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01.07.16

Diseño de Patentes (Cerrojos) Se estan Convirtiendo en un Problema Como las mismas Patentes de Software.

Posted in America, Microsoft, Patents at 5:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

English/original

Publicado en America, Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents, Samsung at 8:15 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

El copyright ya cubre muchos diseños, así que para qué extender la llamada protección al vasto ámbito de patentes?

Slide to unlock
Abre el Cerrojo: ponlo en una computer y aparentemente eres un genio, mereciendo una patente.

Sumario: Una fina demostracion de cuan estupidas se han convertido muchas patentes en los Estados Unidos, incluyendo el “diseño¨ de patentes que pertencen a lago abstracto en infórmatica (patentes de software)

EN ALGÚN sentido, muchas patentes de diseño son inherentemente patentes de software como esquemas diagramados para patentar las aplicaciones que a menudo sirven para demostrar. Personalmente he revisado algunas patentes, así que sé como algunos abogados particulares son — no los programadores — quienes intentan dar una ‘vida’ (o forma) a ALGORITMOS por dibujar cosas. Doodles No SON algoritmos*. Son a menudo un espurios presentaciones que intentan dar una forma física a algo cuál es INHERENTEMENTE ABSTRACTO. Pueda extraviar a examinadores y jueces, presumiblemente intencionalmente. Simplemente observen los muchos correo-Alicia artículos compuestos por abogados de patentes; observen simplemente en los consejos que se están dando a uno otro. Ellos se incriminan a si mismos.

“Doodles No SON algoritmos. Son a menudo un espurios presentaciones que intentan dar una forma física a algo cuál es INHERENTEMENTE ABSTRACTO.”Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols llamo al Microsoft ataque de patente de perfil más alto “guerras de patente del diseño” y dijo que la “Fundación de Frontera Electrónica ha declarado que la “Interfaz del Usuario para una Porción de Pantalla de Exhibición” ser la patente mas estúpida de este mes. Muestr qué esta realmente sucediendo en entre Microsoft y Corel por la ribbon patente de diseño de Ofice.”

Escribimos sobre este en la cobertura de última semana con respecto a Corel. “La FFE nombró la patente de diseño de Microsoft para un slider como su Patente Estúpida del Mes,” una persona escribió a nosotros, justo sobre una semana después de que él todo pasó. Pero de hecho, es más de una patente de software, o opaca línea/s entre diseño y software (como el elementos de interfaz).

“Simplemente porque uno toma algo de aquello ha existido por miles de años antes que los ordenadores (como el metal de una puerta/de valla o cerradura de madera) y dibujarlo encima un ordenador con algún callback función/s no (o tener que no) lo hace mágicamente digno de ser patentado, tan solo hacer algo “en el Internet” no hace ideas viejas y triviales patente-elegible.”Considere el punto de vista de los abogados de patentes [1, 2] Acerca de los ataques de Apple contra Samsung, los cuales incluyen la nefario patente de deslizamiento-para-abrir (slider otra vez, entre otras patentes). Y hablando de deslizamiento, qué sobre el “artículo de DERRUMBE” mencionado por Patently-O Today? “Y como asunto de política más grande,” dijo el autor, “es cuestionable si la disección de reclamación verbal es deseable o apropiado en el contexto de patentes de diseño. La aproximación mejor puede ser, cuando Chris Carani argumentó en el artículo de DERRUMBE mencionó encima, a sencillamente instruir jurados “que patentes de diseño sólo protegen el aspecto del diseño global descrito en los dibujos, y no atributos muy funcionales, los propósitos o las características encarnados en el diseño reclamado.””

Escribimos bastante acerca del llamado ¨diseño¨ de patentes de Apple (en principio patentes de software) más de mitad de una década cuándo la guerra de patentes de Apple contra Androide/de Linux empezó. Cuándo los autores mencionan terminos como “diseño de patentes” sólo sería justo de leer o interpretar esto como patentes de software, o una subclase particular de estas. Estas patentes no aluden a cualquier cosa física como una barra que desliza, sólo una abstracción del mismo. “Simplemente porque uno toma algo de aquello ha existido por miles de años antes que los ordenadores (como el metal de una puerta/de valla o cerradura de madera) y dibujarlo encima un ordenador con algún callback función/s no (o tener que no) lo hace mágicamente digno de ser patentado, tan solo hacer algo “en el Internet” no hace ideas viejas y triviales patente-elegible.” Entonces de nuevo, es lo que la Oficina De Patentes y Marcas de los Estados Unidos (USPTO) trajo con su reíble control de calidad. █
____
* Soy un profesional de software con experiencia como programador así como investigador, habiendo revisado papeles para revistas internacionales superiores del mundo (incluso en mi veintes)), lo cual significó la necesidad de identificar arte previo (existente/búsqueda publicada) en a áreas como visión de ordenador y aprendizaje de máquina.

01.06.16

Now It’s Just Patent Lawyers (and Their Rich Clients) Against Everybody Else, Seeking to Maximise Protectionism

Posted in Patents at 8:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

How to keep the rich in power and make them even richer, immune to competition

Greed

Summary: A roundup of recent articles, mostly those composed by patent lawyers in an effort to eternally expand the scope of patents (hence monopolies on ideas and beyond) irrespective of their collective effect on society

THE greed-driven maximalism in the area of copyrights is bad enough (see the current Anne Frank controversy) and the same goes for patents. Expanding copyright’s length and scope seemingly infinitely (to a hundred years or even more beyond the creator’s death) is irrational. Allowing people to copyright two-word phrases is also outright ridiculous. In the case of patents, letting people patent mere concepts and abstract ideas wouldn’t help innovation or improve society. Letting life itself be patented would in some cases increase the frequency of deaths and the number of deaths. So what gives? Now there are even new secrecy (euphemism is ‘trade secrets’) laws in the making, including those deep inside highly extensive treaties that the public cannot see (well, secrets!). I.S.D.S. goes a step further and strives to allow the rich people to sue governments, supposedly in the interest of so-called ‘shareholders’.

“I.S.D.S. goes a step further and strives to allow the rich people to sue governments, supposedly in the interest of so-called ‘shareholders’.”Watch out for maximalism and notice how often the maximalists are basically a bunch of parasites who benefit (as a tiny minority) from the maximalism. In the case of the EPO we now have patents on life — a serious error that even the EU Commission recently criticised. To quote one article about it: “In a resolution backed by a large majority of its members, the European Parliament has taken a clear position against granting patents on plants derived from conventional (“essentially biological”) breeding. In its statement the European Parliament says that these plants, seeds, native traits or genes should be excluded from patentability. Furthermore, plant breeders should not be prevented by patents from accessing biological diversity needed for further breeding. The members of European Parliament insist further that prohibitions in existing European patent law to exclude patents on plant varieties and conventional breeding, are not undermined by the erroneous interpretation currently followed by the European Patent Office (EPO). Not long ago, the EPO granted several patents on tomatoes, pepper and broccoli derived from crossing and selection.”

‘Poor’ patent lawyers, people who are now angry because they have become accustomed to making money from applying for and suing with software patents, are not having a field day anymore. Here they are moaning about Alice, referring to is as “regime” (that’s a new one). To quote the lawyers’ media (from yesterday): “It seems that might be the test. Well, it could be. Under the new Alice regime, it’s hard to tell, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to refuse a patent owner’s appeal based on dismissal of its patent as an “abstract idea” under Alice shows the high court is standing behind the new rule being enforced by what may be best coined as the “Thought Police.””

“Müller appears to have sort of flip-flopped again.”See how other patent lawyers admit that they are fearful of the word “abstract” right now. To quote this one new example from a vocal proponent of software patents: “A case currently pending before the Federal Circuit is anticipated to provide greater guidance into the answer to this question, namely, how district courts should determine whether a claim is directed to an abstract idea.”

Florian Müller, who earlier in his career campaigned against software patents in Europe, now lashes out at Apple in his blog and in Twitter (over a dozen such tweets in the past couple of days). “This blog,” he explains, “which used to be rather sympathetic to Apple’s patent enforcement efforts because the “rip-off” story appeared credible for some time, has been highlighting the weaknesses of such patents as the ’647 “quick links” patent or the slide-to-unlock patent family for a couple of years. Even though things that judges say at a hearing are not the same as an actual decision, the mere fact that the Federal Circuit has expressed massive doubts about those patents already validates my skepticism.”

Müller appears to have sort of flip-flopped again. He already met Apple executives, who simply failed to convince them of their merit in suing Android (and by extension Linux).

“We urge any lawyer, judge, examiner etc. who reads this to antagonise the maximalists.”In other news, sites of patent lawyers suggest new ways to patent software after the Alice case. This is the trend right now. They’re looking for new ways to fool/trick/bamboozle judges and examiners. Don’t let them get away with it (e.g. by adding diagrams and using physical-sounding analogies). These people want more for themselves at everyone’s expense; their clients are usually large multinational corporations such as Apple and Microsoft. They’re actually suing to ban Linux-powered counterparts. It’s an attack on the sharing economy and whatever typically drives innovation the fastest and most efficiently.

This one new article is titled “Is software still patent eligible?” Well, it’s nothing like it used to be. Software cannot be patented anymore, unless the examiners and judges can be caught off guard. As the author put it:

One of the first questions asked by any U.S. patent examiner when reviewing a new patent application is whether the subject matter the inventor is trying to protect is patent eligible. Can the invention be patented, or is it excluded from patentability?

The U.S. Supreme Court, for only the second time in 30 years, tackled this question in the context of a software business method when it issued its decision in the case of Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 134 S. Ct. 2347, 2355, 189 L. Ed. 2d 296 (2014).

In its decision, the court solidified the test for patent-eligible subject matter and indicated that software patents (e.g., patents claiming steps implemented by a general-purpose computer) can be patent eligible under certain circumstances.

Patent-eligible subject matter is defined by a combination of statute and case law. Section 101 of the Patent Act states that “whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.” 35 U.S.C. 101.

We urge any lawyer, judge, examiner etc. who reads this to antagonise the maximalists. They’re not serving society and not seeking to advance/speed up innovation. They are just serving their own pockets and their ultra-rich clients to whom innovation (disruption) is perpetually a threat that mustn’t be tolerated; they’re willing to even just SLAPP it out of existence. █

Microsoft Confirms Real-Time Spying on Vista 10 Users (Operating System as a Bug), Increases Pressure to ‘Upgrade’

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Vista 10, Windows at 7:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Don’t install, just antagonise the bugging

A microphone

Summary: Microsoft inadvertently reminds people who had Vista 10 installed on their PC (sometimes downloaded passively against their will) that it is spying on them all the time and a new kind of pressure is being used to create a panic for acceptance of any forced (remotely-imposed) ‘upgrade’ to Vista 10

TECHRIGHTS does not wish to be dragged back into Microsoft bashing (unlike direct attacks on GNU/Linux, usually with the aid of software patents and patent trolls), but readers probably know by now that Microsoft has been turning people who used to be called users or customers into subjects or products, to be spied on and be treated like a commodity whose amount need to be maximised for exploitation in bulk.

With the introduction of Vista 10, the latest and nastiest (more malicious based on rather objective criteria) version of Windows, Microsoft now spies on every person all the time. There is some good analysis [1] and criticism [2] of this self-incriminating propaganda-driven move from Microsoft, which is desperate to convince people whom it forces to move to Vista 10 that this forcing will be for their own good, not just the good of the NSA.

“Vista 10 is not an operating system but spyware pretending to be one.”Using ‘security’ as a reason, Microsoft is now bashing older versions of Windows. Low on resources, Microsoft leaves in tact even known (to the public) back doors in its Web browsers, as covered by Microsoft-friendly sites (as here) and FOSS-centric sites (well, FOSS-centric most of the time). Here is how to put a positive spin on Microsoft’s latest kind of pressure/demand for people to move to the latest trap: “This news has come as a breath of fresh air as it was considered a bane for many web developers, thanks to the endless security holes in the software.”

Well, Web developers whom I know and work with often complain about the latest Internet Explorer and “Edge” (new branding for the same rubbish). They’re more incompatible with even more Web sites, for various different reasons. So this excuse or optimism is misplaced. As soon as next week, based on Microsoft fan sites, Microsoft will have yet another propaganda by which to pressure people to install spyware on their computers. Now is a good time to move to GNU/Linux. Some high-profile journalists are doing so right now because they better understand the underlying reasons (they’re reasonably technical).

Vista 10 is not an operating system but spyware pretending to be one. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Massive Windows 10 Success Has Six Nasty Surprises

    Understandably perturbed by this BetaNews took Microsoft to task on these revelations and asked if it would like to “explain how it came about the information, and why it is being collected in the first place”. Microsoft’s official response: “Thank you for your patience as I looked into this for you. Unfortunately my colleagues cannot provide a comment regarding your request. All we have to share is this Windows blog post.”

    To which BetaNews makes a very fair conclusion: “Microsoft’s spying is intrusive enough to reveal how long you have been using Windows 10, but the company is not willing to be open about the collection of this data.”

    Consequently the next obvious point to ponder is: If Microsoft is happy to disclose this data without saying how it was attained, what else does it access and track without user knowledge? Given Microsoft already admits much of its automatic spying cannot to turned off, just how many more metrics and how much user data is it gathering from every Windows 10 device?

  2. Why is Microsoft monitoring how long you use Windows 10?

    The various privacy concerns surrounding Windows 10 have received a lot of coverage in the media, but it seems that there are ever more secrets coming to light. The Threshold 2 Update did nothing to curtail privacy invasion, and the latest Windows 10 installation figures show that Microsoft is also monitoring how long people are using the operating system.

    This might seem like a slightly strange statistic for Microsoft to keep track of, but the company knows how long, collectively, Windows 10 has been running on computers around the world. To have reached this figure (11 billion hours in December, apparently) Microsoft must have been logging individuals’ usage times. Intrigued, we contacted Microsoft to find out what on earth is going on.

    If the company has indeed been checking up on when you are clocking in and out of Windows 10, it’s not going to admit it. I asked how Microsoft has been able to determine the 11 billion hours figure. Is this another invasion of privacy, another instance of spying that users should be worried about? “I just wanted to check where this figure came from. Is it a case of asking people and calculating an average, working with data from a representative sample of people, or it is a case of monitoring every Windows 10 installation?”

Links 6/1/2016: CES Focus, Firefox OS in Panasonic UHD TVs

Posted in News Roundup at 6:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • Ford, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Subaru get on board with Linux Foundation

      The Linux Foundation began a new initiative in 2012 called Automotive Grade Linux as an open-source project to develop common Linux-based software cores for connected cars. Now major automakers like Ford, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Subaru have joined AGL alongside existing members Toyota, Nissan, and Jaguar Land Rover.

    • High schooler awarded Linux Foundation scholarship

      RJ Murdok spends his days studying Linux and contributing to bug reports, and he’s only 15 years old.

      Recently, he received a Teens-in-Training scholarship from the Linux Foundation. In the past five years, the Foundation’s Training Scholarship Program has awarded 34 scholarships totaling more than US$100,000 in free training to students and professionals.

      Murdok, who is legally blind, started studying Linux in 2012. He became interested in it when his older brother introduced him to the system. And a year year ago he started using openSUSE Tumbleweed.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Kubuntu 15.10 Gets Plasma 5.4.3 and Applications 15.08.3

        Even if Ubuntu and its flavors don’t usually receive big updates after an official release, Kubuntu doesn’t subscribe to this policy and get big updates for the Plasma desktop and other KDE components.

      • KDE Plasma 5.6 to Land on March 22, 2016, Will Have Five Point Releases

        We reported earlier today, January 6, 2016, the availability of the third maintenance release for the KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop environment, and we’ve promised to share some details about the release schedule of the next major version, KDE Plasma 5.6.

      • KDE Plasma 5.5.3 Desktop Environment Brings the First Plasma 5 Bugfixes for 2016

        The third maintenance release of the KDE Plasma 5 open source desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems was supposed to be released on Tuesday, January 5, 2016, according to the official release schedule.

      • Plasma 5.4.3 and Applications 15.08.3 for Kubuntu 15.10

        In the last months after the 15.10 release, developers have been very busy updating and improving our workflows and documentation which left little time for packaging. But we’re getting back on track, so here’s the missing announcement for Plasma 5.4.3 and KDE Applications 15.08.3.

        Many of you have been asking for Plasma 5.5. We are working on it and are close to finishing the packages for the development release, 15.10 packages will follow soon after.

      • conf.kde.in 2016

        Building on the success of conf.kde.in 2014 at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Community Technology (DA-IICT) in the land of Gujarat and 2015 at Amritapuri in Kerala, India, the horizon of the KDE Community is broadening and shifting to north India. conf.kde.in 2016 takes place on the 5th and 6th of March at Jaipur in Rajasthan, India. As in previous years of the conference, conf.kde.in 2016 will promote the spirit of free and open source software (FOSS) and offer ideas to build awareness about FOSS culture at the college level, when most technology students have their first experience with Open Source. The emphasis will be on KDE technology and Qt, the popular cross-platform application framework.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME Maps Will Allow Users to Add POIs on OpenStreetMap

        The GNOME Maps developers continued to provide really interesting updates for the application, and now they are working on a new feature that will allow users to add POIs on OpenStreetMap.

      • Add your local joint to the map
      • More NX & Chrome Books

        The most recent end point offering is using a ChromeBook. This is not yet in production, and being tested mostly by me at this point. We purchased a HP 14 inch ChromeBook with 4GB memory for around $250. It boots immediately. After opening the Chrome browser, you just put in the right URL and credentials and after a few seconds the GNOME desktop appears. The experience is then the same as the other platforms and this platform will resume sessions started on other types of devices. This ChromeBook is full 1920×1080 and provides an excellent canvas space for running software.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • The January 2016 Issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

        The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the January 2016 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Update 2016-01-05 (stable)

        We are happy to announce our second update for Manjaro 15.12 (Capella)!

        Packages of the new major version of PHP have been released into all our repositories. Besides the new PHP 7 features there are the following packaging changes. In general the package configuration is now closer to what was intended by the PHP project. Also refer to the PHP 7 migration guide for upstream improvements.

        Read more

      • PHP 7 and Linux Kernel 4.4 RC8 are Now Available in Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella)

        On January 5, the Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, announced the general availability of the second stable update for the Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) computer operating system.

        The “Manjaro Update 2016-01-05″ update is here to upgrade all the PHP packages to the latest stable and most advanced version of the world’s most popular server-side programming language, PHP 7. With this occasion, the Manjaro devs made a few adjustments for better integration of PHP 7 in Manjaro Linux, such as to remove the php-pear, php-mssql, php-ldap, php-mongo, php-xcache, and graphviz packages.

    • Ballnux/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Updates CloudForms Hybrid Cloud Management Platform; Adds Support for Microsoft Azure, Containerization

        Red Hat’s latest upgrade to its CloudForms hybrid cloud management platform expands its collection of managed platforms to include Microsoft Azure, following the recent Red Hat / Microsoft partnership. CloudForms 4 also adds management support for container architectures and even self-service features.

      • JPMorgan Chase & Co. Reiterates Overweight Rating for Red Hat Inc (RHT)

        Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT)‘s stock had its “overweight” rating restated by equities research analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in a research report issued to clients and investors on Monday, MarketBeat reports. They currently have a $89.00 price objective on the open-source software company’s stock, up from their previous price objective of $85.00. JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s target price indicates a potential upside of 8.66% from the company’s previous close.

      • Top Stocks of the day: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

      • Fedora

        • Sylvia Sanchez: How do you Fedora

          Sylvia Sanchez is a Fedora user and contributor living in Uruguay. She started using Linux ten years ago when she bought her first computer. Sanchez recalls, “My first computer came with Guadalinex, an Ubuntu-based distribution, promoted by the government of Andalusia, Spain.” In an odd twist, Sylvia was converted to Fedora at an Ubuntu release party. She has been a Fedora user since Fedora 16. Her childhood heroes are Wonder Woman and Spiderman. Milanesas with salad and fried potatoes is her favorite food. She is an aviation enthusiast who loves airplanes and studying history. She recently started a personal blog called Crossing the Air.

        • Does Fedora Linux need to be more stable?

          Fedora Linux is one of the best known Linux distributions, and it’s proven to be quite popular with some users. But is Fedora stable enough or does it need some additional improvement in that area?

          A developer at Red Hat recently shared his thoughts about Fedora Workstation and the ongoing work of improving its stability.

        • Fedora 23 on Tegra K1 Chromebook

          Last year during Flock I got myself an Acer CB5 311 Chromebook with Nvidia Tegra K1 ARM board, and 2 GB ram. It is a very nice machine to run ChromeOS, but my goal behind getting the hardware was all about running Fedora on it. With the great help from Jon Disnard (IRC: masta) on #fedora-arm channel, I finally managed to do that this morning.

    • Debian Family

      • The birth of Debian, in the words of Ian Murdock himself

        Fast forward to 2016 and we now know just how prescient Murdock’s words were: a recent family tree of GNU/Linux distributions (pictured above) makes clear the absolutely key role played by the Debian project in the world of free software, and the enduring contribution of the man who created it.

      • Derivatives

        • TeX Live security improvements

          Today I committed a set of changes to the TeX Live subversion repository that should pave the way for better security handling in the future. Work is underway to use strong cryptographic signatures to verify that packages downloaded and installed into a TeX Live installation have not been tinkered with.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Dueling Raspberry Pi drone autopilots ship in Q1

      Erle Robotics unveiled a Dronecode-ready “PXFmini” drone autopilot for the Raspberry Pi, and Emlid updated its Pi autopilot to a HAT-ready “Navio2.”

      In 2014, Emlid launched a Navio drone autopilot shield for the Raspberry Pi. Last month, the company unveiled a Navio2 update with HAT compatibility, and now Spanish drone firm Erle Robotics has launched a competitor called the PXFmini. The shield works with any Raspberry Pi, but is optimized for the Raspberry Pi Zero.

    • The Rokos Core OS Turns Your Raspberry Pi Into A Bitcoin Node

      The Rokos Core, now in its fourth version, is a disk image for Raspberry Pis that can turn your single-board computer into a full bitcoin node. The system will allow you to hold a bitcoin wallet and mine, send, and receive bitcoin over the network.

      Understand that without specialized hardware this thing is essentially the way to actively waste electricity and/or hold bitcoin. However, because it is a full BTC node, you’ll be doing the bitcoin world a favor while learning a bit about mining.

    • Raspberry Pi Raspbian Cross Compiler Toolchains on 64-bit Linux

      It might be obvious if you’re more familiar with gcc and cross compiler toolchains, but in the Raspberry Pi tools project there’s 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the tools. Trying to use the 32 bit versions on 64 bit Linux does not work. Rather than some useful error though, trying to execute any of the 32 bit versions from a shell gives a rather un-useful “No such file or directory” error.

    • Raspberry Pi Closes December on Up Note

      With the holidays and all, the month of December wasn’t as action packed as some of the past months have been concerning the Raspberry Pi, but there were still some interesting stories that occurred. Let’s take a minute to reflect back on the Raspberry Pi and December.

    • Intel, Qualcomm stake claims in Linux drones

      In Linux-related drone news at CES: Intel acquires AscTec, ZeroTech tips a Snapdragon Flight based “Ying” UAV, and DJI and Ford launch a $100K app contest.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android N switches to OpenJDK, Google tells Oracle it is protected by the GPL

          The Oracle v. Google legal battle over the use of Java in Android keeps on going, but this week Google made a change to Android that it hopes will let the company better navigate its current legal trouble.

          Google told VentureBeat that it in “Android N,” the next major version of Android, it is swapping Android’s Java libraries from its own Apache Harmony-based implementation to one based on Oracle’s OpenJDK—yes that Oracle, the same company suing Google. OpenJDK is the “official” open source version of the Java Platform, and Oracle makes it available under the GPL with a linking exception.

        • 2016 Technology of the Year Finalist: Android Auto

          Ever wonder why the tiny little Android-powered computer constantly riding around with you in your car is subjected to a life as a dust collector while you struggle to comprehend the terribly designed infotainment system that resides in the center of your car’s dashboard? We feel your pain. Which is why we’re so excited by the promise offered up by Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

        • Android has a serious bug that looks a lot like Stagefright
        • Casio’s first smartwatch brings Android Wear outdoors

          For all the talk of smartwatches over the past year-plus, it’s been difficult to convince most people that it’s worth wearing one every day. Casio thinks it has a solution, though — while you definitely won’t want to wear its first smartwatch seven days a week, you might find it genuinely useful for one or two.

        • Huawei made a 10-inch Android tablet with a stylus

          Huawei didn’t spend too much time talking about this one at its CES press conference today, but the Chinese smartphone maker revealed a new 10-inch Android tablet called the MediaPad M2, a larger version of the 8-inch M2 it shipped last year.

        • New Balance is making an Android Wear smartwatch, and Intel is putting chips in its shoes

          New Balance is now a gadget company. The athletics giant has created a Digital Sport division that will focus on devices, embedded technology (e.g. sensors in New Balance shoes and apparel), and performance sport (e.g. sensors in sports equipment).

          Its first product? An Android Wear-powered smartwatch that will “track runners’ routes via GPS and also enable them to run with music” without the need to bring along a smartphone. Unfortunately that’s about all we know at the moment. New Balance’s smartwatch launches this holiday season.

        • Haier Launches New 9.7-inch Android Tablet

          Haier might not be a brand many are familiar with, but if you have been keeping up with the tech scene for a while, you might have heard their name pop up once or twice. The company has launched a variety of products in the past, like smartwatches for kids, and just last year during CES, they even unveiled a 105-inch TV.

        • Google Announces New Chromecast Audio And Android TV Hardware Partners

          You could be forgiven if you had already forgotten about Android TV, but Google’s one-year-old Android-based successor to its ill-fated Google TV project is still around and kicking. Today, Google announced a number of new hardware partners for Android TV, as well as a number of new partners who plan to build Chromecast Audio — it’s recently launched audio version of Chromecast — directly into their speakers.

          Soon, you will find Android TV on screens from brands like Arcelik, Vestel, RCA, Hisense, TCL and Bang & Olufsen. Google is also working with Indonesian cable and broadband provider Linknet to offer an Android TV-based set-top box. Previously, the only Android TV sets were available from Sony, Sharp and Philips.

        • Casio launches Android Wear smartwatch that lasts a month per charge

          Casio has launched the G-shock of smartwatches with its first Android Wear device that can last a month between charges.

          The Smart Outdoor Watch, which was launched at CES 2016 in Las Vegas, is the first true smartwatch aimed at the outdoors that can run apps but is waterproof and shockproof to US military MIL-STD-810 standards. That means the watch will be fine in water up to 50m deep – most smartwatches can manage up to 1.5m – and will probably survive a tumble down a rocky outcrop.

        • The excellent Remix OS is bringing Android to every old x86 PC (and Mac) for free

          When I first tested the Remix Mini at the end of last year, I was blown away. Sure, the hardware is interesting and portable, but it’s the fork of Android adapted to make the Remix Mini into something resembling a desktop system that really took me by surprise.

          It’s what Chrome OS should be, in some ways: productivity-focused and instantly familiar, with full support for Android apps from the Google Play store.

        • Nvidia’s Shield Android TV gets a little more customizable with Marshmallow upgrade

          Android 6.0 Marshmallow is coming to the Nvidia Shield Android TV, bringing with it a handful of small and useful updates. Nvidia hasn’t said exactly when the upgrade will be available, but released a video yesterday outlining the new features. These include more customization for the home screen, greater control over external storage, and a hands-free, first time setup process that lets you add your Google account to the Shield just by telling your smartphone: “OK Google, set up my device.”

        • Android’s latest version is still hard to come by
        • More than 4x as many people are running Gingerbread than Marshmallow

          Do you remember when Gingerbread came out? This would have been December 2010: more than five years ago. Do you remember your excitement and anticipation as you waited for Android 2.3 to finally arrive on your device? You might be feeling the same way about Marshmallow now, eagerly awaiting its eventual appearance.

        • Android needs a bit of growing up for productivity

          Tablets were initially designed for consuming content, like web pages, videos, and ebooks. They were, to some extent, larger but somewhat dumber cousins of smartphones. Advancements in mobile technology as well as the pervasiveness of the Internet, however, eventually introduced tablets to new use cases. People now compose documents, make great arc, and even compose music or edit videos on their tablets. In other words, tablets have become devices for productivity aside from entertainment.

        • Android is ousting Windows from its last mobile bastion

          They’re everywhere, but you rarely notice them: the millions of handheld devices — often equipped with scanners — that delivery people, store clerks, and hospital staff responders often carry to manage inventory, process orders, and verify delivery.

          Nearly all of these supply chain-oriented devices run a version of the Windows Embedded operating system, which has had many names over the last decade. But within five years, the companies using these devices will have ditched Windows and moved to Android in one of the biggest industry platform shifts ever.

        • Android Set Top Box Lets You Stream and Record via HDMI Input

          While on the hunt for some hardware that would let him stream video throughout his LAN [danman] got a tip to try the €69 Tronsmart Pavo M9 (which he points out is a re-branded Zidoo X9). With some handy Linux terminal work and a few key pieces of software [danman] was able to get this going.

        • Sun, Oracle, Android, Google and JDK Copyleft FUD

          I have probably spent more time dealing with the implications and real-world scenarios of copyleft in the embedded device space than anyone. I’m one of a very few people charged with the task of enforcing the GPL for Linux, and it’s been well-known for a decade that GPL violations on Linux occur most often in embedded devices such as mobile hand-held computers (aka “phones”) and other such devices.

        • ZTE launches two inexpensive Android phones at CES 2016

          If you’re tuned into our CES coverage, these new ZTE smartphones might not be your first choice for a handset. But they’re aimed at a critical market for phone makers; consumers who don’t want to spend flagship prices or get pulled into a monthly financing plan with US carriers. First is the $129.99 Grand X3, an Android 5.1.1 Lollipop handset with a 5.5-inch HD (720p) display, 1.3GHz Qualcomm quad-core processor, and 16GB of storage, which can be expanded up to 64GB with microSD cards. It’s got an 8-megapixel camera, with a 2MP sensor on the front. It’s not going to win any performance awards, and at this size, 720p is noticeably less crisp than 1080p. It’s not a terrible looking display though, and the amount of bloatware is minimal. That’s nice to see. This one’s headed for Cricket.

        • New Balance announces Android Wear smartwatch for running smartphone-free

          Smartwatches can be hugely convenient tools when it comes to tracking runs and workouts. But the vast majority require that you also bring your smartphone along for the run or ride which, for some, limits the appeal of a wrist-mounted tracker.

Free Software/Open Source

  • OpenSSL’s teachable moment: Secure Shell key management in light of open source vulnerabilities

    Imagine an Internet without encryption. Credit card numbers would flow in the clear from point to point. Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information would be sitting ducks for any cyber criminal to make off with. And government secrets wouldn’t stay secret for long.

  • Events

    • FOSDEM and Devconf.cz trip

      As two years and year ago I plan to make conference combo: FOSDEM in Brussels and then Devconf.cz in Brno. Weekend after weekend. But this time I want to make it different.

      First I thought that will skip devconf.cz one. But this is quite important Fedora conference so checked how to make it cheaper that in previous years. And found out few deals and setup a trip which should be interesting.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS will Power New Panasonic UHD TVs Unveiled at CES

        Panasonic announced that Firefox OS will power the new Panasonic DX900 UHD TVs, the first LED LCD TVs in the world with Ultra HD Premium specification, unveiled today at CES 2016.

        Panasonic TVs powered by Firefox OS are already available globally, enabling consumers to find their favorite channels, apps, videos, websites and content quickly and pin content and apps to their TV’s home screen.

      • CES 2016: Firefox OS Still Alive, Powering New Panasonic UHD TV

        The open source Firefox OS will be used to power new Panasonic DX900 UHD TVs, Mozilla and Panasonic have announced.

  • Databases

    • UK spies publish NoSQL database system as open source

      Last month, the British intelligence agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) published its first public project under the Apache 2 open source license.

    • Oracle fends off open source to stay top rated database

      Oracle is maintaining its place at the top of the database software rankings, according to new data that has been released by website DB-engines.

      The numbers show that the company is still successfully managing to hold off open source challengers, and ranks higher than MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, despite its rating being slightly down from last month.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Christopher Allan Webber: Goodbye 2015, Hello 2016

      The reduced time spent coding on MediaGoblin proper has been deceptive, since most of the projects I’ve worked on have spun out of work I believe is essential for MediaGoblin’s long-term success. I took a sabbatical from MediaGoblin proper mid-year to focus on two goals: advancing federation standards (and my own understanding of them), and advancing the state of free software deployment. (I’m aware of a whiff of yak fumes here, though for each I can’t see how MediaGoblin can succeed in their present state.) I believe I have made a lot of progress in both areas. As for federation, I’ve worked hard in participating in the W3C Social Working Group, I have done some test implementations, and recently I became co-editor on ActivityPump. On deployment, much work has been done on the UserOps side, both in speaking and in actual work. After initially starting to try to use Salt/Ansible as a base and hitting limitations, then trying to build my own Salt/Ansible’esque system in Hy and then Guile and hitting limitations there too, I eventually came to look into (after much prodding) Guix. At the moment, I think it’s the only foundation solid enough on which to build the tooling to get us out of this mess. I’ve made some contributions, albeit mostly minor, have begun promoting the project more heavily, and am trying to work towards getting more deployment tooling done for it (so little time though!). I’m also now dual booting between GuixSD and Debian, and that’s nice.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Mayor Bowser Just Made DC’s Economic Data Open-Source
    • How the Open Source Car Could Change the Auto Industry

      Show-stopping rims, subwoofers that make your license plate rattle, razor-sharp decals — custom car modifications that regular people can still do themselves are getting fewer and farther between, and even updates like these take considerable effort and skill and might be beyond the reach of most car owners. In the not-so-distant past, car owners who were so inclined could make all sorts of changes to their cars. Open an engine on a current model, though, and you have to practically be a technology expert to do anything. But what if all the technology, all the blueprints and patents, were readily available to everyone? What if, instead of purchasing a pre-made car manufactured by an industry veteran, you could set up a microfactory and actually build your own car? And, what if car manufacturers, rather than spending years and years and untold sums racing to be the first to discover and perfect the latest technologies, instead shared their findings, encouraging rapid development, the likes of which we can now only imagine?

    • Open Hardware

      • How to build an open hardware amplifier in 5 steps

        ElectroSmash just released an open hardware guitar amplifier called the 1Wamp. Designed as a small and portable 1 watt amplifier loaded with all the features of big amps, the project was fully developed using only open source tools—like KiCAD, a design suite to create schematics and layouts in any platform.

  • Programming

    • Build a web browser with 20 lines of Python

      The Qt graphical toolkit has been at the heart of the KDE desktop since its inception, and it’s used by many other cross-platform applications. It’s a great because it does so much of the hard work for you, even at a low level. There’s a Qt class for dealing with string manipulation, for example, or sorting lists. There’s exceptional networking support and transparency, file handling, native XML and image handling. Using Qt to perform all these tasks means you don’t have to re-invent the wheel or import yet another library into your project. But Qt is still best known for it’s high level user-interface design, where you can quickly construct an application from buttons, sliders, forms and images and tie them all together from your code.

    • PHP 5 Support Timeline

      With the new year starting the PHP project is being asked to decide about the PHP 5 support timeline.

      While Aligning PHP 5.6 support timeline with the release date of PHP 7.0 seems like common sense to keep the support schedule continuous, there’s a big question whether to extend it further to an additional one year of security support till the end of 2018. This would make PHP 5.6, the last of the PHP 5 branch, to have 2 years of security support and de facto getting the same life span as PHP 7.0 would (ending support of both in Dec 2018).

    • Java loses no luster in popularity index

      Java is coming off a banner year in language popularity indexes, and it looks to continue its momentum in 2016.

      Named the Programming Language of the Year on the Tiobe index and scoring the largest increase in popularity, Java remains in the top spot for the first month of this year as well. Tiobe’s index is calculated based on a formula assessing searches on languages in a variety of different search engines.

Leftovers

  • Bulgaria reports eGovernment progress

    The Bulgarian government is making good progress in offering electronic government services. The country’s Ministry for ICT in December reported on progress in providing online validation of documents, and making these documents available online.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • These 19 Big-Name Toothpastes and Face Scrubs Will Be Forced to Ditch Tiny Bits of Plastic

      Just before Christmas, Congress passed a law banning microbeads—those tiny pieces of plastic that act as exfoliants in face washes, toothpastes, and other personal-care products.

    • As If Slavery Weren’t Enough, 6 Other Reasons to Avoid Shrimp

      Ah, shrimp. Americans can’t get enough of it: Per capita consumption has doubled since the early ’80s, and we now eat on average about four pounds per year of the briny crustacean. Not even tuna and salmon (about 2.3 pounds each) outshine the shrimp on the US dinner table.

      But the all-you-can-eat specials and fish counter fire sales ride on a massive shrimp-farming boom in the developing world, mainly in South Asia. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, global farmed shrimp production leapt from 154,00 metric tons in 2000 to 3.3 million metric tons in 2013. Imports now account for 90 percent of the shrimp we eat.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Wednesday
    • Third try is no charm for failed Linux ransomware creators

      Getting cryptographic implementations right is difficult. A group of malware creators is currently experiencing that hard truth, to the amusement of security researchers.

      For the past several months, a group of cybercriminals have been infecting Linux systems — primarily Web servers — with a file-encrypting ransomware program that the security industry has dubbed Linux.Encoder.

    • Indian Hackers Attack Pakistani Websites In Response To Pathankot Terror Attack

      An Indian hacking collective named Indian Black Hats has defaced multiple Pakistani websites. This Kerala-based group has dedicated the attack to the little daughter of a Pathankot terror attack martyr. The group told fossBytes, “Harming is not our aim..but if anyone pick their eyes on our mother India..we stand for it”.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Saudi Coalition Just Bombed a Center for the Blind in Yemen

      THE NEW YEAR seems to have brought little change for civilians living under bombs in Yemen. Early Tuesday morning, missiles reportedly fired by aircraft supporting the Saudi-led and U.S.-backed coalition damaged a center for the blind in the capital city of Sanaa, as well as the city’s chamber of commerce, a wedding hall, and at least one residential area.

      Multiple outlets reported that the attacks caused no casualties, though one local report, citing an unidentified security official, claimed “at least three people” were wounded at the al Noor Center for Care and Rehabilitation of the Blind in Sanaa. Footage from the capital, published by the International Business Times, showed images of crumbled buildings, collapsed rooftops, and a young man weeping in the street. A spokesperson for UNICEF in Sanaa told Vice News that the al Noor Center offers classes for visually impaired students.

      In an email to The Intercept Tuesday, Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, confirmed that his office had received reports of airstrikes in Yemen indeed hitting the al Noor Center, as well as the other reported sites. The Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the region, did not respond to requests for comment.

    • The 18-Minute Gap

      Frankly, I’m more interested in why the FBI doesn’t have cell phone tracking data from this period, especially given that they clearly have it from after the 18 minute gap. I asked on Twitter today but none of the journalists who covered this presser seem to have asked that obvious question (though there seems to be a map indicating some kind of cell tracking).

      If they shut off their phones or otherwise hid their tracks, it would suggest some importance to whatever they were doing in that 18 minute gap.

      One thing the FBI didn’t say, nor any of the crack reports I saw covering the press conference, is that the 18 minute gap — from 12:59 p.m. to 1:17 — happens to coincide with a period when Farook’s now arrested buddy, Enrique Marquez, was not captured on his employers’ closed circuit video.

    • New Hillary Emails Reveal Propaganda, Executions, Coveting Libyan Oil and Gold

      The New Year’s Eve release of over 3000 new Hillary Clinton emails from the State Department has CNN abuzz over gossipy text messages, the “who gets to ride with Hillary” selection process set up by her staff, and how a “cute” Hillary photo fared on Facebook.

    • For a Return to Normalcy

      The economic “emergency” required that we surrender the very concept of economic freedom, the foreign “crisis” meant we had to mobilize the nation, impose conscription, institute rationing, and turn industry over to the cartels. The social and economic life of the country was militarized, and dissent was crushed, along with the Constitution: hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans were interned, antiwar activists were prosecuted for “sedition,” and the Supreme Court itself was besieged by the enemies of liberty.

    • Saudi-Iran Crisis Spells a Long Syrian War

      The Saudi decision to start the new year with mass executions bore the hallmarks of a calculated move. Riyadh doubtless anticipated that the Basij would do to Saudi diplomats what had been done to previous representatives of governments who had incurred the Ayatollah’s wrath. The Saudis were prepared to cut diplomatic relations, and ensure that other Arab states followed suit.

      Not for the first time in recent months, an Iran which prided itself on anticipating the next step of its enemies and on outsmarting them, found itself wrong-footed by the Saudi move. Just as it was when Riyadh announced its military offensive against the Houthi takeover of Yemen, Iran still worked on old assumptions that Saudi Arabia moved cautiously and behind a bead curtain.

    • North Korea Claims It Just Detonated a Hydrogen Bomb For the First Time

      This doesn’t mean that North Korea has actually detonated a real hydrogen bomb, however, and experts are already suggesting that it’s unlikely the country has done what it claims. At least one U.S. official has already told ABC News that the U.S. does not believe North Korea has developed hydrogen bomb tech yet.

    • There’s No Evidence North Korea Has an H-Bomb–but NYT Knows Fear Sells Papers

      Fusion-based hydrogen bombs have more explosive power than nuclear fission bombs that rely on uranium or plutonium. “If the North Korean claim about a hydrogen bomb is true, this test was of a different, and significantly more threatening, nature,” the Times reports. It’s not made clear, though, what if anything North Korea could achieve by having a bomb that could destroy a city and its suburbs rather than just a city, or how the response by the US and its allies to such a threat would be in any way different.

    • Wednesday Morning: Otherwise Known as Mike-Mike-Mike Day

      NK’s Kim Jong Un later confirmed a “miniaturized hydrogen nuclear device” had been successfully tested. Governments and NGOs are now studying the event to validate this announcement. The explosion’s size calls the type of bomb into question — was this a hydrogen or an atomic weapon?

    • When Will China Finally Abandon the Loons in North Korea?

      There’s something a little hard to understand about China’s continued sponsorship of North Korea. Historically it’s easy enough to understand, but for the past couple of decades it’s surely been nothing but a huge millstone around their necks. Are they really that worried about problems on the border with North Korea? Would they really lose that much face if they abandoned North Korea for good? And surely that would be more than made up for by the goodwill it would generate with the West.

    • The Deceptive Debate Over What Causes Terrorism Against the West

      Ever since members of the U.K. Labour Party in September elected Jeremy Corbyn as party leader by a landslide, British political and media elites have acted as though their stately manors have been invaded by hordes of gauche, marauding serfs. They have waged a relentless and undisguised war to undermine Corbyn in every way possible, and that includes — first and foremost — the Blairite wing of his party, who have viciously maligned him in ways they would never dare do for David Cameron and his Tory followers.

      [...]

      Beyond such studies, those who have sought to bring violence to Western cities have made explicitly clear that they were doing so out of fury and a sense of helplessness over Western violence that continuously kills innocent Muslims. “The drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody,” Faisal Shahzad, the attempted Times Square bomber, told his sentencing judge when she expressed bafflement over how he could try to kill innocent people. And then there’s just common sense about human nature: if you spend years bombing, invading, occupying, and imposing tyranny on other people, some of them will want to bring violence back to you.

    • New ‘Jihadi John?’ ISIS Video Features English-Speaker

      For those who still don’t get why the War of Terror continues to fail after 14+ years, here is another lesson.

      We all remember “Jihadi John,” who of course was never called that except in the western media. John (real name: Mohammed Emwazi) was a British citizen who became radicalized, joined ISIS and went on to do horrible things, including beheadings. The media, in hand with the White House and Downing Street, fluffed this one loser guy up into an international super villain. So, when eventually the world’s most powerful nation finally killed him in November 2015 with million-dollars air sorties and drones, we were all supposed to go full-out-bin-Laden-celebration, on the road to victory over Islamic State, with a little old fashioned Wild West vengeance thrown in for the feel good.

      And so now guess what?

      There’s a new guy to replace Jihadi John. He doesn’t have a stupid nickname yet, so let’s be the first and call him Haji Hank. He executed five persons claimed to be British spies, creating the video you see above in the process.

    • Does the media say too much when reporting on terrorism?

      efore committing their heinous acts, terrorist-minded individuals will be sure to wipe out all the information on their cell phones after learning in the media how the damaged handsets found near the San Bernardino shootings in early December helped the FBI track a confidante. They may also decide not to use phone communication altogether after reading precise media reports on how, in January last year, Belgian police were able to kill two jihadists after intercepting suspicious calls originating in Athens. The same ill-intentioned individuals will tear to pieces their receipts after finding out in the mass media how French police linked one of the terrorists of the Paris bloodbath to Brussels, thanks to parking tickets issued in Molenbeek, a district in the Belgian capital.

    • ISIL/ Daesh Threatens to attack Saudi Arabia after Executions

  • Transparency Reporting

    • UK Government Spends Three Years And Large Sums Of Money To Avoid Revealing The Number ’13′

      Nothing very threatening there, you might think, but the UK government refused on the basis that disclosing this magic number would “impinge on cabinet collective decision-making”. So Buchanan appealed — first, to the Cabinet Office, the department he had made the request to, where he was turned down, and then to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which oversees this whole area of government transparency.

    • Red tape and a three year FOI battle with Cabinet Office

      Journalism is, at least in part, the art of delivering new information in a timely manner.

      In which case, I have to admit a failure.

      It’s important to point out that I wasn’t wholly to blame, what with the government taking me to court and all that.

      Nonetheless what I’ve finally learned isn’t a story now – and probably wouldn’t have been when I thought it might have been.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Tensions flare over environmental threat of Canadian gold mine in Kyrgyzstan

      The remote Issyk Kul province in eastern Kyrgyzstan, on the border with China, is home to some of the most stunning vistas of the rugged Tian Shan mountain range that cuts through much of Central Asia. Mountain goats and endangered snow leopards roam the rocky slopes, while rare species of dandelion and wild tulip bloom in alpine meadows.

    • VW Lawyer
    • Here’s what David Cameron’s Flood Resilience Review must do

      This is starting to feel a bit like Groundhog Day. Two years ago, the UK experienced horrendous floods during its wettest winter ever. Back then, David Cameron charged Oliver Letwin with reviewing our flood defences. But his report was never published.

      Two years on, and the Met Office have just confirmed that December 2015 was the wettest month on record, ever. Storms Desmond, Eva and Frank broke new rainfall records and have devastated the North of England and Scotland with floods. And David Cameron has… ordered another flooding review, led by Oliver Letwin.

      This time, if the Government’s Flood Resilience Review is to be at all meaningful, it needs to tackle four crucial issues: climate change, land management, budgets and governance.

    • America’s Food System Could Be More Vulnerable to Climate Change Than We Thought

      For billions of people around the world, the most immediate threat posed by climate change is at the dinner table, as staple crops face a steadily worsening onslaught of drought, heat waves, and other extreme weather events. The United States certainly isn’t immune to these challenges; for proof, just look at California, where an unprecedented drought has cost the state’s agriculture industry billions.

      Still, the conventional thinking among many scientists is that developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia—where people are typically hit harder by food price spikes and generally more reliant on agriculture as a primary source of income—are the most vulnerable to food-related climate impacts.

      A paper published today in Nature may add a wrinkle to that assumption. Scientists often track the impact that an individual weather disaster has on crops (again, see California), but the new research takes it a step further.

    • Energy boost for Russia and neighbours

      Renewable energy could supply Russia and Central Asian countries with all the electricity they need by 2030 − and cut costs significantly at the same time.

    • Midwest Flooding Damage Assessment Imagery

      NOS’s National Geodetic Survey (NGS) continues to collect damage assessment imagery of flooding along the Mississippi and Arkansas River. A team of NOAA aviators began collecting the photographs on January 2, flying above the area at around 7,500 feet aboard NOAA’s King Air aircraft equipped with specialized remote-sensing cameras. Imagery is available online to view and download.

    • If Obama is a Climate Leader, Why Is US Oil Industry Booming?

      Despite President Barack Obama’s claims of climate leadership, the U.S. oil industry is booming under his watch.

      Bloomberg Business journalist Jennifer Dlouhy reported on Tuesday that “U.S. oil production has surged 82 percent to near-record levels in the past seven years and natural gas is up by nearly one-quarter.”

      The domestic fracking surge—a pillar of Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy—is key to this trend.

    • VP Kalla Slams Neighboring Countries Over Haze Complaints

      Vice President Jusuf Kalla has denounced neighboring Singapore and Malaysia for complaining about the severe haze caused every year by Indonesian forest fires. He said he took note of the way the neighboring countries had kept complaining when toxic haze from adjacent areas in Indonesia, Riau in particular, fouled their air.

      “For 11 months, they enjoyed nice air from Indonesia and they never thanked us. They have suffered because of the haze for one month and they get upset,” Kalla said on Tuesday.

      Environmental group Greenpeace Indonesia reported forest fires in Riau have worsened from 6,644 hotspots in 2011 to 15,112 hotspots in 2013.

    • Oklahoma Is Now the Earthquake Capital of America

      Earthquakes in Oklahoma increased by 50 percent in 2015, surpassing the previous year’s record and sounding new alarms over the risks of oil and gas operations like hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

    • EPA Releases the First of Four Preliminary Risk Assessments for Insecticides Potentially Harmful to Bees

      The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a preliminary pollinator risk assessment for the neonicotinoid insecticide, imidacloprid, which shows a threat to some pollinators. EPA’s assessment, prepared in collaboration with California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation, indicates that imidacloprid potentially poses risk to hives when the pesticide comes in contact with certain crops that attract pollinators.

  • Finance

    • VIDEO: Bernie Sanders Inveighs Against Wall Street in Major Address on Economic Policy Proposals

      We need a banking system that is part of the productive economy – making loans at affordable rates to small- and medium-sized businesses so that we create decent-paying jobs. Wall Street cannot continue to be an island unto itself, gambling trillions in risky financial instruments, making huge profits and assured that, if their schemes fail, the taxpayers will be there to bail them out.

    • Work less, play more

      Time is perhaps the most precious commodity of all. While we can buy more possessions and work new jobs, we can never make more time or recapture what has already been spent. But considering how much work dominates our lives, we question concepts around working and time relatively little.

      While paid employment can provide security, for many, jobs are a means of putting “food on the table” within a work culture that feels more enslaving than natural or joyful. But now there is growing recognition that traditional working patterns no longer serve us. More and more people are searching for freedom from bosses, wages, commuting and consuming, seeking instead the lives we truly want to lead.

    • Thomas Piketty Ran The Numbers On Income Inequality. Here’s What He Found.

      Some of the top experts on income inequality released a study of new, more accurate data this week, revealing that Americans in the top 1 percent have done far better than everyone else for the last half century — and why they’ve gotten so far ahead.

      At the American Economic Association conference this week, economists Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, and Thomas Piketty released their preliminary research that uses a new analysis of tax, survey, and national accounts data. That’s more accurate, they say, than just looking at tax data, which misses huge chunks of the actual income people bring home.

    • The cracks begin to show: a review of the UK economy in 2015 (part one)
    • The cracks begin to show: a review of the UK economy in 2015 (part two)

      Thus, the ultra-flexible UK labour market (“with employers in the driving seat”, in the government’s own charming words) – to be enhanced by the repressive new Trade Union Act – has had the effect of causing productivity to fall.

    • Convincing the Young to Blame the Old, Not the Rich

      First, Rampell’s comparison is misleading, since there are few married couples with single breadwinners turning age 65. Most women have been in the workforce for the last four decades. If we look to the same study referenced by Rampell, and take the more typical case of a couple with an average earner and low earner, we find that the value of the Medicare benefit is roughly four times (rather than six) times the taxes paid.

      Most of the reason the value of Medicare benefits exceeds the value of the taxes paid is not the generosity of the benefits received by our seniors. The main cause is the fact that we pay our doctors twice as much as doctors in Canada, Germany and other wealthy countries. We also pay twice as much for our drugs and medical equipment. This is a case of upward redistribution from the rest of us to members of the 1 Percent. (Almost all doctors are in the richest 1 or 2 percent of the income distribution.) But rather than talking about how the rich raise the cost of our healthcare, Rampell wants us to be upset at seniors.

    • Surprise! Corporate America Is Throwing Down for the TPP

      American big business has now officially endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), giving many all the proof they need that the 12-nation deal—poised to be the largest ever—is bad news for people and the planet.

      An association of Chief Executive Officers known as the Business Roundtable (BRT) announced its formal backing on Tuesday, indicating that it plans to use its muscle to press Congress to approve the deal this year. In fact, BRT president John Engler told The Hill that the association wants the TPP to pass as quickly as possible—before the summer.

    • Ben Carson Has a Tax Plan!

      This is great! At a guess, your average zillionaire would have an effective tax rate of about 8 percent compared to about 20 percent today. Ka-ching!

    • Lots of Rich People Seem to Be in Tough Financial Straits

      I’m not sure what to make of this. Either there are a whole lot of rich people who manage their money really badly, or else this is some kind of statistical artifact. Or maybe rich people consider separate summer and winter getaway homes to be among the things they “need.” It’s a headscratcher.

    • How Bernie Sanders And Hillary Clinton Differ On Wall Street

      Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) unveiled a comprehensive financial reform plan in a speech Tuesday just a few miles from Wall Street itself, vowing to break up large financial institutions that pose a threat to the economy and complete the “unfinished business” of reform which began under President Obama.

    • Greece’s Varoufakis to Launch Pan-European Progressive Movement

      Hoping to show Europeans they have an alternative to the prevailing system of “authoritarianism” and austerity, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced a new cross-continent movement with a “simple, common agenda:” To democratize Europe.

      The movement, known as the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (or DiEM 25), will be launched on February 9 at Berlin’s Volksbühne theater.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Ted Cruz Knows What His Followers Want

      The president is the one on the right, of course. He’s the menacing one who looks more like a stormtrooper than the actual Nazi, but still retains plausible deniability in case someone like me happens to point out the entirely coincidental resemblance. It comes to us courtesy of the Ted Cruz campaign, which is apparently fully adopting Trumpism as its guiding vision.

    • Ted Cruz: Obama Is Putting On Commando Gear And Coming For Your Guns
    • 2016 Will Be a Test for Super PACs

      What do Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have in common? Pause for requisite awful hair joke. No really. From a campaign finance perspective, they have one distinctive thing in common: they have no Super PACs propping up their candidacies.

    • Would a privatised Channel 4 still be a serial risk-taker?

      Why do we care so much about Channel Four? After all, as a supplier (I’ve worked for Channel Four on and off since 1984, that’s, scarily, more than three decades) it can be truly infuriating. And, every few years, there’ll be an article in the broadsheets, or a session at Edinburgh, about how Channel Four ‘isn’t what it used to be’. But, isn’t that the point? It keeps changing and it’s always the same. It’s as much part of Britain and its media landscape as the BBC – and that’s saying something. It is the place where most of the new stuff happens – formats, styles of documentary, new shapes of different types of content. It’s one of the reasons networks all around the world see Britain as a player.

    • The Most Chilling Political Appointment That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg

      But why should any of us take relationship advice from you? Because you founded Facebook? That isn’t a qualification. Because you run a massively popular website and can broadcast such advice to millions (even through third-party news outlets)? That doesn’t automatically make it good advice. Our relationships, on any level, are not for you to judge. In this case, your so-called “advice” is worthy only of contempt. And so, in reponse I say:

      Piss off, you sexist hypocrite.

    • NSA hacked two key encryption chips

      None of the documents in the Snowden archive identify all or even most of the encryption standards that had been targeted, and there was a concern that if an attempt were made to identify one or two of them, it could mislead the public into believing that the others were safe. There also seemed to be a concern among some editors that any attempt to identify specific encryption standards would enable terrorists to know which ones to avoid.

    • UK mass surveillance ‘totalitarian’ and will ‘cost lives’, warns ex-NSA tech boss

      Planned surveillance laws in the UK are “totalitarian” and the bulk collection of people’s data makes people “more vulnerable” to terrorist attacks, a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower has said.

    • GCHQ mass spying will ‘cost lives in Britain,’ warns ex-NSA tech chief

      Plans by the UK’s Conservative government to legitimize the mass surveillance of Brits won’t work, and will cause lives to be lost to terrorism.

      That’s the view of a former senior US National Security Agency (NSA) staffer, who will sound off on blanket snooping at a parliamentary hearing this afternoon (Wednesday).

      William Binney, the former technical director of the NSA’s Analytic Services Office, will give evidence before the Investigatory Powers Bill committee, which is scrutinizing proposals to grant fresh spying powers to British agencies.

    • Neocons Protest US Spying on Israel

      U.S. neocons are livid over a report that U.S. intelligence spied on Israeli efforts to sabotage the Iran nuclear talks, though they are curiously silent on evidence that Israel spies on the U.S. Ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar says it would be a mistake to let this pressure blind U.S. leaders on what Israel is up to.

    • The FBI’s ‘Unprecedented’ Hacking Campaign Targeted Over a Thousand Computers

      In the summer of 2015, two men from New York were charged with online child pornography crimes. The site the men allegedly visited was a Tor hidden service, which supposedly would protect the identity of its users and server location. What made the case stand out was that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had used a hacking tool to identify the IP addresses of the individuals.

      The case received some media attention, and snippets of information about other, related arrests started to spring up as the year went on. But only now is the true extent of the FBI’s bulk hacking campaign coming to light.

    • Selective outrage at NSA snooping

      The U.S. has been caught spying on foreign heads of state – again. And just as with the tapping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, revealed in 2013 by the Edward Snowden documents, the target was the leader of a supposed ally: in this case, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

      Despite President Barack Obama’s promise two years ago to limit spying on heads of state of friendly nations, a Wall Street Journal report last week described National Security Agency spying on Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials while the U.S. was negotiating a nuclear arms agreement with Iran and trying to sell the resultant agreement to a fairly skeptical Congress.

    • Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

      The governments of Australia, Germany, the UK and the US are destroying your privacy. Some people don’t see the problem…
      “I have nothing to hide, so why should I care?”

      It doesn’t matter if you have “nothing to hide”. Privacy is a right granted to individuals that underpins the freedoms of expression, association and assembly; all of which are essential for a free, democratic society.

    • UK Legislators Want To Toss Tech Company Officials In Jail If They Inform Users About Government Surveillance Efforts

      Default mode at tech companies these days is to inform users of government surveillance. Unless explicitly forbidden to do so, multiple companies have stated they will inform users of requests for data or suspected state-sponsored hacking attempts.

      The mechanisms inherent in US law usually prevent notification. Requests made by foreign governments, however, operate in a much grayer area. UK legislators are trying to close perceived loopholes with new legislation that would make it illegal to notify users of UK agencies’ requests for data.

    • UK government wants to send tech execs to jail for disclosing surveillance

      Ministers are lobbying to make it a criminal offense for a tech company to inform a user that the UK government is spying on them.

  • Civil Rights

    • New Zealand’s Raid On Investigatory Journalist Was Illegal

      This reminds me of the raids on Kim Dotcom’s house as well, which involved a bogus warrant. Though, in that case, the High Court, after admitting that the warrants were not drafted properly, decided they were “good enough.” Either way, those are the only two law enforcement raids in New Zealand, and both came under sketchy circumstances, where the police couldn’t be bothered to actually follow the rules. What’s going on down there?

    • Fox Host On Obama’s Emotional Response To Child Victims Of Gun Violence: “Check That Podium For A Raw Onion”
    • As Obama Issues Executive Orders, Gun Stocks Explode

      Stocks for two major gunmakers skyrocketed as President Obama unveiled a long-awaited series of executive orders intended to reduce gun violence.

      Gunmaker Smith & Wesson’s stock price closed at $25.86, higher than at any point in 2015. A year ago, on January 7th, 2015, it closed at just $9.93.

    • The Many Hypocrisies of the Oregon Standoff

      The militia members purportedly are “defending” father and son ranchers sentenced for two separate arsons of public lands. The corporate media has been portraying these arsons as some unfortunate accident, when the reality is quite different.

      [...]

      The grandson, a ThinkProgress article reports, had good reason to “keep his mouth shut” out of fear of his family. He later told a sheriff’s deputy that he had been abused multiple times, being punished by blows, forced to eat cans full of chewing tobacco, being driven 10 miles away and forced to walk home, and after carving two letters into himself with a paper clip having the letters removed with sandpaper.

    • Hundreds rally against sexual violence after NYE attacks in Cologne

      Protesters held aloft a sign reading, “Arm Cologne” as up to 500 people rallied against attacks by members of the migrant community during the city’s New Year celebrations, and the authorities’ failure to stop dozens of sexual assaults which took place.

    • Why It’s Scary That the Mall of America Can Crush Dissent

      ON DECEMBER 23, the day before Christmas Eve, the United States’ largest mall moved to shut down a potentially landmark Black Lives Matter demonstration before it even really began.

      Management at the shopping center, Mall of America, located just outside Minneapolis, had stores lower their metal security gates about half an hour before the protest started, part of a “lockdown” that cleared shoppers from that wing of the mall. Only moments after Black Lives Matter organizers entered the mall’s east rotunda, the cousin of Jamar Clark, whose death at the hands of police was the center of the protest, was led away by a throng of police. Organizers directed demonstrators to exit the mall toward the light-rail station. As protesters walked out, the mall broadcast a looping announcement in a friendly Midwestern voice: “Mall of America is now going into lockdown. Seek shelter in the nearest store, and follow employee instructions.”

    • From Waco to Burns: Chicken Wings and Militiamen

      Nearly 25 years ago, on Feb. 28, 1993, preacher David Koresh and his 125 live-in congregants, the “Branch Davidians,” exchanged fire outside Waco with agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Six of their number and four ATFers were felled. After encircling it for 51 days, the FBI assaulted the Davidian compound, Mt. Carmel, with volatile CS gas and Army tanks, leading to a fire that took more than 80 lives, including those of two dozen children. In retribution for their deaths, thinking that his action would spark a revolution, “patriot” Timothy McVeigh on April 19, 1995 planted a fertilizer bomb at the curbside of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168; again, some of the victims were toddlers. In anybody’s book, all of that was tragedy.

      But today’s standoff by armed “patriots,” “Constitutionalists” and “sovereign citizens” outside Burns, Ore., will most likely be in accord with Marx’s dictum that history first presents itself as tragedy—and then as farce.

      The practices and preconditions for another bloodbath are simply not present at the Malhueur National Wildlife Refuge, where a dozen buildings have been seized by a group that calls itself a militia.

      The apparent organizers of the occupation are Ammon and Ryan Bundy, sons of Cliven Bundy, who with a little help from his friends held federal forces at bay in Nevada in April, 2014. Ammon Bundy has proclaimed that “I know the Lord is involved” in the Oregon occupation, but neither he nor his brother, like Koresh, is a guru of a passionate church. Their accomplices are not in agreement about God, without whose blessing, it seems, few members of our species are today prepared to face martyrdom.

    • Judge Helps Ensure That The More Ignorant Law Enforcement Officers Are, The More They’ll Be Able To Get Away With

      Why? Because probable cause is whatever a cop says it is. This is an ongoing issue in states where marijuana has been partially legalized. In California, medical marijuana is legal. The cops can’t seem to deal with this new reality. So, they find bogus reasons to raid houses, relying on multiple law enforcement-friendly exceptions to the Fourth Amendment to keep their busts intact… or at least minimize the number of times judges will find them culpable for violations. Cops say “upon information and belief” and magistrate judges nod in approval.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • HTTP/2.0 — The IETF is Phoning It In

      A very long time ago —in 1989 —Ronald Reagan was president, albeit only for the final 19½ days of his term. And before 1989 was over Taylor Swift had been born, and Andrei Sakharov and Samuel Beckett had died.

      In the long run, the most memorable event of 1989 will probably be that Tim Berners-Lee hacked up the HTTP protocol and named the result the “World Wide Web.” (One remarkable property of this name is that the abbreviation “WWW” has twice as many syllables and takes longer to pronounce.)

      Tim’s HTTP protocol ran on 10Mbit/s, Ethernet, and coax cables, and his computer was a NeXT Cube with a 25-MHz clock frequency. Twenty-six years later, my laptop CPU is a hundred times faster and has a thousand times as much RAM as Tim’s machine had, but the HTTP protocol is still the same.

    • IPv6 non-alternatives: DJB’s article, 13 years later

      With the world passing 10% IPv6 penetration over the weekend, we see the same old debates coming up again; people claiming IPv6 will never happen (despite several years now of exponential growth!), and that if they had only designed it differently, it would have been all over by now.

      In particular, people like to point to a 2002–3 article by D. J. Bernstein, complete with rants about how Google would never set up “useless IPv6 addresses” (and then they did that in 2007—I was involved). It’s difficult to understand exactly what the article proposes since it’s heavy on calling people idiots and light on actual implementation details (as opposed to when DJB’s gotten involved in other fields; e.g. thanks to him we now have elliptical curve crypto that doesn’t suck, even if the reference implementation was sort of a pain to build), but I will try to go through it nevertheless and show how I cannot find any way it would work well in practice.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

01.05.16

Links 5/1/2016: NVIDIA Shows Linux Some Love, Black Lab Enterprise Linux 8.0 DP3

Posted in News Roundup at 7:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Residents Sue Over ‘Negligent’ Practices By Gas Company, As Pipeline Leak Goes Into Third Month

      For more than two months, methane has been escaping from a storage well in Los Angeles, causing the evacuation of thousands of homes and dumping more than six coal plants’ worth of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

      Now, residents are suing, alleging that Southern California Gas Company took out and never replaced a safety valve that could have shut off the leak, and generally failed to maintain the site.

    • Thousand of Californians Are Fleeing an Enormous Methane Leak. Here Are 8 Things You Need to Know.

      For more than two months, California has experienced a slow-moving environmental disaster: Methane leaking from a faulty natural gas well near Los Angeles neighborhood Porter Ranch has displaced thousands of families and is releasing the greenhouse gas equivalent of driving 7 million cars each day.

    • The GOP’s ‘First Priority Of 2016’ Is Pretending They Can Repeal Obamacare

      Republicans in Congress have wasted no time in establishing their lead battle of the new year: repealing Obamacare. House Speaker Paul Ryan calls it his “first priority of 2016,” and the Senate promises a bill repealing the health law will hit President Barack Obama’s desk no later than Tuesday.

      For now, the GOP’s threat is purely symbolic. Obama will undoubtedly veto any move to quash his landmark health care law. But, with an election on the horizon, this may be the point. This is the first time that a bill seeking to repeal Obamacare will actually reach the White House — and, for conservative members of Congress, the fact that a bill will make it that far is a success.

    • Organic Farmers Score New Victory in ‘David and Goliath’ GMO Fight

      Jackson County, Oregon wins new protections against cultivation of genetically engineered crops

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Bribery over Humanity: The UK, Saudi Arabia and the UN Human Rights Council

      Wither human rights – especially when it comes to strategic partnerships. The UK-Saudi Arabia relationship has been one of a seedier sort, filled with military deals, mooted criticism and hedging. When given the John Snow treatment as to what Britain’s role behind securing Saudi Arabia its position on the UN Human Rights Council was, Prime Minister David Cameron fenced furiously before embellishing Riyadh’s value in its relations with the West.

    • Ottawa going ahead with Saudi arms deal despite condemning executions

      But the biggest Saudi mass execution in decades – delivered by beheading and in a few cases firing squad – is not moving Ottawa to reconsider a massive deal to supply the Mideast country with armoured fighting vehicles. The transaction will support about 3,000 jobs in Canada for 14 years.

    • Canada Condemns Saudi Executions, But Arms Sales Speak Louder Than Words

      Despite condemning Saudi Arabia’s recent mass executions and raising concerns about human rights abuses, the Canadian government said this week it is moving forward with a controversial $15 billion weapons sale to the Gulf state.

      Reportedly Canada’s largest-ever arms export contract, the deal was confirmed amid growing condemnation of ongoing western support for Saudi Arabia, despite mounting evidence of atrocities committed by the state, from neighboring Yemen to its own soil.

    • The Refugee Conundrum

      This past summer, Germany suspended the Dublin regulation, requiring refugees to remain in their port of entry, unfairly burdening certain countries with a staggering number of refugees.

    • US Enabled Saudi Arabia’s Crackdown on Pro-Democracy Protesters

      Just days before Saudi Arabia performed a mass execution of 47 people, including four pro-democracy protesters; the US approved tens of millions in military contracts to the Saudi government. The contracts include $24 million to Raytheon Company for equipment relating to Patriot missiles, $12 million to Advanced Electronics Co. for electronics updates to F-15 fighter jets, and tens of millions of dollars to Boeing Co. for implementation of a laser guided, air-to-ground weapons system.

    • Iraqi Shiites up in Arms, claim Saudi “Spying on behalf of ISIL/Daesh”

      Saudi Arabia’s execution on Saturday of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr Baqir al-Nimr has so far not created a crisis between Riyadh and the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government. But Saudi Arabia’s name with the rank and file Shiites and parliamentary backbenchers is mud.

      On Tuesday, thousands (or perhaps only hundreds) of demonstrators from the Muqtada al-Sadr bloc came out in front of the walled-in Green Zone to demand that the Saudi embassy be closed. Alarmed, al-Jubeir called his counterpart, expressing fears that the mission might be overwhelmed by angry crowds. The Iraqi foreign minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, pledged to Riyadh that his government would protect the Saudi embassy. Contrary to some reports, it has not been attacked.

    • Saudi Arabia, Our Great and Good Ally

      One way or another, there’s not much question that this was a calculated move by Saudi Arabia. They knew how Iran would react—and they hoped that it might scuttle the Syrian peace talks, maybe the Iranian nuclear deal too, and at the very least, create some chaos that they could take advantage of.

      Ladies and gentlemen, this is our great and good ally. They flog apostates. They export Sunni extremism. They treat women as chattel. They flog and imprison gays. They import slave labor from abroad. They have no truck with freedom of religion or freedom of speech. Their royal family is famously corrupt. And they really, really want to start up a whole bunch of wars that they would very much like America to fight for them.

    • The Saudis Go Full ISIS

      Saudi Arabia has perpetrated a mass execution that puts ISIS’s beach beheadings to shame. Forty-seven heads rolled on Saturday. One of them belonged to Nimr al-Nimr, a revered Shi’ite cleric who had been sentenced to death for sermons in which he criticized the government (especially for its persecution of the country’s Shi’ite minority). His brother has been sentenced to be crucified.

    • US Should Stop Supporting Likely Saudi War Crimes

      Yemen is a small, poor, and insignificant (from the perspective of US vital interests) country just South of Saudi Arabia. It doesn’t even produce much oil; but of course Saudi Arabia does – and that’s why the Saudis are getting so much US support, despite Saudi Arabia’s despicable foreign and domestic policies. The US government ousts dictators in Iraq and Libya and loudly criticizes Iran’s bad human rights policies; in contrast, the United States mutes its criticism of Saudi Arabia’s atrocious human rights record, sweeps under the under the rug that the 9/11 attackers were mostly Saudi nationals, and ignores that Saudi Arabia is the biggest exporter of militant Sunni Islamism by its support for radical schools around the Islamic world. Why does the world’s only superpower tolerate a major ally supporting potential US enemies (the US has the same toleration for Pakistan doing a similar thing)?

    • US Military Leadership Resisted Obama’s Bid for Regime Change in Syria, Libya

      Seymour Hersh’s recent revelations about an effort by the US military leadership in 2013 to bolster the Syrian army against jihadist forces in Syria shed important new light on the internal bureaucratic politics surrounding regime change in US Middle East policy. Hersh’s account makes it clear that the Obama administration’s policy of regime change in both Libya and Syria provoked pushback from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

    • Does Bernie Sanders’ Imperialism Matter?

      When Sanders attempted to frame Hillary as “pro-regime change” in relation to the catastrophe she created in Libya, Hillary pointed out that Sanders voted “yes” to support that regime change. As the war machine rolled into Libya Sanders wasn’t a speed bump; he was a lubricant. Clinton and Sanders both have Libyan blood on their hands.

      Sanders has Afghan blood on his hands too, having voted for the invasion of the now-endless Afghan war that triggered the beginning of the flurry of Middle East wars. And while Sanders brags about voting “no” for the 2003 Iraq war, his vote soon morphed into a “yes,” by his several votes for the ongoing funding of the war/occupation.

      Sanders also voted “yes” for the U.S.-led NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, and supports the brutal Israeli military regime that uses U.S. weapons to slaughter Palestinians.

      When it was announced that Obama was choosing sides and funneling guns to the Syrian rebels — thus exacerbating and artificially extending the conflict — Bernie was completely silent; a silence that helped destroy Syria and lead to the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

    • Saudi Arabia ‘Torpedoes’ American Middle East Policy With Execution Of Shia Cleric

      The execution of Nimr has already raised sectarian tensions in the Middle East between Iran, a country ruled by Shia Ayatollahs, and a few Sunni-majority states. The execution led to protests by Shia in Baghdad, Al Awamiyah in Saudi Arabia, Srinagar and Lucknow in India, and Tehran. A crowd stormed and torched the Saudi embassy in Tehran over the weekend, leading Sunni-ruled states Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Sudan, and Bahrain to suspend diplomatic ties with Iran.

    • Donald Trump Displays Profound Foreign Policy Incoherence on O’Reilly Factor

      First off, the US is already plenty involved in Yemen, with more than a billion dollars in sales of munitions (including internationally-banned cluster bombs) to the Saudis, as well the use of US military personnel offering direct “targeting assistance” for the relentless Saudi-led bombing campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who overthrew the Saudi-backed Yemeni government last year.

    • Agh Scary Dark Hordes Are Coming!

      So fetid real Donald Trump has released his first TV ad, a stunningly unsavory mess of race-baiting, fear-mongering and lies that highlights the long, dark, mournful plunge this country has taken from our better angels. The grainy=sinister black and white ad begins with images of Obama and Hillary quickly and subtly morphing into photos of the San Bernardino shooters – get it?!? – and goes downhill from there. The real Trump says Muslim terrorists are everywhere which is why we need a “temporary shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until we can figure out what’s going on” – the most coherent policy proposal and Bestest Line Ever – and then Donald will “quickly cut the head off ISIS and take their oil,” even though actually it’s not theirs, and then he’ll “stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for.” This promise is accompanied by overhead video of ant-like brown folks swarming toward a wall that turns out to be Moroccan migrants trying to cross the border into Spanish territory in 2014; his campaign said “No shit, but that’s what our country is going to look like” – even though actually illegal immigration has steadily dropped – and the “Pants on Fire” lie was “1,000% on purpose,” so it’s all good. Or, umm, not.

    • Pentagon Slush Fund is Draining the Economy and Militarizing Foreign Policy

      Late last year, Congress authorized $514 billion in baseline defense spending for fiscal year 2016. However, on top of the baseline budget, another $59 billion was authorized for the war budget, also known as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund. These budgets combined give the Pentagon a total of $573 billion to spend this fiscal year.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Power Imbalances in Ukraine

      The western press is ginning up alarm because hackers caused a power outage in Ukraine.

      [...]

      While the physical attack did get coverage, there seemed to be little concern about the implications of an attack aiming to undercut Russian control of the peninsula. Whereas here, the attack is treated as illegitimate and a purported new line in the sand.

    • US gives meat producers a pass on climate change emissions

      If the Paris climate pact is going to succeed at staving off climate change disaster, the 195 participating countries will need to achieve a difficult feat – trust.

      Yet the U.S. government already is failing to implement its own rules on tracking emissions. It is not collecting emission reports from one of the country’s largest sources of greenhouse gases: meat production.

    • ‘Volcanic’ Porter Ranch Gas Leak May Take Months to Close

      The gas leak in Porter Ranch, California that has been pumping tens of thousands of kilograms of methane into the air every hour since October 23 may take months to close up, according to state officials.

      Thousands of residents in the San Fernando Valley community, roughly 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles, have been forced to relocate due to health problems caused by the fumes—including, in some cases, bleeding eyes and gums.

      However, officials recently announced that fixing the broken pipe will take more time than initially planned, with emergency crews unlikely to finish closing it up before March or April due to unexpected safety concerns.

      Methane emissions are up to 87 times more polluting than carbon dioxide over a 20-year span. Advocates for the residents warned there could be untold public health consequences, while environmentalists note that the size of the leak, which continues full force, is roughly a quarter of California’s total annual methane emissions.

    • Sanders Blasts Trump On Weird Climate Change Claim

      Bernie Sanders is apparently fed up with Donald Trump’s offhand and often outlandish claims. On Monday night, the Democratic candidate blasted Trump’s claim that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.

      “What an insight,” the independent senator from Vermont told the audience at a New Hampshire rally. “How brilliant can you be? The entire scientific community has concluded that climate change is real and causing major problems, and Trump believes that it’s a hoax created by the Chinese. Surprised it wasn’t the Mexicans.”

    • Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Fate of Our Earth

      It’s clear that neither of these true terrors of our planet and our age has to happen (or at least, in the case of climate change, come to full fruition). To ensure that, however, we and our children and grandchildren would have to decide that the fate of our Earth was indeed at stake and act accordingly. We would have to change the world.

  • Finance

    • Trade negotiators won’t face the truth: investors don’t need special treatment

      The year started with a bang in the trade world. The Commission published initial findings from a 2014 public consultation on the reform of ISDS, or investor-state dispute settlement. The report found that less than 3% of the 150,000 participants supported this reform agenda. The remaining 97% opposed either ISDS reform or the mechanism altogether.

    • How The TPP Is Trouble: Public Interest Explicitly Tossed In Favor Of Corporate Interests

      Michael Geist is counting down the days to when the TPP can first be signed in the US (February 4th) by going through and highlighting problematic aspects of the agreement. He’s started with the simple fact that the TPP’s intellectual property section is explicitly designed to favor corporations over the public. We’ve obviously discussed some of this ourselves, such as the fact that the only reference to things like the public’s rights (such as fair use) is to recommend that countries consider them, but when it comes to stronger copyright and patents, the TPP requires them.

    • Wall Street Kicks Off 2016 With a Faceplant

      While the proximate cause of the current turbulence is China’s flagging manufacturing sector, the underlying reasons are even more important, like the dismal state of the US economy which continues to languish in a long-term coma. Here’s a brief recap from economist Jack Rasmus at CounterPunch:

    • Why Sanders’ Economic Plan Is Best For The 99 Percent

      Sanders would increase the public investments in jobs-creating infrastructure by $1 trillion over the same five-year period – creating one million new jobs, while helping to retool the U.S. economy to reduce carbon emissions.

    • ‘Break Em Up!’: Sanders Speech Takes Aim at Big Bank Greed
    • U.S. Laws Criminalizing Sleeping in Public Have Grown as Much as 60 Percent in Just a Few Years

      There is a war on, and it concerns the homeless’ right to sleep. Across the United States, recent years have seen a spate of municipal laws that criminalize the act of sleeping in public places. These laws often target the act of sleeping in private vehicles under the guise of “anti-camping” legislation.

    • People My Age Have Had Their Aspirations Crushed by Austerity – It’s Time to Change That

      We know the devastating impact austerity has had on our most vulnerable, but what we don’t talk about is how it has resulted in crushed aspirations for a whole generation.

    • Ghoulish Wall Street Speculators Pour Money Into Gun Companies

      Even before President Obama began explaining a slate of executive actions to tighten background checks for gun buyers on Tuesday morning, Wall Street speculators delivered a late Christmas present to gun manufacturers.

      Stocks in Smith & Wesson and competitor Sturm Ruger leapt dramatically in morning trading as investors flocked to the firms, anticipating that gun sales will spike in response to the modest tightening of background check rules.

    • Top bosses will earn ‘more than UK average salary’ by end of today

      Top FTSE 100 bosses will have earned more money by Tuesday afternoon than the average British worker will do in the entire year, a think tank has claimed.

      The High Pay Centre (HPC) compared the earnings of top executives with the average salary of UK workers and found that bosses would only need to work 22 hours to reach the median full-time employee salary.

    • Happy 2016! These CEOs Have Already Banked An Average Worker’s Salary

      By lunchtime Monday, Canada’s top chief executives had already banked an average worker’s annual salary.

      To put that another way, in 2014, the country’s top-paid CEOs took home 184 times as much as the average Canadian worker, according to an annual report on publicly-traded companies released Monday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

      According to the report, the average take-home for a CEO in the country was $8.96 million, accumulated through salaries, stock options, bonuses, and share grants. Meanwhile, the average worker earned a total of $48,636, while the average minimum wage worker got $22,010.

    • Who’s Being Fined? Not Corporate Criminals

      One way to check on government action against corporate crime is to type into Google News the word “fined.”

      Who is getting fined for wrongdoing?

      Five years or so ago, if you did this, you would get a smattering of corporate criminals on the first page.

      But let’s look and see what we get today.

      First story up out of the NBA — Paul George, Marcus Morris fined for Saturday’s altercation.

      Second story up also out of the NBA — Bucks’ Mayo fined $25,000 by NBA for dispute with referee.

      Then you have a story out of Thailand — Western tourists fined for flashing their breasts on Thai island of Phuket.

    • The ‘Pink Tax’ Is a Myth

      During the height of holiday shopping season, a consumer report stoked ample ill-will toward American manufacturers after purporting to show that women’s products are priced higher for completely arbitrary reasons. This so-called “pink tax,” said the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), affects almost every product marketed at American females, “from cradle to cane.”

    • Dow Plunges 276 Points in First Trading Day of 2016

      Global stocks kicked off 2016 with a stumble, as a disappointing report on China’s economy rekindled concerns over slowing global growth and tempered hopes for a better year.

    • Forget the Market Plunge. This Year, the Global People Plunge Continues

      Though global stocks peformed gymnastics on Monday, the real problem for working- and middle-class people: The economy is rigged.

    • The Economy in 2016: On the Edge of Recession

      Consider: The median wage is 4 percent below what it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. The median wage of young people, even those with college degrees, is also dropping, adjusted for inflation. That means a continued slowdown in the rate of family formation—more young people living at home and deferring marriage and children – and less demand for goods and services.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • O’Reilly Lets Trump Off The Hook For His Misleading TV Ad That Misrepresented US Southern Border
    • 12 Craziest Things About Trump’s Spokeswoman Katrina Pierson

      Pierson’s most recent act of provocation was wearing a necklace of bullets for a CNN interview, to show her love and support for the NRA. When she was criticized, she said she’d wear a necklace of fetuses next time, to bring “awareness to 50 million aborted people that will never [get] to be on Twitter.” She did not stop there, adding “the liberals freaking out about my accessories are sexist. They only approve of women in pantsuits and jackets. Oh, and tampon earrings.” That last bit was a reference to MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry’s unusual accessories in a July 2013 broadcast.

    • Debate Schedule Is Allowing GOP To Frame Election Narrative

      The last Democratic presidential debate was buried on a Saturday night up against the opening of Star Wars. Naturally it drew a fraction of earlier Republican debate audiences – and even of the earlier Democratic debates. The next debate is scheduled, astonishingly, on a Sunday night, January 17, the middle day of a three-day weekend. But just in case that might still draw an audience, it is also up against NFL playoff games. What is going on?

    • Jeb Bush May Seek a Campaign Boost From His “Very Popular” Brother

      With Hillary Clinton bringing her husband (and 42nd US president) Bill Clinton on the campaign trail with her in New Hampshire, Jeb Bush may soon follow suit with his presidential kin. The former Florida governor appeared on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning, and host Brian Kilmeade asked whether he would follow Clinton’s lead and recruit his brother, former president George W. Bush, to boost his struggling campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

  • Censorship

    • Schools’ PC censorship strangles the free mind

      In the face of spiraling campus demands for trigger warnings, safe spaces, mandatory diversity training and sanctions against offensive words, some pundits are asking where today’s college students learned to be so fearful of competing viewpoints.

      One answer that has escaped scrutiny could lie in our public schools, where principals and school boards too often fail to teach and respect students’ speech rights.

      Writing in 1943, while the nation was at war, in a case on the right of students to refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, Justice Robert Jackson proclaimed that individual rights must be respected even in grade schools “if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source.”

    • Turkey Has Released VICE News Journalist Mohammed Rasool On Bail

      VICE News journalist Mohammed Ismael Rasool has been released on bail in Turkey after spending more than four months behind bars on terrorism charges.

      Rasool was detained alongside two VICE News colleagues on August 27 and sent to a maximum security prison.

      A document issued by a court in Diyarbakir stated that no bail payment was made, that Rasool was detained “as a protective measure,” and he cannot leave the country. He must also report twice a week to a police station near where he lives.

    • US Copyright Office Asks For Public Comments On DMCA’s Notice And Takedown

      What comes out of this may certainly be interesting, but it’s not difficult to predict that there will be two huge piles of responses that are more or less diametrically opposed: a group of content creators who are obsessed with the fact that they have to send takedown notices and that their works still keep popping up will complain about all of this, and say that the notice and takedown process is too onerous for content creators, and that we should move instead to a world where platforms have to pro-actively monitor things, such as with a “notice and staydown” procedure. On the flip side, you’ll have plenty of people and internet platforms talking about how onerous things are from the other side: platforms are inundated with piles of requests, many of which are completely bogus, but which companies often feel compelled to take down to avoid liability. And end users face tons of censorship due to bogus and abusive takedowns.

    • ‘ISIS New Years Eve Terror Plot’ Story Is Totally Bogus

      Another major holiday, another sensational ISIS terror plot the FBI takes credit for preventing. This time, the case splashed across the news is that of Emanuel Lutchman, a 25-year-old panhandler in Rochester, New York who allegedly plotted to attack a restaurant on New Years Eve. All major network broadcasts lead with the story and it was breathlessly featured everywhere from The New York Times to CNN. There’s only one problem: the way the story is being presented is wildly inaccurate and in many ways factually false.

      Like almost all 11th hour FBI terror busts, the only thing the media has to go off is a DOJ criminal complaint that’s released to the press. Statements from the accused or their lawyer very rarely reach the public. And he criminal complaint and FBI press release are framed to deliberately deceive the media.

      Let’s run down some of the key claims made by the media and why they’re either factually incorrect or misleading.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Man Charged With Planning (Non-) Attack on Behalf of ISIS

      New York governor Andrew Cuomo said in an interview that “the arrest of Emanuel Lutchman is an important reminder of the new normal of global terrorism.”

    • Out of Options, California Ships Hundreds of Troubled Children Out of State

      At 14, Deshaun Becton’s life is a roadmap to California’s faltering efforts to care for its most troubled children.

      Over more than a dozen turbulent years, he lived with a half-dozen foster families and in five different group homes. Now he is among the more than 900 children that California sends to out-of-state residential facilities, most of them in Utah, a ProPublica analysis shows.

      Each of these children represents a surrender of sorts: a tacit acknowledgement that California — the nation’s biggest and, by some measures, richest state — somehow has no good answer for them.

    • Children Caught In Sweep as Feds Begin Mass Deportations
    • More Than 120 Central Americans Taken Into Custody In Large-Scale Deportation Raid

      Don’t open your door. Ask for a warrant when a stranger knocks on your door. Memorize the phone numbers of relatives and lawyers.

      These are just some of the pieces of advice that immigrant advocates have been giving Central Americans who entered the country after May 2014, now that the Obama administration has begun an aggressive immigration operation targeting them for deportation in the new year.

      Over the weekend, at least 121 Central American individuals primarily from Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina were taken into custody and are now in the process of being repatriated to their countries of origin.

    • Cliven Bundy’s Neverending War

      A year and a half after television news crews departed Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch, the revolution he hoped to spark against federal stewardship of public lands is still going. But it’s hard to say it’s going strong.

    • It’s Not Just Militia Members Who Want to Take Over Federal Land

      Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has also endorsed state or private control of federal land. “You run into problems now with the federal government being, you know, this bully,” Paul told a crowd in June before meeting with Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who refused to pay more than $1 million in fees for grazing his cattle on federal land. The meeting, Bundy said, helped show Paul “the difference between Cliven Bundy’s stand and Ken Ivory’s stand.” Bundy’s son Ammon is currently leading the armed occupation in Oregon.

    • The Rule Of Law No Longer Exists In Western Civilization — Paul Craig Roberts

      Bundy and militiamen, whose count varies from 15 to 150 in the presstitute media, have seized an Oregon office of the BLM as American liberty’s protest against the frame-up of the Hammonds on false charges. As I write the Oregon National Guard and FBI are on the way.

    • The Bundy Siege is a Wake-Up Call: American Extremists Are Getting Desperate and Dangerous

      Something scary is happening in the so-called libertarian west. Armed terrorists have taken over a federal building in Oregon. By now, you know the story, even as it plays out in real time. It’s an escalation of an ongoing battle that started with the Cliven Bundy Ranch fiasco, wherein a gutless Federal government let a bunch of armed kooks run roughshod over basic law enforcement. Bundy refused to pay his grazing fees, and instead decided to make his private profit with stolen public resources, threatening violence if authorities attempted to correct his infractions. This latest dustup is superficially about a couple of ranchers given five-year prison sentences for setting fires that destroyed public land, but that is only a flimsy pretext; this is another round of antisocial behavior by a group of (mostly) men who are watching the decline—if not outright elimination—of their power and influence in the west.

    • What’s Wrong With Laughing & Labeling Oregon Militants “Terrorists”

      There are others, who have made similar funny remarks. Cliff Schechter, a Daily Beast columnist, suggests, “Could be much worse. Could be group of 12 year-old African American kids wielding toy guns in Oregon. Then we’d use napalm.” And various others believe they are clever as they compose variations of, when will leaders in the White community renounce this violence?

      I have a joke of my own. Good thing these militants aren’t in North Waziristan. Otherwise, President Kill List would have an armed drone flying over their heads faster than one could say white caliphate.

      However, there is one issue with all of this humor: it is predicated on concepts of identity, which are reinforced through disproportionate actions of the State.

      The language is a product of understandable frustration and cynicism toward a government, which fails to apply a system designed to fight “terrorism” equally against all people regardless of their skin color or religion. It is rooted in a powerlessness, a recognition that there is no movement to meaningfully unravel a system, which fuels the disparity in law enforcement. But the target appears to be the government for failing to criminalize all people to the same extent as the government would criminalize brown or black people, who engaged in similar acts.

    • These Two Photos Are Worth a Million Words in Explaining Oregon Militia Leader Blain Cooper

      These two photos are pretty much all you need to know about the leader of the armed white men who have taken over the federal building in Oregon, a group the Internet has dubbed Y’all Qaeda.

    • Terrorism, American Style

      We in America thus must deal with the unfortunate fact that domestic terrorism is becoming a serious national security threat, greatly helped by the provocative rhetoric of the leading Republican presidential candidates. Since 9/11, “non-Islamic extremists” actually account for more lives lost than “Islamic extremists,” by 48 to 45. Yet, this predominantly white, male, Christian terrorism invariably escapes being labeled as such. Instead, the mass media uses more polite language, such as “militia men” and “armed activists”—words that probably would not be applied if the terrorists were American Indians, African Americans, Jews, or of course Muslims. As Janell Ross writesin the Washington Post, “The descriptions of events in Oregon appear to reflect the usual shape of our collective assumptions about the relationship between race and guilt—or religion and violent extremism—in the United States.”

    • Take a Bite Out of Crime

      Henderson, Nevada, officials have agreed to pay $13,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of a 17-month-old girl mauled by a police dog.

    • Confusion, language barrier contribute to Henderson police dog biting child — VIDEO
    • Who Killed Sammy Younge Jr.? SNCC, Vietnam, and the Fight for Racial Justice

      Issued more than a year before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous Riverside Church speech against the war, SNCC faced repercussions for its dissent. For example, the Georgia legislature denied SNCC spokesperson and elected state representative Julian Bond his seat because he stood by the statement. As he fought for his elected office, Bond wrote an educational comic book on the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the connection between the struggles of the Vietnamese and the struggles of African Americans for self-determination and human rights.

    • Attacks on Hoffman Report From Military Psychologists Obfuscate Detainee Abuse

      In the wake of the July 2015 Hoffman Report, which found that the American Psychological Association (APA) colluded with the Department of Defense (DOD) to ensure that no APA policy would constrain psychologists’ participation in DOD’s “enhanced interrogation” program, the APA Council of Representatives passed an historic ban on the involvement of psychologists in national security interrogations and at detention sites that operate outside or in violation of international law, including Guantánamo Bay Detention Center.

    • “Speed Trap Town” Dissolves Entire Police Dept After Years of Officials Getting Rich from Fines

      Despite issuing and collecting a record number of traffic fines, the money from those fines never found its way to the village bank account. The clerk of courts and the deputy clerk of courts, with the help of the ticket writing cops, enriched themselves to the tune of $260,000 before they were finally caught in October.

    • Report Finds Juvenile Program Failed to Reduce Robberies, but Police Are Expanding It

      For years, the New York Police Department has tried to stop robberies before they might happen by intervening in the lives of some young offenders. The approach was heralded by the author Malcolm Gladwell in a best-selling 2013 book as an innovative way to shake up the criminal justice process. Elected leaders gave $2 million over the last two years in support.

    • Upholding Power of the People, Court Says Voters Can Weigh In on Citizens United

      When it ruled Monday that California lawmakers can ask for voters’ opinions on campaign-spending laws, the state Supreme Court underscored “that the ultimate power of our government is vested in the people,” Common Cause senior vice president Karen Hobert Flynn declared in the wake of the decision.

      By upholding the legality of Proposition 49—which would ask voters whether Congress should propose an amendment overturning the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United—the court spoke “directly to the question we have faced since the Citizens United ruling,” Hobert Flynn continued. “Are we a democracy of, by, and for the people, or are we to be ruled by an elite, moneyed class, where the power of government rests in the hands of a few wealthy special interests?”

    • California Supreme Court backs advisory ballot measures

      The unprecedented legal test stems from Proposition 49, a measure removed from the November 2014 ballot by the state’s high court that sought voter views on whether Congress should be asked to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 Citizens United ruling on unlimited independent campaign spending.

    • California Supreme Court Says Voters Can Advise on Citizens United

      A California Supreme Court ruling will let the state’s voters offer their collective opinion on political campaign financing. The court decision, which was handed down Monday, allows Californians to urge their members of Congress to pass a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United.

    • Conservatives Mock Obama For Crying About Child Victims Of Gun Violence During Speech

      Several conservative media figures attacked President Obama for crying as he spoke about child victims during a speech detailing executive actions designed to reduce gun violence.

    • ISIS’ War On Children

      Grace “Khadija” Dare’s camo-clad child might be one of the youngest to appear in an ISIS propaganda video, but the militant group has been eerily inclusive when it comes to children. Perhaps more than any other militant group, ISIS has made children into war machines. Children have long been brainwashed, drugged, and threatened children into picking up arms. ISIS has elevated their place in conflicts, given them revered roles as trained executioners, guards, and recruiters. The United Nations has confirmed that children as young as 12 are being trained by ISIS.

    • You Can’t Report Truthfully on Israel Without Facing Its Wrath

      Makarim Wibisono has announced his resignation as UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, the position I held for six years until June 2014.

      The Indonesian diplomat says that he could not fulfill his mandate because Israel has adamantly refused to give him access to the Palestinian people living under its military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

      “Unfortunately, my efforts to help improve the lives of Palestinian victims of violations under the Israeli occupation have been frustrated every step of the way,” Wibisono explains.

      His resignation reminds me in a strange way of Richard Goldstone’s retraction a few years ago of the main finding in the UN-commissioned Goldstone report, that Israel intentionally targeted civilians in the course of Operation Cast Lead, its massive attack on Gaza at the end of 2008.

    • Entire Florida Police Dept Busted Laundering Tens of Millions for International Drug Cartels

      The latest revelations show that at least 20 people in Venezuela were sent drug money from the Florida cops, including William Amaro Sanchez, the foreign minister under Hugo Chavez and now special assistant to President Nicolas Maduro.

      They wired a total of $211,000 to Sanchez, even while the U.S. government was investigating Venezuelan government leaders involved in the drug trade. Instead of reporting their knowledge of Sanchez to federal agencies, the cops went on laundering money, taking their cut, and all the while aiding Sanchez in his machinations, which likely included political corruption.

    • Cologne sex attacks: Merkel disgust at New Year gang assaults

      Women have made at least 90 criminal complaints to police about the harassment by gangs at Cologne’s main railway station on Thursday night.

      Germans have been shocked by the scale of the attacks, involving many groups of drunk and aggressive young men.

      Witnesses and police said the men were of Arab or North African appearance.

      Mrs Merkel called Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker on Tuesday and expressed her “outrage over these disgusting attacks and sexual assaults”.

      The chancellor said everything must be done “to find the perpetrators as quickly and comprehensively as possible and punish them, regardless of their origin or background”.

      Up to 300 women demonstrated against the violence near the scene of the attacks on Tuesday evening. One placard read: “Mrs Merkel! Where are you? What do you say? This alarms us!”

      There is an intense debate in Germany about refugees and migrants, who arrived in record numbers last year. But Mayor Reker urged people not to jump to conclusions about the Cologne assailants.

      “It’s completely improper… to link a group that appeared to come from North Africa with the refugees,” she said, after crisis talks with the police.

    • Two Arab-Israeli passengers deplane following demands of Israelis on-board

      “The whole episode , which did indeed delay the flight for more than 1 hour and 30 minutes, is indeed very unfortunate and we are grateful that the two Israeli passengers affected did agree to fly the next day. We thank again the two Israeli passengers that agreed to disembark for their understanding and collaboration and we apologize for the whole episode which was indeed extremely unfortunate.”

      The Director of Amnesty International in Israel Yonatan Gher said the incident on the plane reflected the Israeli government’s incitement against the Arab Israeli community following the Tel Aviv shooting attack last week in which two people were killed.

    • Imagine If They Were Black: How Oregon Reveals the Real Story About Race and Whiteness in America

      I recently wrote two pieces on white privilege and the occupation of federal property in Oregon by a gun-toting terrorist insurrectionist “militia” that is led by the sons of Cliven Bundy—the Nevada rancher who, with the aid of an armed group of anti-government protesters, stood down federal authorities in 2014 because he did not want to pay his back taxes and grazing fees.

    • Families are taken into custody as push to deport immigrants denied refuge begins

      After searching the house, the agents showed Gutierrez a photo of her niece, 30-year-old Ana Lizet Mejia. Mejia fled Honduras when her brother was killed by gangs. She entered the U.S. illegally with her son as part of a wave of Central American migrants seeking refuge from violence in the summer of 2014.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • DSL Users Still Can’t Get Advertised Speeds They Pay For, Nation’s Telcos Couldn’t Care Less

      And that 12 Mbps mark is rather generous. There are tens of millions of DSL customers who are lucky to nab 3 Mbps downstream on a good day, thanks to phone companies that face no serious competitive incentive to upgrade. Worse, some of these companies (like AT&T and Verizon) are actively trying to drive these unwanted customers away with apathy and price hikes so they can focus on more-profitable wireless. Others, (like Frontier, Windstream and CenturyLink) are buying these aging assets up, but wind up being so saddled with debt meaningful upgrades aren’t possible (assuming they had competitive incentive to do so).

    • What Is P2P File Sharing And How It Works?

      The rudimentary internet was more like a peer-to-peer network – “Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the World Wide Web was close to a P2P network in that it assumed each user of the web would be an active editor and contributor, creating and linking content to form an interlinked “web” of links”,” writes Wikipedia.

  • DRM

    • Warner Brothers, Intel Begin Futile Legal Assault To Defend Ultra HD And 4K DRM

      Believing it can keep the lid on HDCP 2.2 stripping technology, Warner Brothers and Intel’s daughter-company Digital Content Protection have filed suit (pdf) against LegendSky. According to the lawsuit, the company’s technology violates not only the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, but also the Lanham Act by falsely claiming that its HDFury hardware complies with HDCP’s license requirements.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Understanding David Lowery’s Lawsuit Against Spotify: The Insanity Of Music Licensing

        We generally don’t talk much about musician David Lowery around here any more. We covered a few stories about him a few years ago, and he seemed to take it ridiculously personally, and continues to attack me with false and misleading claims. Every so often someone sends me a link to a blog post he’s written and it’s almost always laughably wrong (for example, in one recent story he falsely claimed that “Google” is on Spotify’s board — because a former Google exec who is no longer at the company also happens to be on Spotify’s board). So, take the following with that caveat in mind. I tried to be objective in the analysis, but some will likely suggest that’s impossible given his years-long attacks on me.

      • Daughters Sue ‘Big Bang Theory’ Over Infringing Use Of Mother’s 82-Year-Old Poem ‘Warm Kitty’

        A copyright infringement lawsuit has been filed against a long list of defendants — all of it related to the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.” Supposedly, a poem written in 1933 is being used without permission of the putative rights holders (the author’s daughters) and making everyone involved with the show a lot of money.

        The poem, titled “Warm Kitty,” is often sung by one of the main characters. It has been used often enough to become its own cultural force, resulting in a pile of Big Bang Theory merchandise featuring the words and/or title.

      • Celebrate Aaron Swartz in Seattle (or Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, NYC, SF)

        I’m organizing an event at the University of Washington in Seattle that involves a reading, the screening of a documentary film, and a Q&A about Aaron Swartz. The event coincides with the third anniversary of Aaron’s death and the release of a new book of Swartz’s writing that I contributed to.

Patent Lawyers and People in ‘IP’ Jobs Warp the Debate About the Patent System: EPO-Funded Writers, Glorification of Patent Trolls, and Software Patents

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 3:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

EPO media

Summary: The EPO’s ‘communication’ campaign is coming along nicely, with staff that is unable (not allowed) to criticise the EPO’s nefarious agenda, writers that are are indirectly paid by the EPO, and opportunistic patent lawyers that encircle the system like hungry vultures

“In stark contrast to this,” wrote one commenter today, “is the proposal of the European patent Office to forbid all former employees to continue their lives with a job in IP, pensioners and younger employees alike.”

Well, EPO patent examiners can, as Florian Müller pointed out last year, start a long and fulfilling career outside the field of so-called ‘IP’ (misnomer for patents as IP is a vague term that alludes to all sorts of things).

“Come on now,” one person responded to the above. “not all former employees. If you are a buddy of BB [Battistelli] then you’ll be all right … no restrictions will apply.”

Remember our recent discovery about prohibitions on free speech by some former EPO staff. Team Battistelli has been actively trying to suppress messages contrary to its agenda, including the UPC. Even people who leave the EPO are being subjected to gags. One might expect it from history’s most oppressive regimes; well, that’s the EPO.

“Team Battistelli has been actively trying to suppress messages contrary to its agenda, including the UPC.”“In a nutshell,” this one new article claimed today, “the new Spanish Patents Act will introduce a number of changes, both in prosecution and enforcement proceedings.” No mention of the UPC, which the Spanish historically resisted (and the Spanish language is being discriminated against — a subject of future articles of ours).

Will the UPC ever become a reality at all? That’s still an uncertainty, but Battistelli and patent lawyers try to induce defeatism by stating that it’s inevitable and just a matter of time. Germany is still not accepting it, so the EPO’s mouthpieces at IAM keep trying to shame it into it (we gave another example of it earlier today). There are even worse things going on at IAM at the moment*.

The German Parliament unambiguously opposes software patents, yet German patent lawyers pretend not to be seeing these unambiguous statements. They hope to exploit confusion and expand the scope of patents, though they’re even disputed by other patent lawyers [1, 2, 3, 4].

“Will the UPC ever become a reality at all? That’s still an uncertainty, but Battistelli and patent lawyers try to induce defeatism by stating that it’s inevitable and just a matter of time.”Not only in Twitter do we find these patent boosters, who are almost always patent lawyers. “I cover intellectual property issues to prevent IP horror stories,” wrote this one writer today. It’s just patent propaganda from a so-called ‘IP’ person at the billionaires’ propaganda mill, Forbes. This is just a bunch of patent lawyers and ‘IP’ people having a ‘circlejerk’ (pardon the term) framed as an in-depth article about Alice. They are a bunch of people who work for massive corporations (like those which Forbes glorifies on a daily basis), framing patents as necessary for what’s called “entrepreneurs”. █
______
* Joff Wild, writing at the (indirectly) EPO-funded IAM ‘magazine’, now sucks up to a famous proponent of software patents and an abusive patent aggressor (likely antitrust violator) called Qualcomm, which IAM dubbed “one of our IP personalities of the year.” We already showed how IAM organised an event for trolls (having been paid by some of the world’s nastiest trolls) and IAM ‘magazine’ now gives an award to a patent troll and defends these indefensible actions. According to this new report, patent trolls are a growing problem even in 2015. “According to a report by Unified Patents,” said the unnamed author, “an organisation that claims to fight ‘patent trolls’, published yesterday, January 4, NPEs were responsible for 66% of all infringement claims filed in US courts, an increase on last year’s figure of 61%. High-tech patents accounted for the majority of cases (64%) asserted in US courts. Following an overall drop in the number of claims filed in 2014 compared to 2013, the year 2015 saw infringement claims asserted at US courts rise by 14% compared with last year. In 2015, 5,769 cases were filed compared to 5,045 in 2014. More than 3,000 of the claims filed in 2015 were from NPEs.”

So Much for ‘Vocal Minority’… Half of EPO Staff Signed Petition in Support of SUEPO

Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Staff protects staff representatives and resents the management

SUEPO reps

Summary: Team Battistelli has gotten caught telling a Big Lie once again, serving to discredit pretty much anything it has to say not just to the public but even to its own staff

TWO weeks from now there will be another major protest in defense of EPO staff representatives, who are metaphorically being lined up for firing. According to this new article, support for the staff representatives is massive. Not only have nearly half of all EPO staff found the courage to publicly protest against their employer last month. “According to a SUEPO leaflet,” says WIPR, “a petition urging the suspension to be revoked has attracted almost 3,500 signatures, which has defied alleged claims from management that the three members only have the support of a “minority of staff”.”

“Nowadays we apprehensively observe that the EPO is little more than a self-serving, self-aggrandising propaganda mill which spies on every member of staff better than the Stasi ever did.”Got that? Team Battistelli claims only a “minority of staff” supports the representatives.

The EPO is basically run by a bunch of liars. Don’t believe anything they say, irrespective of the subject (e.g. the accusations against staff, the UPC). Nowadays we apprehensively observe that the EPO is little more than a self-serving, self-aggrandising propaganda mill which spies on every member of staff better than the Stasi ever did. Oh, and occasionally it also issues some patents… █

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

–Groucho Marx

The European Patent Office (EPO) Has Become a Propaganda Mill After the FTI Consulting Deal

Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

EPO and FTI Consulting

Summary: Only a few months after the EPO signed the €880,000 FTI Consulting contract there is little coming out of the EPO other than low-quality patents (including software patents) and a lot of self-serving, self-aggrandising propaganda

THERE is nothing but greenwashing this morning from the EPO’s PR department [1, 2]. Even a month later (if not more) they haven’t quite gotten tired of trying to associate EPO patents with ethics, using propaganda which they paid to create.

As Gordon B-P, a British Local Lay Minister, put it yesterday: “Why on earth should a Patent Office need a “PR Team” in the first place? Bizarre…” (in reference to this recent article of ours, as well as the FTI Consulting work)

“IAM’s EPO-friendly ‘magazine’ (also paid indirectly by EPO) is currently organising (with payment from the EPO’s PR agency) a pro-UPC event in the US.”IAM’s EPO-friendly ‘magazine’ (also paid indirectly by EPO) is currently organising (with payment from the EPO's PR agency) a pro-UPC event in the US. Yesterday this ‘magazine’ (paid by the EPO, a proponent of the UPC) kept trying to shame Germany — again! — into UPC endorsement (the last sentence says “Germany seems to have gone very quiet about ratification of the Unified Patent Court”). Is this reporting or advocacy? And if it’s advocacy (similar to PR), then whose? It’s not hard to see what’s going on here…

Yesterday we published a document from the A.C. (Administrative Council) which outlines further crackdowns on EPO staff. Here is a new comment about it which says:

“Some new CA-Docs are out.”

Self-serving and to be expected. “On a proposal from the President,,” nuff said?

This is why many of us (who have been here for a long time – and admittedly – know that it is difficult at this stage of life) are looking for a way out of the shambles that the EPO is becoming.

These people who are running (used jocularly) this place are beyond comprehension – they have no terms of reference – and yet they are given carte blanche. It only makes sense because the people that really count (elected politicians) are not just not interested enough or fail to see the bigger picture.

Luddites had the same problem back in the 18th century,,,,

Watch how the EPO is run; it’s a tyranny, not a democracy, and we know who benefits here. It’s just about as democratic as a corporation (which is inherently anti-democratic, by design). No wonder today’s EPO mostly serves large corporations, even when these corporations aren’t European at all. No wonder today’s EPO gently moves towards allowing software patents in Europe, much to the chagrin of Microsoft, IBM, and so on.

“When I said at 32C3 that “presentation of information” was also under attack, I was right. Graphical User Interfaces patentable in Germany, despite the exclusion of “presentation of information” in the EPC,” Benjamin Henrion wrote today [1, 2] in reference to his recent CCC talk, with link to this article from Bastian Best, who wrote: “Patent applications on new types of GUIs oftentimes run into trouble in Germany because the examiners consider them to be “presentation of information“. As the avid reader will know, the presentation of information is one of the items on the list of subject-matters excluded “as such” from patent protection.”

The EPO isn’t a European institution. It’s international, global, and globalist. It has become abundantly evident that Europe derives almost no value at all from the EPO and the UPC would only make things worse (unless you’re some non-European corporations seeking to sue the whole of Europe in one fell swoop). █

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