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08.05.15

Links 5/8/2015: Tanglu 3, Linux Foundation Courses Expand

Posted in News Roundup at 7:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Open Source Software Growth Is Rising

    GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath discusses open source software and GitHub’s plan to expand internationally. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang on “Bloomberg West.”

  • Hayao Miyazaki CG Tribute Made with Open Source Tools

    Dono produced photorealistic worlds for the memorable stars of Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and many more of Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpieces using a suite of open source tools, including Blender for 3D, Gimp for image editing, and Natron for compositing. The only non-open source software was the rendering engine, Octane.

  • To Expedite Innovation, Give Away Your Code

    Open-source software has been a growing phenomenon for more than two decades, but in recent years it has risen in importance in a whole new way: as a key to rapid innovation for startups and corporate giants alike.

    One example of open-source software being used to increase the velocity of technical innovation can be seen with Airbnb. In early June, Airbnb did something that might sound crazy. It decided to give away a sophisticated software tool it developed called Aerosolve.

    Aerosolve uses machine learning to understand what consumers will pay for a certain kind of room in a certain place — and helps people figure out how to price their Airbnb rentals.

  • Adobe opens legal style guide and encourages clear writing

    Adobe has made its Legal Department Style Guide available to everyone under a Creative Commons license. This shows that open source principles are illuminating even the foggy world of legal writing. I’ve taken a pass through the guide, and can affirm that it’s generally sound and useful. It could help reduce obscurity in legal documents and foster more effective communication.

  • Ada Initiative Closes Up Shop
  • Ada Initiative organization to end, but its work will continue
  • The Ada Initiative Shuts Down, but Its Programs Will Be Open Source

    After four years of working tirelessly to improve diversity in tech, the Ada Initiative is shutting down. As a nonprofit organization, they led unconferences that brought women in tech together to help them find their feminist identities, they led impostor syndrome workshops, and they even had workshops for allies who want to help women in tech. Their programs and camps were one-of-a-kind, and the industry will be sorely missing their presence.

  • Guest View: How open source can help you break free of the storage Matrix

    The world inside the data center has been changing too, and it is changing fast. The large, status quo storage companies are just as nervous. This group of large legacy system companies has ruled the data center for the past 40 years. They’re the ones selling all that pricey systems hardware—especially in storage found in every organization. They are pushing their brand of reality, and when those companies came knocking, you paid, even as you felt something was not right.

  • University of Toronto Runs on Nexenta Open Source-Driven Software-Defined Storage Platform Supporting Key Cloud Services

  • Events

    • A Preview: Oracle Connects the Dots at LinuxCon/CloudOpen/ContainerCon

      I’m really pleased with the lineup of keynote speakers and sessions we have planned for LinuxCon, CloudOpen and ContainerCon taking place in Seattle in just two short weeks. Content is our first priority for these events, and I think developers, SysAdmins and executives will be happy with what they find in the keynote hall, session rooms and workshops.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • Teaching students the value of open source

      Open source is not just about making something publicly accessible. It is a set of values—a way of working that practices open collaboration between a community to build or maintain something. On the basis of these values, today we can observe a vibrant and thriving open source community responsible for many of the great successes in many industries.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • developing v8 with guix

      This machine runs Debian. It used to run the testing distribution, but somehow in the past I needed something that wasn’t in testing so it runs unstable. I’ve been using Debian for some 16 years now, though not continuously, so although running unstable can be risky, usually it isn’t, and I’ve unborked it enough times that I felt pretty comfortable.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Slavery “Necessary” Says Education Department Of Extremadura

      When some bureaucrat tells the world that there are no other options than non-free/slavery software for vocational schools, I know they’re lying. It’s just not true. If businesses want school graduates to use non-free software they should do their own training. It’s not up to government to do what they could do for themselves. It’s not government’s job to preserve the Wintel monopoly. That’s not good for the economy and it’s just wrong to indoctrinate citizens into slavery. Extremadura is cranking out graduates who know GNU/Linux and Free Software. Businesses should accept that and use Free Software too. There’s just no reason that businesses or government should throw money to the wind that could be better spent buying machinery or buildings or hiring people locally.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Design electronic circuits with MeowCAD

        MeowCAD is an online free and open source electronic design application tool. Its focus is on schematic and PCB design for electronic circuits. Since MeowCAD is a completely FOSS SaaS, it circumvents the problems with vendor dependence. For example, one can download and run local copies of MeowCAD, thus giving the designer complete control over their own tools.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Bernie Sanders is best for America

      Being a single mom has created a desire in me to find more resources for parents, especially those who are under served or low income.

    • Bernie Sanders, Open Borders and a Serious Route to Global Equality

      Some progressives expressed dismay last week to discover that Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, doesn’t favor a policy of open immigration. While such a policy would undoubtedly allow billions of people in the developing world to improve their lives, there are not many people in the United States who relish the idea of the country’s population tripling or quadrupling over the next three or four decades.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • Security, Privacy and Standards Loom Large for Internet of Things

      As the Internet of Things (IoT) ramps up, there are more and more calls for proper legislation surrounding it, and proper standards for its advancements. As we recently reported, trade groups are urging the U.S. Congress to be wary of too much government intervetnion in IoT development. There are also some concerns about IoT security and the standards surrounding it.

    • EFF creates ‘stronger’ standard for Do Not Track

      Privacy advocates have long been working toward a coherent Do Not Track standard, and this week a new option is being put on the table. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with companies including Medium and DuckDuckGo, have introduced a new Do Not Track standard that they claim to be “stronger” than those currently going around. The standard sticks to Do Not Track’s existing tenets: it should be opt-in, and enabling it should tell websites and advertisers not to store and share information on the person visiting them. Supporting the standard is also voluntary, which is less of a choice and more of an acknowledgement that there’s no legal backing that requires websites not to track anyone.

  • Civil Rights

    • Controlling When the Cameras Record

      Around the U.S., the agents that control the public have been observed to beat up, shoot, kill, and arrest members of the public, with a special focus on protesters, members of minority groups, and people making recordings of the actions of those agents. This is often followed by fabricated accusations against the victim, meant to create false justification for the attack itself.

    • To LA Times, Meth in Skid Row Victim’s Blood More Important Than Gun in His Flesh

      Captured on cellphone video, the incident received attention because we are living in a moment when many people have decided that the state-sanctioned killing of black people by law enforcement is worth our attention—and that’s very uncomfortable for those who want to believe that every police killing must be in some way justified, if we could only see how. So Keunang’s autopsy—five months later—was likely to make some kind of news, but what kind?

    • Reverse this

      Being a cis white man who’s a native English speaker from a fairly well-off background, I’m pretty familiar with privilege. Spending my teenage years as an atheist of Irish Catholic upbringing in a Protestant school in a region of Northern Ireland that made parts of the bible belt look socially progressive, I’m also pretty familiar with the idea that that said privilege doesn’t shield me from everything bad in life. Having privilege isn’t a guarantee that my life will be better, in the same way that avoiding smoking doesn’t mean I won’t die of lung cancer. But there’s an association in both cases, one that’s strong enough to alter the statistical likelihood in meaningful ways.

08.04.15

Links 4/8/2015: KDE.org Redesign, Point Linux 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 5:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Cloud’s Open Source Seeds Are Growing Strong

    New features, functionality, rewrites and releases of open source software are being driven by customers, and it’s important to understand how the benefits of open source software can change. There have been many cases of organizations originally seeking open source primarily for cost savings, but then later realizing other benefits, including performance and reliability.

  • Announcing the shutdown of the Ada Initiative

    It is with mixed feelings that we announce that the Ada Initiative will be shutting down in approximately mid-October. We are proud of what we accomplished with the support of many thousands of volunteers, sponsors, and donors, and we expect all of our programs to continue on in some form without the Ada Initiative. Thank you for your incredible work and support!

  • Lockheed Open Sources Its Secret Weapon In Cyber Threat Detection

    The cybersecurity team at Lockheed Martin will share some defensive firepower with the security community at Black Hat this week with the open source release of an internal advance threat tool it has been using in house for three years now. Dubbed Laika BOSS, this malware detection platform is meant to help security analysts better hunt down malicious files and activity in an enterprise environment.

  • The Ada Initiative For Supporting Women In Open Tech Is Ending

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Open source Chromecast competitor, Matchstick, is dead

        Nearly a year ago, Matchstick hit Kickstarter with the goal of bringing a more open HDMI dongle to challenge the likes of the Chromecast and Fire TV Stick. Today, however, its creators made a painful revelation.

        They’re not going to be able to deliver a satisfactory product, and that means around 17,000 backers won’t be getting their hands on the Firefox OS-based Matchsticks they were hoping for when they pledged their support to the project last fall.

      • The Mozilla We’ve Got

        Nope, just non-Windows users being played so far [1]. I should have guessed with it being Adobe’s DRM that is being used that maybe Linux wouldn’t see the best support. It’s also depressing to me that Mozilla has given up on calling it what it is in some cases [2].

      • Pale Moon 25.6.0 (Firefox Based Browser) Brings New Features And Security Fixes

        As you may know, Pale Moon is an open-source, cross-platform browser based on Mozilla Firefox, being up to 25% faster then the original.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Ceilometer, Gnocchi & Aodh: Liberty progress

      It’s been a while since I talked about Ceilometer and its companions, so I thought I’d go ahead and write a bit about what’s going on this side of OpenStack. I’m not going to cover new features and fancy stuff today, but rather a shallow overview of the new project processes we initiated.

    • Mirantis and AppFormix partner to optimise enterprise cloud computing and improve infrastructure efficiency

      AppFormix, a leading provider of analytics and control services to cloud-based datacentres, has formed a partnership with Mirantis to become a Mirantis Unlocked partner. This will see AppFormix integrate with Mirantis OpenStack to bring analytics and control of resource utilisation to OpenStack based private cloud infrastructure.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5: The best office suite today won’t cost you a dime

      I’ve used LibreOffice as my main office suite since it forked from OpenOffice five years ago. Now its latest edition, LibreOffice 5.0, is better than ever. And, in my book, that means it’s the best standalone office suite available in 2015.

    • Working with Pivot Tables in LibreOffice Calc

      Pivot tables is a very powerful tools in spreadsheets that allow you to analyse big massive of data in flexible dimensions.

      LibreOffice Calc gives you an option to build your own Pivot tables using the built-in tools.

  • Education

    • Making the Case for Koha: Why Libraries Should Consider an Open Source ILS

      When Engard educates people on what open source is, what it means to use open source software, what types of software are available, which companies use it, and who trusts it, they see that their fears are unfounded, she says. To back up her discussions with facts, she maintains bibliographies on open source and open source security. She also has a set of bookmarks on Delicious, and she wrote a book, Practical Open Source Software for Libraries. “[W]hen people come to me and say open source is too risky … I have facts and figures, just what librarians want, to say no, all software has potential risk associated with it. You have to evaluate software side by side, and look at it, and really take the time to compare it. … I know you’re going to pick the open source solution over the proprietary because it is so quickly developed, so quickly fixed, so ahead of the curve as far as technology is concerned.”

  • BSD

    • Lumina Desktop 0.8.6 Released!

      Just in time for PC-BSD & FreeBSD 10.2 (coming soon), the Lumina desktop has been updated to version 0.8.6! This version contains a number of updates for non-English users (following up all the new translations which are now available), as well as a number of important bug-fixes, and support for an additional FreeDesktop specification. The PC-BSD “Edge” packages have already been updated to this version and the FreeBSD ports tree will be getting this update very soon as well.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Who Reads the Source Code Anyway?

      Today’s new feeds were just chock full ‘o interesting articles. The first up came from Ole Tange who set up a little experiment to see how long it took for someone to read his source code. Bryan Quigley commented on “The Mozilla We’ve Got” and OpenSource.com interviewed Linus Torvalds’ daughter, who is building a career in computer science and engineering. Elsewhere, Brook Kidane reviewed Point Linux 3.0 and Laurent Montel ran down KDEPIM 5.0.

    • The state of Federation

      It’s been a long time since there has been any news on the state of federation, so here’s an update on where Mediagoblin’s at and some technical aspects of federation. We’ve been working with the W3C Social Working Group to define the future of federation, and part of my work there has been to work on the ActivityPump standard. There’s more to say on that and why we’re investing time there, but this blogpost will mostly be about MediaGoblin and federation from a technical perspective.

    • Who actually reads the code?

      I am the maintainer of a piece of free software called GNU Parallel. Free software guarantees you access to the source code, but I have been wondering how many actually read the source code.

      To test this I put in a comment telling people to email me when they read this. The comment was put in a section of the code that no one would look to fix or improve the software — so, the source code equivalent to a dusty corner. To make sure the comment would not show up if some one just grepped through the source code I rot13′ed the source code.

  • Public Services/Government

    • New Extremadura Govt to support open source in schools

      The autonomous region of Extremadura (Spain) is committed to the use of open source in schools, the new Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) government says in a statement published on Monday. However, the administration will not cancel the EUR 38 million request for PC hardware and proprietary software licences, published by its predecessor.

    • Sielocal – Economic Transparency System in Spain

      “Our aim is to anticipate the information needs of the local public sector, information professionals and all citizens by providing a web space that makes it possible for them to view, compare and comment on town halls’ principal fiscal and accounting ratios, by allowing free access to multiple types of reports, segmenting the reports by autonomous regions or provinces. We intend to work with other exeprts and the principal National and Europan Transparency foundation.

    • Transparency in the EU: still a long way to go

      In terms of transparency, countries in the European Union (EU) still have a long way to go, a report entitled Future-proofing eGovernment for a Digital Single Market, and conducted by several IT service providers, revealed.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • The Personal Computer That Beat Apple (For a While)

    When the TRS-80 — a personal computer from Tandy that would be sold via their RadioShack stores, hence TRS — went on sale on Aug. 3 in 1977, computers weren’t exactly new. The Apple I had been introduced the previous year and personal computers were clearly a growing market, but Tandy is often credited with pioneering the idea of mass-market personal computer.

  • Twitter Jumps the Shark

  • Google+

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Hacktivists congratulate Daily Show’s Jon Stewart via Donald Trump’s website

      Canadian hacktivists Telecomix Canada have defaced Donald Trump’s website. The message, entitled “Your Moment of Zen, Mr Stewart” is a shoutout to Jon Stewart of the Daily Show for his steady criticism of Donald Trump.

      The announcement was made by Telecomix Canada on pastebin and says that the reveal of the server penetration is in honour of the last week of Stewart’s tenure helming the Daily Show on Comedy Central.

    • Macs can be remotely infected with firmware malware that remains after reformatting

      When companies claim their products are unhackable or invulnerable, it must be like waving a red flag in front of bulls as it practically dares security researchers to prove otherwise. Apple previously claimed that Macs were not vulnerable to the same firmware flaws that could backdoor PCs, so researchers proved they could remotely infect Macs with a firmware worm that is so tough to detect and to get rid of that they suggested it presents a toss your Mac in the trash situation.

    • More malware turns up on Macs

      As we head into the middle of the week more news will be coming out surrounding the Black Hat hacker conference which takes places on the 5th and 6th this week. A talk that will be given by Trammell Hudson, Xeno Kovah and Cory Kallenberg is set to show a flaw in the firmware of Mac computers which can be remotely targeted.

    • The World’s First Firmware Worm for Mac Is Here, and It Sounds Scary
    • 0-day bug in fully patched OS X comes under active exploit to hijack Macs

      Hackers are exploiting a serious zero-day vulnerability in the latest version of Apple’s OS X so they can perform drive-by attacks that install malware without requiring victims to enter system passwords, researchers said.

    • Hackers are exploiting an OS X flaw to install unwanted adware
    • Apple stock implosion shreds $113.4B

      Apple (AAPL) shares are down significantly for the second day Tuesday — bringing investors’ paper losses to staggering levels and putting the stock further into correction territory.

    • From Car-Jacking To Car-Hacking: How Vehicles Became Targets For Cybercriminals

      The morning after Laura Capehorn parked her Saab 9-3 estate, all she could find of it was a car-shaped hole in the snow.

      The interior designer had left the vehicle outside her mother-in-law’s house in Shepherd’s Bush, London, one evening in January 2014. By the morning it was gone, presumed stolen.

      Police immediately asked to see the car’s key, and weren’t surprised to find out it was an electronic fob. They had seen an increase in tech-savvy criminals using a key-cloning system to gain entry to high-value vehicles. Once in, the thieves drive away within seconds.

    • WordPress 4.2.4 Security and Maintenance Release

      WordPress 4.2.4 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

    • Six Vulnerabilities Patched With Release of WordPress 4.2.4

      The developers of the WordPress content management system (CMS) today announced the release of version 4.2.4. This security release addresses six vulnerabilities and four bugs.

      According to the release notes, WordPress 4.2.4 patches three cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws and a SQL injection vulnerability that can be exploited to compromise websites. The latest version also protects users against a potential timing side-channel attack, and prevents attackers from locking posts from being edited.

      Marc-Alexandre Montpas of Sucuri, Helen Hou-Sandí of the WordPress security team, Netanel Rubin of Check Point, Ivan Grigorov, Johannes Schmitt of Scrutinizer, and Mohamed A. Baset have been credited for reporting these vulnerabilities.

      WordPress has noted that these fixes are also included in WordPress 4.3 RC2.

      Check Point has published a brief advisory for the SQL injection vulnerability (CVE-2015-2213) patched in the latest version of WordPress. According to the security firm, this is a critical flaw affecting WordPress 4.2.3 and prior.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Britain’s secret ties to governments, firms behind ISIS oil sales

      Key allies in the US and UK led war on Islamic State (ISIS) are covertly financing the terrorist movement according to senior political sources in the region. US and British oil companies are heavily invested in the murky geopolitical triangle sustaining ISIS’ black market oil sales.

      The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq and Turkish military intelligence have both supported secret ISIS oil smuggling operations and even supplied arms to the terror group, according to Kurdish, Iraqi and Turkish officials.

      One British oil company in particular, Genel Energy, is contracted by the KRG to supply oil for a major Kurdish firm accused of facilitating ISIS oil sales to Turkey. The Kurdish firm has close ties to the Iraqi Kurdish government.

    • CBS Evening News Reports On Historic Climate Policy Without Mentioning “Climate Change”

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • US Politicians’ Racist Anti-Iranian Remarks Don’t Make Headlines

      Imagine a US senator publicly calling the Chinese “evil people.” Imagine a governor saying African leaders are “animals.” Imagine a presidential candidate claiming Latinos are “liars.” In each of these cases, the media would rightfully explode, condemning the politicians for their overt racism.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Government Seizes Vehicles Worth $1 Million; Brings No Charges, Keeps The Cars

      It’s not so much the American public losing a few opportunities to buy a luxury vehicle as it is the other thing: tight control of sales. The American public can’t get many laws written in its favor, but large industries certainly can. This initial thrust led to lots and lots of partnerships with local law enforcement agencies conveniently located near shipping docks. And this led to lots and lots of luxury vehicles ending up in the hands of law enforcement.

      Then, the government stopped the crackdown. It claimed to be making an effort to more tightly focus its forfeiture efforts as a result of Eric Holder’s reform initiative. The appearance of being an errand boy for corporate interests certainly didn’t help. Cases were dropped and charges dismissed. But the vehicles remained in the government’s hands.

      One person in Saeki Co.’s position spent two years fighting for the return of a seized vehicle and $125,000 in cash. This followed about a dozen similar settlements, most occuring after a legal battle with the agency(ies) holding the vehicles. In other cases, the prevailing parties still have yet to be fully recompensed. And others are still being prosecuted for violating a law the federal government isn’t entirely clear on and has lost an interest in enforcing.

    • Police Body Cams Should Turn on Automatically, Says Richard Stallman

      Richard Stallman is famous for creating the GNU operating system, and founding the free software movement, which changed how we develop software. Now he’s published an essay in Technology Review about how police body cams should switch on automatically any time an officer pulls out a weapon.

      Stallman’s proposals are somewhat similar to what we’ve seen previously from groups like the ACLU, which crafted a model bill for regulating policy body cams. In that model bill, the ACLU suggests that police should turn body cams on whenever they respond to a call or interact with a member of the public — except when it would be dangerous for the officer to turn the camera on

  • Intellectual Monopolies

Microsoft Admits Vista 10 Not a ‘Free’ ‘Upgrade’, Especially If You Upgrade

Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 4:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft debunks its own false promises, showing that Vista 10 as ‘free’ is virtually a mirage

With Vista 10, Microsoft still makes it hard to install GNU/Linux (without Windows then wiping or breaking it). But to make matters worse, watch how Microsoft now treats people who ‘upgrade’ their computer to Vista 10:

Microsoft answers

Microsoft answers

Microsoft answers

Microsoft answers

Microsoft answers

Vista 10 is not free. It’s not free for anyone. Get over it. █

Free Software is Commercial

Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, Security at 4:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“There’s no company called Linux, there’s barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it’s free.”

–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO at the time

Summary: Corporate media helps stigmatise Free/Open Source software as unsuitable for commercial use and once again it uses the ‘security’ card

SEVERAL days ago in our daily links we includes two articles that used the term “commercial software” (to mean proprietary software). Both cited Synopsys. It is amazing that even in 2015 there are some capable of making this error, maybe intentionally. Commercial software just means software that is used commercially. A lot of it is Free/Open Source software (the corporate media prefers the term “Open Source” to avoid discussion about the F word, “freedom”).

“Commercial software just means software that is used commercially.”Yesterday we found yet another headline which repeats the same formula (as if they all received the same memo), calling proprietary software “commercial software”, thereby reinforcing the false dichotomy and the stigma of Free software. “Looking at our Java defect density data through the lens of OWASP Top 10,” says Synopsys, “we observe that commercial software is significantly more secure than open source software.”

Another article from yesterday reminded us that Free software takes security very seriously and top/leading Free software projects are widely regarded (even by Coverity) as more secure than proprietary counterparts. Oddly enough, Synopsys links to a “Coverity Scan Open Source Report 2014″, not 2015, and the report is behind walled gardens, so it is hard to check if these headlines tell the whole story or just part of it. The analysis itself is done by proprietary software, whose methods are basically a secret. Go figure…

We recently saw some very gross distortions where security issues in proprietary software got framed as a Free software issues. As we have repeatedly demonstrated and stressed over the past years and a half, there seems to be a campaign of FUD, ‘branding’, and logos (the latest being targeted at Android/MMS) whose goal is to create or cement a damaging stereotype while always ignoring back doors and even front doors in proprietary software (now out in the open because of the British Prime Minister and the ringleader of the FBI). █

‘Sanader’s Protégé’ Željko Topić Slammed by Press in His Home Country

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Ivo Sanader
Ivo Sanader, “convicted felon who served as Prime Minister of Croatia,” based on Wikipedia
Photo licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Summary: The mischiefs of Benoît Battistelli and Željko Topić still not forgotten while temporary calm prevails at the EPO

Sanader is in prison, but Topić is not. Actually, Topić now receives an astronomically-high salary from European taxpayers. He escaped his country where he faces many criminal charges to reach a high office in a cosmopolitan area, just like other minions whom he is professionally close to or tightly connected to [1, 2, 3, 4].

The EPO remains somewhat of a laughing stock not just because of Topić but also his boss, Battistelli, who flagrantly and shamelessly ignores the law, insisting that he is exempt from the rules accompanying basic European laws. It’s utter disregard for every member state, not just the Dutch. Since a lot of EPO staff are currently on holiday, we may not be hearing so much about the EPO these days, but nothing has changed for the better.

Today we present two English translations of articles that were published in the Croatian press on the 30th of June. “The content of both articles is much the same,” told us a source who offered translations, “and they both refer to the Council of Europe declaration launched by Pierre Yves Le Borgn’.” We covered this a month ago.

Here is the first translation. The original article is at tjedno.hr.

EUROPEAN COUNCIL LAUNCHES DECLARATION CONCERNING THE EPO

June 30, 2015

On the initiative of Pierre-Yves Le Borgn’, a French representative to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, two SDP Members of the Croatian Parliament, Melita Mulić and Gvozden Flego, took part in the launch of a declaration dealing with the recent scandalous events at the European Patent Office (EPO). Apart from them, the text of the declaration was signed by 82 other parliamentarians, including four out of five of the leaders of the main political groupings in the Assembly. One of the signatories of the declaration is Mr. Josip Juratovic, a Member of the German Parliament [born in Croatia].

We remind our readers that on 17th February 2015, the Court of Appeal in The Hague ruled against the European Patent Office (EPO), claiming that its internal dispute resolution system led to the violation of fundamental rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Social Charter. The Court also stated that the EPO cannot invoke its immunity in such a manner that an international organization becomes a place with fewer rights, protected by its so-called immunity from jurisdiction.

The persons who are at the centre of this political and economic scandal which has been one of the main subjects of attention of the European media in recent months, are the President of the EPO, the Frenchman Benoît Battistelli and his right-hand man, Mr. Željko Topić, the former director of the State Intellectual Property Office of the Republic of Croatia.

The aforementioned declaration invites all 38 member states of the EPO which are also members of the Council of Europe to act to resolve this legal deadlock, and it also invites the EPO management to comply with the decision of the Hague Court of Appeal.

Another article can be found at dnevno.hr. The headline is “Sanaderov kadar u središtu europskog skandala!” which translates to “Sanader’s protégé at the centre of a European scandal!”

COUNCIL OF EUROPE REQUESTS THE ADOPTION OF A DECLARATION ON THE EPO

Sanader’s protégé at the centre of a European scandal!

Author: D. Boroš
Tuesday, June 30, 2015

The actors at the centre of the political, economic, and media scandal which is among the main topics of newspapers throughout Europe in recent months, are the President of the EPO, the Frenchman Benoît Battistelli and his right-hand man, Mr. Željko Topić, the former director of the State Intellectual Property Office of the Republic of Croatia.

Members of the Croatian Parliament form the SDP, Melita Mulić and Gvozden Flego, on the initiative of Pierre-Yves Le Borgne, the French representative to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, participated in the launch of a declaration concerning the recent scandalous events at the European Patent Office (EPO).

In addition to them, the text of the declaration was signed by 82 other parliamentarians, including four out of five leaders of the main political groups of the Assembly. One of the signatories of the declaration is Mr. Josip Juratovic, a [Croatian-born] member of the German Parliament.

We remind our readers that on 17th February 2015 the Court of Appeal in The Hague pronounced judgment against the EPO, claiming that its internal dispute resolution system led to the violation of fundamental rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Social Charter.

The Court also stated that the EPO cannot invoke its immunity in such a manner that an international organization becomes a place with fewer rights, protected by its so- called immunity from execution.

Connected to this, the actors who found themselves in the middle of this political and economic, and also media scandal which is one of the main stories in newspapers throughout Europe in recent months, are the President of the EPO, Frenchman Benoît Battistelli and his right-hand man, Mr. Željko Topić, the former director of the Croatian SIPO.

The aforementioned declaration invites all 38 member states of the EPO which are also members of the Council of Europe, to bring this legal impasse to an end, and it invites the EPO management to comply with the judgment of the Hague Court of Appeal.

A lot of action is likely to resume at the end of this summer. No issue, no scandal, and no instance of corruption has been addressed yet. Nobody at the very top has resigned (or got fired) for quite some time although it’s well overdue. A lot of European politicians are now involved. Even Croatian politicians are upset at the EPO. █

08.03.15

Links 3/8/2015: Linux 4.2 RC5, Korora 22

Posted in News Roundup at 3:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • A College Without Classes

    Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

    Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Aging Pipes Are Poisoning America’s Tap Water

      In Flint, Michigan, lead, copper, and bacteria are contaminating the drinking supply and making residents ill. If other cities fail to fix their old pipes, the problem could soon become a lot more common.

      [...]

      In the past 16 months, abnormally high levels of e. coli, trihamlomethanes, lead, and copper have been found in the city’s water, which comes from the local river (a dead body and an abandoned car were also found in the same river). Mays and other residents say that the city government endangered their health when it stopped buying water from Detroit last year and instead started selling residents treated water from the Flint River. “I’ve never seen a first-world city have such disregard for human safety,” she told me.

  • Security

    • DNS server attacks begin using BIND software flaw

      Attackers have started exploiting a flaw in the most widely used software for the DNS (Domain Name System), which translates domain names into IP addresses.

      Last week, a patch was issued for the denial-of-service flaw, which affects all versions of BIND 9, open-source software originally developed by the University of California at Berkeley in the 1980s.

    • Researchers Create First Firmware Worm That Attacks Macs

      The common wisdom when it comes to PCs and Apple computers is that the latter are much more secure. Particularly when it comes to firmware, people have assumed that Apple systems are locked down in ways that PCs aren’t.

      It turns out this isn’t true. Two researchers have found that several known vulnerabilities affecting the firmware of all the top PC makers can also hit the firmware of MACs. What’s more, the researchers have designed a proof-of-concept worm for the first time that would allow a firmware attack to spread automatically from MacBook to MacBook, without the need for them to be networked.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • A Haven From the Animal Holocaust

      There are mornings when Susie Coston, walking up to the gate of this bucolic farm in her rubber boots, finds crates of pigs, sheep, chickens, goats, geese or turkeys on the dirt road. Sometimes there are notes with the crates letting her know that the animals are sick or injured. The animals, often barely able to stand when taken from the crates, have been rescued from huge industrial or factory farms by activists.

      The crates are delivered anonymously under the cover of darkness. This is because those who liberate animals from factory farms are considered terrorists under U.S. law. If caught, they can get a 10-year prison term and a $250,000 fine under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. That is the punishment faced by two activists who were arrested in Oakland, Calif., last month and charged with freeing more than 5,700 minks in 2013, destroying breeding records and vandalizing other property of the fur industry.

  • Finance

    • Jimmy Carter: U.S. Is an ‘Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery’

      Former President Jimmy Carter had some harsh words to say about the current state of America’s electoral process, calling the country “an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery” resulting in “nominations for president or to elect the president.” When asked this week by The Thom Hartmann Program (via The Intercept) about the Supreme Court’s April 2014 decision to eliminate limits on campaign donations, Carter said the ruling “violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system.”

    • Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery”

      Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday on the nationally syndicated radio show the Thom Hartmann Program that the United States is now an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”

    • Charles Koch calls for unity against ‘corporate welfare’

      As top GOP presidential candidates arrived at a hotel here to court the influential donors of the Koch network, Charles Koch called on retreat attendees to unite with him in a campaign against “corporate welfare” and “irresponsible spending” by both political parties.

      Speaking on the hotel’s grassy lawn with the Pacific Ocean shimmering behind him, Koch opened the gathering hosted by Freedom Partners by noting that the theme of the weekend would be “Unleashing Our Free Society.” Koch network donors and politicians alike must work toward “eliminating welfare for the wealthy,” he said.

    • Fox Analyst Compares Donald Trump To St. Augustine And Mr. Smith Goes To Washington

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • At NY Observer, Trump’s Too Close to Cover–but Promoting Publisher’s Real Estate Is No Problem

      The Huffington Post‘s Michael Calderone (7/28/15) had a piece on the ethical dilemma posed for the weekly New York Observer by the fact that its owner and publisher, Jared Kushner, is married to Ivanka Trump, daughter of real estate mogul and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. One would expect the Observer to be all over the Trump story, given that its self-proclaimed mission is to cover “the city’s influencers in politics, culture, luxury and real estate who collectively make New York City unique,” but instead the paper has had next to nothing to say about Trump’s controversy-fueled presidential bid.

  • Censorship

    • Anti-Web Blocking Site More Popular in the UK than Spotify & Skype

      A service that helps users circumvent web-blocking injunctions handed down by the UK High Court has grown to become one of the country’s most popular websites. Unblocked.pw provides instant access to dozens of otherwise blocked domains and is currently ranked 192nd in the UK, ahead of both Spotify and Skype.

    • David Cameron Wants To Shut Down Porn Sites Because Kids Are Clever Enough To Defeat Age Restrictions

      UK Prime Minister David Cameron has been using “porn” moral panics as a wedge issue to ramp up censorship and control over the internet in the UK. He’s been pushing aspects of it for years, including demands for the impossible: filters that block “bad content” but allow “good content.” Yes, it does seem bizarre that someone in as powerful a position as David Cameron sees the world in such a black and white way, but remember, this is the same guy who bases his defense of more spying powers on what happens in fictional TV crime dramas.

      His latest plan? Well, he’s insisting that he’s going to shut down porn websites if they don’t guarantee to keep out everyone under the age of 18. Yes, many sites have some age controls, but kids aren’t stupid and can usually figure out a way around them. And that’s always going to be the case. And it’s been the case since pornography existed. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that it’s quite likely that David Cameron himself first came across pornographic material long before his 18th birthday.

    • The Pirate Bay Will Be Blocked in Austria

      Following a European trend, an Austrian Court has ordered a local ISP to block access to The Pirate Bay. The legal action, brought by copyright holders, resulted in an injunction which orders the ISPs to block access to several popular torrent sites and also affects Isohunt.to, 1337x.to and h33t.to.

  • Privacy

    • GCHQ and Me

      Events were about to take me on a different journey. Behind me, sharp footfalls broke the stillness. A squad was running, hard, toward the porch of the house we had left. Suited men surrounded us. A burly middle-aged cop held up his police ID. We had broken “Section 2″ of Britain’s secrecy law, he claimed. These were “Special Branch,” then the elite security division of the British police.

      For a split second, I thought this was a hustle. I knew that a parliamentary commission had released a report five years earlier that concluded that the secrecy law, first enacted a century ago, should be changed. I pulled out my journalist identification card, ready to ask them to respect the press.

    • I’m Quitting Social Media to Learn What I Actually Like

      Three years ago, I began taking August off social media. I wasn’t alone. That was the year everyone started writing about digital detoxes, smartphone-free summer camps, and Facebook cleanses. One writer at the Verge took a year’s vacation from the Internet.

      I don’t seem to see those stories as much anymore. To figure out why, I decided to ask my 1,868 Facebook friends. I pulled up the site, but before I could properly articulate the question, I noticed a guy I met briefly five years ago had posted hiking photos from the same place I went hiking last week. We had both been in Oregon!! What a coincidence! I clicked on the photo and saw he’d been there with a woman I knew from high school. Well, how do they know each other? I clicked on her photo and up came a profile pic of three tiny children, all adorable. The youngest had a Brown University shirt on. A little bit of digging revealed that, in fact, her husband had gotten a job at my alma mater and they’d all moved to Providence. I’d learned so much in just five minutes, but what was it I’d wanted to know from Facebook?

    • Supporter Newsletter: July 2015

      And now, after taking legal action, the High Court has ruled that DRIPA was indeed inconsistent with EU law.

  • Civil Rights

    • Police in Norway Haven’t Killed Anyone in Nearly 10 Years

      Police in Norway hardly ever use their guns, a new report released by the Scandinavian country’s government shows. In fact, it’s been almost 10 years since law enforcement shot and killed someone, in 2006.

      Perhaps the most telling instance was when terrorist Anders Breivik opened fire in 2011 and killed 77 people in Utoya and Oslo. Authorities fired back at him, all right, but only a single time. In 2014, officers drew their guns 42 times, but they fired just two shots while on duty. No one was hurt in either of those instances.

    • Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later

      Dr. Lewinski and his company have provided training for dozens of departments, including in Cincinnati, Las Vegas, Milwaukee and Seattle. His messages often conflict, in both substance and tone, with the training now recommended by the Justice Department and police organizations.

      The Police Executive Research Forum, a group that counts most major city police chiefs as members, has called for greater restraint from officers and slower, better decision making. Chuck Wexler, its director, said he is troubled by Dr. Lewinski’s teachings. He added that even as chiefs changed their use-of-force policies, many did not know what their officers were taught in academies and private sessions.

    • Spanish Cops Use New Law To Fine Facebook Commenter For Calling Them ‘Slackers’

      On July 1st, the Spanish government enacted a set of laws designed to keep disruption within its borders to a minimum. In addition to making dissent illegal (criminal acts now include “public disruption” and “unauthorized protests”), Spanish legislators decided the nation’s law enforcement officers should be above reproach. This doesn’t mean Spanish cops will be behaving better. It just means the public will no longer be able to criticize them.

    • German Netzpolitik journalists investigated for treason

      Press freedom is under threat in Germany — two journalists and their alleged source are under investigation for potential treason for disclosing and reporting what appears to be an illegal and secret plan to spy on German citizens.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Why ISPs still take forever to install business Internet service

      Dealing with telcos and carriers for enterprise circuit installation is still a royal pain. Haven’t we been doing this long enough to do it well?

    • The Web We Have to Save

      Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in. They were Tehran’s taxicabs writ large.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Killing Spotify’s Free Version Will Boost Piracy

        Spotify is generally hailed as a piracy killer, with music file-sharing traffic dropping in virtually every country where the service launches. However, much of this effect may be lost if recent calls to end Spotify’s free tier are honored.

      • Google Asked to Remove 18 ‘Pirate Links’ Every Second

        Copyright holders continue to increase the number of copyright takedown requests they send to Google. As a result the company is currently asked to remove a record breaking 18 links to “pirate” pages from its search results every second, a number that is still increasing at a rapid pace.

      • Kim Dotcom claims deal offered

        He says the offers included one which was conditional on him leaving New Zealand, where he has been a thorn in the side of the government since he and three colleagues were arrested at the request of the FBI in January 2012.

      • Copying And Sharing Was Always A Natural Right; Restricting Copying Never Was

        In the still-ongoing debate over sharing it’s paramount to realize that sharing and copying was always the natural state, and that restricting of copying is an arbitrary restriction of property rights.

The World is Changing and Patent Law Can Change Either for Better or for Worse

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

Summary: Recent secret dealings (which are being exposed to the public owing to whistle-blowers) show the degree of coordination and collusion against public interests; it’s up to us, the majority, to fight back and tackle this injustice

THE world’s disparate legal systems are under attack from so-called ‘trade’ deals and their dirty dealers. We hardly ever cover this subject (except in daily links), but almost everyone knows the impact of these, owing in part to leaks and public demonstrations which raise awareness. One goal is globalisation (in the negative sense) and a method that is trending these days is ‘harminisation’ of laws across nations and continents, almost always in a way that makes them more corporations-leaning and plutocrats-friendly. It’s not surprising considering who works on these deals in secret. These conspirators are bypassing democracy because they want more for themselves and less for the rest of us. It has a lot to do with patents, which are codified into law to legalise monopolisation, i.e. marginalisation of challenge or competition (even from government, as ISDS comes to demonstrate).

Last week we wrote about what was happening in New Zealand. The so-called ‘trade’ deals can potentially bring software patents to New Zealand. Here is how one news site from New Zealand put it some days ago: “The Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry won’t say whether New Zealand’s laws on software patents will need to be overhauled if agreement is reached on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“Parliament passed a law that outlawed software patents “as such” in 2013. The wording of the law change was a compromise that resulted from years of tortuous debate.

“Trade magazine CIO reported that Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) leaks suggested Mexico was now the only country against allowing software to be patented.

“The important point here is that some companies are starting to distance themselves from the EPO and USPTO.”Here in Europe we already have some loopholes similar to those which exist in New Zealand. These enable some companies to patent software (as long as it’s bound to some unspecified “device”). Europe has the Boards of Appeal (BoA) mechanism for independent/external assessment — not oversight — of the EPO and it too is being crushed right now (recall the BoA’s role in defending against software patents half a decade ago). The BoA is clearly under attack right now, as stories we covered served to show. It wants public input to help save it from the ruthless EPO, which hates to share any of its governance. The European Patent Office is now a totalitarian entity right at the heart of Europe. It must be stopped.

A biased site which targets patent lawyers spoke of an interesting trend the other day, published under the headline “The companies that abandon most US and EPO patents – and shoulder much responsibility for raising quality” (the latter part is spin).

The important point here is that some companies are starting to distance themselves from the EPO and USPTO. Corporate culture may be evolving for the better. “In the latest issue of IAM magazine,” says the author, “Matthew Beers and Maria Lazarova of Ocean Tomo take a deep-dive look at patent abandonments data from both the USPTO and EPO. The full article contains a wealth of interesting data but, for the purposes of this blog we’ll take a sneak peek at the findings relating to IP owners and which of them abandon the most patents at both agencies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, about half of the top 50 companies by abandonment volume are also in the top 50 by number of applications filed. What’s more, of the top 50 companies by abandonment volume over the period examined by Beers’ and Lazarova’s analysis, well over two-thirds appear among the top abandoners at both the USPTO and the EPO.”

This is bad news for patent lawyers. Over in the US, which expands the USPTO to Silicon Valley (as planned), it is said that there is now “New Guidance on Patent Subject Matter Eligibility”. “On July 30,” writes a site of patent lawyers, “the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) released a set of documents providing examiners and practitioners with additional guidance on patent subject matter eligibility. The July 2015 Update responds to comments received from the public following the USPTO’s issuance of the 2014 Interim Guidance (2014 IEG) on December 26, 2014.”

It sure looks like they are limiting patent scope. The assignment of patents on software really must stop, at the very least because judges deem these patents patent-ineligible, based on the law (they are not patent examiners, but they know the limits of the law and can enforce the law by exercising their duty).

Just the other day we learned that a famed BitTorrent entrepreneur managed to get a patent on P2P live streaming. TorrentFreak said this “may be the start of a new breakthrough,” but we hardly feel excited by the passage of yet another patent on software. This really ought to stop and a good start would be scrutiny of the ‘trade’ deals, those who facilitate them, the USPTO, the EPO, and politicians who push for the UPC (essentially another so-called ‘harmonisation’ of law and courts framework). There are many powerful and selfish forces looking to gain power and money at the expense of everybody else, especially scientists. As we are by far the majority, we can repeatedly beat those relentless forces. From awareness comes anger and when the majority is angry the evil forces become fearful and often retreat (see ACTA). █

The Latest on Patent ‘Reform’ in the US: GOP Media Deception, Healthwashing Patents, and SIIA Lobbying

Posted in Patents at 6:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

It’s all about might and power (rich people can buy law), not objective assessment of public interests

Semi trailer

Summary: Techrights looks at the more prominent actors driving patent policy in the US, with budget to absorb and agenda to lobby for

THE efforts to make a ‘reform’ happen in the US patent system have not been receiving much media coverage, not in the past week anyway. As we have pointed out before, such efforts mostly or only target patent trolls anyway, so they are incomplete. “Give existing reforms a chance to kill patent trolls,” said this article from last week (the headline speaks only about patent trolls). “Over 8 million patents later,” the author said, “we’ve moved from fertilizer to a revolution in genetics and digital technologies. Thousands of patents have issued on computer software and methods of doing business.” Well, so patent scope is certainly a problem, why focus just on trolls?

“Patent Reform Is Not a Left Wing Thing,” said the Independent blog a week ago while GOP-leaning media is still fighting against patent reform. Here is a notable right-wing site attacking the Innovation Act by stating: “Congressman Goodlatte’s Innovation Act (H.R. 9) is too broadly written and will penalize numerous inventors and companies who develop and commercialize patented innovation. Further, it is based on flawed and unreliable data about “patent trolls.” Rather than rushing to pass this legislation, we should slow down and ask more questions. Only by asking questions will we understand the potential downfalls, unintended consequences, and effects on all stakeholders of the innovation economy.”

The corporate media took a stance similar to that of the GOP. “We Must Not Weaken the Patent Laws that Lead to Cures” was the headline in NewsWeek and Wall Street media uses the ‘health’ card too (painting patents as “healthy” or “life-saving”). To quote: “In 2012, CardioNet, a BioTelemetry subsidiary, filed suit against MedTel24, Inc. and other Companies in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for patent infringement. CardioNet sought an injunction against each defendant, as well as monetary damages. The defendants asserted counterclaims alleging the patents in the suit were invalid and not infringed.”

Andrew Chung, over at Reuters, wrote about UnitedHealth getting sued on antitrust claims. It’s about patents and more specifically misuse of patents to actually harm lives and damage health. To quote Chung: “Nearly four months after a California healthcare software company won a patent infringement verdict against UnitedHealth Group, it filed a new lawsuit alleging the insurance giant obtained its patents fraudulently and violated federal antitrust laws” (not a unique situation).

Over at lobbyists’ media and sites that repost articles (not really news sites), the SIIA (lobby which we wrote about before [1, 2, 3, 4]) pushes to crack down on trolls. The writer describes himself as “vice president for public policy at the Software & Information Industry Association, the principal association for the software and digital content industries, and a leading authority on U.S. tech policy.”

Looking at the SIIA’s Web site and recalling what we wrote about it over the years, it can do both good and evil because some of the time it lobbies for interests of its proprietary software component (members).

In summary, the debate over ‘reform’ continues in the media, but it is dominated not by scientists but politicians and other lawyers, including lobbyists. Conveniently they use the “health” metaphors to give the illusion that lives are at stake. It’s that infamous “do X or many people ARE GOING TO DIE” trickery. █

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