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09.02.16

Links 2/9/2016: Docker Fork Questions, Baidu’s Free Software

Posted in News Roundup at 6:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Journal September 2016
  • September 2016 Video Preview

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • A Docker Fork: Talk of a Split Is Now on the Table

      Discussions about a split from Docker are now underway among several Docker ecosystem vendors and end users. Expressing frustration of Docker’s management of Docker Engine, the technologists with the companies are exploring ways to address various issues around supporting enterprise Docker deployments.

    • Forking Docker will lead to more fragmentation

      If you have been keeping up with Docker lately, you may have come across my blog post about the sad state of Docker. In this post, I go over how the 1.12 release appeared interesting from all the marketing announcements and the constant copying and pasting of the same Docker content into blogs over the world. However, many others and I expressed our opinions on Hacker News on how Docker failed to deliver a quality product and how they failed to create a quality release. The New Stack then summarized all of the weekend discussions going on in a new blog post and discussed that a fork of Docker may arise. Is a fork really the best answer? Let’s take a look.

      The nice thing about open source software is that anyone can take the software and modify it as needed or even create their own version of the software for redistribution. Software repositories like GitHub make it really easy for developers to fork a project and begin making their own changes and improvements. A recent example was the fork of OwnCloud into NextCloud. My problem with forking is that it leads to fragmentation. I personally like one or two ways of doing something well versus many different ways to partially achieve the same goal.

    • Why the container community is wrong to whine about Docker

      The Docker inmates want to run the asylum, as Red Hat’s Daniel Riek makes clear. So much so, in fact, that there are rumblings of a Docker fork. Companies like Red Hat see their future in containers and worry about being forced into second-class citizenship, while operations vendors like VMware worry about the entire fabric of their virtualization businesses being ripped to shreds.

    • Memory Issues with Linux Control Groups Might Affect Containerized Applications

      The paper authors suggest several workarounds for these problems, including pre-touching the memory, which involves ensuring that the memory is allocated when the process starts, rather than on demand. The exact methods of doing this vary across platforms. Another option is to better assess the memory footprint of an application so that allocation can be done more accurately. The page cache usage is not easy to estimate, but the anonymous memory can be estimated easily. The anonymous memory can be estimated from system metrics like the Resident Set Size (RSS).

    • Docker usage rises, but high portability pointless for most

      The adoption of Docker — and containers in general — within AWS environments continues to rapidly increase. However, reports show that abandonment rates align with adoption rates, which is interesting for those looking at Docker’s potential.

      Docker usage has quintupled in a single year — following the patter of most-hyped technologies, according to a recent study by Datadog, a monitoring and analytics platform. But this raises some questions: Can this growth be sustained? And, if so, what will be the likely patterns of adoption?

    • IBM links Blockchain with AI in new Industry Platforms business unit

      IBM has underscored how seriously its taking Blockchain technology with the creation of a new business unit centered around it. The new business, called Industry Platforms, will be led by Global Business Services chief, Bridget van Kralingen.

      IBM’s entire blockchain leadership team will transition to the new business, which was first announced last year.

      As well as working on Blockchain technology, the Industry Platforms business will also work to promote its Watson artificial intelligence platform in the financial services sector.

      “The Industry Platforms business will bring clients radically optimized processes and marketplaces that leverage Watson, IBM Cloud, IBM Systems, blockchain, deep domain expertise and ecosystems of partners and developers,” said IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.

    • Habitat: Automating Applications, Minus Platform and Infrastructure Hassles

      Remember the days when technology platforms sat in silos and our fierce allegiance to them did too? “We’re a Mac shop,” admins would announce. “We’re all in on Windows,” another might say.

      Those days are quickly fading, along with the barriers that used to separate platform and infrastructure technologies. Instead, we are moving toward a world of containers, multiple instances of virtual machines, and multiple operating systems working in tandem. This is especially true in data centers, and open source tools are helping to drive the trend.

      There is a pronounced need for ways to run applications on multiple types of infrastructure, ranging from bare metal to virtual machines to containers to the cloud. That’s where Habitat comes in. It’s an open source project focused on “automation that travels with the application.” It has pedigree, too. Habitat comes from the makers of the venerable configuration management and automation platform Chef, which, like Puppet, has helped to optimize many heterogeneous technology environments.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • 8 Best and Most Popular Linux Desktop Environments of All Time

      In this article, we shall list and walk through some of the best desktop environments for Linux, including a few of their illustrious features and components. However, we should note that this list is not organized in any particular order.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Connect links your Android phone with your Linux desktop

        Despite the name, KDE Connect isn’t just for KDE Plasma desktop users. You can install KDE Connect on any Linux desktop environment. After that, you’ll just need to install the KDE Connect app for Android from the Google Play Store.

        With KDE Connect on your Linux PC and Android phone, you’ll be able to link them together. Notifications you receive on your Android phone will appear on your Linux PC. If you receive an SMS message on your phone, you’ll see it on your Linux PC and you can respond to it from Linux. KDE Connect also offers other useful features, like the ability to trigger custom commands and use your phone as a media controller remote. The connection is made without any servers—your phone and PC connect directly to each other using TLS encryption over the local network.

        Read more

      • KDE Arrives in Berlin, Elects Thomas Pfeiffer to the e.V. Board

        Today KDE has been arriving in Berlin for Akademy, our annual meeting, which is year is part of the larger QtCon conference. This year we are teaming up with KDAB to gather together with the wider community of Qt developers for the first time, which is a major opportunity to share experiences between the open source and the commercial worlds. Also at the gathering are the VLC developers. VLC is one of the most successful open source projects successfully reaching out to users on all platforms and is a project we have long cooperated with. And the Free Software Foundation Europe will be brining the important political edge to our talks.

      • Kubuntu-16.04 and updates

        I installed kubuntu-16.04 in April. Although I don’t use it much, I occasionally boot into it to check a few things. Whenever I booted into Kubuntu, I looked to see if the update applet was notifying me of updates. I left the system running for an hour or more, to give it plenty of time to find out.s

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Finding Five Good Linux Distributions Isn’t That Easy

      This is a good alternative list of distribution suggestions. Android is an interesting shout but having tried it myself I think something needs to happen with regards to navigation to make it worthwhile.

      Xubuntu is always a worthy suggestion and it makes a good base for creating the distribution you really want.

      I tried Netrunner out recently. Whilst it is a reasonable distribution I am not personally a fan of the KDE desktop. Netrunner does come with a good set of applications pre-installed.

    • I Asked “What Are The Best Linux Distributions For The Average Person”, You Answered

      August was a light month for me blogging wise because I was in Florida for 2 weeks and unable to post anything.

      In September I will be ramping things back up and writing more reviews and more tutorials.

      What this process has shown me is that I have a lot of good readers and I thank everyone who submitted a list and everyone who reads the blog.

      I also have a very diverse reader base with people coming from all over the world to submit their lists.

      From a technical point of view there were 42 different distribution suggestions and this is maybe why it is hard to suggest a top 5.

      However if I sort the data based on the number of suggestions per distribution the top 5 are as follows:

      Linux Mint
      Ubuntu
      Manjaro
      Linux Lite
      Ubuntu MATE / ZorinOS

      My original list included three of those distributions and the two that didn’t make the list above are Peppermint OS and PCLinuxOS.

      I can’t argue with Linux Lite and it is definitely up for a new review in September and Ubuntu MATE should probably have made the list of PCLinuxOS. As mentioned earlier I have concerns over Zorin and I will state my case in a new article next week.

      I stick with my suggestion of Peppermint however because it has been around a long time and it provides a good blend between being lightweight yet productive. I also personally still think PCLinuxOS is a good choice although often overlooked.

    • New Releases

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • Throw a Beta Pizza Party
      • openSUSE 42.2 Pushed Back as Beta is Released
      • openSUSE Releases Leap Beta, Modifies Road Map

        Software testers and Linux enthusiasts can now get the Beta release of openSUSE Leap 42.2, which was released today.

        “Leap is for pragmatic and conservative technology adopters,” said Ludwig Nussel, the release manager for openSUSE Leap. “Testing the beta helps make Leap even more mature, so we encourage as many people as possible to test it.”

        openSUSE Leap focuses on well-established packages, like systemd 228 and Qt 5.6. The release day for the official version is scheduled for Nov. 16, which is one week after SUSECon.

      • Tumbleweed Enhances Encryption, has Massive Updates

        openSUSE users are at no loss for getting new software as this week the rolling distribution Tumbleweed had several snapshot releases and there was a beta release for openSUSE Leap 42.2.

        openSUSE’s rolling distribution Tumbleweed, which was originally created by Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, had six snapshots two weeks ago and four last week. This week we will look at another six snapshots.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat’s Latest OpenStack Platform Boasts New Management Features

        Red Hat is known to some people as the only U.S.-based public company that is exclusively focused on open source, and known to many for its Linux-focused strategy complemented by rock solid support. But as I’ve noted before, the cloud beckons in a big way for Red Hat. The company has recently extended a broad partnership with Microsoft focused on Linux and cloud agreements.

        And now, Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, its latest open Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform designed to deploy, scale and manage private cloud, public cloud, and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environments. It’s based on the OpenStack community “Mitaka” release, and Red Hat says it offers customers a more secure, production-ready automated cloud platform integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2, Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, and Red Hat CloudForms for hybrid cloud management and monitoring.

      • Red Hat Inc. ranks 25th as most innovative company under the Forbes list of ‘World’s Most Innovative Companies’ list
      • Red Hat still plans on being The OpenStack company

        Other companies — Canonical, SUSE, and Mirantis — all plan on being OpenStack powers, but Red Hat shows it’s determined to be number one with its latest OpenStack cloud release.

      • Red Hat Takes Aim at VMware With RHV

        Although VMware and Red Hat might have seemed to be best buddies at last week’s LinuxCon, this week it’s become obvious that Red Hat is locked and loaded and has VMware in its sites. During a week when the suits at the virtualization company would doubtlessly like attention focused on Las Vegas and its VMWorld 2016 users’ conference, Red Hat has been stealing the headlines on just about every major tech site with news of its own virtualization products.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • SUSE Contributions, Fedora & Korora 24 Reviews, Security Distros
        • Fedora 25 Alpha Released with Wayland Default
        • Korora 24

          The Korora distribution is based on Fedora and provides users with several desktop editions. Each edition of Korora ships with multimedia support and with several third-party repositories enabled. This gives Korora access to a wider range of software with its default configuration.

          The latest release of Korora, version 24, is based on Fedora 24 and includes the same changes and technology as its parent. The Korora release is available in four flavours (Cinnamon, GNOME, MATE and Xfce). A fifth edition featuring KDE’s Plasma desktop is planned, but was not available when I began this review. The new release media is available for the 64-bit x86 architecture exclusively, however existing Korora 23 users who run 32-bit systems can perform live upgrades to Korora 24. The Pharlap driver manager has been removed from this release.

        • The next version of Fedora picks up Rust

          You know a language has arrived when its toolchain ships as a standard component with operating systems.

          Rust, Mozilla’s language for safe and speedy systems level programming, has landed a prime-time slot in the next edition of Fedora Linux, according to the change set for the first public alpha for Fedora 25.

        • Crash test dummy? Love the excitement of breaking an OS? Fedora 25 Alpha has landed

          If you’re a chronic complainer and nit-picker with a spare machine and a willingness to suffer multiple crashes, weird screen artefacts and possible data loss: Fedora 25′s alpha has landed ahead of its anticipated November 2016 release.

          If you want to help the developers by breaking stuff, don’t risk dual-boot on OS X if you’ve got live data, because this known bug is a treat:

          “The installer appears to support volume shrink for OS X volumes (Apple Core Storage) by offering a Shrink button and sizing slider in Automatic partitioning; and likewise allow numeric resizing in Manual partitioning. However, setting the installer to resize these volumes and proceeding with installation will result in complete data loss of the volume. Resize the volume in OS X’s Disk Utility to create free space before proceeding with the installation of Fedora.”

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 to Be Released on September 14, Add Numerous Improvements

            We’ve been asked by many of our readers what’s going on with the development of the next major OTA software update for Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices, the OTA-13.

          • Should You Upgrade To Ubuntu 16.04 From Ubuntu 14.04

            Ubuntu 16.04 has been out for about 4 months now and it is the latest long term support release which gurarantees support for 5 more years.

            Do you need to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 right now or should you wait a while? In this guide I am going to list reasons for and against upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04 and help you to decide when it is right for you.

          • Ubuntu Working On Improved Low Graphics Mode For Unity 7

            While Ubuntu developers continue work on preparing the Unity 8 desktop for rolling out across all form-factors, Unity 7 is still seeing some new improvements as their interim desktop solution.

          • 5 Things We Secretly Miss About Ubuntu

            Sure, it’s super stable, far more compatible, and less buggy than it was a few years back. The polish and professionalism mirrors Canonical’s own transition from scrappy startup to server-ruling stalwart.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • ReSpeaker Is an Upcoming Open Source, Modular Voice Interface to Hack Things

      Softpedia was informed by SeeedStudio about an upcoming device that was fully funded in twelve hours on Kickstart, while still having 20 days to go on its crowdfunding campaign.

    • Linaro Announces First Development Board Compliant with 96Boards TV Platform Specification

      Linaro Ltd, the collaborative engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM® architecture, today announced support for the HiSilicon ‘Poplar’ board – the first development board compliant with the 96Boards Enterprise Edition TV Platform specification. The board is the latest addition to the 96Boards family, the open specification defining a platform for the delivery of low-cost 32-bit and 64-bit ARM ecosystem developer boards. It is available to purchase for under $100 from Tocoding Technologies.

    • HiSilicon’s Poplar Is The First Linaro 96Boards EE TV Platform

      Linaro has announced the first development board that supports their 96Boards’ Enterprise Edition TV Platform specification.

      The HiSilicon Poplar development board is their first TV Platform compliant product and targets set-top box developers and hobbyists. The Poplar dev board is powered by a Hi3798C V200 SoC that packs in a quad-core 64-bit Cortex-A53 processor and Mali T720 for graphics. The Poplar board costs $79 USD or closer to $100 when factoring in shipping.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • Have a strum on Lightning Uke, the first open-source 3D printed electric ukulele
  • 3D printed ukulele comes with open source software

    A team of designers from Taiwan recently have created an open-source 3D printed electronic ukelele. This could very well to be the first open-source one in the world. With a full-size fretboard, regular strings and tuners, and a custom-made amplifier, pick-up, and speaker, the exotically shaped ukelele was named Lightening Uke and was particularly designed for consumer 3D printers.

    No matter for masters or green-hands, an ukulele would always be a good choice to play because of its portability and user-friendliness. However, few of these players would claim to be able to play “Over the Rainbow” with a 3D printed instrument. Surely we have already seen several 3D printed instruments online, (like the 3D printed violin) but these Taiwanese designers noticed that there weren’t any open-source ukuleles and that’s why they decided to bring this unique instrument to all makers.

  • Why News Corp loves open source

    The struggles of publishing giant News Corp and its media brethren are no secret, but from an IT perspective scurrying to cut costs amidst falling revenues may have inadvertently put the business on the path to innovation.

    Speaking at the Future IT Infrastructure forum in Melbourne this week, News Corp’s top infrastructure architect Nicholas Tan urged his peers to join the publisher in embracing the open source community.

    Open source is not “hobby software” anymore, Tan said.

    “It’s definitely the real deal and it is powering a lot of the tech we consume today even if we don’t realise it.”

    News Corp has been gradually deploying open source technologies at strategic points in its stack – “where our major business value is, where we need to be highly differentiated – that is where our developer talent will go”, Tan said.

  • How small enterprises can leverage open-source to build for the enterprise

    Open-Source software allows small businesses to leverage millions of dollars worth of software to build customized solutions which are usually well supported by a global community of users. Many of Canada’s closest allies have already made huge strides to adopt it for their biggest and most challenging IT projects.

  • Survey: Infographic Shows Open Source Increasingly Embraced by Developers

    Open source platforms are no longer just for a small group of hardcore coders. A recent study by Black Duck and North Bridge of developers and security professionals shows that 65 percent of respondents have embraced open source as a critical element of their development strategy.

    Emerging technologies such as containers are also on the rise; 59 percent of respondents already utilize containers in a variety of deployments to speed up their go-to-market strategies, from development and testing to internal and external production environment.

  • Culture and lack of skills holding back Australia’s open source adoption: Coles

    When it comes to the adoption of open source technologies in Australia, Niall Keating, head of Big Data at supermarket giant Coles, has said that it is both the culture and talent shortage that is holding the country back.

    Having worked in the Hadoop space for the past four years, Keating said he has seen a shift in attitude towards open source, watching businesses deploy such technology in earnest to solve real business problems.

  • Web4Africa has launched a data mirror project to localise popular open-source content in Nigeria

    Pan-African web hosting company, Web4Africa, has launched the first West African mirror project aimed at providing a local mirror of popular open-source projects in Nigeria.

    The Nigerian Mirror Project, which is physically hosted in Nigeria, will reduce the high cost of bandwidth by bringing free and open-source content closer to end-users in Nigeria through data mirroring. Access to bandwidth in Nigeria is expensive compared to most parts of the world, and this is mostly due to the fact that most of the content consumed by Nigerian Internet users is generated outside the country. With this Mirror Project, free and open-source software will become more available, and user experience will be made better with faster downloads.

  • The Intersection of Alchemy and Open Source

    As open source continues to take over over the software development landscape, so too are the metaphors for how its success today has multiple historical precedents. For science-fiction author and activitist Cory Doctorow, open source is an idea that helped to raise humanity out of the dark ages.

    In a keynote at the LinuxCon North America conference in Toronto last week, Doctorow compared the age of open source to the enlightenment.

  • Baidu open sources its deep learning platform PaddlePaddle

    Taking a cue from some of its U.S. peers like Google, Chinese Internet search giant Baidu has decided to open source its deep learning platform.

    The company claims that the platform, code-named PaddlePaddle after PArallel Distributed Deep LEarning, will let developers focus on the high-level structure of their models without having to worry about the low-level details. A machine translation program written with PaddlePaddle, for example, requires significantly less code than on other popular deep learning platforms, said Baidu spokeswoman Calisa Cole.

  • Baidu open-sources Python-driven machine learning framework
  • Baidu Open Sources its Deep Learning AI Platform
  • Chinese Search Company Wants to Revolutionize Deep Learning
  • Baidu open sources its machine learning software
  • China’s homegrown AI sector takes off
  • Baidu Open-Sources PaddlePaddle Deep Learning Platform
  • Baidu peddles PaddlesPaddles, floats open source AI tech
  • China’s Baidu to open-source its deep learning AI platform
  • Baidu follows US tech giants and open sources its deep learning tools
  • Baidu Signs Partnership Deal With HARMAN; To Open Source Software Platform
  • Baidu to Open Source New Platform for Deep Learning Community
  • Baidu Delivers a Hardened Open Source Deep Learning Tool

    A few weeks ago, in an article for TechCrunch, Spark Capital’s John Melas-Kyriazi weighed in on how startups can leverage artificial intelligence and deep learning tools to advance their businesses or even give birth to brand new ones. In a subsequent post, I noted that quite a few of them have been tested and hardened at Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other companies, and some of them may represent business opportunities.Since then, there has been more action on the open source AI and deep learning front.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Build vs. buy equation changes, as open source big data tools surge

      Build vs. buy is a decision that has long been intrinsic to the mission of the IT leader. In the age of big data and open source software tooling, the familiar dilemma has taken a different tone, according to reporters speaking in the latest edition of the Talking Data podcast.

      Important elements in making build vs. buy decisions are the total cost of ownership of software over time, the competitive benefit to be gained by adding new features quickly and the skill sets available within the organization for any given new technology initiative.

    • On complexity in big data

      What’s the scale we’re using here? What makes big data and NoSQL more complex than cloud or mobile?

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Contemplating the retirement of Apache OpenOffice

      Outgoing Apache OpenOffice project management committee (PMC) chair Dennis Hamilton has begun the discussion of a possible (note possible at this point) shutdown of the project. “In the case of Apache OpenOffice, needing to disclose security vulnerabilities for which there is no mitigation in an update has become a serious issue. In responses to concerns raised in June, the PMC is currently tasked by the ASF Board to account for this inability and to provide a remedy. An indicator of the seriousness of the Board’s concern is the PMC been requested to report to the Board every month, starting in August, rather than quarterly, the normal case. One option for remedy that must be considered is retirement of the project. The request is for the PMC’s consideration among other possible options.” (Thanks to James Hogarth.)

  • CMS

    • Drupal 8.2, now with more outside-in

      Over the weekend, Drupal 8.2 beta was released. One of the reasons why I’m so excited about this release is that it ships with “more outside-in”. In an “outside-in experience”, you can click anything on the page, edit its configuration in place without having to navigate to the administration back end, and watch it take effect immediately. This kind of on-the-fly editorial experience could be a game changer for Drupal’s usability.

      When I last discussed turning Drupal outside-in, we were still in the conceptual stages, with mockups illustrating the concepts. Since then, those designs have gone through multiple rounds of feedback from Drupal’s usability team and a round of user testing led by Cheppers. This study identified some issues and provided some insights which were incorporated into subsequent designs.

      Two policy changes we introduced in Drupal 8 — semantic versioning and experimental modules — have fundamentally changed Drupal’s innovation model starting with Drupal 8. I should write a longer blog post about this, but the net result of those two changes is ongoing improvements with an easy upgrade path. In this case, it enabled us to add outside-in experiences to Drupal 8.2 instead of having to wait for Drupal 9. The authoring experience improvements we made in Drupal 8 are well-received, but that doesn’t mean we are done. It’s exciting that we can move much faster on making Drupal easier to use.

  • Education

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

  • Public Services/Government

    • Which countries have open-source laws on the books?

      As the institutional use of open-source software continues to expand like an octopus, the public sector remains a key target market.

      Government users like Linux and other open-source software for several reasons, but the most important ones are probably that total cost of ownership is often lower than it is for proprietary products and that open-source projects don’t vanish if the company providing them goes under.

    • German free software proponents approach lawmakers

      German members of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) are once again contacting political candidates in next month’s state elections. The major, traditional parties fear the unknown, while left, green and pirate parties favour the use of such software in public administration.

      In the state of Berlin and the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern FSFE members are studying the party programmes. At the same time, the group is lobbying the candidates, advocating public administration’s use of free and open source software solutions.

    • Free Software in the Berlin election programs
    • Germany While Leading In Adoption Of FLOSS Still Has Luddites In High Places
    • Corbyn Promises Broadband For All And Open Source Government

      Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn vows to democratise the internet with funding, better public services, open source software and broadband access

      Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to deliver superfast broadband and mobile coverage to every home and business in the UK as part of a digital manifesto that also includes support for open source software.

      The Labour leader described a ‘universal service network’ that would provide the connectivity, alongside online resources for education, a digital bill of rights and a ‘digital passport’ that would be used as a secure online identity for public services.

      Public funding would be made available to make the cost of connecting citizens with services such as transport, accommodation, culture and catering and any Labour government would require all software and hardware paid for by public money to be made open source.

    • CNAS report recommends DOD ‘embrace open-source software’

      A new report from the Center for a New American Security is recommending the Pentagon take more aggressive steps to embrace open-source software.

    • Defense Department failing to capitalize on open-source benefits

      The Defense Department increasingly relies on software for everything from weapons systems to accounting, but it is failing to capitalize on the power of open-source software, according to a report from the Center for a New American Security.

    • Defense Department needs to embrace open source or military will lose tech superiority

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Nice: NASA Opens Up Its Research Online For Free

        Every once in a while, we get some good news out of a government agency. Based on a 2013 directive from the White House, NASA had finally announced early this year that it would be following the NIH model and making its publicly funded research available for free online. With the only caveat being a restriction on research that relates to national security, NASA has made good on plans to publish the rest of this research on Pubspace, its new publicly-facing portal for sharing this research.

  • Programming/Development

    • Converseen 0.9.5 porting to Qt5 is available for Linux

      During the last weeks I worked on the Qt5 porting of my open source project Converseen, a cross-platform batch conversion and image processor tool, thanks to the help of rezso, an user from GitHub who sent me some patches with a lot of useful changes that enabled the project to be compiled with Qt5.

      In addition to this, I spent a couple of hours making the project compatible (and compilable) with Visual Studio 2015 in order to make it available for Windows platforms, too. In particular, the Windows version comes with ImageMagick 6.9.5 HDRI bundled in the same package.

    • Preliminary Qt 5.8 Alpha Packages Now Available

      The Qt Project is readying the Qt 5.8.0 Alpha toolkit release.

      Qt 5.8 is now under a feature freeze and working to get its release schedule back on track with hopes of releasing Qt 5.8 before Christmas.

    • GitHub Showcases Most Popular Open Source Developer Tools

      With open source having “won” in becoming “today’s preeminent architecture,” developers may want to check up on the most popular development tools used in community projects.

      One place to do that is GitHub, the go-to choice for developers worldwide to host their open source projects. Sure, the company has published the occasional report based on data mining its stores of projects, such as one recent study of the most popular programming languages, but there’s another resource that devs can consult at any time to check up on the hottest trends in open source development.

    • 5 great Java performance optimization tricks

      Optimizing your Java code requires an understanding of how the different elements in Java interact, and how it interacts with the operating system that is it running on. Use these five tips and resources to start learning how to analyze and optimize your code.

      Before we get to the good stuff, you might be concerned about licensing. Java is owned by Oracle, and is under Oracle’s BCL license which is not a free/open source license. Even so, Oracle Java is part of many open source projects. OpenJDK is the free software implementation of the Java platform, licensed under GPL v2. (See Free Java implementations on Wikipedia for more information.)

Leftovers

  • Genode OS 16.08 Released With seL4 Kernel Improvements

    Genode OS 16.08 allows running more software off the seL4 micro-kernel, adds support for virtual networking and Tor, support for VirtualBox on top of the Muen separation kernel, support for VirtualBox 5 on their NOVA kernel, virtual AHCI controller support, statistical profiling support, and more.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • WHO Debates Expansion Of Role In Virus-Sharing

      The global treatment of influenza is under reconsideration at the World Health Organization this week, as a review group of a WHO influenza pandemic framework looks at issues such as its relationship with an international treaty protecting countries’ ownership biological resources.

    • WHO Flu Pandemic Framework Working, Group Says; Some Concerned

      A World Health Organization framework to respond to influenza pandemics is working successfully, the confidential draft report of a review team has found. But some areas, such as virus genetic information, still need more work. Stakeholders, meanwhile, are challenging some findings and a concern was raised that lawyers may be influencing the science behind decisions on this issue.

  • Security

    • Linux Foundation Restructuring CII Security Effort for Scale

      Since creating the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) in 2014 in response to the Heartbleed vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic library, the Linux Foundation has raised $5.8 million in funding to support the effort. It easily could raise much more, given its popularity.

      Nicko van Someren, CTO of the Linux Foundation, is leading an effort to restructure the governance model for the CII, to help accelerate security for the internet. In a video interview, he details his suggested changes, which are being reviewed by the CII’s existing membership.

    • BlackArch Linux Ethical Hacking OS Is Now Powered by Kernel 4.7.2, New ISOs Out

      On August 30, 2016, the development team behind the BlackArch Linux penetration testing distribution based on Arch Linux announced the release of new Live ISO images with updated components and various improvements.

    • Kali Linux 2016.2 Released as the Most Advanced Penetration Testing Distribution

      The Kali Linux (successor to BackTrack) developers are back from the DEF CON Vegas and Black Hat conferences for security professionals and ethical hackers, and as they promised earlier this year, they’re now announcing the availability of Kali Linux 2016.2.

    • Fairware ransomware for Linux Web servers
    • The Newcomer FairWare Ransomware Hits Linux Running Servers (Maybe)
    • New and Mysterious FairWare Ransomware Targets Linux Servers
    • FairWare Ransomware Strikes Linux Systems, Deletes Files, Demands Bitcoin Payment
    • New FairWare ransomware targets Linux web servers, holds web folder hostage
    • Fantom and FairWare ransomware discovered
    • FairWare ransomware infects servers through exposed Redis instances [Ed: Rerunning a story from last month to make Linux sounds scary, due to a Redis misconfiguration]
    • Insecure Redis Instances at Core of Attacks Against Linux Servers
    • Blackhat wannabes proffer probably bogus Linux scamsomware

      A new purported ransomware variant is hitting Linux servers, deleting files and demanding payment for the return of lost data.

      The scam is possibly a bluff, since it does not follow the regular format of encrypting files and leaving ransom notes for slick and automated payment.

      Information on the attacks is scarce. Bleeping Computer researcher Lawrence Abrams suspects it is likely a copy of the deleted files with the web folder uploaded to an attacker’s server, rather than complex encryption being applied.

    • School Creates Own Security Hole; Tries To Have Concerned Parent Arrested For Hacking

      We’ve seen it so often over the years, it’s probably now time to accept the fact that this will never change: when entities are presented evidence of security holes and breaches, far too often the initial reaction is to shoot the messenger.

      A school whose online student portal exposed a lot of sensitive data decided the best way to handle a concerned parent’s repeated questions about how it was handling the problem was to file a criminal complaint against the parent. (via the Office of Inadequate Security)

      The details of the breach (since closed) were reported by independent journalist Sherrie Peif.

    • [Tor] A New Bridge Authority

      After ten years of volunteer maintenance of Tonga, Tor’s bridge Authority—a piece of critical infrastructure within the Tor network—our colleague and friend, Lucky Green, a long time cypherpunk, and free speech and privacy advocate, has decided to step down from this role. Tonga’s cryptographic keys will be destroyed this week. We are incredibly thankful to Lucky for all his support and selfless labour in maintaining a key component of our censorship circumvention efforts, grateful for the years we have spent working with him, and very sorry to see him go.

    • More Than 40% Of Attacks Abuse SSL Encryption

      There’s an important caveat about encrypted traffic from new research released this week: Encryption works so well that hackers are using it as cover.

      A new study from A10 and the Ponemon Institute found that 80% of respondents say their organizations have been the victim of a cyberattack or malicious insiders in the past year — and 41% of the attacks have used encryption to evade detection. In addition, 75% say malware hidden within encrypted traffic is a risk to their organizations.

      At issue: The report found that SSL encryption not only hides data from would-be hackers but also from common security tools.

      “Hackers are using SSL encryption to slide by standard perimeter defenses,” says Chase Cunningham, director of cyber operations at A10 Networks.

    • The Cloud Security Alliance publishes its best practices for Big Data security

      Big Data is a boon for businesses worldwide, but the benefits come at a cost. The more data companies store, the more vulnerable they are to potential security breaches. And data breaches can be enormously expensive when they occur. IBM’s 2016 Cost of Data Breach report found that the average consolidated total cost of a data breach grew from $3.8 million to $4 million in the last year, which makes securing their data an important goal for any company that’s invested in it.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Clinton: Treat cyberattacks ‘like any other attack’

      Hillary Clinton on Wednesday called for the U.S. to begin treating cyberattacks like any other assault on the country.

      “As president, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyberattacks just like any other attack,” the Democratic presidential nominee said. “We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses.”

      Clinton called for the U.S. to “lead the world in setting the rules in cyberspace.”

      “If America doesn’t, others will,” she said.

      The remarks, given during a foreign policy speech at the American Legion Convention in Cincinnati, address one the central challenges the Obama administration has faced in responding to cyberattacks.

    • How Clinton And US Government Benefit When New York Times Attacks WikiLeaks

      Without any evidence whatsoever, the New York Times published a “special report” tying the operations of WikiLeaks to Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Times reporters strongly suggested, “whether by conviction, convenience, or coincidence,” WikiLeaks’ document releases, along with statements by its editor-in-chief Julian Assange, have “often benefited Russia at the expense of the West.”

      This kind of journalism has historically been labeled yellow journalism. It is a crude exaggeration and distorting of reality aimed at sensationalism. Times reporters fuel a manufactured idea that somehow WikiLeaks is a Russian pawn of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the country’s new Cold War against the United States.

      In fact, decades ago, the CIA spread anti-communist propaganda and disinformation, which had a way of making it into American newspapers. Perhaps, during that era this type of story would have been planted by the CIA in the Times, however, nowadays the CIA does not need to plant news stories. Journalists willingly adopt their agenda and ideology and publish stories like this one, which have the same effect.

  • Finance

    • French minister calls for halt to TTIP talks

      There is ‘no more political support’ in France for EU-US trade pact, foreign trade secretary says.

      By Joshua Posaner for Politico Pro

      France wants to stop negotiations on a transatlantic trade pact between the EU and U.S., the country’s secretary of state for foreign trade said Tuesday.

      Matthias Fekl said “there is no more political support in France for these negotiations,” adding that “France calls for an end to these negotiations,” according to AFP.

    • The Secret Threat That Makes Corporations More Powerful Than Countries

      International corporations that want to intimidate countries have access to a private legal system designed just for them. And to unlock its power, sometimes all it takes is a threat. Part two of a BuzzFeed News investigation

    • Apple to shareholders: order to pay back $14.5bn in taxes ‘will be overturned’

      Tech giant Apple told shareholders it did not consider the European commission’s decision to collect $14.5bn in back taxes final on Tuesday and was “confident that it will be overturned”, but analysts warned the picture was more complex.

      In a note posted to the company’s investor relations page, the company said it did “not expect any near-term impact on our financial results” and that it was prepared to pursue the matter in court for years to come. “While we desire a resolution as soon as possible, the process is likely to take several years,” the company said.

      Peter Kenny, senior market strategist at Global Markets Advisory Group, said that it wasn’t clear which side would prevail, ultimately. “There’s no telling whether the verdict will stand on appeal, but we know that the landscape is changing for US corporations in the EU,” he told the Guardian.

    • Apple ordered to pay €13bn after EU rules Ireland broke state aid laws

      Apple has warned that future investment by multinationals in Europe could be hit after it was ordered to pay a record-breaking €13bn (£11bn) in back taxes to Ireland.

      The world’s largest company was presented with the huge bill after the European commission ruled that a sweetheart tax deal between Apple and the Irish tax authorities amounted to illegal state aid.

      The commission said the deal allowed Apple to pay a maximum tax rate of just 1%. In 2014, the tech firm paid tax at just 0.005%. The usual rate of corporation tax in Ireland is 12.5%.

      “Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies – this is illegal under EU state aid rules,” said the European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, whose investigation of Apple’s complex tax dealings has taken three years.

    • Apple Inc. Could Lose $19 Billion In Ireland On Tax Probe

      Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) was offered some reprieve on a European tax investigation in recent days after Margrethe Vestager, the Danish Commission in charge of the inquiry, decided to slow down its progress toward making conclusions. Despite that, Apple could still be very much in trouble in Europe, and a new report outlines some of the dangers that Tim Cook and his team may be facing.

    • European Commission Rules Apple Received Illegal State Aid From Ireland, Owes Billions in Back Taxes

      The European Commission on Tuesday will rule that Apple received illegal state aid from Ireland, according to a 130-page judgment known by Financial Times.

    • Apple’s Tax Game Is Hurting Economic Growth

      It’s a big number, though not nearly the tax bill Apple would owe the U.S. if it pulled the $92 billion in profits it is currently storing in Irish and other overseas accounts back to its home country.

      CEO Tim Cook says 40 percent of that would go in taxes to the U.S. and state governments, an amount he recently told the Washington Post Apple would not be willing to pay. “It’s not a matter of being patriotic or not patriotic,” Cook said. “It doesn’t go that the more you pay, the more patriotic you are.”

    • Industry’s Proposed Changes To Draft TPP Were Not Protected Under National Security Exemption, US Judge Says

      Changes to the draft text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) suggested during negotiation of the treaty are not protected under the national security clause of the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a judge ruled yesterday in a rare rejection. But he also defended USTR’s protection of information on the basis that other countries in TPP might accuse the US of “steamrolling” them if US textual proposals from the negotiations were revealed.

    • Theresa May will lead us into a bleak future – outside the single market

      In a famous eulogy published following his death in 1881, the Times wrote of the 19th-century Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli that he “discerned the Conservative working man in the inarticulate mass of the English populace, as the sculptor perceives the angel imprisoned in a block of marble”.

      Can Disraeli’s admirer Theresa May already discern the shape of her Brexit deal imprisoned in the block of marble too? This week’s cabinet meeting at Chequers gave us some clues about the Britain the prime minister sees in her mind’s eye. A briefing stressed that curbing migration is a red line, and that Britain is not interested in an off-the-shelf deal with Europe but a bespoke one. Nevertheless it is still far from clear, perhaps even to May herself, what will emerge once she has finished with her hammer and chisel.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • New DNC Chair Donna Brazile Calls WikiLeaks’ Assange A ‘Criminal’ Over DNC Leak

      In an interview on Sunday, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee criticized Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who she called a “criminal,” and the media for what she perceived to be positive treatment of the government transparency website’s work.

      Donna Brazile took over as interim DNC chair in July after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the wake of WikiLeaks’ “DNC Leak,” an archive of almost 20,000 emails and over 8,000 files that also forced out other key party leaders.

      Appearing on ABC News’ “This Week”, Brazile praised Americans for supporting the victims of the Louisiana flood then criticized Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for his failure to distance himself from the racist statements and attitudes of some of his supporters, including the so-called “alt-right” movement.

    • Bernie Sanders is a no-show for Tim Canova

      Bernie Sanders, the politician who elevated first-time candidate Tim Canova to national attention and a rich campaign warchest, doesn’t appear to be coming to South Florida to help out his protégé in his battle against U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

      At a press conference Wednesday — less than a week before the Aug. 30 primary — at his Hollywood campaign office, Canova pushed back against reporters’ questions about why Sanders hasn’t appeared in the Broward/Miami-Dade district.

      “You tell me why he isn’t coming,” said Canova. “I don’t have an answer to that. I am very proud to have his support. Quite frankly we don’t need him here to win this election. Our field operation is growing by the day. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the one who needs to run out and get folks to come in from out of town to help protect her — to shield her from the voters. I am out there talking to voters every day.”

    • The Green Party’s Jill Stein Wants a Green New Deal

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EU: Europe needs to invest $800bn in digital infrastructure to catch up with US

      Europe needs to invest close to $800bn in its digital infrastructure to catch up with the United States and China, the European Union commissioner responsible for the issue said on Thursday.

      Commissioner Guenther Oettinger also urged fellow Austrians to reject populist views that could deter technology experts from migrating to Europe to help drive development.

      If Europe can’t develop fibre-optic networks and next-generation high-speed 5G wireless applications and networks fast enough “we will lose, because important technological applications will not be possible any longer in our industry”, Oettinger said.

    • ESPN Can’t Get Out of NFL Player’s Privacy Lawsuit Over Reporter’s Tweet

      ESPN is no Gawker, but the sports giant is now facing the prospect of a trial in Florida that has shades of the litigation brought by Hulk Hogan over an invasion of privacy.

    • Court: Okay For Trial To Move Forward Against ESPN For Tweeting JPP’s Medical Chart

      ESPN’s lawyers also pointed out that Pierre-Paul is not suggesting that Schefter was prohibited from reporting on the exact details within the chart, which was the actual harming information if any harm actually was done, but that tweeting out the medical chart image itself suddenly was actionable. Why Pierre-Paul chose this attack on ESPN and a journalist rather than whatever source shared the chart with Schefter in the first place is largely left unaddressed, although the depth of the parties’ respective pockets likely has something to do with it.

      Regardless, this is a disappointing ruling on many levels. Those seeking medical attention certainly do have an expectation of privacy from those providing the healthcare work and one would think HIPAA violations may be in play here as well, but Pierre-Paul has no such expectation of privacy from a journalist covering him. The proper defendant in this case is obviously whomever provided the chart to Schefter and likely over HIPAA violations. Whatever the implications upon privacy at issue here, it seems quite clear that chilling the reporting of journalists who receive information from sources is not hte proper vector for addressing those issues. Between this and the Gawker case, along with the public comments by one well-known would-be politician, we seem to entering a different era in terms of how the press is viewed and treated in America.

    • FBI’s stingray quickly found suspect after local cops’ device couldn’t

      According to new government affidavits filed earlier this week, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) used its stingray without a warrant in 2013 for several hours overnight as a way to locate a man accused of being involved in shooting a local police officer. The OPD called in the FBI when that effort was unsuccessful. The FBI was somehow able to locate the suspect in under an hour, and he surrendered to OPD officers.

      That suspect, Purvis Ellis, is the lead defendant in the case of United States v. Ellis et al. The case involves four men who are charged with the January 21, 2013 attempted murder of local police officer Eric Karsseboom in the parking area in front of a Seminary Avenue apartment complex in East Oakland. The men are also charged with running an alleged local gang, centered around Seminary Avenue (known as “SemCity”).

    • Court Documents Show FBI Had To Bail Out Oakland Police With Its Bigger, Better Stingray

      The only reason these affidavits even exist is because the judge presiding over the prosecution of Purvis Ellis ordered the government to submit declarations detailing how the devices were used to locate him. Two declarations — one from the FBI [PDF] and one from the Oakland PD [PDF] — shed some additional light on the now-ubiquitous cell phone-tracking technology.

      Neither law enforcement agency sought a warrant for their Stingray deployments. Both declarations claim none was needed because of “exigent circumstances.” Given that this occurred before the DOJ instituted a warrant requirement for the FBI’s Stingray use, it’s unlikely any evidence is in danger of being tossed.

      The Oakland PD’s declaration states the same thing: no warrant was sought because of “exigent circumstances.” Similarly, there appears to have been no warrant requirement in place for the Oakland Police Department at that time. That doesn’t mean the court won’t find that the use of a Stingray device (or, in this case, two of them) requires the use of a warrant, but even if it does, the good faith exception is likely to apply — especially in the FBI’s case, as its warrant requirement was still thee years away. In both deployments, pen register orders were used to obtain subscriber info. Because exigent circumstances dictated the requests, no judicial approval of the orders was needed.

      Ellis’ lawyers are hoping the judge will find the circumstances surrounding the Stingray deployments to be not nearly as “exigent” as the government claims.

    • Lawsuit: Warriors App Secretly Allowed For Creepy, NSA-Style Tracking Of Users

      The Golden State Warriors are the team of the megalomaniacs and bloodsuckers of Silicon Valley, and they are run by a trophy-fucker who thinks he invented smallball. From their continued obfuscation of their own ridiculous luck with a teleological argument about how their success was predetermined by their organizational character to their second-best player humping the “Actually, Failure Is Good” line, they embody the worst tendencies of their region. I would have thought that secret data mining was beyond the capabilities of a basketball team, but according to a class-action lawsuit, the Warriors official team app may have violated users’ privacy. The lawsuit alleges that the team’s official smartphone app has recorded private conversations and other audio from users’ phones without their knowledge or permission, and without giving them the ability to opt out.

    • Flagrant foul? Mobile app user accuses NBA’s Warriors of spying on conversations
    • Lawsuit claims Warriors app used to secretly listen in on fans
    • Golden State Warriors Android app constantly listens to nearby audio, fan says
    • Lawsuit alleges that Warriors’ app illegally listens in on users
    • Lawsuit calls foul on Golden State Warriors’ app
    • Warriors’ app secretly records users’ conversations, according to lawsuit
    • Lawsuit filed against Warriors’ app for violating consumers’ privacy
    • Lawsuit claims popular Warriors app accesses phone’s microphone to eavesdrop on you
    • Class action lawsuit claims Warriors’ official app covertly listened to users
    • Golden State Warriors, Signal360 And App Developer Sued Over ‘Eavesdropping’ Allegations
    • Warriors Wrap Up: Warriors Face Lawsuit Regarding App
    • Lawsuit Claims Warriors App Monitors User Conversations
    • Lawsuit accuses Golden State Warriors of spying on fans through team app
    • Golden State Warriors’ app at the center of a lawsuit
    • Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Golden State Warriors to Notch Another NBA Championship?
    • Lawsuit Claims Warriors Team App Secretly Recorded Users’ Conversations
    • Warriors general manager says team will take time to evolve during new season
    • Golden State Warriors app alleged to record users’ conversations without consent
    • Lawsuit Claims Warriors Mobile App Eavesdrops On Fans Even When Not In Use
    • NBA Team Smartphone App Secretly Records Private Phone Conversations, Claims Lawsuit
    • Lawsuit claims Warriors app secretly records users’ conversations
    • NBA’s ‘Golden State Warriors’ app allegedly listens in on users’ conversations constantly
    • DOD data center closures could affect DC area
    • Inspector General Finds NYPD’s Surveillance Of Muslims Routinely Violated Consent Decree Guidelines

      Following two lawsuits against the NYPD for its pervasive, rights-violating surveillance of the city’s Muslims, the department’s Inspector General took a look at a sampling of cases from 2010-2015 to see if the Handschu Agreement — crafted in 1985 and heavily modified in 2002 — was being followed. The short answer is “No.” So is the long answer [PDF].

      The guideline was part of a consent decree created in response to pervasive NYPD surveillance of activities protected by the First Amendment, even when no unlawful activity was suspected. The guideline worked for awhile, but the 9/11 attacks changed that. The NYPD brought in two former CIA employees who decided to turn a domestic law enforcement agency into Langley on the Hudson. Former CIA officer David Cohen used terrorism fears to compel a judge to significantly modify the Handschu Agreement.

      >From that point on, the NYPD steadily abused the revamped agreement. Its “Demographics Unit” designated entire mosques as terrorist entities, placed the city’s Muslims under surveillance, and — best of all — generated zero leads.

      The Inspector General’s report points out that the NYPD couldn’t even comply with the relaxed, post-9/11 Handschu Agreement. Instead, the Demographics Unit copy-pasted justifications for pervasive surveillance and passed them up the ladder to the rubber stamps handling the approval process.

    • U.K. and Double Game of Terrorist Ratlines and GCHQ Spying: Control of Smartphones

      Edward Snowden warns about the role of big government in the United Kingdom (UK) and how the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) can literally control smartphones at the drop of a hat. Of course, this isn’t a shock to anyone because the British government is obsessed with monitoring various different social media networks and all forms of telecommunications. However, despite this, it is still alarming to know that GCHQ can even spy on individuals when smartphones are turned off and take images.

      Before focusing on the advice of Snowden and looking into GCHQ in relation to smartphones, it is important to mention the terrorist intrigues of the British government. After all, various governments in the UK, irrespective if the Conservative Party or Labour Party, have supported various terrorist groups since the late 1970s onward in relation to Sunni Takfiri Islamist groups. Indeed, if you go further back into history then obviously several British governments also helped America in various areas in relation to supporting right-wing authoritarian regimes throughout South America.

    • EU General Data Protection Regulation

      The GDPR seeks to afford technologically neutral protection, by addressing legal aspects of the processing and free movement of personal data in light of the technological developments of the past 20 years. The review of the personal data protection system that led to the GDPR derived from the central role that the Internet plays in personal and business life and the concerns of individuals about unlawful intrusions by both companies and public authorities into their personal data (e.g., see the CJEU’s judgement in case C-362/14, Maximillian Schrems v Data Protection Commissioner, invalidating of the EU-US Safe Harbor).

    • Leaked Catalogue Reveals a Vast Array of Military Spy Gear Offered to U.S. Police

      A confidential, 120-page catalogue of spy equipment, originating from British defense firm Cobham and circulated to U.S. law enforcement, touts gear that can intercept wireless calls and text messages, locate people via their mobile phones, and jam cellular communications in a particular area.

      The catalogue was obtained by The Intercept as part of a large trove of documents originating within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, where spokesperson Molly Best confirmed Cobham wares have been purchased but did not provide further information. The document provides a rare look at the wide range of electronic surveillance tactics used by police and militaries in the U.S. and abroad, offering equipment ranging from black boxes that can monitor an entire town’s cellular signals to microphones hidden in lighters and cameras hidden in trashcans. Markings date it to 2014.

      Cobham, recently cited among several major British firms exporting surveillance technology to oppressive regimes, has counted police in the United States among its clients, Cobham spokesperson Greg Caires confirmed. The company spun off its “Tactical Communications and Surveillance” business into “Domo Tactical Communications” earlier this year, presumably shifting many of those clients to the new subsidiary. Caires declined to comment further on the catalogue obtained by The Intercept or confirm its authenticity, but said it “looked authentic” to him.

    • Privacy Groups File FTC Complaint Over Whatsapp Facebook Privacy ‘Bait And Switch’
    • Meet USBee, the malware that uses USB drives to covertly jump airgaps
    • USBee, the new malware that covertly jumps airgaps using USB drives
    • How to Leak Data From Air-Gapped Computers With a USB Device
    • Creating a buzz: USBee software causes air-gapped computers to leak data via USB connections
    • USBee stings air-gapped PCs: Wirelessly leak secrets with a file write
    • Researchers have replicated one of the NSA’s scariest hacking tools

      Called USBee, and developed by security researchers at the Ben-Gurion University’s Cyber Security Center, the technology lets attackers move data from a protected computer over the air. Certain conditions have to be met. First, an insider must infect the computer with the malware. Then, any USB stick must be plugged into that computer. Finally, the attacker needs to be near the compromised device.Called USBee, and developed by security researchers at the Ben-Gurion University’s Cyber Security Center, the technology lets attackers move data from a protected computer over the air. Certain conditions have to be met. First, an insider must infect the computer with the malware. Then, any USB stick must be plugged into that computer. Finally, the attacker needs to be near the compromised device.

    • FBI director: ‘There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America’

      Welcome back, hope you had a great summer, let’s get right back to our regularly scheduled cyber programming: A global war over encryption.

      FBI Director James Comey, who has spent the last six months itching to get back into a public debate over the spread of encryption and mandated special backdoor government access to data, took to a spotlighted stage on Tuesday to pointedly criticize tech companies who offer default strong encryption on devices, saying he was preparing for the argument to extend into 2017 and beyond.

    • The NSA Research Director Wants Hackers to Know Who She Is [Ed: Another NSA puff piece comes out now…]
    • Mysterious Group Hacks The NSA

      The latest hack revealed over the weekend has nothing to do with the Democratic Party or George Soros, and instead a mysterious hacker group by the name “The Shadow Brokers” claims to have hacked the Equation Group – a government cyberattack hacking group associated with the NSA, and released a bunch of the organization’s hacking tools. The hackers are also asking for 1 million bitcoin (around $568 million) in an auction to release more files.

      “Attention government sponsors of cyber warfare and those who profit from it!!!!” the hackers wrote in a manifesto posted on Pastebin, on GitHub, and on a dedicated Tumblr.

    • Cisco, Huawei and Juniper play down NSA attack reports

      Cisco, Huawei and Juniper have played down reports that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has developed tools to spy on traffic running through their equipment.

      Juniper and Cisco admitted that there were vulnerabilities, that have now been addressed. Huawei did not go so far, but said the company was making “significant investments” in security.

      The reports emerged after a group called Shadow Brokers released files that seemed to show the NSA was targeting not only US companies such as Cisco and Juniper but also Chinese vendor Huawei.

    • CIA director misled FBI about how agency spied on Pentagon Papers leaker

      CIA Director Richard Helms misled the FBI in June 1972 to cover up his agency’s role in helping to smear the reputation of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked a secret history of the Vietnam War to the press, a newly released CIA document shows.

      In a June 28, 1972, memo to his deputy, Vernon Walters, Helms wrote that he asked the FBI to “desist from expanding this investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations.” Those details are included in the 155-page CIA inspector general’s report that was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch and released Tuesday. Other elements of the document were first reported Tuesday by Fox News.

      Helms’ misdirection enabled the CIA’s role in the Pentagon Papers case to go undiscovered for 11 months amid a growing political scandal that would eventually force President Richard Nixon from office and lead to an extensive investigation into abuses by the CIA and other parts of the U.S. Intelligence community.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Strong evidence suggests a Peruvian police ‘death squad’ set up and killed criminal suspects

      Nine members of Peru’s national police are being investigated on suspicion of participating in a “death squad” responsible for as many as 27 killings carried out to secure promotions and impress superiors, government officials said.

      One police general, a commander and seven officers are suspected of having organized at least six bogus police operations from 2011 to 2015 that resulted in the deaths. While most of the victims had criminal pasts, at least 11 people killed during the operations had no police records, investigators say.

      A source within a special investigative committee formed by recently inaugurated President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski told the Los Angeles Times late Tuesday that investigators believe corrupt police using intermediaries persuaded delinquents to carry out robberies and then killed them during the heists to gain performance points.

    • EFF, ACLU Asks Ninth Circuit Court To Rehear Two Recent CFAA Cases

      The EFF and ACLU are pushing the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to hold full en banc rehearings (with all 11 judges, rather than just three) of two recent CFAA-related cases. The first case, US v. Nosal, is the more (in)famous of the two. In this decision, the court read the language of the CFAA broadly enough to criminalize a mostly-harmless everyday activity participated in by thousands of Americans: password sharing.

      The court tried to couple this with some “authorization” wording to make it appear as though the court wouldn’t entertain frivolous prosecutions using interpretation of the CFAA, but that gives the court (and the DOJ) far more credit than they have earned.

      The other case — Facebook v. Power Ventures — is dangerous in its own way, even if it involves two private companies, rather than the US government’s prosecutorial arm. The same appeals court didn’t go quite as far as it did in the Nosal decision in terms of criminalizing password sharing, but instead made the district’s stance even more confusing by arriving at a seemingly-contradictory conclusion.

    • ACLU Challenges Gag Orders Issued To Tech Companies By The DOJ

      The ACLU is hoping to intervene in Microsoft’s legal battle against the government, challenging gag orders attached to warrants and subpoenas issued under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Microsoft sued the DOJ back in April, arguing for the right to notify customers that their communications and data have been handed over to the government.

      Microsoft didn’t have a problem with the government’s gag orders in every case. It’s just that the demand for secrecy accompanied more than half of the ~300 orders per month Microsoft receives. And nearly 70% of those gag orders arrived with no fixed end date.

      The ACLU petitioned the court to intervene in the case on its own behalf, citing its position as a Microsoft customer. The DOJ filed a motion to dismiss Microsoft’s lawsuit, hoping the court will find Microsoft has no standing to challenge gag orders on its customers’ behalf. The ACLU is trying to prevent this from happening until the DOJ addresses the issues raised by the ACLU’s (attempted) intervention. In its opposition [PDF] to the DOJ’s motion, the ACLU points out that the government’s “no standing” argument pretty much nullifies any sort of due process for Microsoft customers (including the ACLU) who’ve been targeted by the DOJ’s super-secret warrants, relegating them to a Kafka-esque legal purgatory.

    • Australian Government Using Data Retention Law To Seek Out Journalists’ Sources, Hunt Down Whistleblowers

      If there ever were decent protections for whistleblowers in Australia, they’re gone now. Australia’s Attorney General was pushing for harsher whistleblower punishments two years ago, while simultaneously claiming data retention laws — and expanded permissions for intelligence agencies to pore through retained data — were simply the way governments were doing business these days.

      And what a business it is. The Australian government wants to punish whistleblowers but finds they’re often difficult to track down. It’s just so much easier to find those they leak documents to, like journalists, and work towards getting them to divulge their sources. The “best” part about the new data retention laws is that those seeking whistleblowers to punish won’t have to confront journalists directly. In fact, they may never need to speak to them at all.

    • Turkey removes more than 10,000 security personnel, academics in purge

      Turkish authorities have suspended about 8,000 security personnel and more than 2,000 academics, adding to a purge of people suspected of having links to perpetrators of a failed coup, the Official Gazette said on Friday.

      Since the coup attempt in mid-July, in which rogue soldiers tried to topple President Tayyip Erdogan’s government, Turkey has removed 80,000 people from public duty and arrested many of them, accusing them of sympathising with the plotters.

      Of the security personnel removed in the latest purge, 323 were members of the gendarmerie and the rest police, according to the Official Gazette, in which the government publishes new laws and orders.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • FCC Gives Up On Municipal Broadband Fight

      Easier said than done. Telecom incumbents, like so many large players, have an absolute chokehold over state legislatures. So much so that ISPs like AT&T continue to have success passing new laws of this type despite growing, significant bipartisan public opposition to them. For years ISPs quickly passed these laws by framing this as a partisan issue of government “competing with the free market.” But as Comcast and AT&T consumers get an ongoing master class in how broken and not free the telecom market is, members of both parties have grown increasingly hostile toward protectionism of this type.

    • AT&T, Poster Child For Government Favoritism, Mocks Google Fiber For Government Favoritism

      First, let’s just get out of the way that the idea of AT&T, now bone-grafted to our intelligence agencies’ domestic surveillance efforts, giving anybody a lecture on government favoritism deserves a major hypocrisy award.

      What’s AT&T actually upset about? Google Fiber has been pushing to reform utility pole attachment rules, one of several layers of regional bureaucracy telecom monopolies used to slow broadband competitors from coming to market. Google Fiber’s been pushing cities like Louisville and Nashville for “one touch make ready” laws that let a single, insured contractor move any ISPs’ hardware — often reducing installation from half a year to just a month. AT&T’s response? To sue cities like Louisville for overstepping their authority. Such decisions, AT&T argues, should be left up to the state regulatory bodies that AT&T all but owns.

      AT&T’s taking the opportunity to kick Google Fiber while it’s down, the company plagued by recent rumors that it’s pausing a handful of unannounced cities to consider supplementing fiber service with wireless broadband. Sources with knowledge of Google Fiber’s plan tell me many of the reports about Google Fiber hitting deployment “snags” have been either overstated or in error, but the fact that Google Fiber hasn’t publicly clarified its dedication to expansion suggests there likely is some possible restructuring going on as the company takes stock of its recent Webpass acquisition and eyes wireless as a way to supplement fiber.

    • AT&T Dodges FTC Throttling Lawsuit Using Title II Classification It Vehemently Opposed

      Back in 2011, AT&T stopped selling unlimited wireless data plans, and began heavily pushing more expensive capped and metered plans. Existing unlimited users at the time were grandfathered, but the company engaged in all manner of sneaky behavior to try and make life as unpleasant as possible for these users, ranging from blocking them from using Facetime unless they migrated to metered plans, to heavily throttling these “unlimited” users after only consuming a few gigabytes of data. Ultimately AT&T faced a $100 million fine by the FCC (currently being contested by AT&T), and a 2014 lawsuit by the FTC for misleading consumers and dramatically changing the terms of service while users were under contract.

    • T-Mobile Declares It’s On ‘The Right Side Of History’ As It Laughs At Net Neutrality

      While T-Mobile has certainly done some good things for the wireless industry, the company’s ongoing tone deafness on net neutrality isn’t doing the carrier any favors. T-Mobile fought against real net neutrality rules, then, once passed anyway, got right to work trying to find creative ways around the rules using zero rating (exempting only some content from usage caps). When net neutrality advocates and scholars repeatedly pointed out T-Mobile was violating net neutrality and being a bit hypocritical (“we’re edgy and love consumers but not real net neutrality!”), the company dug a deeper hole by attacking groups like the EFF.

      Last week T-Mobile upped the ante with new plans that promise “unlimited” data, but are not only more expensive, they throttle tethering, throttle overall consumption at 26 GB, and throttle all video to 1.5 Mbps or 480p. Users who want HD video to actually work correctly can apparently pony up $25 more per month. Emboldended by T-Mobile and a (so far) apathetic FCC, Sprint revealed similar “unlimited” data plans of its own, which throttle all video, games and music to 1.5 Mbps, 2 Mbps, and 500 kbps respectively, unless you pony up another $25 per month.

      Groups like the EFF were quick to point out that installing ISPs as middlemen who get to determine how well your services work based on how much you pay in a marginally-competitive broadband market sets a horrible precedent. If regulators allow T-Mobile to charge more money for HD video to work, what stops Comcast from charging you more if you want 4K Netflix streams to work? Or AT&T deciding it can charge you more if you want your Steam games to download at full bitrate? This is a door that, once opened, won’t be easily closed. And once this practice is a standard, it will be abused.

  • DRM

    • DRM: Still Hurting Paying Customers The Most

      So, we have two issues, neither of them useful to end users. On Adobe’s end, we have a protection scheme that requires an internet connection. That’s classic DRM — phone home, get permission… all well and good (NOT REALLY) until someone needs access to documents but can’t because they’re not connected to the internet.

      Then we have an update that breaks the connection Adobe’s DRM relies on, forcing the same problem on users who do have internet access. The problem with DRM schemes like these is that they rely on a bunch of parts that aren’t interconnected (Adobe, Windows) but both have to be working properly to get the job done… rather than just, say, open Adobe Reader and be done with it. Subtract an internet connection and Adobe’s documents are useless, even to authorized users. Throw a suprisingly volatile Windows update into the mix and end users doing everything right are still screwed. Combine the two and sensitive documents are suddenly so “protected” that a majority of users can’t even view them. And, remember, this is a “privilege” corporate customers pay for.

      DRM: still mostly useless and still mainly a pain in the ass for paying customers.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • A triple dose of defeat – three antibiotic patents of Cubist revoked in one trial

      This case concerns three patents owned by the defendant Cubist Pharmaceuticals LLC relating to the antibiotic daptomycin, originally discovered by Eli Lilly in the 1980s. Patent EP1115417 (“the 417 patent”) claims a range of doses of the drug to be administered once a day. The other two patents, EP1252179 and EP2264047 (“the 179 patent” and “the 047 patent” respectively), claim different methods of purifying daptomycin. The claimant, Hospira UK Limited, sought the revocation of all three patents, which were all considered in a single trial. Mr Justice Carr found all three patents to be invalid.

    • Trademarks

      • Louis Vuitton’s Inability To Take A Joke Opens Up A Chance To Fix Our Broken Trademark Laws

        As you may recall, earlier this year we wrote about a good ruling in a ridiculous lawsuit by the notoriously overaggressive trademark enforcers at luxury goods giant Louis Vuitton. You can look back at some of their earlier lawsuits, but the one we wrote about this year was particularly ridiculous. It sued a small bag maker called “My Other Bag” who made a simple tote bag that played on the famous joke bumper sticker “My Other Car is A….” with some sort of luxury car brand listed as the final point. People would put those on not-nearly-as-nice cars. In fact, when I was a kid, my dad had a Ford Pinto (yes, the exploding kind) and it had “My Other Car is a Porsche” as a bumper sticker. It’s not a very funny joke (and I totally didn’t get it as a kid), but it’s a joke.

      • Moosehead Lager Makers At It Again: Suing Moose Whiz Root Beer For Trademark Infringement

        Earlier this year, Moosehead Brewery made the wonderful decision to get into a trademark dispute with the makers of a different beer, called Müs Knuckle, I imagine because trademark lawyers now know both that I’m paying attention to these cases and that I have the sense of humor of a high school sophomore. Moosehead essentially asserted that it owned the trademark rights to anything remotely close to “moose”, including made up words that are homonyms but which have delightfully vulgar connotations. Other than the issue of the word “moose”, none of the trade dress in question had anything remotely to do with one another.

        Which is slightly different in another trademark suit that Moosehead Brewery has initiated. In the case of Moosehead Brewery v. Moose Wizz Root Beer, the labels are somewhat similar in color and logo, though there is certainly differentiation within them as well. The real issue here, instead, is that one of these is an alcoholic drink while the other is just a soda.

    • Copyrights

      • SUPER KAT-EXCLUSIVE: Here’s draft Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market
      • Our ‘Copying Is Not Theft’ T-Shirt Seems To REALLY Upset Some People

        That doesn’t necessarily mean that copying is always legal or morally correct. But it pretty clearly is not theft.

        The shirt is selling fine (get yours soon, because it’s only available for a few more days!), but what’s been surprising is how much it has resulted in pure rage from some people who seem really, really pissed off that we’d dare suggest the simple fact that copying is not theft.

        Earlier this week, we wrote about the head of the Global Anti-Counterfeiting Group promising to make counterfeit copies of our t-shirt (which seems a bit… odd, no?), but today I wanted to highlight some of the other responses we’ve received. The fact is, many people do understand the message and seem to appreciate it, but I’m somewhat surprised at those who disagree with it who feel the need to not just disagree, but to act as if merely stating a four word factual sentence is somehow offensive. It started in our comments where someone insisted that saying copying is not theft wasn’t just wrong, but was “ignorant and irresponsible.” Huh.

      • Announcing The Techdirt Greenhouse Salon: The Battle For Copyright Reform

        Several years ago, we hosted a series of really fun events called the Techdirt Greenhouse, which involved getting a lot of smart people together and actively brainstorming on a variety of topics. We’ve been wanting to bring back the Greenhouse events for a while now, and we’re finally going to do so with a new series of evening “Greenhouse Salons” hosted by our Copia Institute. Today we’re announcing the very first of these new Greenhouse Salons, The Battle For Copyright Reform. As you know, there are ongoing efforts to reform copyright around the globe, with a proposal leaked for the EU and one expected shortly in the US.

      • PETA Has Lost Its Monkey’s ‘Next Friend’ In Its Crazy Copyright Case

        The ongoing saga that is the monkey selfie lawsuit has continued to move forward, with the lawyers for photographer David Slater filing their brief in response to PETA’s. As you probably recall, PETA had teamed up with a primatologist named Antje Engelhardt claiming to be “next friends” for the Indonesian macaque monkey named Naruto, who is alleged to have taken the following selfie with David Slater’s camera.

      • 3 copyright tips for students and educators

        Copyright is a really complicated topic, and when it comes to online use of creative works, accidentally crossing the line between fair use and a copyright violation is easy. How do you know what is copyrighted? Recently Frederico Morando (Creative Commons, Italy) and I presented a training session on understanding copyright policies at Wikimania 2016, which was originally proposed by Wikipedian User:Jim Carter. We covered topics such as fundamentals of copyright, exclusive rights, Berne convention, copyleft, Creative Commons licenses, Public Domain, fair use, and copyfraud.

      • The last thing the API economy needs is copyright friction

        The Oracle versus Google verdict set a positive precedent for the future of the API economy, but will it last? What is at stake if the decision is reversed?

        While on the surface Oracle versus Google might seem like a battle for profit between two tech giants, the implications are much more significant. This is a battle for interoperability and the merit-based making of entire markets.

UPC Threatens to Send the European Patent Office Circling Down the Drain

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“When asked by Ars, the EPO’s spokesperson mentioned the imminent arrival of the unitary patent system as an important reason for revising the EPO’s internal rules…”

–Dr. Glyn Moody

Expect a possibly new (or reused) name for the same bad scheme that favours trolls and large corporations

EPO as family business
The EPO is being run like a cliquish family business these days… and it shows [1, 2, 3, 4]

Summary: The European Patent Office (EPO) may never see the UPC becoming a reality (almost definitely not under Battistelli) and staff of the EPO should antagonise any attempt to replicate and make it a reality

THE UNITARY patent, or UPC (Unified Patent Court)*, threatens the EPO‘s staff, especially or in particular parts of the Organisation which are currently foreseen/expected to be made redundant by unitary courts, with rumours suggesting that their jobs would go somewhere like Paris (Battistelli’s gift to France perhaps).

Not much is known about the UPC right now because Brexit undermined it so badly that it may never happen at all (in no shape or form). SUEPO noticed that this German programme covered the subject, presumably “(from 14’35’’ onwards, Das Erste, 17 August 2016): on the Unitary Patent.”

“German State TV “Das Erste” Plusminus,” told me one person (who informed many others as well), has a “very critical report about UPC-from 14’35’’ onwards, Das Erste, 17 August 2016″ (a translation of it would be very much appreciated as we already have a translation of a similar TV report from Italy).

Suffice to say, there are voices in the media that do try to advance the UPC. The boosters of the UPC (like Team UPC) act as though everything is alright (it’s not!) and MIP has just published another Unitary Patent and UPC “progress report”, even though there has been no concrete progress. To quote the summary: “UK IPO speaks out on UK’s involvement in the UPC and Unitary Patent system; UK patent attorney body CIPA prefers UK in the system; experts to discuss the latest on the UPC and post-Brexit patent strategies at MIP European Patent Forums in September.”

That’s all talk and lobbying, no action. Meanwhile, as one new comment put it:

Instead of running after something which has gone, it would be wiser to put energy in saving what is left from the UP/UPC once UK has gone, but then to look at the matter with fresh eyes. The matter should be simplified and the influence of common law should be thrown overboard. After all, UK has left and the continent is not an area relying on common law.

Going back to MIP, there’s this new bit of coverage from Shanghai which says: “Post-coffee break, Gordon Harris, a partner of Gowling WLG, shared his observation on the impact of Brexit on IP rights. He stressed that EU registered IP rights remain protected in UK for the time being, and there will be no change to European patents.”

As usual, it’s patent (or IP) lawyers that dominate all those debates and it’s hardly surprising that they want more litigation and more problems. They profit from it. The more, the merrier.

EPO patents are already suffering a steep decline in quality (we covered this many times before); imagine the effect of combining that with some EU-wide courts, which would effectively empower all sorts of parasitic elements like patent trolls. Regarding the “Unitary patent and related developments,” said a not-so-recent (pre-Brexit) oral report from EPO staff, “Ten Contracting States have ratified the treaty so far, most recently Bulgaria. The ratification in the Netherlands is currently pending. The consequences of the Brexit votum are unforeseeable. The Italian delegation as well as the observers from Business Europe and epi called for “business as usual” and encouraged further engagement of the EU states to conclude the Unitary Patent. SR [Staff Representation/Representatives] confirmed that staff would in principle be ready and willing to make the Unitary Patent a success, i.e. a legal title with high legal certainty. But the SR also reminded the Council that solid search and thorough examination requires time. Political guidelines are to be given by a conference of ministers of the Contracting States according to Article 4a EPC. The SR repeated again that this conference is long overdue.”

Generally speaking, the EPO under Battistelli arrogantly disregards the EPC in all sorts of way. Not only that in fact; Battistelli also ignores national and sometimes international laws. These people want us to believe that there is some “greater good” in all this and all the abuses are somehow to be justified in the long term because of “reforms” like the UPC.

Now that it looks increasingly unlikely that the UPC will ever become a reality, where does that leave Battistelli? Why did the SR (as above) play along with only very cautious criticism? Are they already this afraid of the lunatic in chief and his goons? Has it become unacceptable to merely question the merits of the UPC? There are no merits.

The UPC is on the retreat these days; as we noted last month, it’s hardly even mentioned these days (internally and externally). Our guess is, the whole bundle of legislative laundering will be changed to overcome Brexit and maybe renamed yet again. Will staff be prepared to antagonise it? Already, boards of appeal (patent quality assurance) have essentially been ejected from the EPO’s building (exodus or diaspora imminent, probably as early as next year), so time is running out for those wishing to save the EPO rather than letting it become another USPTO (with virtually no quality control, lots of patents trolls, and leanings towards large corporations that effectively run it**). It now attempts to garner support by asking for feedback, at a time when press releases are issued aplenty to celebrate newly-granted software patents [1, 2].

Judging by some of the latest comments in IP Kat, people generally understand that the boards’ move to Haar has nothing to do with independence. To quote one such comment:

In spite of all the nice words, the message of Mr Battistelli to his staff drafting the proposal and arranging the move to Haar (and to the Administrative Council) was clear: here is what I want to do to the Boards of Appeal; now you arrange for it to happen somehow, and if necessary find an explanation why it is legal.

By the way, as an (unintended?) side-effect, the president is for the moment de facto himself in control of the Boards of Appeal; see http://amba-epo.org/; so far for independence…

Here is a comment about the legal opinion just formally unleashed by SUEPO:

The London-based lawyers, Bretton Woods Law, has produced a legal opinion concerning the actions of the President of the EPO, and the responsibility of the Administrative Council as well as the Member States of the EPO with respect to staff:

LEGAL OPINION – CONSIDERING THE ACTIONS OF THE PRESIDENT, THE ADMINISTRATIVE COUNCIL AND
MEMBER STATES OF THE EUROPEAN PATENT OFFICE

BREACHES OF BASIC AND FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AT THE EPO

I quote:

“It is not hard to see that many of the circumstances that have arisen at the EPO
amount to violations of the rights contained in the ECHR. To list but a few: fair
trial provisions are fundamentally absent at the EPO, since the President sits as a judge in his own cause; there is a lack of equality of arms, delays, an absence of due process and a tribunal that is itself beholden for its funding to the very institutions it is being invited to find against. The provisions in respect of sick leave (and the effective ‘house arrest’ of staff members) appear to contravene the right to a private and family life. The arbitrary treatment and abuses of the system in respect of staff representatives appear to be an attack on all of the rights listed above.”

It is probably worth the paper it is written on for President Battistelli and his Administrative Council.

Still, I am looking forward to the decision of the High Court in the Netherlands about the EPO breaching fundamental human rights …

Here’s more on that:

Me too.

Alas, the “Hoge Raad” seems to have pushed their decision date a bit further down the road… :(

From their site:
“15/02186 Europese Octrooi Organisatie en de Staat / Vakbondsunie Europees Octrooibureau (VEOB) en Staff Union European Patent Office (SUEPO)

Is de Nederlandse rechter bevoegd in deze zaak? En zo ja, moet deze vakbond door het octrooibureau worden toegelaten?

Conclusie 30 september 2016.”
Case number is there, and expected decision date.
A month to go, which puts it just beyond the next Board28 (22 September) and before the next AC meeting (12/13. 10.2016)

In December, we might see more party than decisions, as it’ll be meeting 150 of the AC. And that’s the AC which should discuss the results of the meeting regarding the social conference.
Well timed…

As the following comments note, Battistelli, who postponed any discussions about the social situation at the EPO until October, has produced propaganda to be used, for a payment, to lie to the Council (again):

And the Social Conference is arranged for 11th October – the day before the AC. Staff – but only the registered Union – can apply to participate but, with the ‘conference’ due to start and end less than 24 hours before the AC begins, it would be hard not to be cynical as to whether the conclusions may already have been decided or not.

The significance of the timing isn’t being overlooked:

What is the stated purpose of the “Social Conference”? If it is any way connected with the decision-making of the AC, then you would appear to have every reason to be cynical.

Also, do we know the proposed agenda for the next AC meeting? I would be very interested to learn what (if anything) the AC intends to do about the President’s interventions in case Art. 23 1/16, as well as whether they intend to make redress to the individual who was the subject of that case.

Remember the time Battistelli used his silly lobbying event and IAM propaganda to pretend (to the Council) that on the technical front everything was great? Again, well timed. The EPO is basically being run by villainous liars and since it’s like a family business there’s enough loyalty at the top to prevent dissent. █
_____
* The name of the UPC just keeps getting changed, making criticism of it harder to maintain and easier to dodge.
** USPTO Directors typically come from mega-corporations, a de facto policy which inevitably introduces a conflict of interests (one of them, David Kappos, became a lobbyist thereafter, serving his former employer and intervening in USPTO policies). The latest such Director is at least a female (Lee) — something which Brimelow might have something to say about after she got muscled out by “alpha-males”. From the figures that are publicly accessible, say some EPO insiders, “we can deduce that female staff are not fairly and equally treated since in particular very few senior managers are female. This is an inadequate situation for an international organisation in the 21st century.” The few females at the top are not only French but in some cases connected (friendliness and kinship) to Battistelli himself. One must be careful of appointment of women where these appointments are made by man who virtually control and use them for “femmewashing”. Not too shockingly, the Wall Street-funded political campaign of Clinton is supported by patent maximalists (mostly males), white male executives, and extremely chauvinistic regimes from Gulf states. The patent maximalists reportedly support Clinton because her patent policy, as we noted here before, echoes their wishlist and desires.

The Corrupting Influence of Money in the Linux Foundation (Bias for Sale)

Posted in GNU/Linux, GPL, Microsoft, VMware at 2:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

When enemies of the GPL (GNU) like Microsoft and VMware — not just GNU/Linux-friendly companies such as Red Hat — pay the Linux Foundation to get their way

Red Hat glasses

Summary: The growing danger of a Linux Foundation which is funded not just by proprietary software giants but also direct opposition of Linux and serial violators of the licence of GNU (GPL)

THE level of entryism at the Linux Foundation has become way beyond acceptable and now that only corporations are involved in decision-making (see reminder below) we expect to see the verge of the farcical. How long before the Linux Foundation is not even pro-Linux but is instead pro-industry (for the industry giants that fund and thus dominate it)? Or, put another way, will it endorse things irrespective of the very spirit of both Linux and GNU? Whether something is or is not Free/Open Source software and whether it promotes (GNU) Linux? You know something is very wrong when the (paid-for) keynote speech at the biggest Linux conference is given by the company that called Linux “cancer” and continues to attack Linux to this date. That’s like having Donald Trump at the Democrat’s conventions and campaigns.

We have been trying to write more about patents, especially about the EPO, so not many articles mention Linux or talk about Microsoft these days. Microsoft’s latest patent attacks on Free software are revealing; Microsoft says it “loves Linux”, but its attacks on Linux definitely carry on (as recently as a couple of weeks ago or less).

“Microsoft’s latest patent attacks on Free software are revealing; Microsoft says it “loves Linux”, but its attacks on Linux definitely carry on (as recently as a couple of weeks ago or less).”The following points were mentioned a lot over the past 2 weeks, but we finally decided to write an article about it because sponsored articles (for Linux Foundation funders) continue to come out from the Linux Foundation’s Web site (this disclosure says IBM, but previously it was Microsoft). Why is the Linux Foundation simply morphing into a mouthpiece? Why, for example, is it willing to publish Microsoft lies? Just because Microsoft pays for it doesn’t mean it’s ethical or worthwhile. It reminds us of the years when Microsoft used (exploited) Novell for Microsoft marketing. I’ve exchanged nearly a dozen E-mails about this with Stallman this past week and he too is concerned about it.

The main subject of this article is actually VMware, a company that has been notorious for GPL violations for quite a few years (almost a decade). Some people wrote articles noting that Torvalds had publicly acknowledged the important role of the GPL at LinuxCon. Shortly thereafter, however, Torvalds blasted GPL enforcement. A week ago we saw at least two articles about exactly that [1, 2] (related but less relevant is this article).

“VMware recently poached Dirk Hohndel from Intel (head of Open Source [sic] or whatever they call it) and it was him who interviewed Torvalds as his trusted colleague less than a fortnight ago at LinuxCon, just shortly before the above attack on Kuhn et al.”Journalists then saw a rant in the mailing lists and decided to inform readers regarding Torvalds’ public rant against the Conservancy [1, 2] (these link to the original from the mailing list). A few more articles about the subject have been published since (these are in our daily links) and they serve to reinforce suspicions that Sandler (not just Kuhn) from the Conservancy got pushed out of the Linux Foundation, causing a lot of backlash about a year ago. The backlash was about abandonment of funds (material support) to the Conservancy; it happened after VMware had joined the Linux Foundation and the Conservancy got involved in a GPL enforcement lawsuit against VMware.

But here comes the interesting thing — an observation which I mentioned last week (in passing) over at Tux Machines. VMware recently poached Dirk Hohndel from Intel (head of Open Source [sic] or whatever they call it) and it was him who interviewed Torvalds as his trusted colleague less than a fortnight ago at LinuxCon, just shortly before the above attack on Kuhn et al. It reinforces the suspicion that the Conservancy’s decision to uphold the GPL on behalf of a client made Hohndel an enemy and then, by inference, made Torvalds somewhat of an enemy. Remember that a lot of ‘ex’ Microsoft executives now run VMware (look who has been running the company since 2008) and the company famously violates the GPL (this has been known for many years), just as Microsoft did when it created a shim for its proprietary, back door-compatible Hyper-V (that too was a GPL violation, but Microsoft moved quickly to comply once caught [1, 2, 3])?

“How long before the Linux Foundation is truly/entirely incapable of defending Linux from patent lawsuits and upholding the GPL because Linux foes and GPL foes develop financial strings, making them harder (or riskier) to publicly criticise?”The above observations came out late (I did not wish to write about the subject), but when Microsoft attacked Linux with patents it became too much to skip (I only say “Linux” because it’s Android in this case). How long before the Linux Foundation is truly/entirely incapable of defending Linux from patent lawsuits and upholding the GPL because Linux foes and GPL foes develop financial strings, making them harder (or riskier) to publicly criticise? █

09.01.16

A Post-Alice Reality (World Without Software Patents) Takes Its Toll on the Patent Microcosm in the United States

Posted in America, Courtroom, Patents at 4:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

And it doesn’t take the truth too well…

Shooting messengers

Summary: Discussion about the closure of patent law firms and the inability to defend software patents, which were granted in error for many years and are finally facing proper scrutiny

THE patent landscape surely came under long-overdue judgment and certainly it is changing. It’s changing quite rapidly. It is not changing in favour of patent law firms, that’s for sure; it’s actually the other way around as these firm are trying to adapt to these recent changes and learn new tricks — if any exist at all (here is Alexander P. Ott from McDermott Will & Emery trying new tricks to patent software in spite of the rules this week) — in order to pretend that everything is the same as before and ultimately convince examiners/judges likewise. As we have shown in recent months, this rarely works anymore and they have very little control over what PTAB does (appeals by the patent holder/s are rare and usually ineffective). The figures and the facts are out there, but patent lawyers actively suppress them and even attack the messengers. For few instances of this, see the example above (Breyer) and recall more recent insults. It makes patent law firms look rather mean-spirited and vindicative. They’re like a pack of hyenas now.

“The figures and the facts are out there, but patent lawyers actively suppress them and even attack the messengers.”As one might expect, uncertainty over a large proportion of patents (existing and prospective/pending) reduces confidence among patentors. They might as well not bother attempting to patent (or renew patents on) abstract things like “something on a device” or “something over the Internet” (notorious but ubiquitous types of patents). There’s plenty of prior art therein and usually no inventive step, just the ‘dressing up’ of an old idea. Judges can see that. Judge Jacob would have said “technical” = restatement of the same problem,” Benjamin Henrion wrote, suggesting that they should formally “abolish swpats and the biggest negative points disappear. Otherwise face abolitionists. Will find Pilch’s quote” (see Henrion’s tweet to that effect; Pilch is the FFII’s founder).

We sometimes hear about patent law firms struggling, but rarely do we hear about large ones (with nearly 100 staff) taking the beating. Let’s face it; reduced demand for patents would inevitably shrink the market (or meta-industry which is patent bureaucracy). Deflation is to be expected now (or soon), as growing realisation of the status quo spreads further than just to lawyers, who still try to keep their clients in the dark (longing for pre-Alice days and selectively covering new developments so as to maintain an illusion).

“They might as well not bother attempting to patent (or renew patents on) abstract things like “something on a device” or “something over the Internet” (notorious but ubiquitous types of patents).”Another patent law firm has just imploded and there was plenty of press coverage about it early in the week, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. The patent bubble seems to be bursting with Alice and Mayo, so this patent law firm — like others before it — is virtually being taken over by another firm from Texas (the capital of trolls where there is still affinity for software patents). Here is the ‘damage control’ or the face-saving PR about this now-defunct patent law firm. They try to make the staff transfer look like good news. “Lipstick on a pig” comes to mind here.

One patent lawyers’ site meanwhile bemoans the departure from an era of software patents (it’s a rare exception for them to be upheld by courts or boards post-Alice).

The detailed breakdown of the post-Alice situation for software patents is preceded by the following text:

It has now been a two years since the Supreme Court rendered its now infamous Alice v. CLS Bank decision. It is safe to say that the Alice decision has had a profound impact on software patent enforcement, both at the Federal Circuit and in the Federal district courts.

Here is a summary of Federal Circuit Section 101 software eligibility decisions. As you will see, very few software patents have been upheld by the Federal Circuit in the last few years.

Breakdown of Federal Circuit 101 Cases, Post-Bilski, by Inventive Subject Matter

Here come the patent maximalists to berate PTAB, quoting something new from CAFC. “The Federal Circuit has remanded the Veritas v Veeam Software case back to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, finding its reason for denying a motion to amend “unreasonable”,” Michael Loney writes in MIP. This is probably seen by them as an opportunity to overturn, but still, that would not count in the figures above.

CAFC‘s hostility towards software patents is especially noteworthy because it’s the fault of this court that software patents exist in the US in the first place. Suffice to say, more people now recognise the correlation between software patents and trolling. It’s also unsurprising that patent attorneys are unhappy about this new “Unpatent Manifesto”, which attempts to take things even further. The person behind it explains his point with a hypothetical analogy, stating “it wouldn’t be possible for anyone to patent the next biological change in the human body, it shouldn’t be possible for anyone to patent the next invention that will represent a great evolution of our species.”

“The “Unpatent Manifesto” might as well just be renamed the Patent Quality Manifesto.”The author is especially concerned about patent trolls, which are a symptom of no (or far too little) patent quality at the USPTO. He wrote: “The patent system is also the home of the so called “patent trolls”, or non-practising entities. Their mission is to accumulate patents with the only purpose of extorting money to those pushing for innovation. They patent already invented things, and patent or buy obvious inventions so they can later threaten companies with a lawsuit.”

The “Unpatent Manifesto” might as well just be renamed the Patent Quality Manifesto. In our view, patents themselves are not inherently the problem to tackle; the lack of quality control means that in the US, for example, there are now nearly 10 million patents (including expired ones). That’s far too much as it shows that the system long ago got detached or deviated away from its original purpose. And it’s impossible for any one person or firm to keep abreast of. There’s a huge overhead. █

British Telecom (BT) is Still a Patent Bully: Next Target is Yet Another GNU/Linux Supporter

Posted in Action, America, Debian, Europe, Patents at 3:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Valve of Steam OS (Debian GNU/Linux) fame

Summary: The latest target of BT’s patent bullying (shakedowns and lawsuits) is the company that has turned into somewhat of a Debian proponent (albeit with DRM)

BT is a patent aggressor whose activities in the court we haven't heard of in a while (it even targeted Android). BT shows no sign of relenting. This unpopular strategy carries on and the latest suggests that “British Telecommunications (BT) have filed a lawsuit against Valve claiming patent infringement. The action was brought “based on Valve’s continued willful infringement” of four patents (I’ll go into what they are in a moment) and was filed in Delaware on 28 July.”

“It resorts to patent aggression to make up for commercial issues, just like IBM (it too became a patent bully).”Notice the choice of Delaware. The British and US media wrote quite a lot about this lawsuit [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21]. So far we have found 22 articles about this lawsuit alone (that’s a lot for patent news) and it looks rather obvious that BT is just getting desperate. It resorts to patent aggression to make up for commercial issues, just like IBM (it too became a patent bully). █

The Long Reach of Battistelli’s Policy of Retribution

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Control by fear even in Berlin?

Battistelli in Germany

Summary: A former EPO staff representative from Berlin got laid off, reinforcing the perception that anyone who dares criticise the misguided policies of the Office takes a huge risk

THE Napoleonic vision that Battistelli has of himself is truly an infectious disease (at the top management) and it’s hard to understand how such a character, which is inherently and fundamentally political (where lying — not science — is one’s art and trade), made it into high EPO positions (Council, then the Office). It’s not even allowed, as per the rules.

Like (in)famous autocrats, Battistelli chose to treat critics not as a source of guidance but as enemies. This is very common in the political world, but not in science, where people openly debate competing theories and present evidence for their views (like peer review).

We have already learned about Battistelli’s attacks on staff representatives in Munich (resulting in dismissals) and similar attacks in The Hague (dismissals seem inevitable at this stage). What we did not know, however, is that a former staff representative in Berlin was dismissed earlier this year. Whether or not it may be related to staff representation activities we don’t know, but we have asked around.

As people can recall, the EPO arrogantly pretends that all these disciplinary actions are mere coincidences and nothing to do with union-busting (it’s arrogant as it assumes people are utterly foolish and might actually believe this). Will this dismissal in Berlin too turn out to be connected to union activity? If anyone has information about this, please get in touch. In Vienna, the fourth EPO site, people who represent staff rarely identify themselves by name and in an expression of solidarity for fellow staff (in other sites) all we ever saw were hands of people.

Battistelli has nothing to be proud of. He fostered a culture of fear, no free thought (not openly anyway), and at the same time he scared away (or drove away) some of the key members of staff at the Office. One might dare say that if Battistelli ran a political party of his own, it would be a total disaster, driving a nation into recession or bankruptcy. Never again should the Council appoint a politician to manage scientists, especially not a psychopath like Battistelli. A lot of the top-level management is now stuffed with friends of his. █

Links 1/9/2016: Fedora 25 Alpha, GhostBSD 10.3, OpenBSD 6.0

Posted in News Roundup at 11:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How eBay Uses Apache Software to Reach Its Big Data Goals

    eBay’s ecommerce platform creates a huge amount of data. It has more than 800 million active listings, with 8.8 million new listings each week. There are 162 million active buyers, and 25 million sellers.

    “The data is the most important asset that we have,” said Seshu Adunuthula, eBay’s head of analytics infrastructure, during a keynote at Apache Big Data in Vancouver in May. “We don’t have inventory like other ecommerce platforms, what we’re doing is connecting buyers and sellers, and data plays an integral role into how we go about doing this.”

  • Technical documentation doesn’t have to be dull
  • University fuels NextCloud’s improved monitoring

    Encouraged by a potential customer – a large, German university – the German start-up company NextCloud has improved the resource monitoring capabilities of its eponymous cloud services solution, which it makes available as open source software. The improved monitoring should help users scale their implementation, decide how to balance work loads and alerting them to potential capacity issues.

    NextCloud’s monitoring capabilities can easily be combined with OpenNMS, an open source network monitoring and management solution.

  • Events

    • Wayland at QtCon

      On Friday QtCon starts and there will be of course an update about the current state of Wayland support in Plasma. See you during the lightning talk session on Friday between 17:30 and 18:30 for my lightning talk “We are in Wayland!”

    • A Webinar on Big Data

      For all you open source data scientists out there, this hour-long recorded webinar explains the big data tools and services you can use on Amazon. I learned a lot of data science lingo watching this video.

    • LinuxCon talk slides: “A Practical Look at QEMU’s Block Layer Primitives”
    • FOSSCON 2016 –Event Recap

      FOSSCON 2016: Free & Open Source Software CONference was hosted at the International house of Philadelphia on Aug 20th 2016, and showcased nearly 20 vendors and nearly as many talks (plus ‘lightning talks’) and a Key Signing party.

    • Most LPC passes sold out; refereed track proposals deadline nears
    • September is here!

      September is the Software Freedom Day month (among other things) since 2005 (SFD 2004 was in August) and this year is no exception! As of last night we have a total of 58 events in 34 countries, with only 42 fully registered (you can see the location on our famous SFD map). There is always a delay between wiki page creation (which includes the plan, speakers, date and location) and the registration which ask organizers to specify where the event will happen.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • The open source backlash is here. Is HPE’s Big Data foray the answer?

      Open source Big Data tools are undoubtedly seen as fresher, hotter and more capable than proprietary resources, but companies are growing tired of sifting through open source for the magic combination that will make their data profitable.

      Some are starting to miss the stewardship of the “proprietary dinosaur,” yet they can’t afford to miss out on open-source innovation. One company is aiming to turn its awkward position in the middle into a value proposition to solve customer conundrums.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Swiss administrations may share their software

      Public administrations in Switzerland have the right to share their software under an open source licence, conclude Prof. Dr. Tomas Poledna and Prof. Dr. Simon Schlauri, two legal specialists, in a report for the Canton of Bern (Switzerland). The canton says that the report clears the way for the IT department to make available to others the business solutions that were developed for the Bern administration.

    • The US Military Will ‘Be Left Behind’ If It Doesn’t Embrace Open-Source Software, Report Says

      Amid a rising China and Russia, the Pentagon’s slow pace on the software front could cost it tactically for years to come.

      Unless the Defense Department and its military components levy increased importance on software development, they risk losing military technical superiority, according to a new report from the Center for a New American Security.

    • Is United Kingdom a leading country in the FOSS world?

      There is no secret that I am a born Russian living in the United Kingdom. I travel to my motherland for different reasons from time to time.

      I must admit that I am not that fond of the current Russian government. They more often talk about the use of free open source software than make any practical steps toward applying it. I even wrote several critical articles about this a few years ago.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Sweden to compare Nordic eHealth initiatives
    • France assesses its public policy evaluations

      The French government is assessing how it evaluates its public policies. The assessment of its ‘Évaluer les politiques publiques’, (public policy evaluation, EPP) started in July and will last until December. Following 68 EPPs, it is now time to study the evaluation itself, comments SGMAP, France’s government modernisation unit.

    • 6 tips for interviewing with open culture companies

      For the last several years, I’ve been studying under an open organization and future of work guru. And for longer than I can remember, I’ve felt that business should operate differently—really move at the speed their people can innovate rather than standing on who’s held office the longest.

      So you can imagine how long it took for me to embrace the open organization mindset. It was rather like an old school touchdown dance in my mind. I’m excited by the value proposition open organizations present.

      Knowing I wanted to be engaged in a company that leverages the value of those at its table, I decided to begin seeking out one I could join. I knew the impact I could personally have on the world could become exponential if I did.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

Leftovers

  • Thrill-seekers suspended mid-air as Alton Towers Smiler ride is halted

    Thrill-seekers have been left stuck on a rollercoaster at Alton Towers which last year crashed, seriously injuring five people.

    The theme park visitors were on the Smiler when there was a “temporary stoppage” but nobody was injured, a spokesman said.

    The £18 million ride at the Staffordshire attraction smashed into another carriage on June 2, 2015.

  • Security

  • Finance

    • The new TTIP? Meet TISA, the ‘secret privatisation pact that poses a threat to democracy’

      An international trade deal being negotiated in secret is a “turbo-charged privatisation pact” that poses a threat to democratic sovereignty and “the very concept of public services”, campaigners have warned.

      But this is not TTIP – the international agreement it appears campaigners in the European Union have managed to scupper over similar concerns – this is TISA, a deal backed by some of the world’s biggest corporations, such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, Walt Disney, Walmart, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase.

    • A ‘private, global super court’ you’ve never heard of is changing the world

      A little-known international arbitration system is gaining global power and allowing multinational corporations to sue entire countries.

      Buzzfeed News spent months reporting on the scope and power of the investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, and just published a nearly 10,000-word investigative report on the system. If you don’t have two hours to go through the whole tome, here are some highlights.

    • Apple: You can have taxes or you can have jobs, but you can’t have both

      Apple’s official statement on the European Union ruling against its Irish tax arrangements tells you all you need to know about what is at stake: You can have taxes or you can have jobs, but Apple is in no mood to deliver both.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Former Bush official endorses Clinton

      Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Wednesday picked up an endorsement from another member of former President George W. Bush’s administration.

      “Secretary Clinton has demonstrated her skills as Secretary of State, especially but by no means exclusively in helping other Asian countries counter Chinese bullying in the western Pacific,” James Clad, the former deputy assistant secretary of Defense under Bush, said in a statement.

      “For Republicans and Democrats alike, everything in national security requires clarity and steadiness, whether managing nuclear weapons or balancing great power rivalries.”

      Clad talked about the importance of never losing sight of national interest. He said that is a “discipline which Secretary Clinton possesses in full measure.”

      “Our adversaries must never hear flippancy or ignorance in America’s voice,” he added.

      “They should never take satisfaction from an incompetent president. Giving an incoherent amateur the keys to the White House this November will doom us to second or third class status.”

      Clad tied in his own experiences, saying he has seen what can happen when “American reliability falters.”

      “It’s not pretty, for us or for the world,” he said.

    • A New McCarthyism: Greenwald on Clinton Camp’s Attempts to Link Trump, Stein & WikiLeaks to Russia

      Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald says Democrats have adopted a “Cold War McCarthyite kind of rhetoric” by accusing many its critics of having ties to Russia. “It’s sort of this constant rhetorical tactic to try and insinuate that anyone opposing the Clintons are somehow Russian agents, when it’s the Clintons who actually have a lot of ties to Russia, as well,” Greenwald said. “I mean, the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton helped Russian companies take over uranium industries in various parts of the world. He received lots of Russian money for speeches.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Did the UN Redefine ‘Hate Speech’ over a Singaporean Blogger?

      The United Nations’ comments on a controversial Singaporean blogger “effectively narrows the definition of ‘hate speech’ under international law,” a U.S. human rights advocacy group says.

      Seventeen-year-old Amos Yee (余澎杉) faces potential jail time after posting controversial material related to the beliefs of Christians and Muslims in videos, blogs and Facebook posts. The trial, which started on Aug. 17, is still on-going, but Yee has pleaded guilty to three of six charges of intending to wound religious feelings and two counts of not reporting to a police station.

    • Microsoft services to crack down on ‘hate speech’

      The end may be nigh for trolls on Skype and Xbox. Microsoft is launching a customer support service that allows users to report hate speech. Conversely, the new system also includes an appeals forum to reinstate contested content.

      For hate mongers on the internet, Microsoft would become judge, jury and executioner. On Friday, the software conglomerate rolled out a new system for airing grievances regarding hate speech posted on Microsoft-hosted services.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Building a new Tor that can resist next-generation state surveillance

      Since Edward Snowden stepped into the limelight from a hotel room in Hong Kong three years ago, use of the Tor anonymity network has grown massively. Journalists and activists have embraced the anonymity the network provides as a way to evade the mass surveillance under which we all now live, while citizens in countries with restrictive Internet censorship, like Turkey or Saudi Arabia, have turned to Tor in order to circumvent national firewalls. Law enforcement has been less enthusiastic, worrying that online anonymity also enables criminal activity.

      Tor’s growth in users has not gone unnoticed, and today the network first dubbed “The Onion Router” is under constant strain from those wishing to identify anonymous Web users. The NSA and GCHQ have been studying Tor for a decade, looking for ways to penetrate online anonymity, at least according to these Snowden docs. In 2014, the US government paid Carnegie Mellon University to run a series of poisoned Tor relays to de-anonymise Tor users. A 2015 research paper outlined an attack effective, under certain circumstances, at decloaking Tor hidden services (now rebranded as “onion services”). Most recently, 110 poisoned Tor hidden service directories were discovered probing .onion sites for vulnerabilities, most likely in an attempt to de-anonymise both the servers and their visitors.

    • NSA ‘Cyber Weapons’ Leak Shows How Agency Prizes Online Surveillance Over Online Security

      With a name like the National Security Agency, America’s chief intelligence outfit might at least attempt to promote American security online. At the very least, one would hope its activities don’t actively undermine U.S. cybersecurity. But—bad news—a recent leak of the agency’s digital spy tools by a myterious group called the Shadow Brokers shows how the agency prioritizes online surveillance over online security.

    • FBI Director wants ‘adult conversation’ about backdooring encryption

      FBI Director James Comey is gathering evidence so that in 2017 America can have an “adult” conversation about breaking encryption to make crimefighters’ lives easier.

      Speaking at Tuesday’s 2016 Symantec Government Symposium in Washington, Comey banged on about his obsession with strong cryptography causing criminals to “go dark” and making themselves harder to catch. Comey said that once the election cycle is over, he will be resuming his push to force technology companies to bork their own products, and this time armed with plenty of supporting documentation.

      “The conversation we’ve been trying to have about this has dipped below public consciousness now, and that’s fine. Because what we want to do is collect information this year so that next year we can have an adult conversation in this country,” he said, AP reports.

    • Comey: FBI wants ‘adult conversation’ on device encryption

      FBI Director James Comey warned again Tuesday about the bureau’s inability to access digital devices because of encryption and said investigators were collecting information about the challenge in preparation for an “adult conversation” next year.

    • James Comey Claims He Wants An ‘Adult Conversation’ About Encryption; Apparently ‘Adults’ Ignore Experts

      This is not just insulting, but counterproductive. Plenty of experts have been trying their damnedest to have an “adult conversation” with Comey, explaining to him why he’s wrong about the risks of “going dark,” while others have — in fairly great detail — explained the serious dangers behind Comey’s approach.

      Comey’s response to these efforts so far has been the equivalent of sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming “nah, nah, nah — can’t hear you!” while repeating his “nerd harder” mantra.

      An “adult conversation” has to be one where someone in Comey’s position is able to admit that maybe, just maybe, he’s wrong. It’s not one where he gets to keep demanding a new conversation until people tell him that night is day. Because that’s just silly.

      This new claim about an “adult conversation” is also stupidly counterproductive. All it’s going to do is make the actual experts here — like the authors of that MIT paper on the dangers of backdoor — dig in and have absolutely no interest in dealing with Comey. How could you when he so flippantly brushes off all the work they’ve done already?

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • De Lima: No shortcut to law and order

      Sen. Leila de Lima admitted that there is a need to intensify the campaign against illegal drugs in the country but with the least number of killings.

      The neophyte senator suggested that the country’s criminal justice system and law enforcement should be reformed.

      “There should be no shortcuts in trying to achieve law and order in our society,” De Lima said in an interview with CNN Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday morning.

      The senator added that law enforcers and prosecutors should be trained in the “proper manner” for them to be more efficient.

    • De Lima files 7th case vs Marcos’ ‘hero’ burial at SC

      Senator Leila M. de Lima has filed the seventh legal challenge against the plan to bury dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos at the Libingan ng Bayani, on the eve of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on the divisive issue.

      In her 38-page petition, De Lima said that “no President has the power to rewrite history.”

      De Lima argued that interring Marcos’ remains at the heroes’ cemetery would go against the very spirit of the 1987 Constitution, as the charter was crafted precisely to prevent the abuses committed under his regime.

    • By Sitting Down Kaepernick Challenges Americans to Reflect on What They Really Stand For

      Standing up and singing the Star-Spangled Banner before sporting events is a time honored American tradition. It is a rousing anthem that champions in song the nation’s values of freedom and liberty for all. It is also meant to remind fans in the stadium and at home that there are more important things that unite us than sporting rivalries.

      At the heart of this ritual is a profound contradiction. It too often serves as a force for forgetfulness. In belting out “O say can you see” Americans are allowed to unthinkingly celebrate the USA. They can forget for a moment the illegal invasions of foreign countries that have left millions dead. They can turn the mind away from the black citizens being killed by police with seemingly almost total legal immunity. They can close their eyes to the fact that they are now an oligarchy ruled by corporate elites and their bipartisan political supporters instead of a vibrant democracy governed for, by and of the people.

      There is a also a deeper forgetting at play. It is to overlook the country’s history of systematic racism starting with slavery. It is to be given a few minutes pause to close one’s eyes to its tradition of classism at home and economic exploitation abroad. It is a stirring moment of collective amnesia to an America’s past that from the beginning has continually betrayed its avowed commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for many of its citizens as well as those it has oppressed around the world.

      [...]

      Kaepernick’s rejection of the anthem is therefore a political protest that should not and cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, so much of the coverage is on that action itself as opposed to what it represents.

      The tragedy of the anthem is that its music all too commonly drowns out genuine voices for justice. It is a blaring cacophony of American triumph that silences all critical reflection. The tune and the words stir emotions so that those singing it no longer have to hear the cries of its country’s victims.

    • Homeland eyes special declaration to take charge of elections

      Even before the FBI identified new cyberattacks on two separate state election boards, the Department of Homeland Security began considering declaring the election a “critical infrastructure,” giving it the same control over security it has over Wall Street and the electric power grid.

      The latest admissions of attacks could speed up that effort possibly including the upcoming presidential election, according to officials.

      “We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process, is critical infrastructure like the financial sector, like the power grid,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said.

08.30.16

Links 30/8/2016: Fedora 24 Reviewed, Ubuntu Patched

Posted in News Roundup at 2:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux, Linus, Bradley, and Open Source Protection

      In a nutshell, this rather heated (and at times unnecessarily personal) debate has focused on when is the right time to defend the rights on the GPL. Bradley is of the view that these rights should be intrinsically defended as they are as important (if not more important) than the code. Linus is of the view that the practicalities of the software industry mean sending in the lawyers can potentially have an even more damaging effect as companies will tense up and choose to stay away.

    • Evolving a Best-of-Breed IoT Framework by Gregory Burns
    • 2016 LiFT Scholarship Winner Tetevi Placide Ekon: Learning Computer Science Online

      Tetevi Placide Ekon is a graduate student studying civil engineering at the 2iE Institute for Water and Environmental Engineering in Burkina Faso. He was one of 14 aspiring IT professionals to receive a 2016 Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) scholarship, announced this month.

      Since receiving his bachelor’s degree in water and environmental engineering and moving onto graduate school, he has nurtured a passion for computer science, and especially open source. Tetevi has completed free courses covering Linux, Apache big data systems and more, and he plans to use this scholarship to pursue more advanced training.

    • Raspberry Pi Zero Will Likely Be Supported On Linux 4.9

      It’s looking like the Raspberry Pi Zero might be playing fine out-of-the-box with the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel cycle.

      Eric Anholt posted his weekly VC4 driver status/changes. In there the Intel-turned-Broadcom developer commented, “Finally, I landed Stefan Wahren’s Raspberry Pi Zero devicetree for upstream. If nothing goes wrong, the Zero should be supported in 4.9.”

    • Graphics Stack

      • Running Caffe AlexNet/GoogleNet On Some CPUs Compared To NVIDIA CUDA

        With working on some Broadwell-EP Linux comparison benchmarks this weekend, as part of that onslaught of benchmarks I decided to run the CPU-only Caffe build on a few different Intel CPUs. For fun, afterwards I checked to see how the performance compares to Caffe with CUDA+cuDNN on a few Maxwell/Pascal GPUs.

      • A Slew Of RadeonSI Gallium3D Fixes To Kick Off The Week

        After already making a ton of improvements to the RadeonSI Gallium3D stack this month, Marek Olšák is looking to end the month on a high note with yet more fixes to the open-source AMD driver.

        What’s more fun than seeing on a Monday morning [PATCH 00/20] Plenty of RadeonSI fixes. The 20 patches take care of a variety of RadeonSI fixes. Marek commented, “This series contains mostly fixes, i.e. for DCC, cubemaps, tessellation, texture views, Gather4, viewport depth range, etc. There are also some new HUD queries.”

  • Applications

    • Avidemux 2.6.13 Open-Source Video Editor Gets AAC/ADTS Import and Export

      The developers of the Avidemux open-source and cross-platform video editor software have announced a new maintenance update in the 2.6 series, bringing multiple improvements, bug fixes, and a handful of new features.

    • A Quick Hands-On With Chatty, A Desktop Twitch Chat Client

      Chatty is a desktop Twitch Chat client for Windows, macOS and Linux written in Ja

    • HP Linux Imaging and Printing 3.16.8 Adds Support for Linux Mint 18, Fedora 24

      The open-source HP Linux Imaging and Printing (HPLIP) project has been updated on August 29, 2016, to version 3.16.8, a maintenance update that adds support for new printers and GNU/Linux operating systems.

      According to the release notes, HP Linux Imaging and Printing 3.16.8 adds support for new all-in-one HP printers, including HP OfficeJet Pro 6970, HP OfficeJet Pro 6960, HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile, HP DeskJet 3700, as well as HP DeskJet Ink Advantage 3700.

      Also new in the HPLIP 3.16.8 update is support for the recently released Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce, and the upcoming KDE editions, the Fedora 24 Linux operating system, as well as the Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 “Jessie” distribution. So if you’re using any of these OSes, you can now update to the latest HPLIP release.

    • MPlayer-Based MPV 0.20.0 Video Player Released with New Options and Commands

      The popular, open-source, and cross-platform MPV video player software received a new update, version 0.20.0, which comes only two weeks after the previous 0.19.0 maintenance release.

      MPV 0.20.0 is not a major update, and, according to the release notes, it only implements a couple of new options and commands, such as “–video-unscaled=downscale-big” for changing the aspect ratio.

      Additionally, the MPlayer-based video playback application also gets the “–image-display-duration” option for controlling the duration of image display, and a new “dcomposition” flag for controlling DirectComposition.

    • FFmpeg 3.1.3 “Laplace” Open-Source Multimedia Framework Now Available for Linux

      The major FFmpeg 3.1 “Laplace” open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework has received recently its third maintenance update, version 3.1.3, which brings updated components.

      FFmpeg 3.1 was announced two months ago, at the end of June, and it introduced a multitude of new features to make the popular multimedia backend even more reliable and handy to game and application developers. Dubbed Laplace, FFmpeg 3.1 is currently the most advanced FFmpeg release, cut from Git master on June 26, 2016.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Romp Home with these 21 Peerless ASCII Games

        Linux has a raft of open source games. The vast majority of these games are atheistically pleasing. Popular games often have full motion video, vector graphics, 3D graphics, realistic 3D rendering, animation, texturing, a physics engine, and much more. Computer graphics have been advancing at a staggering pace. At the current rate of progress, in the next 10 years it may not be possible to distinguish computer graphics from reality.

        Early computer games did not have these graphic techniques. The earliest video games were text games or text-based games that used text characters rather than vector or bitmapped graphics.

        Text-based games are often forgotten and neglected. However, there are many ASCII gems out there waiting to be explored which are immensely addictive and great fun to play. The developers’ works featured in this article focus on content and fun gameplay.

      • Editorial: I ditched SteamOS in favour of a normal Linux distribution for my gaming

        I have been debating whether to write this up for a while, but here I am. I have completely ditched SteamOS in favour of Ubuntu Mate.

        If you follow me on Twitter, you would have probably known this article was coming due to how frustrating an experience it has been for me.

        I was spurred on due to the BoilingSteam website writing about it, and they echo some of my own thoughts and frustrations.

        Recently I was sat with my son and wanted to play a point & click adventure game called Putt-Putt with him. SteamOS needed to restart to update, so I did and it just flashed into a black screen. We waited quite a long time to see if anything happened but nothing did. After rebooting, the system was completely broken with another black screen.

      • In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor has been cancelled and refunds are being offered

        Well I didn’t see this coming at all, I got told in our IRC moments ago that In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor has been cancelled and refunds are being offered.

      • Hot Lava announced by Klei Entertainment, Linux support is planned
      • Vanguard Princess, a popular 2D fighting game is now on Linux & SteamOS

        Fighting games are in short supply on Linux, so Vanguard Princess has come along to help fill the void for us. A few moments ago they announced the Linux version is good to go!

      • Kingdom Rush Frontiers is now available on Linux

        Kingdom Rush Frontiers the latest Tower Defence game from Ironhide Game Studio has just released for Linux! This update also adds in more languages.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat CEO: Taking Open Source Beyond the Data Center

        When Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst spoke at LinuxCon last week, he hardly mentioned RHEL or the company’s stack. Instead, he focused almost entirely on Linux in general and the open source development model in particular. This wasn’t a surprise, as there probably isn’t an organization on the planet with a deeper understanding of open source methodology and its potential. It’s how it built free software into a $2 billion business.

        Most people familiar with Red Hat know the company’s broader vision for open source — sometimes referred to as “the open source way” — goes beyond software, so it also wasn’t much of a surprise when Whitehurst’s talk strayed from data centers and workstations and into areas not normally associated with IT at all.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 24 review: The year’s best Linux distro is puzzlingly hard to recommend

          Fedora 24 is one of the best Linux distro releases you’re likely to see this year. And there are two other releases that I did not have room to cover in depth here: the Server and Cloud variants of Fedora 24, which pack in a ton of new features specific to those environments. The cloud platform especially continues to churn out the container-related features, with some new tools for OpenShift Origin, Fedora’s Platform-as-a-Service system built around Google’s Kubernetes project. Check out Fedora Magazine’s release announcement for more on everything that’s new in Server and Cloud.

          As always, Fedora WorkStation also comes in a variety of “Spins” that are pre-packaged setups for specific use cases. There are prepacked spins of all the major desktops, including Xfce, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, and LXDE (you can also get alternative desktops in one go by downloading the DVD installer). Spins aren’t just for desktops, though. For example, there’s an astronomy spin, a design suite spin, robotics-focused spin, a security spin, and several more. None of these spins have anything you can’t set up yourself, but if you don’t want to put in the time and effort, Fedora can handle that for you.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik” Users Receive the Latest Debian Security Updates

          Today, August 29, 2016, the maintainers of the Parsix GNU/Linux distribution announced the availability of multiple security updates, along with a new kernel version for the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik” release.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 16.10 Wallpaper Contest Is Now Open For Entries

            Doors have opened on the Ubuntu 16.10 Wallpaper Contest.

            Few desktop operating systems offer amateur and professional illustrators, photographers and graphic designers the chance to have their artwork seen by millions of people around the world.

            But then, Ubuntu isn’t your average operating system!

          • Flavours and Variants

            • The Peppermint Twist Is Still Cool

              Peppermint is a solid Linux operating system with a record for good performance and reliability. It is an ideal choice for handling everyday computing chores.

              LXDE provides a fast and friendly desktop environment. The entire desktop package and tweaked Peppermint 7 settings give you lots of options for creating a comfortable platform. My only dissatisfaction is the lack of much in the way of desktop animation effects. All it provides are semi-transparent application interfaces in the background.

              The Peppermint community is headed by the Peppermint OS LLC, a software company based in Asheville, North Carolina. Founded in 2010, the open source company issues one major release per year. A partial upgrade rolls out periodically.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Compact, rugged Skylake computer-on-module is big on PCIe

      Kontron’s Linux-ready “COMe-cSL6” COM Express Compact Type 6 module offers 10 PCIe lanes, up to 24GB RAM and 32GB eMMC, and industrial temperature support.

    • Credit card-sized module runs Linux on Braswell

      Axiomtek’s credit card-sized “CEM300” module runs Linux on Intel Braswell SoCs at 4-6W TDP and offers HD graphics, dual SATA III ports, and four PCIe lanes.

      Like Axiomtek’s Atom E3800 “Bay Trail” based CEM846 computer-on-module, its new CEM300 supports Linux and Windows, and uses the 84 x 55mm COM Express Type 10 Mini form factor. The CEM300 advances to 14nm Intel Braswell SoCs, which offer much improved Intel HD Graphics Gen8, while reducing TDPs to a 4W to 6W range. Supported models include the quad-core 1.6GHz (2.4GHz burst) Pentium N3700, the quad-core Celeron N3160, and the dual-core Celeron N3060.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • New NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV Console Shows Up At The FCC

          While the Xiaomi Mi Box does seem to be inching closer towards its release and while this is expected to be the next big major device release for the Android TV platform, the last week has seen speculation mounting as to what NVIDIA might have up their sleeves. This is because a new SHIELD Controller popped up on the FCC and this was then followed by new filings for a new SHIELD Remote control. Of course, just because the two controller accessories were passing through the FCC, it does not automatically mean there will also be a new SHIELD Android TV device coming as well. Although on this particular occasion, that looks to be exactly what is happening.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Remembering Vernon Adams

    Open-source font developer Vernon Adams has passed away in California at the age of 49. [Vernon Adams] In 2014, Adams was injured in an automobile collision, sustaining serious trauma from which he never fully recovered. Perhaps best known within the Linux community as the creator of KDE’s user-interface font Oxygen, Adams created a total of 51 font families published through Google Fonts, all under open licenses. He was also active in a number of related free-software projects, including FontForge, Metapolator, and the Open Font Library. In 2012, he co-authored the user’s guide for FontForge as part of Google’s Summer of Code Documentation Camp, which we reported on at that time.

  • BSD

    • The Voicemail Scammers Never Got Past Our OpenBSD Greylisting

      We usually don’t see much of the scammy spam and malware. But that one time we went looking for them, we found a campaign where our OpenBSD greylisting setup was 100% effective in stopping the miscreants’ messages.

      During August 23rd to August 24th 2016, a spam campaign was executed with what appears to have been a ransomware payload. I had not noticed anything particularly unusual about the bsdly.net and friends setup that morning, but then Xavier Mertens’ post at isc.sans.edu Voice Message Notifications Deliver Ransomware caught my attention in the tweetstream, and I decided to have a look.

    • Why FreeBSD Doesn’t Aim For OpenMP Support Out-Of-The-Box

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Scientific Library 2.2 released

      Version 2.2 of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is now available. GSL provides a large collection of routines for numerical computing in C.

      This release contains new linear algebra routines (Pivoted and Modified Cholesky, Complete Orthogonal Decomposition, matrix condition number estimation) as well as a completely rewritten nonlinear least squares module, including support for Levenberg-Marquardt, dogleg, double-dogleg, and Steihaug-Toint methods.

      The full NEWS file entry is appended below.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Report: If DOD Doesn’t Embrace Open Source, It’ll ‘Be Left Behind’

      Unless the Defense Department and its military components levy increased importance on software development, they risk losing military technical superiority, according to a new report from the Center for a New American Security.

      In the report, the Washington, D.C.-based bipartisan think tank argues the Pentagon, which for years has relied heavily on proprietary software systems, “must actively embrace open source software” and buck the status quo.

      Currently, DOD uses open source software “infrequently and on an ad hoc basis,” unlike tech companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook that wouldn’t exist without open source software.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • The Honey Trap of Copy/Pasting Open Source Code

      I couldn’t agree more with Bill Sourour’s article ‘Copy.Paste.Code?’ which says that copying and pasting code snippets from sources like Google and StackOverflow is fine as long as you understand how they work. However, the same logic can’t be applied to open source code.

      When I started open source coding at the tender age of fourteen, I was none the wiser to the pitfalls of copy/pasting open source code. I took it for granted that if a particular snippet performed my desired function, I could just insert it into my code, revelling in the fact that I’d just gotten one step closer to getting my software up and running. Yet, since then, through much trial and error, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to use open source code effectively.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Affordable, Open Source, 3D Printable CNC Machine is Now on Kickstarter

        The appeals of Kickstarter campaigns are many. There are the rewards for backers, frequently taking the form of either deep discounts on the final product or unusual items that can’t be found anywhere else. Pledging to support any crowdfunding campaign is a gamble, but it’s an exciting gamble; just browsing Kickstarter is pretty exciting, in fact, especially in the technological categories. Inventive individuals and startups offer new twists on machines like 3D printers and CNC machines – often for much less cost than others on the market.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open Standards and Open Source

      Much has changed in the telecommunications industry in the years since Standards Development Organization (SDOs) such as 3GPP, ITU and OMA were formed. In the early days of telecom and the Internet, as fundamental technology was being invented, it was imperative for the growth of the new markets that standards were established prior to large-scale deployment of technology and related services. The process for development of these standards followed a traditional “waterfall” approach, which helped to harmonize (sometimes competing) pre-standard technical solutions to market needs.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Illinois Sues Controversial Drug Maker Over Deceptive Marketing Practices

      Illinois’ attorney general has filed suit against Insys Therapeutics, accusing the controversial pharmaceutical company of using deceptive marketing practices — including paying an indicted doctor thousands of dollars for “sham” speaking events — to sell its signature pain medication.

      It’s not unusual for drug makers to pay doctors who have histories of misconduct for consulting or speaking about their products. A recent ProPublica analysis found that more than 2,300 doctors with records of discipline in five states had received payments from drug and medical device companies since 2013.

      Insys was one of more than 400 companies that made payments to such doctors, but its activities have received far more attention than those of its peers.

      According to investigations in several states, Insys’ business model relied on funneling substantial payments to the doctors who most frequently prescribed its drugs, even if they had troubling disciplinary records or even criminal histories. These payments were mostly for services related to Subsys, a fentanyl-based medication approved by the FDA to treat patients suffering from cancer pain resistant to other types of opioid drugs.

    • CETA Leaves Bad Taste on Food Safety: Report

      While debate rages in Europe about CETA, the Canada-EU trade agreement, a new report warns that the deal could lower food safety standards.

      Food Safety, Agriculture and Regulatory Cooperation in the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, released today by the Council of Canadians and numerous European partners, outlines the regulatory differences between Canada and the EU that could jeopardize European food safety and production standards.

      European farmers, who have been struggling as farm prices crash, will have to compete with Canadian imports.

    • Yet Another Transatlantic Trade Deal Threatening Food Safety, Groups Warn

      The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), a controversial trade deal between Canada and the European Union (E.U.), threatens food safety and other consumer standards, according to a new report by a coalition of advocacy groups.

      Even as other global trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) fall apart amid failed negotiations, consumers and workers around the world still aren’t in the clear. According to Food Safety, Agriculture and Regulatory Cooperation in the Canada-E.U. Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (pdf), released by groups including the Council of Canadians, War on Want, and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, European farmers under CETA will have to compete with Canadian imports while contending with “no animal welfare penalties and lower safety standards.”

    • ‘Just Cut the Price’: Consumer Groups Unimpressed With EpiPen Generic

      The maker of the emergency allergy medication EpiPen, Mylan, on Monday announced a generic version of the drug amid a price-gouging scandal—indicating that, as journalist Sonali Kolhatkar wrote on Twitter, public outrage can create change—but consumer groups say it’s too little, too late.

      “The weirdness of a generic drug company offering a generic version of its own branded but off-patent product is a signal that something is wrong,” said Robert Weissman, president of the advocacy organization Public Citizen, in a statement on Monday. “Today’s announcement is just one more convoluted mechanism to avoid plain talk, admit to price gouging, and just cut the price of EpiPen.”

      Mylan was accused in July of having incrementally hiked its EpiPen prices over time until they reached $600 per two-pen set—a 500 percent increase that was well out of reach for many consumers who need the medical tools in life-threatening allergy situations.

      It was also later revealed that the company’s executives gave themselves exorbitant bonuses and avoided paying taxes while they jacked up the cost of the medication.

  • Security

    • 5 Best Linux Distros for Security

      Security is nothing new to Linux distributions. Linux distros have always emphasized security and related matters like firewalls, penetration testing, anonymity, and privacy. So it is hardly surprising that security conscious distributions are common place. For instance, Distrowatch lists sixteen distros that specialize in firewalls, and four for privacy.

      Most of these specialty security distributions, however, share the same drawback: they are tools for experts, not average users. Only recently have security distributions tried to make security features generally accessible for desktop users.

    • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and 12.04 LTS Users Get New Kernel Updates with Security Fixes

      Immediately after informing us about the availability of a new kernel update for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, Canonical published more security advisories about updated kernel versions for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

    • Canonical Patches Eight Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

      Just a few minutes ago, Canonical published multiple security advisories to inform the Ubuntu Linux community about the availability of new kernel updates for all of its supported Ubuntu OSes, including Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

    • FBI detects breaches against two state voter systems

      The Federal Bureau of Investigation has found breaches in Illinois and Arizona’s voter registration databases and is urging states to increase computer security ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election, according to a U.S. official familiar with the probe.

      The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Monday that investigators were also seeking evidence of whether other states may have been targeted.

      The FBI warning in an Aug. 18 flash alert from the agency’s Cyber Division did not identify the intruders or the two states targeted.

      Reuters obtained a copy of the document after Yahoo News first reported the story Monday.

    • Russians Hacked Two U.S. Voter Databases, Say Officials [Ed: blaming without evidence again]

      Two other officials said that U.S. intelligence agencies have not yet concluded that the Russian government is trying to do that, but they are worried about it.

    • FBI Says Foreign Hackers Got Into Election Computers

      We’ve written probably hundreds of stories on just what a dumb idea electronic voting systems are, highlighting how poorly implemented they are, and how easily hacked. And, yet, despite lots of security experts sounding the alarm over and over again, you still get election officials ridiculously declaring that their own systems are somehow hack proof.

      And now, along comes the FBI to alert people that it’s discovered at least two state election computer systems have been hacked already, and both by foreign entities.

    • Researchers Reveal SDN Security Vulnerability, Propose Solution

      Three Italian researchers have published a paper highlighting a security vulnerability in software-defined networking (SDN) that isn’t intrinsic to legacy networks. It’s not a showstopper, though, and they propose a solution to protect against it.

      “It” is a new attack they call Know Your Enemy (KYE), through which the bad guys could potentially collect information about a network, such as security tool configuration data that could, for example, reveal attack detection thresholds for network security scanning tools. Or the collected information could be more general in nature, such as quality-of-service or network virtualization policies.

    • NV Gains Momentum for a Secure DMZ

      When it comes to making the shift to network virtualization (NV) and software-defined networking (SDN), one of the approaches gaining momentum is using virtualization technology to build a secure demilitarized zone (DMZ) in the data center.

      Historically, there have been two major drawbacks to deploying firewalls as a secure mechanism inside a data center. The first is the impact a physical hardware appliance has on application performance once another network hop gets introduced. The second is the complexity associated with managing the firewall rules.

      NV technologies make it possible to employ virtual firewalls that can be attached to specific applications and segregate them based on risk. This is the concept of building a secure DMZ in the data center. The end result is that the virtual firewall is not only capable of examining every packet associated with a specific application, but keeping track of what specific firewall rules are associated with a particular application becomes much simpler.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Thousands of migrants rescued off Libya

      About 6,500 migrants have been rescued off Libya, the Italian coastguard says, in one of the biggest operations of its kind to date.

      Some 40 co-ordinated rescue missions took place about 20km (12 miles) off the Libyan town of Sabratha, it added.

      Video footage shows migrants, said to be from Eritrea and Somalia, cheering and some swimming to rescue vessels, while others carried babies aboard.

      On Sunday more than 1,100 migrants were rescued in the same area.

    • Can Americans Overthrow The Evil That Rules Them?

      Hillary is a warmonger, perhaps the ultimate and last one if she becomes president, as the combination of her hubris and incompetence is likely to result in World War 3. On July 3, 2015, Hillary declared: “I want the Iranians to know that if I’m president, we will attack Iran. . . . we would be able to totally obliterate them.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/hillary-clinton-if-im-president-we-will-attack-iran/5460484?print=1 The crazed Hillary went on from this to declare the President of Russia to be “the new Hitler.” Little doubt she thinks she can obliterate Russia also.

    • The Sultan’s Hit List Grows, as Turkey Prepares to Enter Syria

      It says a lot about post-failed-coup Turkey that you can spot the priority list of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s foreign antagonists from the Government’s reactions to a massacre. The slaughter of at least 50 Kurdish wedding guests by a suicide bomber in the border city of Gaziantep on Saturday was swiftly blamed on Isis. Erdogan said it was the “likely” culprit. Certainly the target fits Isis’ gruesome track record.

      But then Erdogan’s Deputy Prime Minister, Mehmet Simsek, broadened the scope of Turkey’s enemies. Describing the mass killing as “barbaric” – which it surely was – he then listed the “terror groups” who were targeting Turkey: the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers Party), Isis and the followers of Fethullah Gulen, the exiled and rather eccentric cleric whom Erdogan still claims organised the attempted military coup in July.

    • US Calls ‘Unacceptable’ Turkey’s Attack on Kurdish Fighters in Syria

      The United States has criticized as “unacceptable” the fighting between forces backed NATO ally Turkey and U.S.-backed pro-Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, just days after the U.S. and Russia suggested there was no imminent ceasefire to the conflict that has killed at least a quarter of a million people.

      “We are closely monitoring reports of clashes south of Jarabulus—where ISIL [Islamic State or ISIS] is no longer located—between the Turkish armed forces, some opposition groups, and units that are affiliated with the SDF (Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces),” Pentagon spokesperson Peter Cook said in a statement to Agence France-Presse.

      As Reuters explains, the SDF is a “a coalition that encompasses the Kurdish YPG militia and which has been backed by Washington to fight the jihadists.”

    • Rousseff Warns of Threat to Brazil’s Democracy as “Coup” Nears End

      Suspended President Dilma Rousseff testified during her impeachment trial on Monday, rejecting the charge that she manipulated government accounts, and warning that the “future of Brazil is at stake.”

      “I did not commit the crimes that I am unjustly accused of,” she said in her 30-minute address to the senate, adding, “I’m afraid that democracy will be damned with me.”

      “I can’t help but taste the bitterness of injustice,” the 68-year-old told senators.

      Rousseff has been suspended since May. She—and others—have labeled the impeachment effort a coup, saying the charge that she illegally handled the budget in a way to make it look like it was in a better position than it was is just pretext for removing her from office and putting an end to 13 years of rule by her Workers’ Party.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • White New Orleans Has Recovered from Hurricane Katrina. Black New Orleans Has Not.

      96,000.

      That’s how many fewer African-Americans are living in New Orleans now than prior to Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall 11 years ago today. Nearly 1 in 3 black residents have not returned to the city after the storm.

      It was the worst urban disaster in modern U.S. history. Eighty percent of New Orleans lay under water after the epic collapse of the area’s flood-protection system—more than 110,000 homes and another 20,000 plus businesses, along with most of the city’s schools, police and fire stations, electrical plans, and its public transportation system.

    • In Blow to Colorado Residents, Anti-Fracking Measures Fail to Make Ballot

      Fracking opponents vowed to keep up the fight in Colorado on Monday after it was announced that measures seeking to restrict fracking in the state had failed to make the 2016 ballot.

      Secretary of State Wayne Williams said Monday that supporters failed to collect enough “valid voter signatures” for Initiatives 75 and 78, which would have given local authorities more power to regulate fracking and implemented mandatory setbacks for oil and gas activity around schools, playgrounds, and hospitals, respectively.

    • Colorado is no longer heading to a vote on fracking this November. The state found too few valid signatures.

      Initiatives 75 and 78, which would have allowed new restrictions on oil-and-gas development, now face a steep uphill battle to get on the November ballot.

  • Finance

    • Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand Social Security

      Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has released a new ad that reveals that either he doesn’t understand Social Security or he wants to galvanize opposition to Social Security. Either way, his rhetoric undermines our collective security.

      In his ad, Trump wrongly attacks immigrants and refugees. Contrary to Trump’s claims, unauthorized workers do not receive Social Security. In fact, while they contribute to Social Security through their jobs, they cannot receive Social Security. Undocumented immigrants are not even eligible for means-tested welfare programs like Supplemental Security Income. There is no ambiguity or debate: They are not eligible for Social Security’s earned benefits.

      Unauthorized workers have billions of dollars in Social Security contributions deducted from their pay checks each year. Social Security’s chief actuary estimates that in the last 10 years they have paid more than $100 billion into Social Security. But, under the law, they are not eligible for benefits.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Jill Stein is a pro-immigration environmentalist and still wants to poach Trump votes

      In an interview with Circa, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein discussed her plan to fight climate change, erase student debt and win over Donald Trump supporters.

    • Green Party’s Jill Stein says Colorado leading the way to the future

      With ballot proposals that would revamp the state’s health care system, raise the minimum wage, and allow local governments to regulate fracking, Colorado is blazing a path that the rest of the country should follow, Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate told a crowd in Denver.

      “Colorado is leading the charge. These are the things we need to do at the national level,” Stein, a 66-year-old physician, told a packed house at the Mercury Cafe on Sunday.

      Stein said providing Medicare for all U.S. citizens would revitalize the poorly working health care system by redirecting funds into services that now are spent on administration, bloated salaries for executives, and other costs.

    • Why Hillary Clinton Republicans Matter

      Not since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign has there been such widespread public disavowal by Republicans of their party’s nominee. The Hillary Clinton Republicans will be one of the most important legacies of the 2016 campaigns.

      The question is whether they will constitute the forward end of a political realignment, or just a one-time reaction to the unsuitability of Donald Trump for the presidency.

      Reasons for skepticism about long-term change are rooted in the differences between today’s polarized politics and the more tempered partisanship surrounding the big-bang elections of 1964 and 1980.

      In 1964, there was a lively liberal wing of the Republican Party. GOP figures such as Jacob Javits, Clifford Case, Edward Brooke and John Lindsay had far more in common philosophically with Lyndon Johnson than they did with Goldwater.

    • Glenn Greenwald: Regardless of Trump, Journalists Must Do Their Homework and Investigate Clinton

      Donald Trump has become “such a kind of dangerous presence on the American landscape that a lot of people have become afraid of doing their jobs and scrutinizing his opponent,” Glenn Greenwald told “Democracy Now!”

      Greenwald made his observation as media outlets have launched into Donald Trump’s business and tax history and conducted investigations into the lives and past work of current and former Trump campaign officials Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort.

      Giving a demonstration of the kind of scrutiny he wants his colleagues to practice, Greenwald asked why the Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars in donations from Saudi Arabia and other tyrannical states in the Persian Gulf.

    • Dead Abe Lincoln Says: Vote Gary Johnson

      Via their site and using Facebook, they link a voter who would like to vote Libertarian from a specific state who says they would feel obligated to vote Hillary Clinton if they had no other choice to another voter who says they’d feel obligated to vote Trump in that situation.

    • Sanders Will Campaign for Dems, But Won’t Give Party Coveted Email List

      In an email to supporters on Monday, Bernie Sanders highlighted four hotly-contested races that he says will likely determine the Senate majority: Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio and Nevada.

      “The Koch brothers know this. That is why they are spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat these four candidates for Senate,” Sanders wrote. “And that’s why I’m asking you to support them: Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, Ted Strickland in Ohio, and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada.”

      “I want to be clear,” he continues. “It is very important that our movement holds public officials accountable. The Democratic Party passed an extremely progressive agenda at the convention. Our job is to make sure that platform is implemented. That will not happen without Democratic control of the Senate.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Transparency Hunters Capture More than 400 California Database Catalogs

      A team of over 40 transparency activists aimed their browsers at California this past weekend, collecting more than 400 database catalogs from local government agencies, as required under a new state law. Together, participants in the California Database Hunt shined light on thousands upon thousands of government record systems.

      California S.B. 272 requires every local government body, with the exception of educational agencies, to post inventories of their “enterprise systems,” essentially every database that holds records on members of the public or is used as a primary source of information. These database catalogs were required to be posted online (at least by agencies with websites) by July 1, 2016.

    • Hacker Shows Us How to Unlock a Laptop Using an NSA Tool

      Around Christmas in 2013, a German newsmagazine published a large cache of leaked NSA files, detailing several spy tools used by the NSA.

      The leaked documents were dubbed ANT (Advanced Network Techniques) Catalog, and showed that the US spy agency had a wide array of tools to spy on people’s computers and, as they put it, get the “ungettable.” The tools ranged from a set of fake cellular base stations that hijack phone calls, a USB plug to steal data as soon as it’s connected to a computer, and “radio frequency reflectors,” devices that beam radio signals to other devices, forcing them to beam data back.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Appeals Court Tosses Search Warrant Used By Louisiana Sheriff In Attempt To Silence Critical Blogger

      The Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeals has just ended Terrebonne Parish Sheriff Jerry “Censorious Dumbass” Larpenter’s attempt to silence a critic through the magic of abusing his power. The sheriff obtained a warrant to raid a blogger’s house, using the state’s mostly-unconstitutional criminal defamation law to justify the search. The blogger had pointed out that Larpenter’s wife works for an insurance agency that provides coverage for the local government — something that looked just a wee bit corrupt.

      Larpenter didn’t care for this, so he took his search warrant application — and a complaint by Tony Alford, who runs the insurance company that Larpenter’s wife works for — to an off-duty judge to get it signed. This same judge later declared the warrant to be perfectly legal when challenged by lawyers representing the blogger. The blogger’s lawyers appealed [PDF] this decision, which has resulted in the warrant [PDF] being killed. Naomi Lachance of The Intercept has more details.

    • Maine’s “Instant Runoff” Proposal Could Banish Its Governor From State Politics

      Maine’s colorful governor, Republican Paul LePage, has once again grabbed headlines — this time for leaving a profanity-laced voicemail for an opposition lawmaker and then declaring that the “overwhelming majority” of Maine’s “enemy” are “people of color.”

      LePage’s antics have left many people outside Maine wondering how the bland, sensible state ever elected him. The answer’s straightforward: LePage has never needed a majority of Maine’s votes to win. Maine has a standard first-past-the-post voting system plus a strong tradition of third parties and politicians running as independents. With multiple candidates running against LePage during his two races for governor, he was able to squeak into office both times with just a plurality of votes.

      In 2010, LePage was elected with just 37.6 percent of the vote. In 2014, he received 48.2 percent of the vote. In each election, a combination of independent and Democratic Party candidates received the majority of the votes.

    • Kids in Handcuffs?

      WHEN A KENTUCKY SHERIFF’S DEPUTY was caught on camera handcuffing an 8-year-old boy with disabilities, it made national headlines. But the problem runs deeper than one overzealous officer, say ACLU attorneys who sued the deputy and the Kenton County sheriff’s office in federal court under the Fourth and 14th Amendments and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

    • Do Over, Please: EFF and ACLU Ask Ninth Circuit to Revisit Two Dangerous CFAA Rulings

      Imagine being convicted of a crime for logging into a friend’s social media account with their permission? Or for logging into your spouse’s bank account to pay a bill, even though a pop-up banner appeared stating that only account holders were permitted to access the system? The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last month issued two decisions—by two different 3-judge panels in two separate cases—which seem to turn such actions into federal crimes. We teamed up with the ACLU and ACLU of Northern California to ask the court to review both decisions en banc—with 11 judges, not just 3—and issue a ruling that will ensure innocent Internet users are not transformed into criminals on the basis of innocuous password sharing. We want the court to come up with a clear and limited interpretation of the notoriously vague statute at the heart of both cases, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

    • Kaepernick vs. Trump: Making America Great Again
    • In ‘Tacit Admission’ of Cruelty, DHS Says It Too May End For-Profit Prisons

      On the heels of the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) “important and groundbreaking decision” to phase out the use of private prisons, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has just signaled that it may follow in those footsteps—a move that would heed human rights advocates’ call for the agency to end “prison profiteers in our inhumane immigration system.”

      In a statement released Monday, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson says he asked the Homeland Security Advisory Council to establish a subcommittee tasked with evaluating “whether the immigration detention operations conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] should move in the same direction” as the DOJ, with their findings to be submitted by Nov. 30.

      Among those welcoming the news was Human Rights First’s Jennifer Quigley, who said, “Private immigration detention facilities are inconsistent with international human rights standards and are largely unnecessary.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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