rooted in recordings of a suspect in a different corruption case who spoke about the Clinton Foundation’s alleged dirty dealings.

    • Inside the Clintons’ Moroccan money ‘mess’

      Hillary Clinton’s top advisers downplayed her involvement in arranging a lavish Clinton Foundation conference in Marrakech last year, but behind the scenes they acknowledged her pivotal role and worked to minimize fallout from it.

      After media inquiries about the role of Clinton and the king of Morocco in setting the stage for the conference, Clinton confidants, including her husband, Bill, scrambled to craft a new foreign contribution policy that looked tougher but still let them accept the Moroccan cash, according to hacked emails released by WikiLeaks.

    • The Most Revealing Emails from the #PodestaFiles, Separated By Category (Parts 1 – 28)

      John Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign Chairman. Podesta previously served as Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton and Counselor to President Barack Obama.

      On October 7th, 2016, WikiLeaks publish thousands of emails belonging to Podesta’s private email archives. More emails were released in the days that followed. Below is a compilation of some of the most revealing and damaging emails discovered:

    • Former British military chief: Trump presidency might make the world safer

      David Richards, an independent member of the British House of Lords and former head of the British military, said a Donald Trump presidency might make the world safer.

    • Spirit Cooking: The Most Disturbing Podesta Email Yet? (Warning: Graphic Content)

      In perhaps the most disturbing Wikileaks release to date, Tony Podesta (John Podesta’s brother) is invited to a “Spirit Cooking” dinner with performance artist Marina Abramovic.

      Dinner with a famous artist might sound deeply mundane, but there is far more to this story.

      Abramovic, 69, is a fairly famous Serbian performance artist, who now lives in New York.

    • Leaked email: “Bernie needs to be ground to a pulp,” Clinton adviser and lobbyist wrote to John Podesta

      A Clinton adviser and longtime Democratic Party operative stressed in an email to the Hillary Clinton campaign, “Bernie needs to be ground to a pulp. . . . Crush him as hard as you can.”

      The email was leaked by the whistleblowing journalism organization WikiLeaks, which has released thousands of emails to and from John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

      Joel Johnson, an influential lobbyist with powerful corporate ties and a former senior adviser for President Bill Clinton, sent Podesta a brief message in February titled “Friendly advice. No mercy.”

      He wrote, “Bernie needs to be ground to a pulp. We can’t start believing our own primary bullshit. This is no time to run the general. Crush him as hard as you can.”

      In a sudden lighter note, Johnson then added, “Other than that, hope all is well and congrats on Nevada!” Hillary Clinton had just won the Nevada Democratic caucus against Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont who ran an insurgent leftist grassroots campaign.

      Joel Johnson is an influential political operative with a long history in Democratic circles.

    • Sorting Through the Clinton Email Case and What the F.B.I.’s Options Are

      The F.B.I. needed custom software to allow them to read Mr. Weiner’s emails without viewing hers. But building that program took two weeks, causing the delay. The program ultimately showed that there were thousands of Ms. Abedin’s emails on the laptop.

    • Julian Assange Denies Russia Fed Clinton Emails to Wikileaks

      The founder of whistleblowing website Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has denied that emails leaked from the U.S. Democratic Party (DNC) came with the help of the Russian government.

    • What the WikiLeaks emails tell us about Hillary Clinton’s campaign (and what they don’t)

      It’s one of the greatest ironies of the 2016 presidential campaign: Hillary Clinton — long averse to public scrutiny — forced to deal with the theft and disclosure of thousands of private emails exchanged by her campaign aides and advisors.

      The hacked emails of campaign chairman John Podesta, being released daily by WikiLeaks, have offered unprecedented insight into the way the Democratic nominee and her team grappled with unexpected developments and self-inflicted setbacks.

      The Clinton campaign has refused to validate the emails, noting that U.S. intelligence agencies say they were stolen by Russian government hackers in an effort to affect the election.

    • Wikileaks Has Chilling Effect on Hollywood Ambassadorships

      Whether it was raising a few million for a super PAC or taking to social media, super bundlers including Peter and Megan Chernin and Tom Rothman have been there for Hillary Clinton — support that typically might be rewarded with an ambassadorial posting. But “if and when [Clinton] wins, I do think they will be extremely careful,” says Adam J. Schiff, senior vp of Strategies 360 (Schi previously worked with L.A. operative and fundraiser Noah Mamet, who once served as an adviser to the Wasserman Family Foundation and now is ambassador to Argentina).

      “Sure, donors will be considered, but the vetting process will be more intensive than ever.” Says one political strategist at a major studio: “Some [President Obama appointees] weren’t the most well versed on issues they were expected to be, and that was embarrassing for the administration. The Clinton machine will work hard to avoid that experience, especially as a former secretary of state, so a lot of the top posts will be off the table for the new players.”

      With a Republican-controlled Senate, confirmation for Obama appointees was grueling: Mamet’s took almost 18 months. And that was before the specter of WikiLeaks. Nicole Avant, the wife of Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos, was given the Bahamas posting by Obama in 2009; a State Department inspector general’s report that criticized her tenure recently made its way into a WikiLeaks dump.

    • A True November Surprise: The Clinton Campaign at Obama Justice: Emails on WikiLeaks Show a Top Federal Lawyer Giving Hillary a Quiet Heads Up

      Don’t let Mr. Kadzik’s fancy title fool you: He is a Clinton partisan. Before joining the Justice Department in 2013, Mr. Kadzik spent 30 years at the (now-closed) law firm Dickstein Shapiro, engaging Democratic causes—and Clinton causes. Mr. Kadzik’s wife, Amy Weiss, was deputy press secretary in Bill Clinton’s White House and a communications director for the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Kadzik also represented the DNC. Campaign-finance records show the two variously donated to Hillary’s Senate leadership PAC, to her 2008 presidential campaign and to her current campaign.

    • WikiLeaks: Podesta invited to ‘Spirit’ dinner; host’s known ‘recipes’ demand breast milk, sperm

      A new WikiLeaks release of stolen emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta reveal an invitation by his brother to a “Spirit Cooking dinner” at the home of artist Marina Abramovic.

      “Spirit Cooking with Essential Aphrodisiac Recipes” was released by Ms. Abramovic in 1996, but the “ingredients” call for “fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk” to be consumed “on earthquake nights.”

      New York’s Museum of Modern Art called it a “cookbook” for “evocative instructions for actions or thoughts.” Another recipe calls for “fresh morning urine.”

      “Are you in NYC Thursday July 9 Marina wants you to come to dinner Mary?” Tony Podesta says in an email forwarded to his brother June 28, 2015.

      “Dear Tony, I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place,” Ms. Abramovic says in a June 25 email sent at 2:35 a.m. GMT +2. “Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? All my love, Marina.”

      Ms. Abramovic is a well-known artist who has performed since the early 1970s. Her latest memoir, “Walk Through Walls,” was reviewed by The New York Times Nov. 1.

      “You will need to be able to withstand a great deal of conversation about clairvoyants and tarot cards and didgeridoos and kundalini life forces and monks and gurus and ‘how the soul can leave the body through the center of the fontanel of the head’ to make it very far in this memoir,” the Times wrote.

    • Susan Sarandon on why she is not voting for Hillary Clinton: ‘I don’t vote with my vagina’

      Susan Sarandon has said she will not be voting for Hillary Clinton in the forthcoming presidential elections because she does not vote with her “vagina”.

      The 70-year-old oscar-award-winning actor, who is known for her roles in Thelma & Louise and Dead Man Walking, said she wanted the “right woman” to become President.

      Sarandon, who has formally endorsed Green Party candidate Jill Stein, explained she would not be voting for either Ms Clinton or Donald Trump. She argued it is imperative to get independent candidates up to the five per cent mark in order to start a new party.

      “I want the right woman. There are great women that I admire that have headed nations,” the actor and activist, who was an outspoken Bernie Sanders supporter, told BBC Newsnight on Wednesday.

    • WikiLeaks: Podesta agrees Sanders needs to be ‘ground to a pulp’

      Sanders endorsed Clinton after she clinched the nomination and has been campaigning for her in recent weeks.

      Other leaked emails have also shown Clinton campaign officials talking negatively about the Vermont senator.

    • WikiLeaks: Bill Clinton had ‘real serious conflicts’ with foundation work

      Justin Cooper, a longtime staffer who managed Hillary Clinton’s private server at the State Department, told other high-level aides in Nov. 2011 that he shared the concerns of Doug Band, another longtime staffer, over the possibility that Bill Clinton might soon be asked to sign a disclosure form.

      “I think there [sic] WJC may have some real serious conflicts if we start to make too many rules,” Cooper wrote, using Bill Clinton’s initials, in an email made public Friday by WikiLeaks. “It may be time to update some procedures but we can not ignore the nexus of WJC’s life.”

      Cooper’s warning came at a time when the Clinton Foundation was undergoing a corporate review given the conflicts and bureaucratic excess that had begun to plague its operations.

    • Getting a grip of Bill: #PodestaEmails29 reveals concerns over rogue ex-president
    • ‘Not for this channel’: Podesta was wary of sending intel over Clinton server

      John Podesta was willing to discuss sensitive information with future boss Hillary Clinton while he worked for President Obama and she was a private citizen in August 2014 – but he knew better than to send the intel over Clinton’s private server from his Gmail account, emails released Thursday by WikiLeaks show.

      In the exchange, Clinton, who had resigned as secretary of state 18 months earlier, asked then-Obama counselor Podesta if he knew who was responsible for an Aug. 18 airstrike in Tripoli, in which unidentified bombers blew up an Islamist-controlled arms depot in the Libyan capital.

    • Political Medicine – An Interview With Dr. Jill Stein

      I recently had the privilege of interviewing one of the brightest lights of our times, Dr. Jill Stein. Over the course of our discussion I was profoundly humbled, deeply impressed, educated and surprised, and I even picked up a few vocabulary words while transcribing this interview along the way. Here at Inquisitr I’ve often spoken about the way the press has treated Dr. Stein, so for our interview, I thought it would be nice to give her a chance to freely discuss the things America wants to hear about, without any interruption, badgering or gotcha journalism. So here she is, in her own words.

    • ‘The FBI is Trumpland’: anti-Clinton atmosphere spurred leaking, sources say

      A political firestorm erupted, with Comey and the bureau coming under withering criticism, including a rebuke on Wednesday from Barack Obama. Even some congressional Republicans, no friends to Clinton, have expressed discomfort with Comey’s last-minute insertion of the bureau into the election.

      The relevance of the communications to the Clinton inquiry has yet to be established, as Comey issued his letter before obtaining a warrant to evaluate them. Clinton surrogates contend that Comey has issued innuendo rather than evidence, preventing them from mounting a public defense.

    • FBI examining fake documents targeting Clinton campaign: sources

      The FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies are examining faked documents aimed at discrediting the Hillary Clinton campaign as part of a broader investigation into what U.S. officials believe has been an attempt by Russia to disrupt the presidential election, people with knowledge of the matter said.

      U.S. Senator Tom Carper, a Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has referred one of the documents to the FBI for investigation on the grounds that his name and stationery were forged to appear authentic, some of the sources who had knowledge of that discussion said.

      In the letter identified as fake, Carper is quoted as writing to Clinton, “We will not let you lose this election,” a person who saw the document told Reuters.

      The fake Carper letter, which was described to Reuters, is one of several documents presented to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice for review in recent weeks, the sources said.

    • Congress: Shut Down Government Until the New President Restores the Republic

      Whoever wins the presidency on November 8, Congress should shut down the government, except for essential military or law enforcement personnel, on the first day after the 2017 inaugural unless and until the new President restores the Republic by doing the following:

      1. Immediately end multi-trillion dollar presidential wars that have not been declared by Congress as required by Article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution. That means, among other things, ceasing the offensive use of the military to fight wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

      All United States military personnel should be withdrawn from these war zones for redeployment back home to protect Americans against foreign aggression as the Constitution envisions. To demonstrate that fighting wars only in self-defense does not subtract from our respect for the military, all rank-and-file soldiers should be given pay raises concurrently with the ending of all presidential wars.

    • WikiLeaks: Clinton Camp Brags about Hiding Hillary and Still Getting Positive Media Coverage

      The latest WikiLeaks dump reveals Team Clinton boasting about hiding Hillary for months and still getting positive stories from the media.

    • WikiLeaks: Clinton Campaign Chair Participated in Occult Magic

      While powerful political insiders partaking in ceremonies that have been described as Satanic may seem like something that could exist only in a Dennis Wheatley novel, a June 2015 conversation between Podesta and famed performance artist and occultist Marina Abramović proves such scenarios are chillingly real.

    • Clinton Aides: ‘Definitely’ Not Releasing Some HRC
    • The Clinton Campaign at Obama Justice

      The most obnoxious spin of the 2016 campaign came this week, as Democrats, their media allies and even President Obama accused the FBI of stacking the election. It’s an extraordinary claim, coming as it does from the same crew that has—we now know—been stacking the election all along in the corridors of the Justice Department.

    • What I learned from visualizing Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails

      It all started early last week. Kevin Hu, one of my senior grad students, told me that a friend of him asked if we could use Immersion — an email visualization tool we had released in 2013 — to visualize Clinton’s Wikileaks email dataset.

      The timing was not ideal for us. Kevin asked me this question when the Media Lab member’s event was getting started, which is a particularly busy time of the year. So my first question to Kevin was: “Can we?”

      [...]

      For years I have created teams that embody a unique capacity to make large datasets easy to understand. Earlier this year we released DataUSA, the most comprehensive visualization of US public data. In 2013, we released a project visualizing the entire formal sector economy of Brazil (dataviva.info). My group also has been hosting the world’s most popular tool to visualize international trade data (atlas.media.mit.edu) since 2011 (see chidalgo.com for a full list of projects). So in this environment, where I command groups with a unique capacity to make data easily digestible, and have a commitment to make data accessible so that people can explore it directly, and make their own decisions, I decided that improving people’s ability to navigate a politically relevant dataset that was already publicly available was the right choice. My intuition was that, if you were going to spend 1, 5, or 10 minutes looking directly at these emails, you would get a slightly deeper understanding of what was in them if you used our interface than the ones that were presently available. I believe that these potential increases in depth, together with the creation of tools that allow people to explore primary sources of data directly, are a contribution. You may disagree with my choice, but I hope you at least understand it.

      So what did I learn by making this dataset accessible?

      [...]

      Later, a friend of one of my students posted the news on Reddit where it went viral. And I mean really viral. It became the top story of the Internetisbeautiful subreddit, and made it to Reddit’s frontpage. It collected more than 3000 upvotes and 700 comments. But as the story peaked, a moderator single handedly removed it in an authoritarian move, and justified his unilateral silencing of the post by adding a rule banning “sites that serve a political agenda or that otherwise induce drama.” Of course, the rule was added AFTER the post was removed.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Leftist Group: Saying Islam Has Problems Makes You A Terrorist

      Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a list of 15 anti-Muslim extremists, including writers, intellectuals, and activists. This “Field Guide” is meant to help journalists tell the “good guys” from the “bad guys” by providing them with ammunition against outspoken critics of Islam.

      The people on this list are lambasted for talking about violence in Islam, unequal treatment of women, the increasing number of Islamist advisors to our government—including Muslim Brotherhood-backed groups like the Islamic Society of North America and the Center for American-Islamic Relations—and the growing treatment of Islam as a protected class, mostly at the behest of the aforementioned Islamist groups.

    • Alibaba’s use of ‘pig’ for new web name angers Muslims

      Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba changed the name of its travel website to cater to the younger generation, its primary customer group, the company announced on Tuesday.

      The group announced last week that it was rebranding its travel portal, changing the name of the website from Alitrip.com to Fliggy.com. The new name is feizhu, or “flying pig” in Chinese. The company also introduced a cartoon-like image of a pig as its new logo.

      “A key goal of the rebranding is to appeal to a younger demographic that accounts for more than 80 percent of our customer base,” Alibaba said in a statement.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Head of MI5 goes public

      For the first time a serving head of a major intelligence service in the UK, Andrew Parker the Director General of the UK domestic Security Service, has given an interview to a national newspaper.

      Interestingly, he gave this interview to The Guardian, the paper that has won awards for publishing a number of the Edward Snowden disclosures about endemic illegal spying and, for its pains, had its computers ritually smashed up by the powers that be.

      The timing was also interesting – only two weeks ago the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (the only legal body that can actually investigate allegations of spy crime in the UK and which has so far been an unexceptional champion of their probity) broke ranks to assert that the UK spies have been illegally conducting mass surveillance for 17 years – from 1998 to 2015.

    • Mass surveillance: First it was for terrorism, then it was for drug trade, and now it’s for unlicensed driving

      As mass surveillance was introduced, we were promised it was only for combating terrorism and violent uprisings. Then, it was used mostly to combat illegal drug trade. As the surveillance is outsourced to private actors, and they’re seeking additional revenue streams, it’s now an option on the table – today – for insurance companies to access mass surveillance data to price a car insurance.

      The ACLU has a long feature article on how aerial mass surveillance footage in Baltimore is being retained far beyond specifications, but the real bombshell comes toward the end: mass surveillance data is being now offered to private clients on purely commercial grounds. It’s certainly bad enough when cities are videofilmed from above in gigapixel resolution and the footage kept forever, despite promises and assurances of the opposite, but letting the surveillance contractors re-sell the same surveillance data to anybody interested opens up a can of worms not previously imagined.

      (Did you get that? There are now aircraft with gigapixel cameras just videorecording how people move across the city, because they can.)

      It all started out with the necessity to defend against terrorism, when mass surveillance laws like the US Patriot Act were being rushed through. Then, it turned out that these anti-terrorism laws were mostly used to fight contraband substances (“narcotics”) and practically not used at all against shady people with an explosive suitcase of plutonium. And so now, we learn that the private contractors doing the actual surveillance have decided they can also sell the data to insurance companies.

    • ‘Operation Hyperion’ Targets Suspected Dark Web Users Around the World

      Earlier this week, law enforcement agencies from across the world announced an operation targeting vendors and users of dark web marketplaces. Codenamed Operation Hyperion, the move is one of the most dramatic police coordinations around the dark web yet, with thousands of people allegedly being identified.

      But how exactly these arrests or interviews were connected to one another, if they were at all, remains unclear, and a large part of the operation seems to be geared toward intimidating current and potential sellers and buyers, and dissuading others from participating in the online drug trade, rather than leading to a substantial number of actual arrests.

    • How much money does Facebook make from you?

      Facebook is making more money than ever: On Wednesday night the company revealed that between July and September it made $7bn (£5.7bn) in revenue – a 59 per cent increase on a year ago.

      This means that each user is increasingly valuable to Facebook. The average revenue per user in the third quarter was $4.01.

    • Facebook’s mobile ad boom ride is almost done, and Wall Street wants to see its next trick

      But Facebook execs have warned that the meteoric revenue growth rates are due for a slowdown next year as the company reaches the limit on how many ads it can squeeze into the News Feed.

    • In scathing ruling, Federal Court says CSIS bulk data collection illegal

      The Federal Court of Canada has faulted Canada’s domestic spy agency for unlawfully retaining data and for not being truthful with judges who authorize its intelligence programs. Separately, the court also revealed that the spy agency no longer needs warrants to collect Canadians’ tax records.

      All this has been exposed in a rare ruling about the growing scope of Canadian intelligence collection disclosed by the court on Thursday. At issue is how the federal domestic spy service has been pushing past its legal boundaries in the name of collecting data, in hopes of rounding out the holdings of a little-known Canadian intelligence facility dubbed the “operational data analysis centre.”

      Many corporations and government agencies are now gravitating toward so-called big data computer analytics that can predict patterns of future behaviour based upon records about what has happened in the past. Spy agencies are no different, and the centre in question appears to be the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s equivalent of a crystal ball – a place where intelligence analysts attempt to deduce future threats by examining, and re-examining, volumes of data.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • A journalist at Standing Rock was shot by police for no reason—and caught the awful moment on video

      As peaceful protests over the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline again turn violent, one journalist near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian reservation in North Dakota captured shocking video showing herself being shot by police out of nowhere as she conducted an interview.

      Erin Schrode, an activist and journalist, was doing an interview at the edge of the Cantapeta Creek when police shot her with a rubber bullet. In her video of the incident, Schrode can be heard screaming, “Ow!” before crumbling to the ground.

    • On Anniversary of the Patriot Act, Artist Passes Out Pocket Knives at the Airport

      Last week, performance artist Michele Pred handed out small pocket knives passengers arriving at San Francisco’s International Airport to replace those that have been confiscated since the passage of the Patriot Act 15 years ago.

    • Artist celebrates Patriot Act’s anniversary by handing out “Official Air Travel Replacement Knives” to arriving SFO passengers

      Last week, artist Michelle Pred celebrated the anniversary of the Patriot Act by dressing up as an old-timey Pan Am flight attendant (she wore her mother’s old Pan Am hat!) and handing out “Official Air Travel Replacement Knives” to people waiting for their bags at SFO (she had 50 knives, but it took more than 50 tries to give them away, as more than half of the people she approached refused to engage with her).

      She had to get a “Free Speech and Expressive Activities Permit” for her performance, and the lengthy application process gave her time to figure out which knives she’d pass out: she chose 2.25″ red pocket knives, these being the kind of knife most often seized by the TSA. The people who took the knives often share stories lamenting the beloved tools, knives and other items they’d had taken away by airport security since the Patroit Act was passed.

      Pred is part of a large, multi-artist show in San Francisco’s Presidio called “Home Land Security,” which features works that critically examine “the human dimensions and increasing complexity of national security, including the physical and psychological borders we create, protect, and cross in its name.”

    • Defense tries to exclude video from trial of cop shooting man in back

      Michael Slager, a white North Charleston officer, is accused of killing Walter Scott, 50, a black man who was pulled over in April 2015 for a routine traffic stop. Scott had a warrant for his arrest, fled the Mercedes-Benz he was driving, was chased into a field, and was then shot and killed as a passerby secretly captured the shooting on video.

      For the most part, those are the general undisputed facts in a case that likely would have been swept under the rug without video evidence. Before the video surfaced, the police defended the officer’s actions. As reported by the Post and Courier, the police said that “…a man ran on foot from the traffic stop and an officer deployed his department-issued Taser in an attempt to stop him. That did not work, police said, and an altercation ensued as the men struggled over the device. Police allege that during the struggle the man gained control of the Taser and attempted to use it against the officer. The officer then resorted to his service weapon and shot him…”

    • How Video Games Unwittingly Train the Brain to Justify Killing

      Would you be surprised to learn that the first statement, suggesting remorse, comes from the American mass murderer David Alan Gore, while the second, of cool acceptance, was made by Andy Wilson, a soldier in the SAS, Britain’s elite special forces? In one view, the two men are separated by the thinnest filament of morality: justification. One killed because he wanted to, the other because he was acting on behalf of his country, as part of his job.

      While most psychologically normal individuals agree that inflicting pain on others is wrong, killing others appears socially sanctioned in specific contexts such as war or self-defence. Or revenge. Or military dictatorships. Or human sacrifice. In fact, justification for murder is so pliant that the TV series Dexter (2006-13) flirted exquisitely with the concept: a sociopath who kills villainous people as a vehicle for satisfying his own dark urges.

      Operating under strict ‘guidelines’ that target only the guilty, Dexter (a forensics technician) and the viewer come to believe that the kill is justified. He forces the audience to question their own moral compass by asking them to justify murder in their minds in the split second prior to the kill. Usually when we imagine directly harming someone, the image is preventive: envision a man hitting a woman; or an owner abusing her dog. Yet, sometimes, the opposite happens: a switch is flipped with aggressive, even violent consequences. How can an otherwise normal person override the moral code and commit cold-blooded murder?

    • ‘Go away, you shouldn’t be here. Don’t come back’: The corner of Yorkshire that has almost no white residents

      From the window of her flat overlooking the canal path in a suburb of Dewsbury in Yorkshire, a blonde woman watches two female figures walking past as they chatter in a foreign tongue.

      Both the passers-by are covered in black Islamic gowns, only a glimpse of their eyes show from the 2 in gap in the veils across their faces.

      They, like many Muslim women who live here, speak little or no English. Lots of them will have no contact with any person from another religion or culture. Almost all have been brought to the UK to wed the British men of south Asian heritage who have made this area their home.

    • The UN is morally corrupt

      A majority of the members of the United Nations Human Rights Council are non-democratic. Obviously, this is a problem – if we presume human rights to have anything to do with fundamental democratic principles such as free speech, a free press and free and fair elections.

      With countries such as China, Cuba, Iraq and Saudi Arabia in the council – one must also doubt what it will and can do when it comes to the right to fair trials, the issue of cruel and unusual punishments and the death penalty.

    • REVEALED: Rahm Emanuel Used A Private Email Server

      Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel used a private email server to communicate with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, leaked emails reveal.

      Emanuel, a former House lawmaker who served early on in the Obama administration, sent an email to Podesta asking him to consider Brian DeSplinter for a position with Clinton’s campaign. Emnauel sent the email from the address [email protected]

      The email address is still active, according to Mailtester.com, and is run through Google’s Gmail service. This is unlike Clinton who used a private email server based out of her Chappaqua, New York home.

    • Police Union Joins Rights Groups In Criticizing Police Chief For Snooping On Journalists

      Police unions are best known for creating distance. They carve out space between police officers and accountability. They widen the gap between fiction and reality. They often act like the loudmouthed relative with the missing brain/mouth filter you always hope won’t insert themselves into discussions about current events.

      On rare, rare occasions, they come across misconduct even they can’t condone. Every so often, police union heads act like normal, decent human beings.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • FCC Lends Support To Google Fiber, Louisville In Fight To Access AT&T Utility Poles

      As we’ve been discussing, the hot new broadband battleground is the boring old utility pole. In most existing markets, a new competitor needs the incumbent ISP to move their gear and “make ready” the pole before a competitor can attach their own fiber. With every incentive to slow new competition, incumbent ISPs have long (ab)used this bureaucracy to their advantage. As a result, this preparation can take the better part of a year, especially if gear from multiple incumbents needs moving.

      In a recent Google Fiber blog post, the company documented the end result of this logjam. In Nashville, the company noted that of the 88,000 poles in Nashville needed to deploy Google Fiber, over 44,000 will require make-ready work — but only 33 had been adequately prepped by incumbent ISPs. In response, Google Fiber has been pushing cities like Nashville and Louisville to pass “one touch make ready” rules, which allow an insured, third-party contractor to move any ISP’s gear (often a matter of inches), provided they give the incumbent ISP a 15-day heads up.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • WIPO Members Divided On IP Agency’s Role In Implementation Of UN Sustainable Development Goals

      Countries of the world decided in 2015 to launch an ambitious agenda to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all by 2030. What should be the role of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization in the attainment of the adopted United Nations Sustainable Development Goals? This question, discussed at the WIPO Committee on Development and IP, is dividing countries, as developed countries argue that only a few goals apply to the work of WIPO, and others argue that there should be no ‘cherrypicking’ as all the goals in one way or another do apply to WIPO’s work as a UN agency.

    • Copyrights

      • A Summary Of International CopyCamp 2016

        Apart from speaker sessions, the “Maker Party” event took place at the conference, which is a Mozilla Foundation’s campaign initiative for better copyright reform, which is in sync with the digital age.

      • UK Govt. Will Address Music ‘Value Gap” as Part of Brexit

        The UK government says it will address the so-called music ‘value gap’ as part of Brexit negotiations. The confirmation came in response to a probing Digital Economy Bill amendment which would see sites like YouTube lose their safe harbor protections if they “optimize the presentation” of uploaded works.

Leaked: An Out-of-Control EPO Union-Busting Parade of Battistelli Marches on in The Hague

Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The Hague Union-Busting
Click for full size

Summary: The Hague is officially seeing its staff union (of the EPO) busted by the thuggish President, who seems to know absolutely no bounds when it comes to violation of human (and labour) rights

UNDETERRED by his Chinchillas at the Administrative Council and unwilling to accept the demands made back in March, Battistelli’s truly destructive EPO legacy gets written, and he hopes it’ll be hidden from the public by posting the above internally.

“Battistelli isn’t just a disgrace to the EPO but a disgrace to his country, to the whole of Europe, and the entire profession in which he takes part.”Well, it’s Friday. It means that the EPO should release some horrible news, as usual. For those who want to know the “sniper” reference (“Snipers of the Hague”), see Battistelli’s utter distortion of facts about so-called “snipers” [1, 2, 3]; it’s just as ludicrous as his misinterpretation of sports equipment ("weapon").

Battistelli isn’t just a disgrace to the EPO but a disgrace to his country, to the whole of Europe, and the entire profession in which he takes part. It’s increasingly insane that he’s still keeping his job somehow, thanks in part to his pet chinchilla.

“And there is real control – by Big Ben himself, El Presidente,” a person joked about Battistelli the other day. If that’s alluding to Castro and the likes of him (maybe Pinochet), then it’s actually more of an insult to Castro than to Battistelli. █

11.03.16

Links 3/11/2016: Ubuntu Snappy Core 16 and New RHEL

Posted in News Roundup at 4:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How the Apache Way has Influenced Open Source

    Brian Behlendorf is well known in the open-source community as one of the founders of the Apache Software Foundation. Today, Behlendorf serves as the Executive Director of the Hyperledger project at the Linux Foundation, though he still takes an interest in Apache.

    In a video interview, Behlendorf discusses how the Apache Way continues to influence the open source movement. Among the key ways that Apache has helped to influence open source development is by having a focus on enabling a community that outlasts the original developers.

  • Developers prefer open source tools

    New research shows that 98 percent of developers use open source tools at work, with 56 percent revealing that more than half of their development tools are open source, and 18 percent using only open source tools.

    The study from code collaboration platform GitLab also shows that more than half of developers (55 percent) are able to choose the tools they work with.

    When asked about the tools and techniques that are most important to them, 92 percent say distributed version control systems (Git repositories) are very or extremely important for their everyday work followed by continuous integration (77 percent), chat/collaboration tools (63 percent), agile development (59 percent) and continuous delivery (55 percent).

  • IndieWeb: Make your social media posts open first

    Where do your witty Tweets end up? What about the rest of the content you create inside walled platforms like Facebook, Swarm, and Instagram*?

    Those posts and images are part of your identity yet they are “lost” in a sense when posted to platforms that aren’t open. That’s where the IndieWeb comes in; it’s based around the idea that you have a personal domain and web space where you post everything first, then you can copy it to third party services, like Twitter.

    The phrase that has been coined to describe it is: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, or POSSE.

  • Google’s TensorFlow Powers Data Robot’s Machine Learning Platform

    Artificial intelligence and machine learning are creating a lot of buzz right now, and open source tools are part of the buzz. A few months back, Google made a hugely influential contribution to the field of machine learning. It open sourced a program called TensorFlow that is now freely available. It’s based on the same internal toolset that Google spent years developing to support its AI software and other predictive and analytics programs.

    Now, data science company DataRobot has announced the latest version of its enterprise machine learning platform. The new release integrates the TensorFlow library for deep learning along with new tools to help users extract insights from all models on the platform. This is a great example of how powerful open source tools are driving commercial offerings forward.

  • Google Working On Open-Source TPM 2.0 Implementation

    For future Chromebooks/Chromeboxes, Google appears to be building an open-source TPM 2.0 implementation that’s possibly backed by open hardware.

    Their own TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 implementation can be found in their Git code and here plus more code here. The TPM 2.0 implementation uses a Cortex-M3 core and there’s also an FPGA version.

  • DirectFB Returns Online

    Over one year after the DirectFB project site disappeared and the code just appearing on GitHub, they have a project site restored but the development still appears rather dormant.

  • TM Forum Wants Role of Open Source Glue

    TM Forum is stepping up to be the organization that unites the multiple open source network management and orchestration efforts going on within telecom today, intending to create a hybrid network management platform that incorporates diverse open source efforts.

    In an interview here today in advance of a TM Forum Workshop tied to Light Reading’s OSS in the Era of SDN & NFV event this week, Barry Graham, senior director of agile business & IT for TM Forum, tells Light Reading the organization has already held one meeting of eight open source groups and is intending to create a Catalyst project for early 2017 as well. Catalyst projects are a TM Forum method of bringing network operators and others together to create real-world solutions that can be demonstrated to the broader community.

  • New open source project Trireme aims to secure containers

    A team made of former Cisco and Nuage Networks veterans has developed an open source project it released this week named Trireme that takes an application-centric approach to securing code written in containers.

  • Walmart Employs Open Source to Level E-Commerce Playing Field

    Now that organizations of all sizes have discovered that IT is indeed a competitive weapon, an interesting phenomenon is starting to occur. IT organizations that build their own software are moving to make that software available under an open source license. Case in point is Walmart, which is now making a React/Node.js application platform dubbed Electrode available as an open source project.

    Alex Grigoryan, director of software engineering for the Application Platform at Walmart Labs, says even though Walmart has spent millions of dollars developing Electrode, the retailer has a vested interest in recruiting other IT organizations to contribute code to extend the core platform.

    “We’re looking for contributions that can help us stay on the cutting edge,” says Grigoryan.

  • IoT Monitoring and Open Source Software With OpenNMS Founder Tarus Balog

    Second, since the software in an open source business is free, selling software licenses can’t be the revenue model. There are a number of ways, however, to make money with open source. One is monetize stability. This is kind of what Red Hat does. They support both the leading edge technology through Fedora and monetize stability through Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Both our open source, but people are willing to pay for stability.

  • Events

    • Video: What’s Next for Containers?

      Red Hat’s Vincent Batts gives a presentation at systemd.conf 2016 conference entitled, “What’s next for containers?”. It is a good overview of where the various container projects are (with no mention of OpenVZ however) and what work needs to be done. I enjoyed his assessment that the first thing that is next is, “Get Past the Hype,” and to, “Make Containers Boring.” Vincent goes over several of the userland tools as well as covers the areas where Linux native containers still need work.

    • Video: systemd.conf 2016 – State of the Union / Portable Services

      There have been a ton of conferences in the last couple of months… and luckily a lot of the presentations were recorded and have been posted. Here is Lennart Poettering’s presentation from the systemd.conf 2016 conference on, “State of the Union / Portable Services”.

    • Software Freedom Kosova 2016

      The 7th edition of Software Freedom Kosova took place in Prishtina from October 21-23. The main conference venue was held at RIT Kosovo (AUK) and workshops were held at Prishtina Hackerspace as well as at Innovation Centre Kosovo (ICK). This years conference involved around 300 participants, 41 speakers, 48 sessions, 10 booth tables aand lots of food

    • Nov. 7 Webinar on Taking the Complexity Out of Hadoop and Big Data
    • Embedded Linux + OpenIoT 2016 Conference Videos Now Available

      Watching the ELCE 2016 / OpenIoT Summiy 2016 videos is free, but a basic registration is required. If you want to watch it, visit LinuxFoundation.org.

    • A new directory of open source technology events

      For the past several years, Gabor Szabo has been the owner and primary editor of the Perl Weekly, and the Perl Maven. Never willing to rest on his laurels, he recently started the Code Maven Podcast, and recently, during the last week of October, he spun up his newest site, a listing of open source technology events.

    • DevOps is a battlefield at the IT shop

      If implementing DevOps practices is difficult, then maintaining them may be even tougher. Michael Nygard knows this—which is why he’s turned to the language of warfare to describe the ongoing campaign that is the agile workflow.

      In his upcoming talk at this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit (“Tempo, Maneuverability, and Initiative”), Nygard, VP of Customer Solutions at Cogitect, Inc., will draw several useful parallels between the theater of modern war and the scene inside the contemporary IT shop. He graciously agreed to tell us about them in advance of the conference, which begins next week.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • An Everyday Linux User Guide To The Thunderbird Email Client

        This is an overview of Thunderbird and hopefully it has highlighted a few new features to those of you who didn’t know they existed and for others it might have convinced you that actually this is a tool I might want to use after all.

        The RSS feed reader is very useful as it allows you to browse your favourite sites without actually visiting them.

      • Corrode Making Progress On Translating C To Rust

        Jamey Sharp, the developer known for some of his past contributions to X.Org, has been hacking a lot lately on his latest project: Corrode. This project is about automatically converting C source files into Rust.

        Corrode is able to convert C code into Rust, but so far is able to perform just basic operations automatically and doesn’t yet take full advantage of Rust’s potential. Corrode is designed to help with partial automation of legacy code into Rust and as a new/complementary approach for static analysis of C programs. Corrode is going along so well that Mozilla has begun sponsoring Jamey’s work with Mozilla continuing to spearhead Rust’s development.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Collabora Online Development Edition 2.0

      Today we release CODE 2.0 which includes Collaborative Editing. We’ve done a huge amount of work since CODE 1.0 – and many of these improvements have been back-ported for our customers & community, but it is perhaps well to credit the authors in one place and survey progress over the last six months.

  • CMS

    • WordPress is not delighting me

      I switched back to WordPress, on a premium subscription, because WordPress started supporting markdown, which I like, and because WordPress is open source software (with open source comments support), which I also like. What’s more, paying for hosting through Automattic means not having to mess with WordPress updates myself, and means helping to support a legit open source software company, and I’m into both of those, big time.

    • WordPress is not delighting me, followup

      Anyway, I let my annual premium subscription auto-renew about a month and a half ago, so I’m out of the refund window, so I’ll probably stick around, although this markdown to HTML autoconvert misfeature is pretty distressing. Worst case scenario, I’m supporting open source software, so there’s that.

  • Healthcare

    • EC’s eHealth interoperability tests use open source

      The European Commission Directorate General for Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE) is using the open source tools for its interoperability testing. On Wednesday, the DG published a request for tender, specifying the eHealth test framework Gazelle and the healthcare documentation and ePrescription specification, implementation and testing tool Art-Decor as reference tools for its digital service infrastructure (DSI).

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Public Services/Government

    • Danish taxes seek Linux and Apache services

      Denmark’s tax authorities (SKAT) are looking for a service provider that can help them with their tax account system, which uses Apache and Linux servers. SKAT on Wednesday published new information on its procurement request from last month.

    • David Graham: Your FOSS Rep in the Canadian Parliament

      You didn’t know we had one? We do! Sort of. David Graham is the Member of Parliament for Laurentides—Labelle, which is in Quebec. He’s also a cofounder of the OFTC (Open and Free Technology) IRC network and for many years used the online handle “CDLU,” for “Confused Debian Linux User.” Confused or not, he got his start in politics running for (and becoming) Secretary of Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit group that helps develop and spread free and open source software, most notably Debian Linux. David was also the newsfeed editor for Linux.com for eight years (Disclosure: I was his boss). He’s also a licensed pilot, a rail fan and the father of a delightful little girl. Hey! I’d vote for him. Wouldn’t you? Assuming we lived in his district, that is.

  • Programming/Development

    • Perl and the birth of the dynamic web

      The web’s early history is generally remembered as a few seminal events: the day Tim Berners-Lee announced the WWW-project on Usenet, the document with which CERN released the project’s code into the public domain, and of course the first version of the NCSA Mosaic browser in January 1993.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • HTML 5.1 Now an Official Web Standard

      The lead up to the official debut of HTML 5 in October 2014 was a very big deal. Now two years later HTML 5.1 was declared an official standard on November 1.

      With HTML 5 work was ongoing for more than seven years and the standard replaced HTML 4.x which had been in place for a decade. HTML 5.1 in contrast is a very incremental step up, dealing with minor items that fell out from the original HTML 5 approach.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Human brain is predisposed to negative stereotypes, new study suggests

      The human brain is predisposed to learn negative stereotypes, according to research that offers clues as to how prejudice emerges and spreads through society.

      The study found that the brain responds more strongly to information about groups who are portrayed unfavourably, adding weight to the view that the negative depiction of ethnic or religious minorities in the media can fuel racial bias.

      Hugo Spiers, a neuroscientist at University College London, who led the research, said: “The newspapers are filled with ghastly things people do … You’re getting all these news stories and the negative ones stand out. When you look at Islam, for example, there’s so many more negative stories than positive ones and that will build up over time.”
      Everyone’s a little bit racist, sometimes | Dean Burnett
      Read more

      The scientists also uncovered a characteristic brain signature seen when participants were told a member of a “bad” group had done something positive – an observation that is likely to tally with the subjective experience of minorities. “Whenever someone from a really bad group did something nice they were like, ‘Oh, weird,’” said Spiers.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • As Flint Suffers, Nestlé Plans Dramatic Expansion of Water Privatization in Michigan

      The state of Michigan has reportedly issued preliminary approval for bottled water behemoth Nestlé to nearly triple the amount of groundwater it will pump, to be bottled and sold at its Ice Mountain plant, which lies roughly 120 miles northwest of the beleaguered community of Flint.

      “Nestlé Waters North America is asking the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for permission to increase allowed pumping from 150 to 400 gallons-per-minute at one of its production wells north of Evart,” MLive reported on Monday.

      “The DEQ Water Resources Division conducted a site review and signed-off on the pumping increase in January, but the Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance is approving the permit,” the report continued. The agency is accepting public comment on the proposal (pdf) until Thursday, Nov. 3.

      While Nestlé and other bottled water companies have rankled many communities for privatizing their public water supply, the news particularly stung in Michigan, where citizens have faced a years-long nightmare over lead contamination in their drinking water. Many residents of Flint are still forced to rely on bottled water for cleaning, cooking, and bathing as government delays have hampered efforts to replace the corroded pipes.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • ​Linux developers under denial of service attack

      According to James Bottomley, an IBM Research distinguished engineer and a member of the Linux Plumbers Conference committee, “Since yesterday we are being attacked from the outside. The attack follows us as we switch external IP and the team has identified at least one inside node which looks suspicious.”

      The conference is not being attacked by some sophisticated Internet of Things distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack like the Dyn attack. No, it’s being mugged by one of the oldest attacks in the DoS book: a SYN flood.

    • Computer Virus Cripples UK Hospital System [iophk: “dodges naming OS affected…does a lot of victim blaming”]

      Citing a computer virus outbreak, a hospital system in the United Kingdom has canceled all planned operations and diverted major trauma cases to neighboring facilities. The incident came as U.K. leaders detailed a national cyber security strategy that promises billions in cybersecurity spending, new special police units to pursue organized online gangs, and the possibility of retaliation for major attacks.

      In a “major incident” alert posted to its Web site, the National Health Service’s Lincolnshire and Goole trust said it made the decision to cancel surgeries and divert trauma patients after a virus infected its electronic systems on Sunday, October 30.

    • Breaking: NHS Trust crippled by cyberattack [iophk: "again, dodges naming the OS causing the malware"]

      Patients who had a scheduled operation on Tuesday November 1 have been told to presume it has been cancelled, unless they are contacted. A select number of services will continue; inpatients will continue to be looked after and patients who would be at “significant clinical risk should their treatment be delayed”, will also be treated. The trust is apparently reviewing the situation on an hourly basis.

      Few details have been released about the nature of the attack but the shutdown has affected Goole and District Hospital, Scunthorpe General Hospital and Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital.
      Ed Macnair, CEO of CensorNet told SCMagazineUK.com that the “NHS is one of the most advanced in the world in terms of digitisation, which clearly has its benefits, but also increases the impact of a cyber attack. The NHS holds hugely personal information about patients and the consequences of that getting into the wrong hands could be devastating.”

      Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) carried out a study into the cyber-resilience of the US healthcare industry last year, finding that security teams in the healthcare sector overemphasised protection of data and didn’t focus on more advanced threats.

    • How Hackers Could Steal Your Cellphone Pictures From Your IoT Crock-Pot

      If you have an internet-connected home appliance, such as a crock-pot, a lightbulb, or a coffee maker, you can control it from the comfort of your smartphone. But a bug in the Android app that controls some of those devices made by a popular manufacturer also allowed hackers to steal all your cellphone photos and even track your movements.

      Security researchers found that the Android app for internet-connected gizmos made by Belkin had a critical bug that let anyone who was on the same network hack the app and get access to the user’s cellphone. This gave them a chance to download all photos and track the user’s position, according to new research by Scott Tenaglia and Joe Tanen, from Invincea Labs.

    • Reproducible Builds: week 79 in Stretch cycle

      Reproducible Debian Hackathon – A small hackathon organized in Boston, USA on December 3rd and 4th. If you are interested in attending, contact Valerie Young – spectranaut in the #debian-reproducible IRC channel on irc.oftc.net.

    • Linux/Moose: Still breathing

      Linux/Moose is a malware family that primarily targets Linux-based consumer routers but that can also infect other Linux-based embedded systems in its path. The compromised devices are used to steal unencrypted network traffic and offer proxying services to the botnet operator. In practice, these capabilities are used to steal HTTP Cookies on popular social network sites and perform fraudulent actions such as non-legitimate “follows”, “views” and “likes”.

    • Cyber security governance in public, private sectors falls short

      Cybercrime is the second most-reported economic crime in Australia and costs the economy an estimated $17 billion annually, but despite this there are widespread “frailities” in the governance of cyber security among executives in both the public sector and private enterprise, according to a newly published report.

      The survey of Australia’s security preparedness by the Macquarie Telecom Group and the National Security College found that there is considerable variation in cyber-risk governance arrangements and an absence of cyber-risk knowledge at the executive/board level.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Controlling the burn: Indonesia’s efforts to prevent forest and land fire crisis

      Forest and land fires making the news in Indonesia is nothing new. But a hostage drama in the middle of “fire season”? That’s a new twist, and indeed dominated headlines in early September. After collecting evidence of burned land within a palm oil concession in Rokan Hulu, Riau, seven inspectors from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MOEF) were taken captive and violently threatened to handover or delete the gathered evidence.

      Only a few days later, the head of the Peatland Restoration Agency (Badan Restorasi Gambut or BRG) was forcefully prevented from entering lands managed by a prominent pulp-and-paper concessionaire in Pulau Pisang, Riau. BRG was investigating reports of alleged illegal conversion of peatland.

      Both incidents illustrate how divisive the fire issue is, particularly at the local level. The incidents also illustrate that despite political will and improved efforts to contain the fires, without an overarching and enforced fire policy, fires will continue to smolder.

      Forest and land fires are now an annual man-made event. Some 2,356 hotspots were detected in Sumatra and Kalimantan between January and August of 2016, and fire-prone provinces of South Sumatra, Riau, Jambi, and parts of Kalimantan have declared emergency fire status. This is a significant improvement from last year, thanks largely to a wetter La Niña-induced dry season; the number of hotspots have dropped by over 74% compared to 2015.

      Government has taken action that includes the moratorium on peat swamp conversion and the ban on new oil palm licenses. The establishment of the BRG in January 2016 is a particularly bold move, as President Joko Widodo set an ambitious target for the agency: restore two million hectares of degraded peatlands. Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya has also pursued legal action against those suspected of starting fires.

    • Elephant Poaching Is Costing African Countries $25 Million Every Year

      With other pressing developmental problems, it’s difficult for many African governments to justify the costs of ramping up the fight against elephant poaching. But a new study published in the journal Nature Communications might give them a good financial reason.

      Elephants are a big draw to parks across Africa, so as their numbers dwindle, so too do the numbers of tourists coming to see them. The first continent-wide assessment of poaching’s effects on tourism reveal that the annual killing of elephants results in a $25 million loss in tourism revenue across Africa. What’s more, this lost revenue is significantly higher than the cost of combating poaching, making it economically favorable to invest in the protection of elephants.

      Every year some 20,000 to 30,000 elephants are slaughtered for their ivory tusks to feed a demand for Chinese and Southeast Asian markets, despite a commercial ban on the trade of ivory. Elephant populations across the continent have fallen up to 60 percent.

    • Say no to the Dakota Access Pipeline

      Native American tribes, including the Sioux, have clear historical causes for grievances against the federal government, including treaties that were approved and then violated. Complaints that pipeline workers have already plowed up previously unrecognized sacred sites should be taken seriously. More broadly, though, the environmental costs of continued reliance on fossil fuels are not only real, but the damage is already underway. The pipeline begins at the Bakken Formation in western North Dakota then angles southeastward through South Dakota, Iowa and into southern Illinois before tying into an existing pipeline network. Proponents of the pipeline argue that the oil it will carry will get to market even if the project is scuttled, transported by truck or rail, which they say carry more risk of environmental damage. But data show that while train and truck accidents might occur more often, pipeline breaks spill more oil and generally cause more damage to the environment by fouling groundwater and wilderness areas.

  • Finance

    • No pay for moths, Karnataka man says he is starving in Saudi Arabia

      Imtiyaz Sheikh Sardar, a resident of Honnavar in Uttara Kannada district, is penniless and starving in Saudi Arabia, where he has been working as a driver since 2014. Imtiyaz, whose Saudi employer hasn’t paid him for months now, said that he is not being allowed to come back home. “I have been hungry for the last several days and my employer is not ready to listen to my grievances,” said Imtiyaz in a WhatsApp message seeking immediate help from the Uttara Kannada district administration. In his communication, however, Imtiyaz has refrained from revealing his local address and only mentioned his passport number.

      With no money to feed himself or support his family , Imtiyaz has decided to contact the Uttarra Kannada deputy commissioner’s office, which is now working towards helping him return to India. “My family too is in trouble,” he said in the WhatsApp message. Imtiyaz has thanked the authorities for their efforts to help him return.

    • America’s road trip: will the US ever kick the car habit?

      A battered Dodge Challenger roars past as I head out on the nine-lane highway, riding past shuttered shops and decaying restaurants and row upon row of vacant, overgrown housing lots.

      Normally I wouldn’t even consider cycling on such an expanse of road, but it’s not so bad in Detroit. After all, the birthplace of America’s car industry doesn’t have that many cars any more.

      My ride along Jefferson Avenue passes the low bulk of Chrysler’s car assembly factory. Along with General Motors’ Hamtramck plant, it is all that remains of the once-great industry which supported this city. Where there were 285,000 jobs, now there are just 10,000.

      In 1940, Detroit was the fourth largest city in the US; now it doesn’t even make the top 20. From a peak of 1.8 million inhabitants, the population now stands at 677,000.

      But the city is resurgent – and its near-total collapse may unwittingly have created one of its most powerful and unique assets. The well-documented flight to Detroit’s sprawling suburbs killed the city inside, but it also left space. The wide rivers of asphalt carved deep into the city were designed to transport a population three times its current size.

    • Brexit court defeat for UK government

      Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU, the High Court has ruled.

      This means the government cannot trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty – beginning formal exit-negotiations with the EU – on its own.

      Theresa May says the referendum – and existing ministerial powers – mean MPs do not need to vote, but campaigners called this unconstitutional.

      The government is appealing, with a further hearing expected next month.

      A statement is to be made to MPs on Monday but the prime minister’s official spokesman said the government had “no intention of letting” the judgement “derail Article 50 or the timetable we have set out. We are determined to continue with our plan”.

    • Brexit: can the ECJ get involved?

      Today’s ruling by the High Court requires the government to obtain approval from Parliament if it wishes to trigger ‘Article 50’, ie the process of withdrawing from the European Union. This short post won’t focus on the national constitutional law issues, but on the process of possible involvement of the EU courts in Brexit disputes.

      The government has announced its intention to appeal today’s ruling to the Supreme Court. Some have suggested that the case might then be ‘appealed’ to the ECJ, but this misunderstands the judicial system of the European Union. There is no ‘appeal’ from national courts to the ECJ. Rather a national court may suspend proceedings and ask the ECJ some questions relating to EU law that the national court believes it needs the answers to. After the ECJ gives the answers to those questions, the national court resumes its proceedings and gives its judgment in light of them. The ECJ normally takes about 16 months to give a ruling, although it could (and probably would) fast-track a case raising fundamental questions about Brexit.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • WikiLeaks: DOJ official gave John Podesta a heads-up on Hillary Clinton’s emails

      Peter Kadzik, the assistant attorney general of the U.S. Justice Department involved with the probe into Huma Abedin’s emails, gave John Podesta a heads-up on when the State Department would start releasing Hillary Clinton’s emails.

      “There is a HJC oversight hearing today where the head of our Civil Division will testify,” Mr. Kadzik emailed from his personal gmail account, with the header “Heads up.”

      “Likely to get questions on State Department emails,” Mr. Kadzik continued. “Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails.”

      Mr. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, then forwarded the email to Mrs. Clinton’s inner-circle and added: “Additional chances for mischief.”

      The email was dated May 19, 2015.

      Mr. Kadzik has a close relationship with Mr. Podesta. They both attended Georgetown University law school together in the 1970s and have remained good friends, with Mr. Kadzik frequently dining with Mr. Podesta.

      The Washington Free Beacon reported Mr. Kadzik previously donated to Mrs. Clinton and the daughter of Mr. Podesta.

    • FBI deputy director whose wife took Clinton friend’s cash is asked why he is still involved in email probe as Congress turn heat up on Clinton

      Even if Hillary Clinton does not win the presidency on Tuesday, Republicans on Capitol Hill say they are revving up for more investigations involving the former secretary of state.

      House Oversight Committee members remain unconvinced that charges of impropriety against Clinton have been fully reviewed.

      Chairman Jason Chaffetz also wants to know if the FBI’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, whose wife received $675,000 in political donations from a close friend of the Clintons, is still working on the Clinton email case in light of that disclosure.

    • Emails show Justice Department official overseeing Clinton probe has close ties to Podesta

      A Department of Justice official who notified Congress Monday that the agency would “dedicate all necessary resources” to the reopened Hillary Clinton email investigation has a close relationship with campaign chair John Podesta, hacked emails show.

      Peter Kadzik, assistant attorney general, sent his son to seek a job on the Clinton campaign given his personal relationship with Podesta. He was invited to a small birthday gathering for Podesta’s lobbyist brother last year. Kadzik also dined with Podesta at his home in January, when the first FBI probe was well underway.

      Emails made public by WikiLeaks over the past several weeks raise fresh questions about the Justice Department’s handling of an investigation into a case with such close ties to the agency’s leadership. Just one week before FBI Director James Comey closed the original Clinton email probe in July, Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s private meeting with Clinton’s husband sparked a wave of outrage that ultimately clouded the Justice Department’s decision to end the investigation.

    • How Clinton Campaign Gamed Super PAC Regulations

      Memos prepared by legal counsel for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign reveal how the campaign developed workarounds so it could coordinate with a network of pro-Clinton super political action committees or Super PACs. The memos were explicitly developed to ensure regulators at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) would not detect any signs of unethical practices.

      While the workarounds may not necessarily be illegal as a result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, they clearly undermine campaign finance law, and for those concerned about the influence of money in politics, the policies developed show how candidates can easily game the system.

      The documents, produced by Marc Elias of Perkins Coie LLP, were attached to emails from the Clinton campaign, which were published by WikiLeaks. They were drafted on April 1, 2015, before Clinton officially launched her presidential campaign.

      Perkins Coie recommended, “Secretary Clinton and her agents to make a hard solicitation for $5,000,” when discussing any Super PAC with prospective donors. Super PACs and their personnel would be free to “follow up with the donor—that day or at any other time of their choosing – to ask for additional funds, without any participation by Secretary Clinton or her agents.”

    • It’s ignorant to vote for Hillary Clinton without reading WikiLeaks

      Those voting for Hillary Clinton, defending Clinton and supporting Clinton without reading the information reported by WikiLeaks are intellectually no different than those who criticize climate science without ever having read the science. In short, if you defend Clinton and ignore WikiLeaks, you have something in common with Sarah Palin. Let that sink in for a moment. Finished processing that? Now process this — if the journalists responsible for reporting on Watergate were labeled “Russian sympathizers,” charged by the media as “attempting to influence an election,” and banned from travel or communication access, how would history judge the event? This is exactly what has happened to Julian Assange, who has done more for journalism than any of these corporate-owned, brand-named media products have done this election cycle. Either you support access to information or you have a problem with an informed public. Which side are you on?

    • WikiLeaks emails show close links between Google’s Eric Schmidt and the Democrats

      Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet and former Google chief executive, has been closely involved in the “strategic planning” of the 2016 Democratic Party presidential campaign for at least two years, emails released by whistleblowing outfit WikiLeaks suggest.

      A number of emails, which were directly highlighted by the WikiLeaks Twitter account, show how Google has previously loaned a company jet to the Democratic Party for an official trip to Africa and how Schmidt himself wanted to be “head outside advisor” to any future presidential candidate.

      In an email sent to Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills on 15 April 2014, Schmidt included a detailed draft plan on how the Democratic candidate should structure their campaign, where it should be based and how technology should be utilised for maximum effect.

      It was sent directly to Robby Mook, who now serves as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief, and was later sent to John Podesta, whose emails were leaked online by the Julian Assange-led anti-secrecy group. At the time of writing, over 30,000 messages have been published.

      “Here are some comments and observations based on what we saw in the 2012 campaign,” Schmidt wrote, adding: “If we get started soon, we will be in a very strong position to execute well for 2016.”

    • New WikiLeaks Release Shows DOJ Official’s ‘Heads Up’ to Podesta

      A new WikiLeaks release shows a possible conflict of interest between a Justice Department official and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

      Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik, the DOJ official in charge of the email investigation, emailed Podesta a heads-up on the case in May 2015.

      Under the subject “heads up,” Kadzik wrote: There is a HJC [House Judiciary Committee] oversight hearing today. Likely to get questions on State Department emails. Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails.”

      Podesta wrote back, adding other Clinton aides, “additional chances for mischief.”

      Kadzik used a private Gmail address to send the note, not his .gov email account.

      Trump argued today in Florida this is yet another example of the “rigged system” being exposed by WikiLeaks.

      “These are the people who want to run our country, folks!” he said about Kadzik and Podesta.

    • WikiLeaks: DOJ official gave ‘heads up’ to Clinton camp
    • WikiLeaks: DOJ official gave Clinton camp ‘heads up’ about email filing

      A senior Department of Justice official gave Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman a “heads up” about new developments related to Clinton’s email use as secretary of state, according to hacked emails published Wednesday by WikiLeaks.

      In May of 2015, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik emailed Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta to tell him about potential developments at an impending congressional hearing, as well as about a new development in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the emails Clinton turned over to the State Department from her private account.

      In an email from Kadzik’s personal account titled “Heads up,” he wrote: “There is a [House Judiciary Committee] oversight hearing today where the head of our Civil Division will testify. Likely to get questions on State Department emails. Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails.”

    • Hacked emails show Clinton campaign communicated with State

      A State Department official appeared to coordinate with Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign hours before the former secretary of state’s exclusive use of private emails was first detailed in a news account last year, newly released hacked emails show.

      Emails from the files of Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta show that the department official provided Clinton aides with the agency’s official response to a New York Times reporter in advance of the newspaper’s March 2015 report that Clinton had used a private email account to conduct all of her work-related business as secretary.

    • Jill Stein op-ed: The real reason millennials are going Green

      Young people are planning to break from the two-party system in unprecedented numbers this year. Their discontent is real: one May 2016 poll showed 91 percent of voters under age 29 wanted an independent challenger to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

      Media pundits have reacted harshly toward these young rebels, especially those supporting me and Ajamu Baraka, who as progressive Green candidates are constantly framed as taking votes from Clinton.

      But instead of attacking our young voters, why not ask what’s motivating them to vote outside the two-party box? They’re well aware of the conventional wisdom that they should vote for the “lesser evil,” which the media has beaten into them for months. What few pundits have been willing to admit is that for many young people, voting Green is not a whim but a well-considered decision.

      Millennials are disillusioned with politics and desperate to change it. For many, WikiLeaks exposing how the Democratic Party sabotaged Bernie Sanders confirmed their suspicions that the political system is rigged. They see Clinton as the embodiment of a political establishment that serves the economic elite, and they reject Trump’s sexist, racist behavior and regressive platform.

    • Liberals wary as Facebook’s Sandberg eyed for Treasury

      Sheryl Sandberg, the billionaire Facebook executive whose book “Lean In” has made her an icon to women in the workplace, is getting lots of attention as a potential Treasury secretary under Hillary Clinton.

      But she’s also drawing red flags from progressives, who are suspicious about her ties to former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, unhappy with Facebook’s international tax practices and wary about seeing the next Democratic White House stack its Cabinet with allies of big business.

      That makes Sandberg an illustration of the lingering skepticism by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other progressive Democrats about the staffing and economic policies of a Clinton presidency — even though Sandberg saidthis month that she has no intention of leaving Facebook.

    • Mainstream Presidential Polls Fuel Illusion That Voters Are Stuck With Only Two Choices

      Corporate media are focused on Donald Trump’s accusations of “oversampling” on the part of Democrats against Republicans. He’s half right, because polls do oversample declared Democrats by up to 14 percent in polls that compose the RealClearPolitics average.

      The deeper story is that mainstream polls skew against youth and independents, who are undersampled in most polls up to a whopping 30 percent. A recent CNN poll sampled few people under the age of 50. Not one major poll lists alternative-party identification in the breakdown of its sample.

      The first problem with sampling involves definitions. Most polls sample “likely voters,” with a bit of expansion to count for a smattering of “registered voters.” So who are “likely voters”? Voters who (1) consistently vote—which automatically excludes people ages 18 to 22, who have no voting history, (2) identify with either of the two major parties and (3) say that they intend to vote in the next election. “Registered voter” polls don’t count first-time voters not yet registered to vote, so forget about the opinions of those college students who are signed up in enthusiastic campus get-out-the-vote drives.

      The questions asked in the polls reinforce established, dualistic views of the political spectrum. The presidential-preference questions in polls that deign to include Green Party nominee Jill Stein and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson don’t ask “Who is the candidate you want to vote for?” or “Which candidate is most aligned with your positions and values?” Nearly all the polls frame the presidential question as “If the election were held tomorrow, who would you vote for?” In a media landscape where we are told—through unbalanced news coverage, controlled debates and ceaseless cultural propaganda, down to the red and blue cups at 7-Eleven stores during election season—that only the Democratic and Republican candidates are considered viable, most people will, of course, hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils. It’s telling that the very next follow-up question reads, “If the election were ONLY held between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who would you vote for?” You might as well reword the questions to (1) “Which candidate do you think will win?” and (2) “Which of these two candidates do you hate the least?” Neither of these questions address the issue of who people want to be their next president.

    • [Old] The Electoral College Still Makes Sense Because We’re Not A Democracy

      The Electoral College has been on life support since a chad—specifically a “hanging” chad—tipped the White House to George W. Bush in 2000. The painful reality of how our Constitution works was never more apparent. The Gore/Lieberman ticket won the popular vote 50,994,086 to 50,461,092 but lost the electoral vote 266 to 271.

      There was a lot more to it, but the punchline is that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Bush the winner because he won the electoral vote. It’s a tribute to the American national character that we weathered that cataclysm without civil war, but it left a bad taste in the electorate’s mouth.

    • FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation now ‘a very high priority,’ sources say

      The FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation that has been going on for more than a year has now taken a “very high priority,” separate sources with intimate knowledge of the probe tell Fox News.

      FBI agents have interviewed and re-interviewed multiple people on the foundation case, which is looking into possible pay for play interaction between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. The FBI’s White Collar Crime Division is handling the investigation.

      Even before the WikiLeaks dumps of alleged emails linked to the Clinton campaign, FBI agents had collected a great deal of evidence, law enforcement sources tell Fox News.

      “There is an avalanche of new information coming in every day,” one source told Fox News, who added some of the new information is coming from the WikiLeaks documents and new emails.

      FBI agents are “actively and aggressively pursuing this case,” and will be going back and interviewing the same people again, some for the third time, sources said.

      Agents are also going through what Clinton and top aides have said in previous interviews and the FBI 302, documents agents use to report interviews they conduct, to make sure notes line up, according to sources.

    • New emails suggest coordination between State Department and Clinton camp

      New revelations from the emails of Hillary Clinton campaign head John Podesta on Wednesday appeared to show coordination between the State Department and the Democrat’s campaign. The stolen emails released by Wikileaks suggested that a government official may have tipped Clinton off that news was about to break about the private email server she used as Secretary of State.

      The message, dated March 1, 2015, came from Department of State press aid Lauren Hickey. In it, she describes having “just cleared” a reply to a New York Times reporter about to publish the story.

      The mail also seemed to imply that the reply to the newspaper had been altered at the Clinton camp’s behest, saying: “Yes on your point re records – done below,” but without context, it was difficult to say what kind of change was made.

      State Department spokesman John Kirby rejected the implication that anything untoward was taking place. Speaking to the press on Wednesday, Kirby said that his department was always determined to “provide accurate information to the media” and that this sometimes required checking in with relevant parties to ensure veracity.

      Wednesday’s trove of emails about Clinton’s private server also included a note from Clinton aide Phillippe Reines saying “there’s a lot to respond to here, but first and foremost the premise is wrong. There is nothing wrong with anyone having personal email addresses or her emailing someone’s private account or vice versa. Maybe she was wishing [aide] Jake [Sullivan] a happy birthday. Or I was sending her a note about her mom. … We’re allowed to have personal lives.”

    • Trump child rape accuser calls off news conference over threats

      A woman who accused Donald Trump of raping her when she was 13 called off a press conference at which she planned to speak out after receiving threats, her attorney said.

      The unidentified accuser, known as Jane Doe, was set to make a public statement for the first time about the accusations Wednesday afternoon alongside lawyer Lisa Bloom.

    • Woman who accused Donald Trump of child rape said she could not go public as she received ‘terrible threats’

      The woman who accused Donald Trump of raping her when she was 13 years old at a party failed to show up at a press conference to give her first public statement as she “received terrible threats” and was “in great fear”.

      Her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, told reporters at a Los Angeles press conference that the accuser was “unable ultimately to do this”.

      Ms Bloom said the accuser planned to reschedule the press conference.

    • Secret Recordings Fueled FBI Feud in Clinton Probe

      Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.

    • #PodestaEmails27: WikiLeaks releases latest batch of emails from Clinton campaign chair

      The latest batch consists of over one thousand emails, bringing the number released so far to over 44,000. WikiLeaks said it will publish a total of 50,000 emails in the run up to next week’s presidential election.

    • Feds probing Clinton Foundation were told to ‘stand down’

      Senior Justice Department officials gave a “stand down” order to FBI investigators digging into the Clinton Foundation, according to a report.

      The order was delivered in February — just as voting got under way in the Democratic presidential primary, a source told the Wall Street Journal.

      “The message was, ‘We’re done here,’” a source told the paper, saying that prosecutors were not moved by the FBI’s presentation of evidence it had gathered to that point.

      Soon after the presentation, Justice Department officials handed down the “stand down” message.

    • Report: Indictment ‘likely’ in FBI’s Clinton Foundation probe

      Two sources within the FBI told Fox News on Wednesday that the investigation of the Clinton Foundation is likely to lead to an indictment.
      Fox News’ Bret Baier said Wednesday that the FBI probe into a possible pay-to-play scheme between Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation has been going on for over a year.

      Sources told the news network that the investigation, which is conducted by the White Collar Crime division of the FBI, is a “very high priority.”

      One source further stated that the bureau collected “a lot of” evidence, adding that “there is an avalanche of new information coming every day.”

      Baier also said that the Clinton Foundation probe is more expansive than previously thought, and that many individuals have been interviewed several times throughout the course of the investigation.

    • The FBI controversy is the latest example of how we don’t believe in anything anymore

      The FBI has long been an iconic institution in American life. After the last week’s announcement by FBI Director James Comey that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server continues, it’s hard to see it staying that way.

      Wrote Roz Helderman, Tom Hamburger and Sari Horwitz in a story headlined “After another release of documents, FBI finds itself caught in a partisan fray”: “For the second time in five days, the FBI had moved exactly to the place the nation’s chief law enforcement agency usually strives to avoid: smack in the middle of partisan fighting over a national election, just days before the vote.”

      Clinton and her allies — including President Obama(!) — are criticizing Comey for stepping into the fray so close to an election. Republicans, who spent the last several months castigating Comey for failing to indict Clinton over the email server when he initially wrapped the investigation in July, are now singing his praises.

      The result of the FBI-as-political-football narrative is nothing but bad for the Bureau.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches to be published by OR Books

      In the introduction, Assange writes: “Hillary Clinton made significant money from delivering these three speeches to Goldman Sachs immediately after stepping down from her role as Secretary of State. Now we can all profit from learning what the likely future president says behind closed doors.”

    • Jill Stein: Hillary Clinton Is ‘Queen of Corruption’

      Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein discusses Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and the “politics of integrity.” She speaks with Bloomberg’s Tom Keene on “Bloomberg Surveillance.”

    • WikiLeaks: Clintons Sell Political Favors to Clinton Foundation Donors

      On November 1, WikiLeaks released an email that revealed one of the most dubious pay-to-play examples between the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons.

      In a March 2015 email, Clinton Foundation director of foreign policy Amitabh Desai asked the Clinton campaign whether Bill Clinton could meet with Ukrainian Clinton Foundation billionaire donor Victor Pinchuk. The purpose of the meeting was to use Bill Clinton as a selling point to other Western leaders, so that Pinchuk could make a statement in opposition to Russian Leader Vladimir Putin.

    • State Dept ‘cleared’ reports on Clinton emails while in close touch with her team – #PodestaEmails

      The chain of emails that WikiLeaks released in its 26th batch of what has been dubbed the “Podesta emails” show communication between Clinton’s team and the State Department, right before the Times published its report.

      It appears the State Department and its former spokeswoman Jen Psaki personally “cleared” and made changes to the report.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Islam’s Apologists Encounter Reality

      One-third of Australians, according to the latest poll, oppose Muslim immigration — down on an earlier survey which put the figure at around fifty per cent. Whatever the actual number, it is heartening to note that good sense continues to defy the elites’ favoured narrative

    • Now we want censorship: porn controls in the Digital Economy Bill are running out of control

      The government’s proposal for age verification to access pornograpy is running out of control. MPs have worked out that attempts to verify adult’s ages won’t stop children from accessing other pornographic websites: so their proposed answer is to start censoring these websites.

    • Gawker and Hulk Hogan Reach $31 Million Settlement

      In fighting a lawsuit filed by the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, Gawker Media lost nearly everything — the verdict, its founder, its independence — but it maintained its resolute conviction that it would win on appeal.

      On Wednesday, however, Gawker capitulated, settling with Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea, for $31 million, according to court documents, and bringing to a close a multiyear dispute that stripped the company of much that once defined it.

      Faced with a $140 million judgment in the invasion of privacy lawsuit brought by Hogan over the publication of a video that showed him having sex with a friend’s wife — and the later revelation that Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, was financing the lawsuit and others against the company — Gawker filed for bankruptcy in June and ultimately sold itself in August to Univision for $135 million.

    • Facebook Deletes Music Piracy Groups Following Complaints

      When peer-to-peer file-sharing was in its infancy, Internet forums were the places where the enthusiasts came to meet. Regular users hung out with file-sharing site owners, while developers offered the latest builds of their new clients.

      For a number of years, these forums housed thriving communities but slowly but surely most fell out of use, hit by a double whammy of failing to stay current alongside the advent of social media. For many, sites like Facebook and Reddit became the go-to place for discussion and news.

      Of course, these platforms can be used for outright piracy too, with users posting links to the latest content on groups dedicated to file-sharing. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the entertainment industries who often put sites like Facebook under pressure to take action.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Slapped wrists for “privacy law breakers” Fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin, and Mio

      It comes after the Norwegian Consumer Council filed a complaint against fitness app Runkeeper in May for illegally sending users’ personal data to a third party in the US, even when not in use.

      The new complaint against Fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin, and Mio will be sent on Thursday to both the data protection authority and Norway’s consumer ombudsman.

      None of the four companies gives users proper notice about changes in their apps’ terms and conditions, the complaint claims, and all of them collect more data than is strictly necessary to provide their service. Nor do the companies fully explain who they may share user data with, or for how long they retain that data.

      As part of its AppFail campaign earlier this year, the Norwegian Consumer Council analysed the terms and conditions and privacy policies of dozens of everyday mobile phone applications. It found that fitness trackers were particularly bad at looking after personal data. Following the 24-hour readout of those T&Cs—designed to shame companies into behaving better—some did update their policies.

    • Montreal Police Face a Storm of Criticism Over Surveillance of a Journalist

      Investigators looking into corruption within Montreal’s police force for almost six months focused their attention on one of Quebec’s most prominent journalists even though he had neither reported on the corruption case nor had any strong connection to it.

      Advocates of press freedom expressed alarm about revelations this week that the police had captured calls and text messages to and from an iPhone belonging to the journalist, Patrick Lagacé, a columnist with the Montreal newspaper La Presse, and were given permission to track his movements by using the phone’s GPS function.

      In response, legal scholars have questioned the legality of the police action, and journalism organizations and politicians have condemned the police monitoring. On Tuesday, the government promised greater protections for journalists.

      On Monday, La Presse reported that Mr. Lagacé had been spied on as part of an effort by Montreal’s police force to find the source of leaks to news outlets about an internal inquiry into allegations that members of a drugs and street-gang unit had fabricated evidence.

      From January to July this year, the police obtained 24 warrants, allowing them to track Mr. Lagacé’s movements by activating the GPS chip on his phone and to record all the numbers associated with texts and calls to and from the device, according to La Presse.

      Most of the warrants, the newspaper reported, were approved by Josée De Carufel, a justice of the peace who was previously a criminal prosecutor.

      Mr. Lagacé said he believed that the surveillance was prompted by general concern within the police force over leaks to the media by its members rather than by worries that the leaked information about the drugs and street-gang unit might jeopardize the investigation. He added that most of the articles based on the leaks that concerned the police did not appear in La Presse but in a competing newspaper and on a television network owned by the same corporation.

    • Facebook isn’t looking out for your privacy. It wants your data for itself
    • Admiral to price car insurance based on Facebook posts
    • Facebook blocks Admiral’s car insurance discount plan
    • Facebook scuppers Admiral Insurance plan to base premiums on your posts
    • Facebook must stop ads that exclude races: lawmakers

      The Congressional Black Caucus has called on Facebook to stop allowing advertisers to exclude racial and ethnic groups when placing housing ads in what lawmakers say is a violation of federal anti-discrimination housing laws.

      “We are writing to express our deep concerns with reports that Facebook’s ‘Ethnic Affinities’ advertising customization feature allows for advertisers to exclude specific racial and ethnic groups when placing housing advertisements,” members of the caucus wrote in a letter addressed to Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday.

      “This is in direct violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and it is our strong desire to see Facebook address this issue immediately,” reads the letter.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Corruption-Fighting Minister Hopes for Obama Pardon

      The birthday cards and letters for the Reverend Edward Pinkney’s 68th birthday this month will be opened and searched before reaching him. That is part of the price the political activist is paying for taking on a powerful corporation in Michigan.

      Pinkney is currently serving a two-and-a-half to ten-year sentence — of which he has served 22 months already — after being found guilty of changing dates on a recall petition. Pinkney denies that he changed these dates.

      He believes that his actual crime was to challenge the Whirlpool Corporation and its political allies in the city of Benton Harbor, Michigan.

    • Amos Yee to be released on home detention

      Social activist Shelley Thio said in her Facebook that teen blogger Amos Yee will be released for Home Detention by the end of this week.

    • Amnesty staff blocked from Moscow office after officials seal premises

      Staff at Amnesty International in Moscow say their office has been broken into and sealed off by municipal officials.

      When employees arrived on Wednesday they found new locks on the door and a stamped paper across the entrance that demanded the office contact the city authorities, said Alexander Artemyev of human rights group’s Moscow office. No warning had been given.

      “Our neighbours told us that five men came around 9.30am, broke in and then changed the locks. When asked what they were doing, the men said it was a rent issue,” Artemyev told the Guardian.

    • Christian convert in French refugee camp told: ‘We will kill you’

      A Kurdish church leader smuggled to Britain says he received death threats – for having left Islam for Christianity – while living in makeshift camps in northern France.

      The church leader, who did not wish to be identified, spent nine months living in camps outside the French cities of Calais and Dunkirk. He told World Watch Monitor that Kurdish Muslims in both camps antagonised him.

      “In Calais, the smugglers [saw] my cross [round my neck], and said: ‘You are Kurdish and you are a Christian? Shame on you,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘Why? I’m in Europe, I’m free, I’m in a free country.’ They said, ‘No, you are not free, you are in the Jungle. The Jungle has Kurdish rule here – leave this camp.’ The smugglers were from inside the camp, and were Kurdish. They said to me, ‘We will tell the Algerians and Moroccans to kill you.’”

      The church leader, who taught art in his home in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as helping to lead a church there, said he received further threats in the camp outside Dunkirk. “They [set] fire [to] my tent,” he said.

    • Calls to UK in Pro-Clinton media to suspend diplomatic immunity of Ecuador Embassy over WikiLeaks publication of Hillary’s emails

      As in almost all articles at mainstream Western media – staunch supporters of Ms Clinton’s candidacy and the geopolitical stances she represents – the Newsweek piece do not treat the main issues in the context: a) whether the published Clinton’s emails kept on private servers are a matter of state-secrets or of national security, b) whether the content of the revelations constitutes aggravating wrongdoings of for instance Hillary Clinton or the Clinton Foundation, the DNC tops, etc., or c) whether the revelations done by WikiLeaks refers to true facts –which should be the paramount concern of the analyses, instead of solely focusing in the messenger, or in how the true was obtained and by whom.

    • Controversy over WikiLeaks Podesta Emails Opens a Debate for Future Journalism

      After the DNC email leaks that led to the resignation of top DNC officials, WikiLeaks has intensified its activity. Since October 7, they began publishing emails from the private account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. The archive contained transcripts of Clinton’s paid Goldman Sachs speeches that show her two faces and total disconnect from the middle class. It also revealed her private remarks dismissing climate activists. As usual, the leaks have been condemned by the status quo and Clinton loyalists. This time, a narrative that ‘Vladimir Putin was meddling in the election’ was used to discredit their publication, with the mainstream media creating an echo chamber of McCarthy-era style hysteria.

      Over the years, as WikiLeaks grew, incorporating their evolving strategies, criticism against the organization has also changed. Back in the day, WikiLeaks was slandered with Pentagon official’s rhetoric of “blood on their hands”, and was depicted as reckless hackers putting innocents in danger. Proclaimed liberal media institutions such as The New York Times abandoned WikiLeaks, with then executive editor Bill Keller differentiating it from his kind of journalism.

      Now, while the beam of transparency is focused on U.S. rigged contest for power, WikiLeaks is once again in the eye of media storms. Some criticize what they perceive as a politically driven information dump and question whether WikiLeaks has gone too far. This new sensation around WikiLeaks is now opening up a debate for all to examine the role of journalism and at the same time gives us an opportunity to understand how the organization’s efforts to open governments is changing the media landscape.

    • Truss: Extra 2,100 prison officers to be deployed

      An extra 2,100 prison officers are to be recruited to ease staffing shortages in jails in England and Wales, Justice Secretary Liz Truss will say later.

      Unveiling a White Paper, Ms Truss will say the new recruits should help to reduce attacks on staff and prisoners.

      She will detail plans for more autonomy for governors and ensure drug tests for inmates when they enter and leave jail.

      But Labour said the speech would be a “blatant PR stunt” unless comprehensive plans to address staff cuts were made.

    • I can’t vote. If you can, you must

      Although some people of color were allowed to vote, many still faced disenfranchisement prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With the recent gutting of that act by the supreme court, the systematic disenfranchisement of people of color is alive and well today.

      Progress on suffrage has always tended to be incremental. And, far from being a closed chapter in our history, the fight to keep things moving forward continues to this day.

      For every thousand people living in the US, seven are incarcerated. That population consists disproportionately of black and brown people, whether accused and convicted of crimes or held by immigration authorities.

    • Turkey threatens EU refugee deal over visa lag

      Turkey could pull out of its refugee deal with the European Union this year if visa-free travel for its citizens is not introduced soon, the country’s foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, warned in an interview published Thursday.

      “Our patience is running out,” Çavuşoğlu told German newspaper Neuen Zürcher Zeitung. “We are waiting on an answer [on visa liberalization] in the coming days. If we don’t get one, we’ll terminate the agreement.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Internet Archive turns 20, gives birthday gifts to the world

      On May 12, 1996, like a benevolent mad scientist, Brewster Kahle brought the Internet Archive to life. The World Wide Web was in its infancy and the Archive was there to capture its growing pains. Inspired by and emulating the Library at Alexandria, the Internet Archive began its mission to preserve and provide universal access to all knowledge.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Alleged KickassTorrents Owner Stays in Prison, Court Rules

        A Polish appeals court has ruled that Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents, will remain in prison. The court refused the request for a supervised release and deems the accusations of the U.S. Government serious enough to keep him in custody.

      • File-Sharing Can Be Legalized Immediately, While Complying With All Treaties

        There’s consistent disinformation from the copyright industry that even if a national parliament wanted to legalize file-sharing, it is not permitted to do so because of international treaties. This disinformational notion is hogwash, and I’m going to show exactly how it’s possible to legalize the private sharing of music, movies, and other culture while complying with all international treaties.

        When determining whether it is possible to legalize file-sharing – defined as the noncommercial sharing of cultural works for personal use, without the consent of the distribution monopoly holder – and still stay in accordance with all international treaties, an obvious shortcut is to check if there is such legislation already somewhere, legislation that has been around for a long time and is accepted as a legislative precedent by the international community and the host legislature.

        It turns out there is. Specifically, there is a very little-known such exception in Sweden (a country and a law I’m very familiar with since it’s my native country), and Sweden is affected by pretty much all existing EU treaties: what applies to Sweden will apply to any EU/EFTA country, like Germany, Czech Republic, or Iceland. When computer programs were moved in under the copyright monopoly umbrella in the early 1990s, politicians actually considered the cost of enforcement of the distribution monopoly when designing the law, unlike today.

      • It’s Finally Legal To Hack Your Own Devices (Even Your Car)

        You may have thought that if you owned your digital devices, you were allowed to do whatever you like with them. In truth, even for possessions as personal as your car, PC, or insulin pump, you risked a lawsuit every time you reverse-engineered their software guts to dig up their security vulnerabilities—until now.

        Last Friday, a new exemption to the decades-old law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act quietly kicked in, carving out protections for Americans to hack their own devices without fear that the DMCA’s ban on circumventing protections on copyrighted systems would allow manufacturers to sue them. One exemption, crucially, will allow new forms of security research on those consumer devices. Another allows for the digital repair of vehicles. Together, the security community and DIYers are hoping those protections, which were enacted by the Library of Congress’s Copyright Office in October of 2015 but delayed a full year, will spark a new era of benevolent hacking for both research and repair.

11.02.16

Caricature: European Patent Office as Mordor

Posted in Europe, Humour, Patents at 10:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

European Patent Office as Mordor

Summary: The latest cartoon which is commentary about the working conditions at the European Patent Office (EPO)

Breaking the European Patent System With the UPC Hammer, Courtesy of the EPO and Lawyers-Centric ‘News’ Sites

Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Breaking what’s clearly not broken to build something new which doesn't work for anything or anyone but billionaires

EPO Frame Breaking
When all else fails Battistelli characteristically uses a hammer

Summary: The latest overt pushes for the Unitary Patent, courtesy of biased (self-serving) media and the EPO’s Michael Fröhlich, who joins Margot Fröhlinger with her Unified Patent Court (UPC) advocacy that conveniently waves off Brexit

THIS new article from Managing IP (MIP), a proponent of the UPC, is very optimistic about the UPC. It’s hardly surprising given the site’s track record. Even though recruitment of UPC judges has been called off the site speaks of the UPC as though it’s some unstoppable gravy train which is also desirable. It’s neither; the public does not want it (at least the few who understand what it does) and it seems to have been derailed — quite fatally in fact — following Britain’s vote for Brexit.

“How can a continent with so many languages get along with the UPC? And now that the only large English-speaking member state may be out, why even have hearings and patents in English?”“UK Prime Minister Theresa May rules out influence of the CJEU and authority of EU law in a post-Brexit Britain,” MIP wrote, but “Labour party MPs demand answers from government regarding UK participation in the UPC and EPO” (we rebutted this spin before). MIP says “five more EU member states including Italy and Slovenia [are] expected to ratify the UPC Agreement early next year,” but without Britain and especially with lingering uncertainty about its status in the EU the UPC won’t get anywhere any time soon. Its death might not be “official” for several years to come, but it’s not too hard to see where this is going.

How can a continent with so many languages get along with the UPC? And now that the only large English-speaking member state may be out, why even have hearings and patents in English? How would Spain feel about it? Battistelli may think (as he’s a clueless nontechnical thug) that patent examination and accurate translations can be attained using algorithms, but he's wrong beyond words. Fools who think that automated translations are an excuse that can make patents go global (applicable everywhere) would have us believe that even patents in Mandarin (new MIP article about notoriously crappy patents from SIPO) would be legible in Latin/Greek-derived languages. At this stage we’re actually entering the twilight zone, wherein totally idiotic people like Battistelli make big decisions that can undermine the whole of Europe. According to another new article from MIP and from IP watch [1, 2], there is a new AIPLA President and he is one who used to be involved in software patents and ITC cases (embargo at the behest of large corporations). WIPR, in the mean time, writes about AIPLA 2016 and quotes the EPO’s Michael Fröhlich (another Battistelli and UPC “yes man”, not to be confused with Margot Fröhlinger [1, 2, 3, 4]) who will say just about anything — even lie — in an effort to make the UPC seem inevitable. From the report:

The Unified Patent Court (UPC) and unitary patent will become a reality, with or without the UK, according to a senior official at the European Patent Office (EPO).

Michael Fröhlich, director of international legal affairs at the EPO, was speaking in a personal capacity at the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s (AIPLA) 2016 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

He said: “The issue of the Brexit vote is the last hurdle in what has been a hurdle chase since the beginning. There have been hurdles that have been higher than what Brexit has posed … and this last one will be taken successfully.”

Slovenia is about to become the 12th country to ratify the UPC Agreement in the coming days, with Italy expected to become the 13th, according to Fröhlich, speaking on Friday, October 28.

He added that Germany plans to finish the parliamentary ratification process by the end of year.

They have been saying this for a long time, yet it never actually happened. Last year Battistelli said that UPC would happen this year and it’s already near December/Christmas. Progress made? Nothing. Even worse — the UPC has gone backwards/in reverse, owing primarily to the UK. Always remember that the EPO’s management is now living in (and accepting) Battistelli’s fantasy land. The man is deluded, maybe clinically damaged. He will say anything to get his way, even breaking his very own rules, then look for scapegoats (especially when he does not get his way). Recall what he's rumoured to have attempted to do even to Roland Grossenbacher (behind his back). Nobody is safe from the paranoia and vengeance of Battistelli, not even old allies/friends like Grossenbacher. Battistelli turned the EPO’s management into a dangerous cult.

“Always remember that the EPO’s management is now living in (and accepting) Battistelli’s fantasy land.”Be wary and sceptical of all the UPC propaganda that’s still abound. Here we have WIPR asking its choir (mostly patent law firms) about things that the choir would profit from. Nothing is said about the number of respondents and their nature, but this was used to generate misleading headlines about UPC, as usual (“Readers confident in UPC despite Brexit vote”).

WIPR did the same thing regarding software patents in the US about a week ago. As we said at the time, that’s like conducting a poll in Fox News about Donald Trump’s chance of becoming President. They’re asking an already self-selecting and biased population to reinforce an echo chamber’s mentality/mindset (self-deluding/self-misleading, disconnected from reality). █

Patent Maximalism is Destroying the European Patent Office (Just a Paperwork Assembly Line), Exile of Boards Ensures No Turnaround

Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

…And the Administrative Council allows this to happen, knowing darn well the consequences

“Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr., 16 April 1963

LANDBRUG photo

Summary: The EPO is racing to the bottom of patent quality and the last resort, the Boards of Appeal, are being destroyed by Battistelli, who attempts to make this destruction appear like “improved independence” while the Administrative Council, led by Battistelli’s Pet Chinchilla, condones these outrageous moves or simply abstains rather than object (ruinous passivity)

THE EPO keeps following the footsteps of the old USPTO — the patent office in which there was only one goal: maximalise profit (for the Office). The inherent problem with this misguided strategy is that it’s short-term (and thus quite likely short-lived), as applicants sooner or later realise that their patents are being devalued and that the newer patents are not even worth pursuing. Too much of everything or too much of anything has a stigma or proverbs associated with it in many languages/cultures.

Watch this latest nonsensical piece of patent maximalism seeded by the EPO and EUIPO for cheap PR. The EPO is so proud that someone reprinted these lies — lies that even Managing IP refused to accept several years ago. Deloitte has also just released similar propaganda in the form of a press release. These people view the whole world in terms of patents (or so-called “Intellectual Property”, which also includes trademarks and other laws). “Industries that use IPR intensively have a huge impact on the economy, study shows. Here are the key findings,” the EPO wrote this week, repeating some of this whole nonsense. They try to take credit for every single segment of the science and technology world!

“Too much of everything or too much of anything has a stigma or proverbs associated with it in many languages/cultures.”In reality, the EPO needs the appeal boards and it needs outside (independent) auditors of patent quality. Sadly, Battistelli is allowed by his Pet Chinchillas at the Council to just demolish these boards, little by little, step by step. The EPO under Battistelli already rejects the law and doesn’t give a damn about what the European Parliament says, so much so that, as Benjamin Henrion put it today: “EPO software patent guidelines have been updated, they keep using the term “computer-implemented inventions” https://is.gd/U8GQmj” (this is a new publication from a British site).

Yet again, as a matter of fact, the EPO is pushing software patents that are against the EPC and the Parliament’s determination. This is happening every week these days, i.e. a lot more frequently than before. We have campaigned on this subject for a very long time (I have personally done so longer than this site’s existence) and this week comes yet another lie from the EPO (namely that people need no special software to apply for a patent, clearly a fallacy). Also this week we see the EPO using EPOPIC as yet another opportunity to distract from abuses, retweeting stuff like [1, 2].

“Why is the media no longer covering internal EPO affairs?”How many people are even aware of what goes on inside the EPO? As one insider put it (illustrating it visually too): “This is how it feels like walking through the EPO corridors in 2016″ (see the image and the responses there). Why is the media no longer covering internal EPO affairs? Have intimidation tactics worked? Why do insiders need to submit anonymous comments in some thread from almost 5 months ago? One such comment says: “The EPO is for sure a magic place with its 365 day/year Halloween, leave-no-trace social conferences and its alien AC support forces. Happy Halloween!”

“As a side effect, more of the EPO money is leeched towards Germany,” another person wrote about the relocation of the boards to Haar:

Re. Art. 36 EPC (weighing of votes):
Germany did not vote no in the Budget and Finance Committee…
I assume, Munich is happy that another building is now in use, thus earning taxes.
As a side effect, more of the EPO money is leeched towards Germany.

Without the German vote, the weighing will be very close against the mass of smaller countries coming to the Administrative Council meeting in December (meeting 150! time for a fancy dinner!).

Here is a very detailed comment about what happened in the meeting behind closed doors:

Yes the German delegation seems to be playing a double game here.
During the June assembly they did not make any criticism of the planned move.

The only delegations that criticised or questioned the proposal were as follows.

Switzerland
“The boards’ location falls within the EPO President’s powers. In the redesigned framework, the BOA President would also play a role, by drawing up their budget. Only via the budget can the Council exercise direct influence. So this is not a formal request either; we are merely pointing out that in our opinion the boards’ location has no bearing on their independence. The Swiss delegation is therefore not prepared to agree to any spending on relocating the boards, and suggests leaving them where they are.”

Ireland
“Relocation: Ireland believes that a separate location for the boards of appeal is neither justified nor required. Users have already expressed the view that
the boards are considered to be independent from the rest of the Office and the fact that the boards are physically located in the Isar building does not
impinge on their independence. It seems that even a relocation within Munich would give rise to unnecessary expense and my delegation cannot see that the expenditure associated with such a move could be justified.”

Austria
“As far as relocating the boards was concerned, those most immediately affected, i.e.BOA members and users, would have to agree. And the cost – even in the
Munich area – would also have to be taken into account.”

Netherlands
There was no point relocating the boards, as proposed in Section C of CA/43/16; this would merely waste money.

Slovakia
“The Office’s relocation proposal was certainly better than the original one, but even such a move should still be presented to the Budget and Finance Committee for opinion, because it would cost a lot of money.”

Czech Republic
“Lastly, on the relocation issue it agreed with earlier speakers. This was more an internal management issue, and should be uncoupled from the
independence question. But if the majority was in favour of a move, it would oppose it.”

Bulgaria
“Relocation did not seem essential, and the costs involved should be looked into.”

Denmark
“Lastly, it was certainly not convinced that relocating the boards – whether in Munich or the vicinity – would make them look more independent.”

As we predicted years ago, the EPO is rapidly losing top talent and is becoming a paperwork pipeline (look at the recruitment standards), without much/any science in the mix. See these two new articles [1, 2] that show us in what ways the EPO is ‘evolving’. Brain drain continues, but the priority now seems to be more paperwork. Nicely done? Painful, covert way to kill any joy and pride associated with a job at the EPO?

Unless something is done to undo the coup, the EPO will end up like the chinchilla shown at the top, dissected and skinned for whatever profit may be in it. █

Links 2/11/2016: Fedora 25 Final Freeze, Minoca OS Under GPL

Posted in News Roundup at 10:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • What if Linux never existed?

    Linux has been around for a long time now, and many of us take it for granted as part of our everyday lives. But have you ever paused to consider what life would be like if Linux never existed? A writer at Network World recently explored this question based on some funny social media posts.

  • Linux Journal November 2016

    I like the idea of life hacking. I’m not sure it’s a term that you’ll find in the dictionary (although perhaps—dictionaries have some odd things in them now), but the idea of improving life by programmatically changing things is awesome. I think that might be why I’m such an open-source fan. When it’s possible to change the things you don’t like or improve on something just because you can, it makes computing far less mystical and far more enjoyable.

  • Desktop

    • Some Disappointed Apple Fans Are Moving To Ubuntu Linux

      At its October event, Apple tried hard to convince the users that its latest MacBook Pro is machine built for professional users. The company showed off the brand new Touch Bar that changed its appearance depending on the applications running on the screen. The new MacBooks are thinner and more powerful than ever. But, there’s something missing that’s driving away some diehard Apple fans.

      Firstly, Apple decided to ditch a large array of connectivity ports–HDMI ports, SD card slot, Thunderbolt 2 ports, and standard USB port. These ports have been replaced by 4 Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports. So, the same power user segment that’s being aimed by Apple, is expressing lots of concerns.

      Apart from the disappeared ports, these MacBooks have maximum 16GB of RAM. On the contrary, minimum 32GB RAM is becoming a standard for power users. While Microsoft is presenting itself as the new innovative tech company, some Apple loyalists are turning to another alternative, i.e., Linux.

    • Elementary, My Dear Siri!

      I’m not one prone to knee-jerk reactions, but I’m also not one to sit about idly without considering alternatives. So the first thing I did after the Apple keynote was to download a copy of Elementary and burn it to an SD card.

      An hour or so later, after checking that my Chromebook would work OK with it1, I installed from the live image to the SSD and began the process of figuring out whether, three years after I first tried it, Elementary is finally good enough for me as a development environment.

      Like last time, this isn’t a review per se, but rather a smattering of my impressions while trying to assess whether it suits me.

      I’m being realistic here – I know it’s not macOS, I don’t expect it to be macOS, it will not be a magical replacement for macOS for most people who share my current disenchantment with Apple, but I am very familiar with Linux, and most definitely need to consider moving to it in the long term given the way Apple has been neglecting Mac hardware and software over the past few years.

      So given this week’s keynote completely ignored desktops and that I sorely need to upgrade my six-year-old Mac mini, this is as good a time as any to evaluate what’s out there.

  • Server

    • AWS releases Amazon Linux container image for use in on-premises data centers

      Amazon Web Services (AWS), a division of Amazon that offers cloud computing and storage services, today announced that it has released a container image of its Amazon Linux operating system — which has, until now, only been accessible on AWS virtual machine instances — that customers can now deploy on their own servers.

      Of course, other Linux distributions are available for use in companies’ on-premises data centers — CentOS, CoreOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Canonical’s Ubuntu, and so on. Now companies that are used to Amazon Linux in the cloud can work with it on-premises, too. It’s available from AWS’ EC2 Container Registry. Amazon Linux is not currently available for instant deployment on other public clouds, whether Oracle’s, Google’s, Microsoft’s, or IBM’s.

  • Kernel Space

    • Fireside Chat: GKH Talks Licensing, Email, and Aging Maintainers

      No one aside from Linus Torvalds has more influence or name recognition in the Linux Kernel project than Greg Kroah-Hartman. More commonly known as GKH, the ex SUSE kernel developer and USB driver maintainer is now a Linux Foundation Fellow and the full-time maintainer of the -stable Linux branch and staging subsystem, among other roles. In a recent Fireside Chat with Kroah-Hartman at Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Tim Bird, Chair of the Architecture Group of the Linux Foundation’s CE Working Group, described him as the hardest working person he knows.

    • Linux 4.4.30

      I’m announcing the release of the 4.4.30 kernel. This fixes a bug in
      4.4.29 and older kernels by reverting two patches that should not have
      been applied.

      All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade.

      The updated 4.4.y git tree can be found at:
      git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.4.y
      and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

      http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

    • Linux Kernel 4.4.30 LTS Fixes a Bug in 4.4.29 and Older Kernels, Update Now

      After informing the Linux community about the release and immediate availability of the Linux 4.8.6 kernel, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the Linux 4.4.29 LTS kernel.

      Linux kernel 4.4.29 LTS was a fairly normal maintenance update that brought changes to a total of 82 files, with 657 insertions and 358 deletions, according to the appended shortlog and the diff from Linux kernel 4.4.28 LTS announced a week ago. However, later that day Greg Kroah-Hartman bumped the version to 4.4.30, removing two patches that shouldn’t have been applied in the first place.

    • Hyperledger Eyes Mobile Blockchain Apps With ‘Iroha’ Project

      A blockchain project developed by several Japanese firms including by startup Soramitsu and IT giant Hitachi has been accepted into the Hyperledger blockchain initiative.

      Developed by Hyperledger member and blockchain startup Soramitsu, Iroha was first unveiled during a meeting of the project’s Technical Steering Committee last month. Iroha is being pitched as both a supplement to other Hyperledger-tied infrastructure projects like IBM’s Fabric (on which it is based) and Intel’s Sawtooth Lake.

    • It’s Bitcoin’s Birthday: Whitepaper Released 8 years Ago Today

      At the time, many people who first read the paper became interested in the background technology, and several wanted to see it in a working state.

      It seems very few knew that was going to happen.

      Once Bitcoin launched in 2009, the biggest success story in digital money was launched. Satoshi launched Bitcoin as open source software so anyone could use it, fork it and update it. At first, the early adopters were mainly from the cryptography community like Hal Finney, the recipient of the very first bitcoin transaction.

    • Web Pioneer Tries to Incubate a Second Digital Revolution

      Brian Behlendorf knows it’s a cliché for veteran technologists like himself to argue that society could be run much better if we just had the right software. He believes it anyway.

      “I’ve been as frustrated as anybody in technology about how broken the world seems,” he says. “Corruption or bureaucracy or inefficiency are in some ways technology problems. Couldn’t this just be fixed?” he asks.

      This summer Behlendorf made a bet that a technology has appeared that can solve some of those apparently human problems. Leaving a comfortable job as a venture capitalist working for early Facebook investor and billionaire Peter Thiel, he now leads the Hyperledger Project, a nonprofit in San Francisco created to support open-source development of blockchains, a type of database that underpins the digital currency Bitcoin by verifying and recording transactions.

    • ​New round of HPE software layoffs begins

      Linux Plumbers, the invite-only conference for core Linux developers, is usually a happy occasion, but not this time.

      Several top programmers came looking for work because they had just been laid off by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). And they weren’t the only ones. Last week, HPE laid off numerous OpenStack cloud developers.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Rust and Vala
      • Bézier curves, markers, and SVG’s concept of directionality

        In the first post in this series I introduced SVG markers, which let you put symbols along the nodes of a path. You can use them to draw arrows (arrowhead as an end marker on a line), points in a chart, and other visual effects.

        In that post and in the second one, I started porting some of the code in librsvg that renders SVG markers from C to Rust. So far I’ve focused on the code and how it looks in Rust vs. C, and on some initial refactorings to make it feel more Rusty. I have casually mentioned Bézier segments and their tangents, and you may have an idea that SVG paths are composed of Bézier curves and straight lines, but I haven’t explained what this code is really about. Why not simply walk over all the nodes in the path, and slap a marker at each one?

      • Rust and GObject

        From documentation Rust provides a low level and high level API to access common operations. Provides a set of assumptions to help its great features like automatic memory management, secure and concurrent data access. On high level side, Rust provides a rich set of common collection, iterators, tuples and others.

        For GObject interoperability, there is a project , and this too, I found to allow you to use GObject based libraries in Rust, while they depends on other project, or directly on GObject Introspection generated XML files to introspect these C libraries.

      • Meet Meow, a Purfect GNOME Menu Editor

        If you love using GNOME Shell but wish that it was easier to create and customise folders in the App View, here’s an app that might help.

      • GNOME Shell 3.23.1 Introduces Dual-GPU Integration, Mutter Adds Wayland Fixes

        We reported last week that the first milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, due for release on March 22, 2017, arrived for early adopters, but the changes weren’t all that significant.

        A few days after the announcement for GNOME 3.23.1, the GNOME Shell 3.23.1 graphical interface and Mutter 3.23.1 window and composite manager made their appearance on the official FTP server, and looking at their changelogs, attached at the end of the article for reference, it appears there are plenty of new features to get excited for.

      • GNOME and Rust

        I’ve been keeping an eye on Rust for a while now, so when I read Alberto’s statement of support for more Rust use in GNOME, I couldn’t resist piling on…

        From the perspective of someone who’s quite used to C, it does indeed seem to tick all the boxes. High performance, suitability for low-level tasks and C ABI compatibility tend to be sticking points with new languages — and Rust kills it in those departments. Anyone who needs further convincing should read up on Raph Levien’s font renderer. The usual caveat about details vis-a-vis the Devil applies, but the general idea looks exactly right. Rust’s expressiveness and lack of baggage means it could even outperform C for non-trivial code, on top of all the other advantages.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • IPFire 2.19 Linux Firewall Distribution Switches to Unbound as DNS Proxy

        On the first day of November 2016, Michael Tremer from the IPFire project, an open source, professional, secure and hardened Linux-based firewall distribution, proudly announced the release of IPFire 2.19 Core Update 106.

        IPFire 2.19 Core Update 106 is the latest stable release of the Linux firewall OS, and it looks like it implements a new DNS proxy, namely Unbound, which replaces the Dnsmasq DNS forwarder and DHCP server used in previous releases. The decision was made because of the recent DNSSEC implementation by default in the distribution, which proves to offer better DNSSEC reliability, enhanced features, such as import of static leases, and improved performance.

      • 4MLinux 20.0 GNU/Linux Distribution Hits Stable Channel, Adds New Boot Options

        Today, November 1, 2016, 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs us about the general availability of the final release of his independent 4MLinux 20.0 GNU/Linux operating system.

        4MLinux 20.0 has entered development at the beginning of September, when the Core edition was pushed to the Beta channels for early adopters, as well as for the 4MLinux developer to rebase all of his GNU/Linux distribution on the new system, which is now powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4.27 kernel fully patched against the “Dirty COW” vulnerability.

    • Arch Family

      • Arch Linux 2016.11.01 Now Available for Download, Powered by Linux Kernel 4.8.6

        Today is the first day of November (still is in some countries), which means that a new ISO respin of the popular and lightweight Arch Linux operating system is now available for download.

        That’s right, Arch Linux 2016.11.01 is out, and it’s powered by the recently released Linux 4.8.6 kernel, which makes Arch Linux the first GNU/Linux distribution to offer a live and installable ISO image powered by the latest stable and most advanced Linux kernel version available, at least at the moment of writing this blog story.

      • Manjaro 16.10 “Fringilla” Released

        A new version of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution is available and continues with its Xfce desktop choice while a KDE Plasma 5.8 version is also available.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Extends IT Automation Reach

        Using a more declarative approach to IT automation that doesn’t require IT operations staff to learn how to program has the obvious benefit of being simpler for more IT organizations to embrace. Now Red Hat is extending the reach of that approach with the release today of an update to the agentless Ansible open source framework that reaches deeper into the realms of networking, containers and the cloud.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 25 Linux Now in Final Freeze, Slated for Release on November 15, 2016

          ovember 1, 2016, was an important day on the release schedule of the forthcoming Fedora 25 Linux operating system, as it hit the Final Freeze development stage, leading to significant cut-offs.

          The Final Freeze stage is a very important step in the development process of any GNU/Linux distribution, which means that no new packages will be added to the operating system and its current state will be preserved until the final release, but not before it passes all tests for all supported hardware architectures. As usual, during the Final Freeze stage, only critical bug fixes are accepted, and new package versions will be pushed to the stable repos after the OS officially hits the streets.

        • Fedora 25′s Hybrid Graphics Improvements, To Support NVIDIA Wayland EGLStreams

          When Fedora 25 ships in (hopefully) two weeks it will contain much better support for hybrid graphics / Optimus systems thanks to improvements led by Red Hat.

        • Fedora 25 Is Vetting Their Switchable Graphics Support This Week

          For those with a NVIDIA Optimus laptop or other dual-GPU system, Fedora QA has organized a test day this week for testing the switchable graphics support for Fedora 25 that will be shipping later this month.

        • Hybrid Graphics and Fedora Workstation 25

          When we started the Fedora Workstation effort one thing we wanted to do was to drain the proverbial swamp of make sure that running Linux on a laptop is a first rate experience. As you see from my last blog entry we have been working on building a team dedicated to that task. There are many facets to this effort, but one that we kept getting asked about was sorting out hybrid graphics. So be aware that some of this has been covered in previous blog entries, but I want to be thorough here. So this blog will cover the big investments of time and effort we are putting into Wayland and X Windows, GNOME Shell and Nouveau (the open source driver for NVidia GPU hardware).

    • Debian Family

      • Debian developer completes 20 years with project

        The Debian GNU/Linux project is 23 years old and one of its developers has just completed two decades with the community Linux organisation.

        Steve McIntyre, who led the project in 2008 and 2009, joined Debian in 1996. He wrote that he had first installed Debian in late October that year, migrating over from his existing Slackware installation with the help of a friend. It took an entire weekend and he says he found it so painful that he thought of bailing out at many times.

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Aporeto Announces Trireme, an Open-Source Security Project for Kubernetes and Docker
  • Trireme Open-Source Security Project Debuts for Kubernetes, Docker

    Network isolation isn’t the only way to secure application containers anymore, so Aporeto unveils a new security model for containers running in Docker or as part of Kubernetes cluster.
    Dimitri Stiliadis co-founded software-defined networking (SDN) vendor Nuage Networks in 2011 in a bid to help organizations improve agility and security via network isolation. In the container world, however, network isolation alone isn’t always enough to provide security, which is why Stiliadis founded Aporeto in August 2015. On Nov. 1, Aporeto announced its open-source Trireme project, providing a new security model for containers running in Docker or as part of a Kubernetes cluster.

  • Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

    Minoca OS is a general purpose operating system written completely from the ground up. It’s intended for devices looking to conserve power, memory, and storage. It aims to be lean, maintainable, modular, and compatible with existing software.

    In other words, it’s built for little devices that want a full-featured OS.

    On the app side, we’ve got a package manager (opkg), and a growing suite of packages like Python, Ruby, Git, Lua, and Node. Under the hood, Minoca contains a powerful driver model between device drivers and the kernel. The idea is that drivers can be written in a forward compatible manner, so kernel level components can be upgraded without requiring a recompilation of all device drivers.

  • Minoca Is A New GPLv3, General Purpose OS
  • ReactOS 0.4.3 Is Near With New Features, RC1 Released

    There are a lot of operating system updates to end out October and begin November… Even the “open-source Windows” ReactOS is out with a new test release.

  • OpenIndiana 2016.10 Released With MATE 1.14 Desktop, Drops Sun SSH

    The latest version of OpenIndiana, the Illumos-powered Solaris distribution letting OpenSolaris live on in community form, is now available.

  • OpenIndiana 2016.10 Unix OS Migrates to FreeBSD Loader, Adds MATE 1.14 Desktop

    OpenIndiana is a free and open-source Unix operating system, based on Illumos and derived from OpenSolaris. The latest version, 2016.10, was announced by Alexander Pyhalov on October 31, 2016.

    The OpenIndiana 2016.10 “Hipster” release comes with a large number of updated components, new features and under-the-hood improvements, but the most exciting ones are the migration to FreeBSD Loader, porting of Intel KMS (Kernel Mode Setting), implementation of Python 2.7 by default, removal of Sun SSH, and MATE 1.14 desktop, which is now integrated and installed by default.

  • Google “Eve” Kabylake System Gains Coreboot Support

    I haven’t seen Google announce any Intel Kabylake powered Chromebooks yet, but activity indicates that they may not be too far out with now having mainlined Coreboot support for a new device codenamed “Eve”.

  • 8 Open Source BPM Software Options

    Open source business process management (BPM) software appears to account for a large percentage of recent innovation in the broader BPM market.

    “Open source solutions are leading the evolution of the BPM technologies: from pure BPM solutions that automate processes, increase productivity and ensure regulatory compliance to business application platforms that include tools and capabilities to empower DevOps teams to effectively create and maintain business applications,” said Miguel Valdes Faura, CEO and founder of Bonitasoft, provider of an open source BPM platform.

    The trends in open source BPM software mirror the broader BPM market, said Phil Simpson, manager, BPM Product Marketing for Red Hat, mentioning a move away from on-premise deployments in favor of BPM-as-a-service, and adoption of more dynamic ad-hoc case management style flows in lieu of rigid process models.

  • Managing Production Systems with Kubernetes in Chinese Enterprises

    Kubernetes has rapidly evolved from running production workloads at Google to deployment in an increasing number of global enterprises. Interestingly, US and Chinese enterprises have different expectations when it comes to requirements, platforms, and tools. In his upcoming talk at KubeCon, Xin Zhang, CEO of Caicloud, will describe his company’s experiences using Kubernetes to manage production systems in large-scale Chinese enterprises.

  • Node.js Is Helping Developers Get the Most Out of JavaScript

    Node.js, the JavaScript runtime of choice for high-performance, low latency apps, continues to gain popularity among developers on the strength of JavaScript.

  • 10 tips for making your documentation crystal clear

    So you’ve some written excellent documentation. Now what? Now it’s time to go back and edit it. When you first sit down to write your documentation, you want to focus on what you’re trying to say instead of how you’re saying it, but once that first draft is done it’s time to go back and polish it up a little.

  • Apache Ignite Powers GridGain’s In-Memory Computing Platform

    Here at OStatic, we’ve often noted that whenever the Apache Software Foundation graduates an open source project to become a Top Level Project, it tends to bode well for the project. Just look at what’s happened with Apache Spark, for example.

    Last year, Apache, which is the steward for and incubates more than 350 Open Source projects, announced that Apache Ignite had become a top-level project. Ignite is an open source effort to build an in-memory data fabric that was driven by GridGain Systems. Now, GridGain Systems has announced that it is offering the Ignite-based GridGain Enterprise Edition in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.

  • Nitrous.io shuts down, open source self-hosted version promised

    Nitrous.io, a Singapore and San Francisco-based cloud integrated development environment (IDE) provider, has announced it is to shut down its development platform and cloud IDE on November 14, with customers given until that date before their data is deleted.

    The company has stopped new signups, and said that payments made after October 16 will be refunded in full, as well as promising that subscriptions to any Nitrous email list will expire at the end of this month.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Forrester: OpenStack and AWS are Now Crowned Cloud Standards

      At the recent OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, nteroperability among OpenStack-powered clouds was trumpeted far and wide. And, in tandem with that, OpenStack proponents are also touting the fact that the open cloud computing platform has emerged as a de facto standard, alongside Amazon Web Services.

      Forrester Research’s latest report, “The State of Cloud Platform Standards, Q4 2016,” specifies that OpenStack and AWS are now the cloud standards. That’s quite something when you consider that OpenStack is only a few years old.

      There are, of course, numerous open cloud platforms out there. OpenNebula, Eucalyptus, and CloudStack are just a few of the choices. But Forrester Research reports that ”almost every public, private, and hosted private cloud provider has either already developed or is in the process of developing varying levels of support for the OpenStack APIs.”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GIMP 2.9.6 Readying New Clipboard, GUI Improvements

      GIMP is taking another step towards the long overdue GIMP 2.10 image program update with a new milestone release being on the horizon.

      The GIMP 2.9.6 release has yet to happen but its NEWS entry was updated for the pending release.

      What users can look forward to in GIMP 2.9.6 is a new clipboard implementation to copy/paste layers and layer groups, color tags, the mouse pointer dialogs and colors applied to images are now color-managed, various GUI additions, improvements to some of the built-in tools, a native WebP loader/exporter, and around 60 bug fixes over the earlier GIMP 2.9 development release.

    • Update NEWS for the GIMP 2.9.6 release

  • Public Services/Government

    • Emilia-Romagna ends its use of OpenOffice

      For the second time this year, an Italian public administration is ending its use of open source office productivity software. A source in the IT department of the Emilia-Romagna region confirmed to the Open Source Observatory last week that the region will end its use of OpenOffice. The region will move to a cloud-based proprietary office solution, others say.

      The IT department did not respond to emails seeking comments sent last week and yesterday. This news item will be updated with more information as it becomes available.

      On 31 October, a press statement by the region’s councillor for the Digital Agenda, Raffaele Donini, mentions the use of unspecified cloud solutions, which should reduce the number of pages printed by the administration each year by some 5 million. The switch would save EUR 700,000 per year.

      Update: the region took its decision to switch to a cloud solution on 24 October.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Wix gets caught “stealing” GPL code from WordPress

      Abrahami was alluding to the use in the WordPress text editor of code originally published as open source under the more permissive MIT public license, as Wix developer Tal Kol said explicitly in a followup post on Medium. Kol said that the code was developed in an attempt to collaborate with WordPress engineers—porting the Automattic, GPL-licensed editor to the React Native JavaScript platform for mobile apps. After a prototype was ready in June, Kol explained, he tweeted a link to the code to Automattic’s engineering team but didn’t get a response until October 28, when Mullenweg called Wix out for a GPL violation.

      The problem for Wix is that while it may very well have open-sourced the component it built using WordPress’ editor—which Kol says was in turn built using another editor licensed under the more permissive MIT open source license—the company then published the component as part of commercially licensed software. That action violates both the spirit and the letter of the GNU Public License, which requires anything built with GPL-licensed code to be distributed with the same GPL license. By adding the GPL-licensed editor module code to its own application, Wix essentially placed its whole mobile application under the scope of the GPL license.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • The Polls of the Future Are Reproducible and Open Source

      There’s a new poll aggregator in town. And it’s a monster, harnessing three of the most powerful ideas in science today: Bayesian inference, open-source software, and reproducible research.

    • Open Data

      • Open Source Data Sharing Software Takes Aim At Cancer

        Researchers collaborating in Pittsburgh have developed an open-source software resource that can better enable investigators studying cancer to process large amounts of genomic cancer data.

        The new resource, developed by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center can assist investigators in sorting through genomic cancer data to determine better methods of cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

        The open-source software, which processes data generated by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project and is called TCGA Expedition, is described in an article in the journal PLOS ONE.

  • Programming/Development

    • Which ‘ancient’ programming language do you use the most?

      The definition of an “older” language is a little fuzzy. For many developers, the languages they are working with were created before they were born. For the purposes of this poll, we selected a few popular languages from Wikipedia’s History of programming languages article and selected the somewhat arbitrary cutoff of needing to have been created prior to 1980.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Paranoid Android: Erica May Be the Creepiest Robot Ever Built

      Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro is a weird dude. For the last couple of decades, he’s been on a quest to make the most lifelike android possible. His first creation was based on his daughter’s image and proved so frightening to his child that the machine had to be locked away in a crate. Later, Ishiguro–who dresses in all-black, like a Japanese Johnny Cash–made a machine that looks exactly like him. As you do.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • Let’s Automate Let’s Encrypt

      HTTPS is a small island of security in this insecure world, and in this day and age, there is absolutely no reason not to have it on every Web site you host. Up until last year, there was just a single last excuse: purchasing certificates was kind of pricey. That probably was not a big deal for enterprises; however, if you routinely host a dozen Web sites, each with multiple subdomains, and have to pay for each certificate out of your own dear pocket—well, that quickly could become a burden.

      Now you have no more excuses. Enter Let’s Encrypt a free Certificate Authority that officially left Beta status in April 2016.

      Aside from being totally free, there is another special thing about Let’s Encrypt certificates: they don’t last long. Currently all certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt are valid for only 90 days, and you should expect that someday this term will become even shorter. Although this short lifespan definitely creates a much higher level of security, many people consider it as an inconvenience, and I’ve seen people going back from using Let’s Encrypt to buying certificates from commercial certificate authorities for this very reason.

    • Microsoft says Russia-linked hackers exploiting Windows flaw [Ed: So it says the back doors it gave the NSA are used by many others]

      Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) said on Tuesday that a hacking group previously linked to the Russian government and U.S. political hacks was behind recent cyber attacks that exploited a newly discovered Windows security flaw.

      The software maker said in an advisory on its website there had been a small number of attacks using “spear phishing” emails from a hacking group known Strontium, which is more widely known as “Fancy Bear,” or APT 28. Microsoft did not identify any victims.

      Microsoft’s disclosure of the new attacks and the link to Russia came after Washington accused Moscow of launching an unprecedented hacking campaign aimed at disrupting and discrediting the upcoming U.S. election.

    • Lack of cybersecurity standards leaves election process vulnerable [Ed: Windows in voting machines is a real issue [1, 2]]

      Hackers continue to exploit vulnerabilities in the U.S. political technology, highlighting the need for cybersecurity standards and guidelines to help protect voter information.

    • Windows zero-day exploited by same group behind DNC hack

      On Oct. 31, Google’s Threat Analysis Group revealed a vulnerability in most versions of Windows that is actively being exploited by malware attacks.

      Today, Terry Myerson, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Windows and Devices group, acknowledged the exploit was being used actively by a sophisticated threat group—the same threat group involved in the hacks that led to the breach of data from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. And while a patch is on the way for the vulnerability, he encouraged customers to upgrade to Windows 10 for protection from further advanced threats.

    • How DNS Works: A Primer

      DNS has been in the news a great deal as of late. First, there was the controversy over the United States government essentially handing over control of the Internet’s root domain naming system. Then DNS made headlines when cybercriminals performed three separate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on a major DNS service provider by leveraging a botnet army of millions of compromised IoT devices. Yet with all the hoopla surrounding DNS, it surprises me how many IT pros don’t fully understand DNS and how it actually works.

      DNS stands for Domain Name System. Its purpose is to resolve and translate human-readable website names to IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. Technically speaking, it’s not a necessary part of the networking processes. Rather, DNS simply makes it easier for human beings to know and remember what server they are trying to reach. For example, it’s much easier to remember that if you want to perform an internet web search, you type in www.google.com as opposed to the IPv4 address of 216.58.217.4.

    • Security Blogger Identifies Next IoT Vulnerability, This Time on Linux OS [Ed: not Linux is the problem here but bad developers of devices]

      Recommendations for mitigation include turning off global telnet open services and not using known vulnerable usernames or passwords. If a device is infected (or you’re not sure if it is), this can be removed by rebooting the infected devices, the post said. Of course it will then have to be secured against the intrusion, or it will be re-infected.

    • Top GCHQ director calls security industry “witchcraft”

      The National Cyber Security Center’s technical director Ian Levy has slammed commonly-accepted cyber security advice, equating the security industry to “witchcraft” and accusing it of deliberately creating unnecessary fear around cyber threats.

      Speaking at Future Decoded 2016, Microsoft’s annual digital transformation conference, Levy argued that cyber security is not transparent and that the industry is “blaming the user for designing the system wrong”.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Swiss police detain eight in a mosque raid

      Swiss police on Wednesday raided a mosque in the north of the country, detaining eight people, AP reported.

      Those in custody are suspected of calling for killing of Muslims refusing to attend prayers.

      Police searched the mosque in Winterthur, near Zürich, and the apartments of three people, according to a statement from the regional prosecutor’s office. Among those arrested was an Ethiopian imam who could have been behind the call for the killings.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • WikiLeaks releases 26th batch of #PodestaEmails from Clinton campaign chair

      The latest release consists of over 1,100 emails. More than 43,000 emails have now been published by the whistleblowing site, which has pledged to make public a total of 50,000 in the run up to next week’s US presidential election.

      Tuesday’s email release divulged more details on the Clinton team’s reaction to her email server scandal and gave further insight into its relationship with the MSM.

    • The FBI Seems To Be Leaking Like A Sieve Concerning Details Of Clinton Email Investigation

      Okay, look, let’s face the fact that any time we write about anything having to do with either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, people in the comments go nuts accusing us of being “in the tank,” or “shills.” or even (really) “up the ass” of one candidate or the other (and, yes, this has happened with both of the major party candidates). I’m assuming it will happen again with this post, even though it’s not true. As should be abundantly clear, we’re not big fans of either choice (and don’t get us started on the third parties…). So when we talk about one, the other (or even both together), it’s not because we’re “biased” or trying to help or hurt one or the other. We’re just doing the same thing we always do, and which we never had a problem with before, which is reporting on policy related issues having to do with technology, free speech, the 4th amendment, law enforcement, etc. So, before you rush in to yell at us in the comments, please consider that maybe just because we’re not toeing the party line on your preferred candidate, maybe it’s not because we’re in the tank for the other one.

    • The Clinton-Obama Emails

      or everyone wondering why the Clinton email case never went to a grand jury, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey offers an explanation: After disclosure of emails between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama , “the president said during an interview that he thought Mrs. Clinton should not be criminally charged because there was no evidence that she had intended to harm the nation’s security—a showing required under none of the relevant statutes.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Why Dakota Is the New Keystone

      The Native Americans who have spent the last months in peaceful protest against an oil pipeline along the banks of the Missouri are standing up for tribal rights. They’re also standing up for clean water, environmental justice and a working climate. And it’s time that everyone else joined in.

      The shocking images of the National Guard destroying tepees and sweat lodges and arresting elders this week remind us that the battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline is part of the longest-running drama in American history — the United States Army versus Native Americans. In the past, it’s almost always ended horribly, and nothing we can do now will erase a history of massacres, stolen land and broken treaties. But this time, it can end differently.

    • State of emergency declared for Alabama after Colonial pipeline incident

      Alabama Governor Robert Bentley on Tuesday declared a state of emergency for the state due to an explosion and fire involving Colonial Pipeline Co [COLPI.UL] in Shelby County on Monday.

      “The State of Emergency is effective November 1, 2016 through December 1, 2016 unless sooner terminated,” according to a statement from the governor’s office.

    • Dakota Access pipeline protesters crowdsource for $5,000, get $1 million

      The crowdsourcing goal was modest: $5,000, enough to help a few dozen people camping in North Dakota to protest the nearby construction of the four-state Dakota Access oil pipeline. The fund has since topped a staggering $1 million.

      The fund is among several cash streams that have provided at least $3 million to help with legal costs, food and other supplies to those opposing the nearly 1,200-mile pipeline. It may also give protesters the ability to prolong their months-long encampments that have attracted thousands of supporters, as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe pursues the fight in court.

  • Finance

    • Liam Fox’s attempt to secure pre-Brexit deal with EU suffers setback

      Liam Fox’s hopes of securing a trade deal with the European Union before Brexit have been dealt a blow by a leading member of the European parliament, who insists no deal can be struck until the UK has left the bloc.

      Danuta Hübner, a former Polish government minister who became the country’s first European commissioner, said it would not be possible for the UK to conclude a trade deal while still an EU member.

      Now an MEP, she chairs the European parliament’s constitutional affairs committee, which will be responsible for vetting any post-Brexit free-trade agreement with the UK.

      In an interview with the Guardian, she stressed negotiations on Britain’s EU exit under article 50, due to begin next year, would be on a different track to talks on the future relationship.

      “Formally you cannot conclude or even negotiate the agreement that belongs to a third-country situation while you are still a member. Article 50 is only about withdrawal and only when you are out can [you] negotiate another agreement.”

    • European Taxi Unions Merge to Create United Front Against ‘Uber Lobby’

      In Spain, as in almost all other markets it has entered, Uber has faced pushback from authorities, protests by taxi drivers, and a rash of rival startups looking to get their own piece of the lucrative ride-hailing market. But the latest attempt to challenge the US company’s hegemony in the taxi app market is a different beast. Perhaps realizing the difficulties in relying on regulation to keep Uber out, taxi drivers in Spain announced this week plans to create their own app.

      This is not the first time taxi drivers have tried to beat Uber and its ilk at their own game. The last few years have seen a rash of rival apps brought out by taxi drivers, but this approach faces considerable challenges, not least winning over customers from big, established brands with multi-billion dollar budgets.

    • Wells Fargo blackballed employees who refused to commit fraud, forcing them out of the industry forever

      Earlier this month, Planet Money aired an interview with a Wells Fargo whistleblower who was fired for trying to alert the bank to the millions of criminal frauds being committed against its customers, and we learned that the whistleblower had been added to a confidential blacklist used by the finance industry, preventing her from ever getting work in the industry again.

      This week’s Planet Money (MP3) airs an interview with another Wells Fargo whistleblower who resigned when the bank made him recant his complaints to upper management, and then put pressure on him to engage in the same frauds as his colleagues. This whistleblower, too, was unable to get work at any other bank, and it wasn’t until a sympathetic hiring manager at a rival bank told him confidentially that he had been blacklisted that he found out why.

      The blacklist is called “U5,” and it’s maintained by the finance institutions as a way of alerting each other to fraudsters who are fired for breaking finance rules. The list was designed to protect banks from fraud, but it has no defenses against fraudulent banks.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Dems should blame Hillary, not Comey, for the ‘October surprise’

      Before Democrats burn James Comey in effigy, they should think about how the FBI director came to have an outsized influence in the election in the first place.

      It’s not something Comey sought or welcomed. A law enforcement official who prizes his reputation, he didn’t relish becoming a hate figure for half the country or more. No, the only reason that Comey figures in the election at all is that Democrats knowingly nominated someone under FBI investigation.

      Once upon a time — namely any presidential election prior to this one — this enormous political and legal vulnerability would have disqualified a candidate. Not this year, and not in the case of Hillary Clinton.

    • WikiLeaks: Clinton Foundation Plagued by Corruption and Conflict

      On November 1, WikiLeaks released an email from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta that provided perspective into the corrupt inner conflicts of the controversial non-profit the Clinton Foundation.

      “I cannot stress enough that if this is not handled appropriately it will blow up,” wrote Tina Flournoy, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, in an April 8 2015 email to Podesta. The subject of the email was “CHAI” referring to the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

      The day before, on April 7, Flournoy noted in an email to Podesta and other Clinton staff, “do you guys know where we are – as of today – on CHAI? That needs to be discussed – but he’s about to lose it if we don’t wrap the call.”

      A 2015 New York Times article explained the tensions between CHAI CEO Ira Magaziner, and the rest of the Clinton Foundation, based on a performance review of Magaziner and by CHAI’s board, an influential member of which is Chelsea Clinton. “Ira’s ‘paranoia’ was mentioned by several board members to encompass Ira’s general mistrust of the board and its intentions,” the performance review noted.

    • CNN Gets Caught in Cheating Scandal

      That’s not the way CNN and Brazile reacted when exposed by the WikiLeaks emails. In the first incriminating email, Brazile told the Clinton team, “From time to time I get the questions in advance” and shared a question on the death penalty that Clinton would be asked on CNN’s March 13 town hall.

    • Hillary Supporters Are Still Trying To Pretend Nothing’s Wrong, And It’s Hilarious

      If you want to have an easy condescending laugh at someone else’s expense (and who doesn’t?), type the words “non story” into the Twitter search bar and look how many Hillary Clinton supporters are using that phrase to try and spin away the FBI’s discovery of new evidence pertinent to the criminal investigation of their candidate. Use quotation marks. You can do it with Facebook’s search function too, just make sure you click “Latest” to get the last few days’ worth of spin.

    • Corruption is the cornerstone of the Clinton campaign

      Reopening Hillary Clinton’s FBI investigation isn’t a political ploy, nor is it an “October Surprise.” But it could be God’s early Christmas gift to America.

      Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, says she doesn’t know how her emails showed up on husband Anthony Weiner’s computer. The FBI stumbled upon another treasure trove of Clinton-related emails while investigating Abedin’s now estranged husband, who is under investigation himself for allegedly exchanging lewd messages with a 15-year old girl.

      Additional emails released in August found that Abedin carelessly toted around classified government information in her car, once asking Clinton’s personal assistant to intercept “a bunch of burn stuff in the pocket of my front seat” she’d left unattended.

      If this wasn’t so incredibly dangerous it would be Saturday Night Live-worthy.

      Despite how we feel about WikiLeaks, Americans should be thanking the good Lord the belly of the beast that is Hillary Clinton has been exposed for what it is. Emails have revealed, as the old song goes, corruption so high, you can’t get over it, so wide, you can’t get around it, and so deep, you can’t get under it.

    • Debunking Trump’s “secret server”

      This is nonsense. The evidence available on the Internet is that Trump neither (directly) controls the domain “trump-email.com”, nor has access to the server. Instead, the domain was setup and controlled by Cendyn, a company that does marketing/promotions for hotels, including many of Trump’s hotels. Cendyn outsources the email portions of its campaigns to a company called Listrak, which actually owns/operates the physical server in a data center in Philidelphia.

      In other words, Trump’s response is (minus the political bits) likely true, supported by the evidence. It’s the conclusion I came to even before seeing the response.

      When you view this “secret” server in context, surrounded by the other email servers operated by Listrak on behalf of Cendyn, it becomes more obvious what’s going on. In the same Internet address range of Trump’s servers you see a bunch of similar servers, many named [client]-email.com. In other words, trump-email.com is not intended as a normal email server you and I are familiar with, but as a server used for marketing/promotional campaigns.

    • Clinton Loyalist Thought Super PAC Coordination With Campaign Was “Skirting if Not Violating Law”

      Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress and policy director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, is arguably Clinton’s most fervent supporter. In one of the hacked emails to and from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta published by WikiLeaks, Tanden emphasized that “I would do whatever Hillary needs always.”

      But as a recently released email chain shows, even Tanden was concerned in May last year that plans of a pro-Clinton Super PAC to directly coordinate with the campaign were “shady” and “skirting if not violating [the] law.”

      That Super PAC’s coordination with the Clinton campaign has since become the subject of a complaint to the Federal Election Commission from the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington, D.C., watchdog organization.

    • Susan Sarandon Goes Full ‘Bernie Or Bust,’ Endorses Jill Stein

      Actress and activist Susan Sarandon is backing Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein instead of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

      In a letter published on Stein’s campaign website, Sarandon cites Clinton’s lack of support for a $15 minimum wage and her silence on the Dakota Access Pipeline as some of her reasons for not supporting the candidate.

      “Fear of Donald Trump is not enough for me to support Clinton, with her record of corruption,” Sarandon’s letter reads. “Now that Trump is self-destructing, I feel even those in swing states have the opportunity to vote their conscience.”

      Sarandon was a vocal champion of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) throughout the Democratic presidential primary, and was among his “Bernie or bust” supporters who said they likely wouldn’t back Clinton’s candidacy if the senator lost the primary.

    • Thankin’ Stein

      Green Party candidate Jill Stein has not endorsed Donald Trump, and she has expressed wariness of either Trump’s or Clinton’s winning the presidency.

    • WikiLeaks: ‘Kept Me Out of Jail’: Top DOJ Official Involved in Clinton Probe Represented Her Campaign Chairman

      The Justice Department official in charge of informing Congress about the newly reactivated Hillary Clinton email probe is a political appointee and former private-practice lawyer who kept Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta “out of jail,” lobbied for a tax cheat later pardoned by President Bill Clinton and led the effort to confirm Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

    • Clinton aide advised: ‘Dump all those emails’

      Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman advised a longtime aide that they were “going to have to dump all those emails” on the day that a report revealed Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email server while secretary of State, according to stolen emails released Tuesday by WikiLeaks.

      “Not to sound like Lanny, but we are going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later,” says the March 2015 message, labeled as from John Podesta to Cheryl Mills and apparently referencing longtime Clinton confidant Lanny Davis.

      “Think you just got your new nick name,” Mills replied.

      Clinton campaign officials have refused to confirm the authenticity of the emails, which are believed to have been stolen from Podesta’s personal account by Russian government hackers.

      Previously released emails have revealed some advisers were frustrated that Clinton hadn’t made information about the server public sooner.

      “Why didn’t they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy,” policy adviser Neera Tanden wrote to Podesta that same evening, March 2, 2015.

      “Unbelievable,” Podesta replied.

    • All The Dumb Sh!t Trump Has Done As Nominee In One

      Donald Trump has never met a person he didn’t want to publicly shame. Google the words “Donald Trump feuds” and you’ll get hundreds of articles detailing spats with random people like world-renowned architect Frank Gehry and comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who, in the fallout of his feud with Trump, said, “If God gave comedians the power to invent people, the first person we would invent is Donald Trump.”

    • Ajamu Baraka Makes His Case to the People of Baltimore

      The Real News profiles scholar, human rights activist and Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Ajamu Baraka on a recent visit to Baltimore

    • CNN Debate Attendee Reacts to Her Question Being Leaked to Clinton Campaign

      On Tuesday’s Happening Now, Fox’s Jenna Lee spoke with the woman who asked the question that former CNN contributor Donna Brazile gave to Hillary Clinton‘s campaign before a CNN presidential debate.

      Lee-Anne Walters identified herself as the “woman with a rash” who wanted to ask Clinton about her plan to address the poison water crisis that continues to afflict Flint, Michigan. Hacked emails from WikiLeaks revealed that when Brazile was still with her old network, she somehow got hold of Walters’ question, and then sent campaign chairman John Podesta advanced notice of what was coming.

      When asked how she felt about the news, Walters said that Clinton “should be disqualified because she had had an advantage she shouldn’t have had.” Walters also said that she was “disgusted” by Clinton’s answer, describing it as a “cop-out” that would not adequately address the lead in the city’s water.

    • Make America Think Again: Why You Should Consider Jill Stein

      You just cannot make up the sort of things we have seen this wild, sordid election cycle. Is it any wonder that sixty percent of Americans think that we need another political party in the United States?

      A vote for Jill Stein would help build such a party. The Greens have been around since 1984 and have had some limited election successes. This year, they have managed to get an all time high number of states, 45, including the District of Columbia, that feature their candidate, Jill Stein, on the Presidential ballots. This came about during an all out effort by the Greens for ballot access across the country. Many Bernie Sanders supporters flocked to the Stein campaign after his withdrawal from the Democratic Presidential race.

    • They Don’t Care About Us

      The Podesta emails show that Democratic power brokers won’t reward labor’s unwavering loyalty or record contributions.

    • Presidential Candidates Dr. Jill Stein & Gov. Gary Johnson [Pt. 1]

      Dr. Jill Stein is a mother, physician and longtime teacher of internal medicine. Also the co-author of two major environmental reports — In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development and Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging — she has dedicated years of public service as an environmental-health advocate. She has testified before numerous legislative panels as well as local and state governmental bodies, playing a key role in the effort to get the Massachusetts fish advisories to better protect women and children from mercury contamination. Her first foray into politics was in 2002, when she ran for Governor of Massachusetts. Dr. Stein is again running to be the Green Party nominee for President in 2016.

    • Democratic megadonor bankrolls ‘Republicans for Clinton’ super PAC

      Most of the money behind an upstart “Republicans for Clinton” super PAC has come from billionaire Democratic megadonor Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook.

      According to a Center for Public Integrity review of new campaign finance filings, Moskovitz has contributed $250,000 to the R4C16 super PAC. That represents about 70 percent of the group’s income through Oct. 19.

      R4C16 nevertheless touts itself as “a grassroots movement” of “concerned Republicans who are committed to vote for Hillary Clinton for president to defeat Donald Trump.”

      During the final presidential debate last week in Nevada, the super PAC sponsored an anti-Trump mobile billboard with the message “DON’T GROPE. VOTE,” which traversed the Las Vegas strip for hours.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • 15 Temples Vandalised In Bangladesh Over Facebook Post

      An angry mob vandalised at least five Hindu temples and attacked property in Bangladesh after an alleged Facebook post mocking one of Islam’s holiest sites, police and residents said Monday.

      Scores of people attacked the places of worship late Sunday in the eastern town of Nasirnagar after a local Hindu fisherman allegedly posted an edited photo on social media of a Hindu deity inside the black cube-shaped Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

      District police chief Mizanur Rahman said two Islamist groups had been demonstrating to demand the arrest and execution of the fisherman when a group of between 100 and 150 men broke away and attacked the temples.

      A local Hindu community leader said at least 15 temples were vandalised and numerous Hindu idols were smashed during the hour-long rampage.

    • Turkey detains editor of secular opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet and bans media reporting on it

      Turkish courts have ordered a media blackout on reporting the detention of the editor-in-chief of secularist opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet.

      Murat Sabuncu was detained while authorities searched for executive board chairman Akin Atalay and writer Guray Oz, the official news agency Anadolu said.

      Police were searching the homes of Mr Atalay and Mr Oz, the agency added.

      CNN Turk said police have issued detention warrants for 13 of the paper’s journalists and executives.

    • Louis Smith banned for two months by British Gymnastics after ‘mocking Islam’ in leaked video

      Louis Smith has been given a two-month ban by British Gymnastics after he appeared to mock Islam in a video that emerged last month.

      The four-time Olympic medallist has already apologised after a video, filmed by Smith that included his friend and retired fellow gymnast Luke Carson, mimicked Islamic prayer practices.

      The incident happened a month after Smith competed at the Rio Olympic Games, where he won a silver medal in the men’s pommel horse.

      He issued a statement soon after the video was leaked to the media to say he was “deeply sorry” for his “thoughtless actions”. The 27-year-old also said that his heavy training regime during his gymnastic career has not allowed him to “behave like an idiot” when he was younger, but accepted that his actions were inappropriate nonetheless.

    • YouTube Signs Landmark Deal to End Music Video Blocking in Germany

      After years of legal battles, YouTube and German music rights group GEMA have reached a landmark licensing agreement. As a result, Germans now have access to tens of thousands of music videos that were previously “not available” in their country.

    • YouTube Censors Video on … Left-Wing Censorship

      What do you suppose happens on YouTube to a video that is a “discourse on the First Amendment and the tactics that progressives are using to limit speech and political engagement by conservatives”? Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, it falls victim to an algorithm with absolutely no sense of irony.

      A video titled “The Dark Art of Political Intimidation” was posted last week by WSJ columnist Kimberly Strassel as a PragerU lecture. “Within several hours of PragerU posting the video,” said a WSJ editorial, YouTube placed it in ‘restricted mode,’ making it inaccessible to schools, libraries and young Americans whose parents have enabled YouTube technology filters.”

    • YouTube Finally Buries The Hatchet With GEMA, Meaning People In Germany Can Watch Videos Again

      Almost four years after we noted that the fight between German collection society GEMA and YouTube had gone on way too long, it looks like it’s finally been settled. If you don’t know, way back when, GEMA, which is effectively a mandatory copyright royalty collector in Germany, demanded insane rates for any music streaming on YouTube. Apparently, it initially argued that a stream on YouTube was no different than a purchase on iTunes, and thus it should be paid the same rate. In 2009, it asked for 17 cents per video view (which was a decrease from the 37.5 cents per stream it had asked for earlier). 17 cents. Anyone who knows anything about how the internet works and how advertising works knows that’s insane. YouTube was paying out a decent chunk of its advertising revenue to other collection societies at a fraction of a penny per view, which is inline with the potential ad revenue.

    • Chinese Live-Streaming Apps Employing Censorship Against Rivals

      Chinese video services have long censored taboo topics to promote the government’s vision of a “harmonious society.” Now some popular providers are turning the same tools on each other, using blacklists to shut out rival platforms, according to a research group.

      Live-streaming video services in China have grown into a $2.5 billion industry by featuring everything from celebrities cooking lunch at home to women seductively eating bananas. But the competition for fickle viewers is such that several of the largest players have quietly scrubbed mentions of rivals along with political red-flags such as party leaders’ names, according to Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

    • Researchers reverse-engineer Chinese streaming services to learn how they’re censored

      As live streaming apps surge in popularity in China, the companies profiting from the craze are pulling out all the stops to censor millions of users and avoid the wrath of a government intent on maintaining a tight control over the flow of information.

      A new report from the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs describes how China’s biggest live streaming apps work to shut down discussion on everything from sex and gambling to political gaffes and government corruption.

    • Civil rights groups take Facebook to task over content censorship
    • Rights groups ask Facebook to clarify policies on content removal
    • Facebook accused of censorship

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Clinton Emails Could Help ex-NSA Contractor Who Took Terabytes Home, Attorneys Say

      In the four years Hillary Clinton sent and received State Department correspondence using a private and insecure email system, Harold T. Martin III allegedly stockpiled classified information inside his Maryland home and an unlocked shed.

      Martin faces charges for alleged theft of government documents and mishandling classified information that carry up to 11 years in prison, and he’s been behind bars since his August arrest, with prosecutors saying they intend to file more serious Espionage Act charges, often used by the Obama administration to go after leakers and whistleblowers.

    • Ex-FBI Chief Reviews Security For Booz Allen After NSA Contractor Arrest

      Consultant firm Booz Allen Hamilton has engaged the services of former FBI director Robert Mueller for an external review of its security practice after one of its employees contracted with the National Security Agency (NSA) was arrested on charges of stealing classified information, reports Reuters. In three years this is the second Booz Allen staff with NSA to have been involved in a controversy, the first being Edward Snowden who leaked classified files in 2013.

      Prosecutors allege that Harold Thomas Martin had been downloading secret documents for over two decades and stolen at least 50 terabytes of classified information. The files seized from Martin’s home include “specific operational plans against a known enemy of the United States and its allies.”

    • ShadowBrokers Release More Alleged Equation Group Data

      Data purports to show configuration details of servers that NSA allegedly hacked and used to host exploits

      For the second time in the last three months, a group that calls itself ShadowBrokers has publicly released data allegedly purloined from the Equation Group, an outfit that many consider to be the cyber hacking arm of the National Security Agency (NSA).

      In August, ShadowBrokers rattled many in the security industry when they leaked details on highly classified hacking tools and exploits that they claimed the NSA had developed and used over the years for breaking into systems belonging to US adversaries.

    • ShadowBrokers dump Equation group hacked servers in publicity push
    • Shadow Brokers Dump List of Servers Hacked by the NSA’s Equation Group
    • ShadowBrokers Dumps Lists of Equation Group Hacked Servers
    • ShadowBrokers Data Dump Leaks Compromised Servers Used By NSA For Hacking Operations
    • Despite its Nefarious Reputation, New Report Finds Majority of Activity on the Dark Web is Totally Legal and Mundane

      Dark web data intelligence provider Terbium Labs has conducted the industry’s first data-driven, fact-based research report that looked to identify what’s really taking place on the far corners of the Internet. For most, the term dark web immediately conjures thoughts of illegal drug sales, pornography, weapons of mass destruction, fraud and other criminal acts. The reality however is that the bulk of activity appearing on the dark web is much like the content and commerce found on the clear web. In fact, research found that nearly 55% of dark web content is legal.

      “What we’ve found is that the dark web isn’t quite as dark as you may have thought,” said Emily Wilson, Director of Analysis at Terbium Labs. “The vast majority of dark web research to date has focused on illegal activity while overlooking the existence of legal content. We wanted to take a complete view of the dark web to determine its true nature and to offer readers of this report a holistic view of dark web activity — both good and bad.”

    • Researchers Claim AI Can Identify Gang Members on Twitter

      Social media feeds contain a wealth of personal information: daily gripes, tastes in music and movies, and plans for nights out. It’s no wonder that police are interested in mining that data for insights into where crime might spring up.

      But can these digital artifacts, taken together, say anything deeper about who you really are? A number of experts believe so: In the near future, algorithms trained on this sort of information may make important decisions about individuals.

      Here’s a recent example. Researchers from the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis) at Wright State University, in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server, say they’ve devised a deep learning AI algorithm that can identify street gang members based solely on their Twitter posts, and with 77 percent accuracy.

    • How Canada’s Anti-Cyberbullying Law Is Being Used to Spy on Journalists

      Patrick Lagacé, a columnist for Montreal’s La Presse newspaper, says that police told him he was a “tool” in an internal investigation when they tapped his iPhone’s GPS to track his whereabouts and obtained the identities of everyone who communicated with him on that phone.

      Lagacé alleges that this surveillance was designed to intimidate and discourage potential sources within the Montreal police department from approaching him with information for his story.

      Police obtained a warrant for this under the hugely controversial Bill C-13, which gave investigators new powers, privacy lawyer David Fraser noted in an interview. The bill was initially sold as combatting cyberbullying and the unwanted publication of intimate images online, also known as “revenge porn.”

      “These laws are presented with certain scenarios in mind, but these are laws of general application that can be used for any offence,” Fraser said. “We need to be very careful in parsing, and frankly, not believing, the objectives that politicians use [when selling the public on the need for these laws]. We need to cut through that and look at the substance of the law to see how they can be used, and more importantly, abused.”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • These Native American Dakota Access Pipeline protesters say they were held in kennels after being arrested

      After a day of clashes between police and demonstrators, at least 140 protesters were arrested near the Dakota Access Pipeline route last Thursday. Now some of the Native American activists arrested say they were kept in dog kennel-like enclosures and that police wrote identification numbers written on their arms.

      One protest coordinator who was arrested, Mekasi Camp-Horinek, told the Los Angeles Times police wrote a number on his arm and kept him and his mother in a mesh enclosure that appeared to be a dog kennel, which did not have any bedding or furniture.

    • Christian priest pelted with stones by children shouting ‘Allahu Akhbar’

      The Ethiopian vicar was visiting the town of Raunheim on the outskirts of Frankfurt when the pre-teens started throwing stones at him.

      Dressed in traditional priest’s gear and wearing a cross around his neck, the 47-year-old was walking to the Russian Orthodox chapel in Frankfurter Straße with a local priest, who wished to remain anonymous, when he was attacked.

      The three children, aged between 10 and 12-years-old, shouted “Allahu Akhbar” as they threw the stones, the other priest who was visiting from a nearby church said.

    • Dakota pipeline protesters say they were detained in dog kennels; 268 arrested in week of police crackdown

      Tens of thousands of people have checked in on Facebook at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation over the past few days. They are expressing solidarity with the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota, which have faced an increasingly brutal backlash from police.

      Native American activists on the ground recently told reporters they had been detained in dog kennels after being arrested at protests against the proposed pipeline. Other protesters have been pepper-sprayed by police and targeted with beanbag bullets as the militarized police crackdown has escalated.

      For months, indigenous groups at Standing Rock have led protests against the $3.8 billion pipeline, which will transfer oil nearly 1,200 miles, from North Dakota south to Illinois.

      Native Americans, who call themselves water protectors rather than protesters, warn that the pipeline will contaminate their lone source of drinking water and pollute their land. Thousands of environmental and social justice activists from around the country have joined their demonstrations in solidarity.

    • Armed migrants fight running battles in the French capital

      A MIGRANT turf war erupted into violence on the streets of one of Paris’ trendiest neighbourhoods early this morning as asylum seekers beat each other to a pulp with wooden clubs.

    • Canadian Police Use Cell Tower Dumps To Text 7,500 Possible Murder Witnesses

      The police are utilizing “dumps” from cell towers in the area to obtain these phone numbers. And that’s all they’ve obtained, apparently. Using the list of connected phones in the area at the time of the murder, the police are sending text messages asking recipients to fill out a website questionnaire to help police find the killer.

      As much as this might seem like an intrusion, it’s probably preferable to the alternative: sending out dozens of officers to question potentially thousands of witnesses. Obviously, it works out well for the police. But it also works out for citizens. Nothing obliges anyone to respond to the unsolicited texts and answering a few questions on a website is far less annoying than being questioned at home by officers peeking through open doors to see if they can spot anything resembling indicia of criminal activity. Why make the entire day a waste? Why not make a few ancillary arrests while investigating an unrelated crime?

      Unfortunately, it appears ignoring the message (or sending back “UNSUBSCRIBE”) isn’t going to keep the cops from using your phone for their communications.

    • DOJ Finally Releases Its Internal, Mostly-Vague CFAA Prosecution Guidelines

      I’d imagine the DOJ is more concerned about crafty cybercriminals beating them in the tech arms race than it is about legislators’ inability to reform the CFAA (something the DOJ routinely opposes). The “Intake and Charging Policy” memo [PDF] for the DOJ’s prosecution of cybercrimes lists a number of factors to be considered before pursuing federal charges.

      The first key is the sensitivity of the information or system accessed “without authorization,” followed by national security considerations and economic impact. Public safety is also a factor. The document points out that information obtained without authorization can be deployed to stalk and harass officials and lower level members of the general public.

      But the definition of “unauthorized access” isn’t explored adequately in the legal memo, leaving this to be answered on a case-by-bad case basis. The prosecutions of Aaron Swartz and Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer suggest the DOJ allows this definition to be set by the complainant rather than by policy. When MIT or AT&T complain, the government listens.

    • If You Want To Believe This Country Is Falling Apart, Just Ask Those Who Are Supposed To Be Keeping It Together

      Nothing sells like fear. And the Department of Public Safety is in need of some sales. There’s $800 million in border security dollars at stake. At least. The DPS would like $300 million more this year because it’s just damn unsafe to share a border with a foreign country.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • After North Carolina Law Bans Municipal Broadband, One ISP Gives Gigabit Connections Away

      Back in August, we noted how the FCC lost an incredibly important case regarding municipal broadband. In short, the FCC tried to dismantle state-level protectionist laws, written by incumbent ISPs, that hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks or striking public/private partnerships for broadband — even in areas those same incumbent ISPs refused to upgrade. The FCC had tried to claim that its congressional mandate to ensure “even and timely” broadband deployment allowed it to strip away any part of these laws that hindered broadband expansion.

      But the courts argued that the FCC lacks this authority, forcing the agency to acknowledge it was giving up on this fight. But there are still countless municipal broadband providers in the 19 states that have passed these laws that can’t launch or expand existing service lest they run face-first into a law written by Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, or CenturyLink lawyers. And there are millions of customers that are incredibly frustrated by the lack of broadband market competition, resulting in the expensive, inconsistent broadband connections most of us “enjoy” today.

    • Canada To Debate Banning ‘Zero Rating’ This Week

      While the United States finally passed net neutrality rules this year, the FCC’s decision to not ban zero rating (exempting some content from usage caps) has proven to be highly problematic. ISPs like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon have all begun exempting their own content from usage caps, putting competing services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu (or smaller startups) at a disadvantage. The loophole has also spawned new confusing options from Sprint that throttle games, music and video by default, unless a consumer is willing to pony up $20 or more extra to have those services actually work as intended.

      So yes, the United States passed net neutrality rules, but its unwillingness to tackle zero rating means that net neutrality is now being hamstrung anyway — now just with regulatory approval.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Germany pours cold water on takeover bids as concern regarding China’s IP-driven M&A activity spreads

      A number of prospective Chinese takeovers of German high-tech businesses have been suspended by Berlin pending further investigation of their potential economic impact and national security implications. The German government’s intervention does not bode well for Chinese buyers, which have been pinning their hopes of procuring strategically valuable IP on Europe after missing out on US acquisitions due to similar concerns.

      Writing in Die Welt at the weekend prior to departing for Beijing to meet with counterparts, German vice chancellor and economy minister Sigmar Gabriel was markedly critical of China’s approach to acquiring foreign technology. While claiming that China protects its own businesses from foreign buyouts through the imposition of “discriminatory requirements”, Gabriel accused the country’s high-tech industries of “going on a shopping tour here with a long list of interesting companies” with the clear intention of gaining control of strategically important technologies. “Nobody can expect Europe to accept such foul play of trade partners,” he added.

    • Ottiglio Leaves IFPMA For Consultancy In Geneva [Ed: Mario Ottiglio to use connections acquired in public corridors in Europe to push private US Big Pharma interests]
    • WIPO Committee Debates SDGs, Review Of Development Agenda Recommendations

      The World Intellectual Property Organization Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) is meeting this week with an agenda including the presentation of a first review on how well WIPO implemented its Development Agenda Recommendations from 2008 to 2015. Also on the agenda is a discussion on what United Nations Sustainable Development Goals can be applied to WIPO’s work, and what the role of WIPO is in technology transfer.

    • Proposal By WHO To Increase Country Contributions Receives Mixed Reactions

      As the head of the World Health Organization warned of funding shortfalls at this week’s financing dialogue, she also proposed to raise assessed country contributions by 10 percent to help mitigate the situation. However, countries had a different take on the suggestion, which is expected to be further considered in the discussions on the budget for 2018/2019, at the Executive Board meeting in January, and at the annual World Health Assembly next May.

    • SCA Hygiene Laches Oral Arguments: How Do we Interpret Congressional Silence?

      Sitting in the background is the Supreme Court’s parallel copyright decision in Petrella v. MGM (2014) holding that the doctrine of laches cannot bar a claim for legal damages brought within the three-year statutory limitations of copyright law. In its opinion, the Federal Circuit distinguished Petrella – finding that in this situation patents should be treated differently than copyrights.

      Martin Black (Dechert) argued for petitioner-patentee SCA Hygiene and suggested that Petrella paves the way: “There is nothing in the Patent Act which compels the creation of a unique patent law rule, and if the Court were to create an exception here, that would invite litigation in the lower courts over a wide range of Federal statutes.”

    • Trademarks

      • CJEU tackles meaning of “so” in trade mark case

        Does the word “so” have a laudatory function when used on its own? The CJEU has struggled to resolve that question in its latest EU trade mark ruling

      • Video Game Voice Actor Strike Devolves Into Petty Trademark Dispute

        For those who don’t follow the video game industry closely, you may not be aware that there is currently a worker’s strike by voiceover actors belonging to SAG-AFTRA against some of the larger game publishers out there. The union and ten or so publishers have been attempting to negotiate a new labor agreement for something like two years, with the sticking point being additional compensation based on game sales. While this concept may sound foreign to those of us that grew up with the gaming industry in its infancy, the explosion in the market and its evolution as an artform certainly warrants the same consideration talents get from other entertainment industries, such as television and film. After all, why shouldn’t game voiceover actors be just as frustrated with Hollywood-style accounting as their on-screen counterparts?

        And, yet, because this is a labor dispute, of course there had to be a petty wrong-turn along the way, which brings us to how SAG-AFTRA is now firing off demands that a PR firm hired by the game studios stop trying to influence the public because of a lame trademark claim. The key issue appears to be that this PR firm is using domain names and social media handles that include the SAG-AFTRA union name.

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Office Fucks Over Thousands Of Sites With Plans To Remove Their DMCA Safe Harbors

        If you run any kind of website it’s super important that you file with the Copyright Office to officially register a DMCA agent. This is a key part of the DMCA. If you want to make use of the DMCA’s safe harbors — which create a clear safe harbor for websites to avoid liability of infringing material posted by users — then you have to first register with the Copyright Office. Larger corporate sites already know this, but many, many smaller sites do not. This is why for years we’ve posted messages reminding anyone who has a blog to just go and register with the Copyright Office to get basic DMCA protections (especially after a copyright troll went after some smaller blogs who had not done so).

        A few months back, we noted, with alarm, that the Copyright Office was considering a plan to revamp how it handled DMCA registrations, which had some good — mainly making the registration process cheaper — but a really horrific idea of requiring sites to re-register every three years or lose their safe harbor protections.

      • Star Athletica arguments: Will SCOTUS find a uniform test for useful articles?

        Supreme Court oral arguments in Star Athletica v Varsity Brands touched on copyright, cheerleader uniforms and camouflage, with observers uncertain the court will come up with an appropriate test for useful articles

        The Supreme Court heard arguments in Star Athletica v Varsity Brands on Monday in a copyright dispute over designs for cheerleading uniforms. The question presented was: “What is the appropriate test to determine when a feature of a useful article is protectable under section 101 of the Copyright Act?”

      • Reykjavik: Icelandic Pirates Triple Result, But Not Largest Party

        The Icelandic Pirate Party has made a record election. Early vote counts place Pirates at 14 percent, for nine ten seats of the 63-seat world’s oldest Parliament. As the victory party draws to a close and the results slowly finalize, it’s worth looking a little at what comes next.

        Pirate Parties keep succeeding, although on a political timescale. It started out a little carefully with getting elected to the European Parliament from Sweden, then to multiple state parliaments in Germany, city councils all over Europe, the Czech Senate, and the Icelandic Parliament, all in a decade’s insanely hard volunteer work.

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