Source: http://techrights.org/2018/08/26/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 14:50:56+00:00

Document:
AS WE last noted yesterday, patent law firms try really hard to convince people and firms to still pursue software patents, based on their misinformation. Sure, major patent offices like the EPO and USPTO may grant such patents, but that does not mean that these patents become (successfully) enforceable. Failed enforcement can cost the plaintiff a fortune (paying the defendant’s legal bills as well). Nowadays, patents can also be invalidated outside the courts, owing to Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) inter partes reviews (IPRs) which receive affirmations from the Federal Circuit.
Yes, this has not actually changed. Iancu cherry-picked some court cases, resulting (at best) in some negligible changes.
We understand that patent law firms are desperate to sell their ‘products’ and ‘services’ (such as lawsuits), but lying to prospective clients only harms their cause. Clients don’t appreciate poor advice. In the remainder of this post we shall present our observations from this past week, showing that the only resurgence — if it can be called that at all — is that of buzzwords.
The Court disagreed with the PTAB, noting that while Perrodin discloses an embodiment that “happened to result in continuity,” “[n]othing about Perrodin’s algorithm required contiguity.” In re Facebookat *5. Perrodin disclosed another embodiment in which resizing one image element resulted in a grid that lacked images in one or more spaces in the grid, i.e., the image elements were not contiguous in the grid. Perrodin’s algorithm allowed noncontiguous image elements in the grid, so “Perrodin could not have disclosed the ‘rule requiring the image elements to be contiguous’” as recited in claim 1. Id.at *6. The Federal Circuit reversed the PTAB’s decision and remanded for further proceedings.
This case isn’t about Section 101. It’s quite rare and unusual for CAFC judges to disagree with PTAB on Section 101. Berkheimer was the only memorable exception.
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board on Wednesday refused to revive claims from a Canadian hotel entertainment company that two patents owned by network device maker Nomadix Inc. are invalid as obvious.
In a pair of decisions, the PTAB denied Guest-Tek Interactive Entertainment Ltd.’s request to rehear its challenges to Nomadix’s computer network systems patents, after the PTAB granted review of the patents, and then expunged that decision and denied review 10 days later.
“It’s quite rare and unusual for CAFC judges to disagree with PTAB on Section 101.”This isn’t about Section 101, but it shows PTAB on top of its agenda.
Three indexing software patents allegedly infringed by a Wisconsin-based party supply company are invalid because they only contain abstract ideas, a federal appeals court ruled in an East Texas case earlier this month.
The patents failed both steps in the so-called “Alice/Mayo” test, the industry standard for analyzing inventions under Section 101 of U.S. code, the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a decision handed down Aug. 15.
The Federal Circuit agreed with an earlier ruling by a Judge Robert W. Schroeder III of the Texarkana Division of the Eastern District of Texas, who granted summary judgment in BSG Tech LLC v. BuySeasons Inc. after finding that plaintiffs’ allegations were directed to abstract ideas rather than patentable inventions. The Federal Circuit affirmed the district judge’s ruling, affirming that none of the patent claims were eligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
So just because the USPTO grants some software patents doesn’t mean they’ll be honoured by courts, not even in Texas (not anymore).
“So just because the USPTO grants some software patents doesn’t mean they’ll be honoured by courts, not even in Texas (not anymore).”That’s the hallmark of a bubble; and that bubble is nowadays bursting. That’s really bad for the USPTO’s reputation because all these software patents that it granted for a number of decades are now bunk, worthless. The worst it can do it continue to grant these.
We’ve been carefully watching patent news over the past week, with particular focus on software patents. We are still seeing many such patents being granted despite the above trends (in courts). Odessa American, for instance, said that “Princeton Identity Receives Three New Patents for Iris Recognition Technology”. Citizentribune and other sites soon published the same thing [1, 2]. These are just software patents again. Computer vision is just software, maths. I know this because it is my field of research, which I practiced for about a decade. Can the examiners at the USPTO not see this (pun intended)? Computer vision (not processing but analysis) tasks are just algorithms.
Hope for who? Who’s “us”? Patent lawyers? Patent trolls? Besides, these people merely cherry-pick outcomes that favour their agenda while mostly ignoring the rest (the vast majority).
A California-based company that makes augmented reality headsets lost its bid to knock out a patent infringement suit related to 3D user interfaces.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware Aug. 21 rejected Meta Co.’s arguments that six patents owned by Genedics LLC, a Massachusetts-based patent licensing company, are ineligible for patent protection because they cover abstract ideas without an inventive concept.
The decision shows some of the difficulties courts face when determining whether a patent covers eligible subject matter.
The Federal Circuit can overturn such decisions, as it often does.
Both applications outline how the use of TEEs could further improve security within a consortium blockchain network, which requires that specific nodes are endorsed to act as validator nodes (VNs) on the blockchain.
The U.S.’s second-largest bank, Bank of America (BofA), has applied for another blockchain patent on the development of a secure crypto storage system, according to a patent document published by the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO) August 23.
Why are patents like these ever being granted? Why does the USPTO openly promote blockchain patents? When will courts finally have the opportunity to tackle such patents and make it clear that adding “blockchains” to software does not make that software any less abstract? Adding words like “cloud”, “AI” and “IoT” to patents is no magic recipe, unless the principal goal is to fool examiners rather than manipulate judges.
THE USPTO is not above the law. In fact, law is very much in the hands of US courts, such as the Federal Circuit or the Supreme Court, SCOTUS. Examiners at the USPTO receive guidelines, based on courts’ rulings — essentially rules by which to assess and judge patents/patent applications. They are not judges in the legal sense, but they judge applications and decide whether to award a patent.
“It is worth noting that none of these cases can impact patent scope, Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) inter partes reviews (IPRs), or the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA).”The difference between judgments and assessments (or a court ruling and examination) is profound; it’s important to distinguish between those two things because patent lawyers certainly conflate whenever it suits them, as we last noted yesterday. We shall revisit this subject again in a few hours.
There is room to debate what makes an invention patentable, but one thing should be uncontroversial: patentable inventions should actually be new. That’s what EFF and the R Street Initiative told the Supreme Court this week in an amicus brief urging it to grant certiorari and reverse the Federal Circuit’s decision in Ariosa v. Illumina [PDF]. We explained that the Federal Circuit’s decision is wrong on the law and bad for innovation, access to knowledge, and the patent system.
This case is not about patent scope (the aspect most cherished by us), but it’s still important. Watchtroll is meanwhile writing about amicus briefs striving to influence other cases dealt with by SCOTUS — something which we doubt will happen for several reasons outlined before.
When conducting an obviousness analysis, courts examine the scope and content of the prior art; the differences between the patent claims at issue and the prior art; the level of ordinary skill in the art; and relevant secondary considerations that may shed further light on the inquiry. Graham v. John Deere Co. Of Kansas City, 383 U.S. 1 17-18 (1966). One such so-called secondary consideration is the degree to which one or more commercial embodiments of the claimed invention has enjoyed success in the marketplace. Id. The rationale behind taking into account commercial success is, to the extent the claimed invention has been commercially successful (as reflected, for example, by strong sales and profits, gains in market share, and meeting and exceeding sales projections), the associated market demand would have led to development and marketing of the claimed invention sooner if the subject matter was in fact obvious (or so the thinking goes). Merck & Co., Inc. v. Teva Pharms. USA, Inc., 395 F.3d 1364, 1376 (Fed. Cir. 2005).
In order to establish that the commercial success factor supports a non-obviousness finding, the patentee must establish that a connection (or nexus) exists between the novel aspects of the patent claim(s) and the alleged commercial success. Id.; WesternGeco LLC v. ION Geophysical Corp., 889 F.3d 1308, 1330 (Fed. Cir. 2018). In other words, the patentee must show that the novel aspects of the claim(s) are driving sales and not aspects of the claim(s) that were known in the prior art. In re Huai-Hung Kao, 639 F.3d 1057, 1069 (Fed. Cir. 2011); WesternGeco, 889 F.3d at 1330. In cases brought pursuant to the Hatch-Waxman Act, while there are exceptions, it is most common that patent challengers’ arguments focus predominantly or entirely on an alleged lack of nexus given the substantial sales typically enjoyed by the brand-name drug products that are the subject of such litigation. Though it bears noting that the mere fact that a company is pursuing a generic version of a brand-name drug, by itself, does not support a “commercial success” finding. Galderma Labs., Inc. v. Tolmar, Inc., 737 F.3d 737, 740 (Fed. Cir. 2013).
Thugs and liars from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will lobby Congress regarding patents. As noted yesterday: “As part of its 2018 Driving Innovation Roadshow, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) will host three intellectual property and innovation business roundtables in Minnesota and Illinois.” Members of Congress are specifically being targeted and lobbyists are bashing their own country, based on falsehoods, to push their agenda.
Those are often critical drugs whose research and development was actually funded by taxpayers’ money. They just want price hikes, exploiting a monopoly that mostly harms poor countries. Does SCOTUS take such considerations into account? What magnitude do ethical factors have? Should competition be blocked? Should generics be banned?
But that function is limited by the second part of its mission—a requirement that the ITC consider the impact of such protection on the American economy, American consumers, and public health and welfare. If ITC action excluding a product from importation would significantly harm the economy, consumers, or health and welfare, the ITC isn’t supposed to issue an exclusion order.
The ITC’s present practice has resulted in an all-or-nothing approach to remedies; either a product is excluded, or it isn’t. But the ITC has the power to tailor its remedies more narrowly.
As always, when it comes to patent law, embargo should be the very last resort if any resort at all. Embargoes benefit nobody except one monopoly. Recall what Microsoft did to TomTom less than a decade ago.
While some would argue that October 5, 1991 is the actual birthday of Linux (that was when prototype code first dropped), today marks the anniversary of when Linus Torvalds first revealed he was working on a modest “hobby” OS that would go on to “revolutionize the world.” To celebrate, OMG! Ubuntu! has rounded up 27 interesting facts about Linux, which includes Steve Jobs offering Linus Torvalds a job in 2000 on the condition he stopped working on Linux (thankfully, he declined).
have become, in how painful it is when it’s lacking.
that are probably in the “there’s always the next one” pile.
Linus Torvalds has officially kicked off the development cycle of the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel series today by releasing the first Release Candidate (RC).
It’s been two weeks since the Linux 4.18 kernel series was launched, so the merge window for the next major release, Linux kernel 4.19, is now officially closed as Linus Torvalds announces today the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) for public testing.
As expected, Linus Torvalds has closed the merge window for 4.19 and released Linux 4.19-rc1.
Longtime Red Hat developer Jerome Glisse has published his latest patches concerning the Heterogeneous Memory Management support, a.k.a. HMM.
Heterogeneous Memory Management was merged in Linux 4.14 as one of the kernel pieces sought after by NVIDIA and other vendors. HMM allows a process address space to be mirrored and system memory to be transparently used by any device process.
Having already made the move this year to the new FreeDesktop.org Gitlab deployment has been Mesa, the X.Org Server, and many of the smaller repositories. This FreeDesktop Gitlab instance running on Google Compute Engine has been a big improvement for the project compared to their aging bare metal servers, their administration resources stretched thin, and Gitlab offering a modern UI compared to CGit and friends. Longer term, Gitlab should yield them more capabilities too around continuous integration and other modern development features.
Following Friday’s release of Go 1.11, a Phoronix reader pointed out a new open-source Internet router software package written entirely in Go.
Router7 was started by a former OpenWRT user after he began running into problems and ended up deciding to develop his own router software than waiting for a Fiber7 DHCP server setup issue to be resolved. This Router7 software is written entirely in Golang and is capable of serving as a home Internet router platform with DHCPv4/DHCPv6, DNS, and other basic capabilities. Router7 is focused on maximizing Internet connectivity, safe/quick updates, and easy debugging support.
Earlier this year MIPS rolled out the I7200 processor core built on the new “nanoMIPS” architecture. The open-source enablement of this new CPU ISA continues to settle down while the latest accomplishment is support for this new architecture in QEMU.
The nanoMIPS ISA is intended to offer “high performance in substantially reduced code size” and still fulfill the needs of an embedded processor by incorporating all MIPS32 instructions and architecture modules. Yes, it’s a 32-bit ISA and intended to co-exist in the embedded ecosystem with MIPS64.
Altium’s Designer Gerber Viewer for Linux is an innovative open source Gerber viewer for Linux. Altium Designer Gerber Viewer is part of Altium Designer as an all-in-one tool. Now you can come up with your idea, design it and convert it to Gerber for viewing inside the software.
You no longer have to use the CAM export function to generate Gerber files for sending to PCB manufacturers. No more wasting of time exporting Gerber files to other 2D drafting and mechanical CAD tools. You no longer need to spend lots of time adding several notes. You no longer need to spend time creating illustrations.
When you generate Gerber files, others can view these files using any EDA tools. Designs can be quickly reviewed, and mistakes can be detected. You can now import Gerber files from other EDA tools on your Linux computer.
But now not only has the existence of such a tool been confirmed, we can also test it now. The new Steam Play is basically a modified version of Wine created by Valve, called “Proton”, an integrated directly in the Steam client.
Run Fedora in Google Cloud Shell!
It is a container based solution, so you have root privileges which means you can do much more than just use the gcloud tool.
You can for instance run Fedora! My project anyfed just got a small update and it is working in Google Cloud shell just fine.
Running total is a concept of summing data items from the beginning to till current stage. Running total can provide you glimpse of total values as the data sets grows. It mostly useful for may use cases, e.g. to track the total sales value till date, to track current account balance considering withdrawal and deposits and so on. This short tutorial will explain how to create running total column in LibreOffice Calc.
Action RPG Contingent from developer Dark Age Studios seems promising, with a planned Kickstarter coming sometime soon and Linux support is planned.
As in 2016, I entered the 2018 LOWREZJAM on itch.io, a game jam where you have to build a game which runs in a 64×64 pixel square. So, really small — the Game Boy was 160×144, or about six times as big. So you’ve not got a lot of space to do things, but then constraints are the mother of innovation and you do get some really interesting game concepts! So, here are my reviews (which are also posted to itch.io so the developers get to see them; you can only rate and review as part of the jam if you entered your own game, which I did.
I’ve only rated games which are browser playable, mainly because there are loads of entries and I have to find a way to cut them down somehow, the reviews are in no particular order, and I didn’t quite get to them all (I nearly did, so apologies if I didn’t get to yours). Some thoughts on the jam as a whole after the reviews.
It’s been a wet and windy day here, so I blew the dust off my copy of Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime to share with the family and it’s the single most bit of fun we’ve had all together with a PC game before.
It’s an older game now, seeing as it release back in 2015 but don’t let that put you off. There’s a serious amount of fun to be had in this absolute gem of a game.
For those who love the classic RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, OpenRCT2 looks like a rather decent open source game engine to give it a new lease of life especially as it continues to be updated.
Chess is a recreational and competitive board game played between two players. It is a very popular game, played by millions across the world, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.
Chess has the virtue of being suitable for people of all ages. It has many positive attributes such as to help individuals develop their memory, improve and enhance their concentration, as well as logical thinking. It also promotes and improves imagination and creativity. Chess is one of those games that takes a few days to learn and the rest of your life to master, with the game being a never ending learning process, even for the top players.
Valve are now offering a chance to test a beta of the next version of Proton in their Steam Play system.
As a reminder: Steam Play is the system built into the Linux version of the Steam client to allow you to play Windows games on Linux. Compatibility varies from game to game, you can see the current titles that Valve have whitelisted in their original announcement.
Valve announced this week that they are releasing a beta version of Steam Play Proton, an improved version of Steam Play that uses a modified version of Wine, that makes Windows games with no Linux compatibility now able to be installed and run via the Linux Steam Client.
Valve’s goal for releasing Proton is to let Linux Steam users enjoy access to a larger back catalog, and also allow future developers to easily leverage their work from other platforms to target Linux.
KDE developers have announced the release of a dedicated version of KDE Neon for the Pinebook, ARM architecture-based laptops that came out last year with some fanfare due to its tight price: $89.
Now there is more than one Pinebook model and none costs $89, all are over $100 including shipping, but the invention – mobile hardware for the desktop – is here to stay and if the label was already used at the beginning Linux to introduce them, it is Linux that is now introduced to them and for everything big, with KDE Plasma.
And we are talking about equipment that assembles components such as 64-bit ARM CPU with quad-core at 1.2 GHz, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of eMMC storage and an 11 or 14-inch TN LCD screen with a resolution of 1366 × 768. With the exception of the processor and the storage, they are specifications of a decade ago, but with which it is possible to offer a low cost device with full functionality. However, nobody thought to put Plasma there, right? Well, they have done it.
KDE developers remain on their spree of various usability enhancements and polishing. KDE contributor Nate Graham also continues doing a great job summarizing these enhancements on a weekly basis.
Time for your weekly dose of Usability & Productivity! It’s another big one, and there’s a ton of stuff winding through the review pipeline that didn’t quite make the cut this week.
So, Akademy happened for me this year. And it was AMAZING!
Suppose you want to translate Dolphin File Manager into your language –say, Indonesian– and quickly preview each change. You can do it as long as you know the basic workflow and commands. You will be able to translate the menubar, toolbar, configurations, and more to your language. Here’s a simple guide that is very easy for anyone to try out and have fun.
However, if you’ve recently just bought a new computer priced at medium range (say an Intel i5 processor with 8GB RAM and equipped with Solid State Drive) and you’re lurking around the Internet searching for a cool Linux distro, so you can get the best Linux experience on your new awesome hardware. Then I recommend trying Linux with GNOME desktop due to its innovative look and ease of use.
GParted is the best graphical disk partition utility for Linux. It is capable of creating, resizing, deleting partitions in Disks, USB drives. Based on libparted, it supports almost all popular file systems.
Welcome to The Roundup #9, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup, we are focusing on the continued modernizing of our software stack, improved resilience, and what is coming up this week!
The popular Solus Linux distribution has experienced a busy week of updates but more changes are on the way to this desktop-focused OS.
GeckoLinux 150 was supposed to be the cure to all openSUSE Leap 15 ailments. It is not. I was expecting flawless results on all fronts, but then there were big issues with multimedia playback and associated performance, visual glitches, imperfect smartphone support, and of course, the graphics driver bomb. This hardly warrants the effort. I also didn’t mention various crashes – the kgreeter crash on logout, every time – but they were there, too. Samba issues, printing issues, and the list goes on. The good things are nice and commendable, but there must be a stable base.
However, the real dealbreaker is the Nvidia setup. This is supposed to just work. If it works in a dozen other distros on this same box, then it should continue working. And I’m certain this has nothing to do with Nvidia drivers but with how the repo contents were compiled and packaged. Then, no easy rescue, none of that SUSE enterprise-like resilience. Finally, you do gain some, but not enough to justify the experience. I will sample Gecko sometime in the future again, but the bad karma around openSUSE remains. So long.
This release features Ubuntu 16.04 as its base (previously 15.04), bringing security fixes and greater stability to unseen corners of the operating system. We’ve also upgraded from Qt 5.4 to 5.9, bringing a number of improvements. Check out the “What’s New” section below for more information on what’s been changed or updated in this release!
Users who have Ubuntu Touch OTA-3 will not be receiving this update automatically. See “How do I get it?” below for more information.
How can I back up my Android contacts in case I lose my phone?
I have been a system engineer for more than 10 years now, almost exclusively working with GNU/Linux systems. I’m also deeply involved in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community for a long time and I spend a lot of time on social networks (mostly Twitter and Mastodon these days). And some behaviours always piss me off.
I’ve been running a #Friendica node for several years now. Some months ago I also started to run a #Hubzilla hub as well. Some days ago I also installed #Mastodon on a virtual machine, because there was so much hype about Mastodon in the last days due to some changes Twitter made in regards of 3rd party clients.
Hubzilla: is the second player in the field of connecting both federations, but has a different focus. It is more of one-size-fits-all approach. If you need a microblogging site, a wiki, a cloud service, a website, etc. then Hubzilla is the way to go. The look&feel is a little bit more modern, but there are some quirks that appears a little odd to me. A unique feature for Hubzilla seems to be the concept of “nomadic accounts”: you can move to a different hub and take all your data with you. Read more about that in the Hubzilla documentation.
Next I joined the Mozilla to work on the Firefox platform partnerships. It has been fascinating working with this team, which originated from the Netscape browser in the 1990′s and transformed into an open-source non-profit focusing on the advancement of internet technology in conjunction with their former competitors, Microsoft, Google and Apple.
Personally, I have a harder go of it because very little of my open source software is appealing to the businesses that have the budget to sponsor them. Instead, I rely on the (much smaller and less stable) recurring donations of my individual users. When I started accepting these, I did not think that it was going to work out. But today, I’m making far more money from these donations than I ever thought possible2, and I see an upwards trend which will eventually lead me to being able to work on open source full time. If I were able to add only a few business-level sponsorships to this equation, I think I would easily have already reached my goals.
There are other options for securing financing for open source, some of which Redis has already been exploring. Selling a hosted and supported version of your service is often a good call. Offering consulting support for your software has also worked for many groups in the past. Some projects succeed with (A)GPL for everyone and BSD for a price. These are all better avenues to explore – making your software proprietary is a tragic alternative that should not be considered.
DRM is causing a lot of vibrant discussions this week on the FreeBSD mailing list… And no, it’s not even Digital Rights Management but rather colorful commentary about their Direct Rendering Manager code and plans for FreeBSD 12.
It began by an announcement made back on 21 August that DRM/DRM2 has been removed from the upcoming FreeBSD 12.0 release. For Direct Rendering Manager kernel graphics driver support moving forward, users should use graphics/drm-legacy-kmod if running really old graphics hardware otherwise one of the drm-stable-kmod / drm-next-kmod / drm-devel-kmod options from FreeBSD Ports.
releases to fix them. The following explains our reasoning.
The Seagate Media Server is a UPnp / DLNA Network Attached Storage mechanism incorporated into the Seagate Personal Cloud for individual level use. In an advisory on the IoT security bug hunt website Summer of Pwnage, several SQL injection vulnerabilities in the Seagate Media Server were discovered and discussed, risking the retrieval and modification of personal data stored in the database used by the media server.
The Seagate Personal Cloud is a cloud storage facility that is used to store photos, videos, and other kinds of multimedia in its media server. As personal data is uploaded into this cloud, it is protected with authorization checks and password security, but within its layout, a public folder exists to which unauthorized users have the right to upload data and files.
In an advisory published on the Confluence website maintained by the ASF community, a remote code execution vulnerability in the Apache Struts 2.x was discovered and elaborated upon by Yasser Zamani. The discovery was made by Man Yue Mo of the Semmle Security research team. The vulnerability has since been given the label CVE-2018-11776. It is found to affect the Apache Struts versions 2.3 to 2.3.34 and 2.5 to 2.5.16 with possible remote code execution exploit opportunities.
Systemd will now resort to using Intel’s RdRand hardware random number generator directly if the Linux kernel is unable to provide the init system with sufficient entropy.
This systemd change stems from the issue of the Linux boot process getting stuck if there’s not enough entropy due to a kernel change to eliminate CVE-2018-1108 over early boot processes potentially having weak random seed data. With systemd’s random-util change, systemd will now use RdRand directly if the kernel can’t provide any randomness, rather than having to block/stall.
Epic Games’ decision to make its popular game Fortnite available on Android through its own website instead of Google Play Store seems to have backfired.
Google has publicly disclosed an extremely dangerous security flaw in Fortnite’s installer that allows attackers to download anything on an Android phone.
A senior US Army official warned Tuesday that drones are “not a panacea” because “drones don’t smell, they don’t feel” and can’t deliver the same battlefield intelligence humans can. However, a leading anti-war activist told Sputnik, don’t expect this to mean drone warfare will be in any way curtailed in the future.
“Congress just approved a 700-plus billion dollar ‘defense’ budget and a lot of money for drone technology, and all the drone manufacturers are now getting richer and richer. And it’s not just the United States — dozens of countries have drones, many countries have armed drones, and it’s just — it’s a Pandora’s box.” And with the US using drones to drop bombs on countries it’s not even technically at war with — Pakistan being one example — how long will it be before this practice spreads?
“If you fly your drone anywhere near a wildfire, you could get someone killed,” said the warning.
A 1951 letter to the Central Intelligence Agency from a former spymaster warned of Russian infiltration in North America’s northern territories. A copy of the letter, which postdates the beginning of the joint CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Air Force stay behind program, was sent from the Assistant CIA Director directly to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, with a copy being sent to the leadership of G-2 (Army intelligence). As described by the CIA’s cover letter, “the Soviet threat to Alaska and Canada is discussed in very general terms.” Despite the letter’s “general terms,” its information and warning were considered important enough to send to Hoover in a package marked SECRET, and it remained classified until late 2018 – 67 years after it was written.
The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the little-acknowledged US government body employing thousands of journalist and media professionals, has been rebranded the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
In a statement, the newly-minted USAGM’s CEO John F. Lansing boasted the organization operated “far beyond traditional broadcast mediums”, such as television and radio — the name change was thus necessary as “the term ‘broadcasting’ does not accurately describe what we do”.
However, the new moniker arguably doesn’t accurately describe what the organization does either.
Reggae legend Bob Marley tragically died aged only 36-years-old, leading music lovers world-wide to grieve.
The Jamaican icon’s life and career were cut short following a four-year battle with cancer.
However, startling claims have emerged of a deathbed confession made by an ex-CIA officer, where he admitted to the killing.
In response to this dire situation, people across the political spectrum began to form solidarity through #Unify4J, an online platform to organize a social media movement in support of Assange. Among those include prominent Trump’s supporters. In the midst of Trump administration’s draconian measures on immigrants and empowerment of white supremacist groups, the idea of working with Trump’s key allies triggered reaction among the left. Recently, Classconscious.org, an outlet spearheading global civic action for Assange’s freedom, scrutinized the idea of uniting with ultra right forces that back Trump and urged the movement to draw a line.
One publication put him in a category of a leftist, while another turns him into a right wing. People speculate and get overly attached to Assange’s political views. Ultimately, the opinion of this inventor does not and should not matter. In the same way that people don’t have to know who invented electricity to have a light or a combustion engine to drive a car, everyone can benefit from this new journalism and use it to enrich society at large.
The date was June 4th, 2017. Winner was 25 years old, blond, blue-eyed, 5-foot-5, approximately 145 pounds, according to an FBI search warrant executed the day before. She’d spent exactly one night in jail. She didn’t fully recognize it yet, but life as she knew it — her day job as a subcontractor for the National Security Agency, the yoga classes she taught in her spare time, the date she’d missed because of her arrest — was rapidly slipping away from her.
Winner worked as a linguist and translator in Arabic and Farsi with the National Security Administration in Fort Meade, Maryland.
NSA whistleblower Reality Winner was sentenced Thursday to five years and three months in prison—the longest sentence ever imposed in federal court for leaking government information to the media. Twenty-six-year-old Reality Winner is the first person to be sentenced under the Espionage Act since President Trump took office. Reality Winner was arrested by FBI agents at her home in Augusta, Georgia, on June 3, 2017, two days before The Intercept published an exposé revealing Russian military intelligence conducted a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software company just days before the U.S. presidential election last November.
African cities generally use less electricity than their European equivalents, as people own fewer appliances and have greater need for thrift. Jet engines are essentially the same as turbines used for electricity generation, and the engines on a single jumbo would power a small African city had they generators attached. Remember that next time you fly.
Worldwide aviation emissions pump slightly more pollution into the atmosphere than the entire United Kingdom economy, and aviation emissions continue relentlessly to increase year after year. Air transport is simply far too cheap for the damage it causes and the resources it consumes. You cannot cause more damage to the Earth’s atmosphere with £30 worth of resources, than by buying a £30 Ryanair ticket to Barcelona. If you spend that £30 on fuel for your diesel car, or on coal and burn it in your garden, you will not come close to the damage caused by your share of emissions on that Ryanair flight.
The fundamental reason air travel has expanded to be so harmful is the international understanding that tax and duty is not charged on aviation fuel – unlike vehicle, train or maritime fuel. Even citizens of Saudi Arabia or Venezuela no longer can access fuel as cheaply as you do in effect when you fly.
The Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (Zacc) is reported to be investigating former Minister of Finance, Tendai Biti over a transaction which took place during the Government of National Unity (GNU) era. This comes after the National Social Security Authority (Nssa) alleged that Biti had unprocedurally ordered the social authority to release $30 million to Renaissance Bank between 2009 and 2013. Rennaisance is now defunct.
THE Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission is investigating former Finance Minister Mr Tendai Biti over a $30 million deal between the National Social Security Authority and the now defunct Renaissance Bank.
Shell companies, pseudonyms, shady lawyers, and secrecy: The president’s and his lawyer’s business practices match the classic pattern of suspicious activity.
“‘Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.’ Jeff, this is GREAT, what everyone wants, so look into all of the corruption on the “other side” including deleted Emails, Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr……” Trump tweeted. The quote Trump referenced was from a statement Sessions released Thursday, where the attorney general defended his tenure at the Justice Department. Sessions released the statement after the president attacked him during a “Fox and Friends” interview, which aired earlier Thursday morning.
President Trump publicly pressured Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “look into all of the corruption” of his adversaries Friday morning, after Sessions issued a rare statement Thursday saying the Justice Department will “not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” Sessions’ statement Thursday appeared to be a direct response to Mr. Trump’s claim on Fox & Friends Thursday that Sessions “never took control” of the DOJ.
Mr. Trump has long pressured his attorney general — in a very public way on Twitter — to investigate Hillary Clinton and current and former top Justice Department officials he dislikes. But those urgings have intensified in recent days, as many in the president’s former circle face charges. On Tuesday, former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law and claimed the president directed him to take the actions to do so. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was found guilty on eight counts related to bank fraud.
US President Donald Trump has continued to engage in a public spat with his own top law enforcer, Jeff Sessions, accusing him of being “unfair” for applying “double standard” in prosecuting suspects.
In a Friday morning rant on social media, Trump complained that a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor is getting 63 months in jail over “classified information”.
“Gee, this is ‘small potatoes compared to what Hillary Clinton did! So unfair Jeff, Double Standard,” the US president wrote, naming his Democrat opponent in the 2016 presidential election.
An Ambassador is evidently not as important as a Scottish First Minister, but there is one interesting similarity. You get to live in a palatial Residence at public expense, and you host numerous social events there, from intimate lunches to grand dinners to receptions for many hundred people. Indeed as a diplomat you do this throughout your career – as an Ambassador, Deputy High Commissioner, First Secretary and even Second Secretary I hosted many scores of such events in my home, and in every case was supported by office and domestic staff who worked under me, both British and local.
The U.S. is now a endless machine for war profiteering and endless war itself. Simultaneously a hyper Imperialist machine directed toward global hegemony. Domestically it is a McCarthyesque empire of propaganda and censorship and mass incarceration.
Many of these bases are as large as small cities. Camp Liberty in Iraq has concrete sidewalks, traffic signals, spas and cinemas as well as coffee shops and Burger Kings. Generals and Admirals employ private jets, and siphon off taxpayer money for vacations at luxury resorts and shopping trips for their wives and family. The bookeeping has been described as functionally fictive. The vast amounts of monies misplaced or unaccounted for is in the trillion of dollars. Everything….from shower heads to gym equipment, to electrical cable is from private firms that usually have spent small fortunes lobbying Pentagon officials or even state department higher ups to *win* these contracts. So ponder that a moment: TRILLIONS of dollars. When anyone asks why *we* are still in Afghanistan after 17 years, this is but one of the answers.
Ex-Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado now runs the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting, a federal agency that creates pro-American “news” and blasts it in the vague direction of Cuba. It would be perhaps inaccurate to say the OCB’s stations — Radio Martí, TV Martí, and Martí Noticias — “broadcast” in Cuba, because even the U.S. government admits the Cuban government is easily able to jam the signals.
Critics argue that as bad as the Castros are, the federal government’s ongoing, near-slapstick attempts to sabotage the administration have done little but ratchet up the tension between the two nations for no real reasons other than spite and force of habit.
Rumours that the film’s script was the source of the disagreement have been reported, with producers alleged to be unhappy with the decision to focus on contemporary political tensions with Russia and a “modern-day Cold War”.
However one industry source told the Telegraph the split was due to a fall out over whether to cast Tomasz Kot as the lead villain. The 41-year-old Polish actor stars in Cold War, a love story set in 1950s Europe, and was described as a “left-field” decision for a Bond enemy.
“Craig has a big say in all the casting decisions. None of the Bond girls have been chosen without his say so,” the source said.
Theatre artists in 15 cities across the U.S. will unite during Banned Books Week (September 23–29) for Banned Together 2018, a series of “censorship cabarets” featuring material from plays and musicals that have been censored or challenged on American stages.
Organized by the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, the non-profit organization that advocates on behalf of writers and other theatre artists facing censorship, the concert series will kick off September 23 in Atlanta, continuing throughout the week with performances taking place in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Nashville, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and more.
t seems like each week brings yet another example of strange and amateurish Facebook censorship. Last Friday morning, the immensely popular PragerU platform tweeted that Facebook had blocked access to its videos. PragerU screen-capped the proof. By the evening, Facebook reported that it had “mistakenly” removed the videos and was restoring access.
Wickr has added a new Secure Open Access capability to its instant messaging app, which the company says enables encrypted communications that is far more resilient to Internet traffic restrictions and censorship attempts than typical domain-fronting approaches.
The new feature is based on the open source Psiphon Internet censorship circumvention tool developed by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab for users of Windows and mobile devices. It uses domain fronting as just one of multiple techniques, including SSH and VPN technology, for directing encrypted traffic around blocking attempts.
Wickr’s latest solution is a partnership with the circumvention service Psiphon, which will be available to enterprise users starting today and rolling out to free users in the weeks to come. Similar to a VPN, Psiphon will disguise Wickr traffic through proxies and other routing protocols designed to make the traffic hard to spot and even harder to block.
Encrypted chat apps aim to keep you communicating securely, but they have a problem: Some governments want to block them from operating entirely. What’s more, some parts of their services can be easily blocked on a local level by anyone with a Wi-Fi network.
To keep conversations flowing, encrypted communications app maker Wickr said Thursday it’s implementing new tools that make its app of the same name immune to blocking attempts. The company will partner with software maker Psiphon, the brainchild of anticensorship researchers at the Citizen Lab, to roll out Wickr Open Access.
Encrypted chat apps are being heavily targeted by government organizations, and one of the most popular victims is Telegram. Wickr seeks to evade censorship laws and any state’s ability to block traffic to and from its servers at a national level. Most of the government organizations order ISPs to block traffic from the official servers of the apps. However, if the data is untraceable, it becomes highly difficult to identify the traffic and block it.
Wickr has partnered with Psiphon to include anti-blocking mechanisms. The added anti-blocking features will be available to only enterprise users for now, and it will be made available to free users in the coming weeks. While the new anti-blocking technology made by Psiphon offers features similar to that of a VPN, traffic is routed through proxies and complex routing protocols to make the data almost untraceable.
Wickr, a private, secure messaging company, has teamed up with Psiphon (previously), a spinout from Citizen Lab (previously) to allow its users to communicate even when they are behind national firewalls.
Messaging platforms had long used “domain fronting” — whereby secure messaging traffic was undetectably mixed in with traffic from Amazon, Google and others — to beat national firewalls, but these were largely discontinued by the major platforms in the face of threats of censorship by authoritarian governments.
Wickr proposes using Psiphon (which uses a variety of techniques to circumvent censorship) as an alternative to domain fronting, initially rolling it out for paid business users, with a promise to extend the feature to all users in the near future.
After three “strikes,” she could be shut down for good.
“Basically it will mean it will silence your voice on the Internet for anybody to see your video. That’s a problem,” she warns.
I recently accompanied my son to his first university open day. He wants to study politics and was inspired by the lecturers he met. Unfortunately, just before we left, he picked up a copy of the student newspaper and his excitement turned to disappointment. A controversial YouTube star he’s interested in had been invited to speak on campus, but the debate had been cancelled.
Hours before the event was to take place, the students’ union decreed that a neutral chairperson was needed, and no one suitable could be found. There had been no recourse to the law and no charges of hate speech. No doubt those convinced that campus free speech controversies are fabricated will shrug and say this is bureaucracy, not censorship. But a speaker some wanted to hear, a debate that had been months in the planning, was halted.
In Hate, Nadine Strossen brings wisdom garnered from decades at the forefront of arguing for civil liberties to bear on the polarised and often inflammatory discussion of free speech. Her central contention, that hate speech laws are “at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive”, is well made. She argues that hate speech should be met by more speech, “counterspeech”, rather than legal restrictions.
The ACLU is seemingly concerned about social media censorship.
In his conversation with HuffPost, the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Ben Wizner, drew parallels to how the situation might play out if the government were in charge of determining what is considered hate speech.
Dorsey had been reluctant to commit to an appearance, even amid reports that Congress was preparing to subpoena him.
Tehran, Aug 25 (Prensa Latina) Iran condemned today the international censorship of its media on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus.
The foreign service of the Radio and Television of the Islamic Republic of Iran issued a statement, which expresses its strongest protest against the blockade of several accounts in the country in internet.
Yes, that’s the story of the infamous Russian trolls who spread divisive content throughout the 2016 presidential campaign season. But it just as easily applies to the recently discovered propaganda network that Facebook and Google have linked to Iran’s state media corporation, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. They and Twitter have since deleted hundreds of accounts between them, thanks to a tipoff from vigilant researchers at the cybersecurity firm FireEye.
Big Tech corporations in the United States have tightened their social media dragnet, censoring accounts that criticize the US government and its allies.
In a Russiagate hysteria promoted incessantly by the US government and corporate media, social media accounts that were identified by shady private cybersecurity firms as supposed “Russian trolls” were targeted first. Then pro-Venezuelan government websites like the state-funded media outlet TeleSUR English and even the independent Venezuela Analysis had their Facebook pages temporarily removed.
Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election may be motivating other foreign adversaries to use social media to try to disrupt U.S. elections going forward, security experts warn.
Experts point to Facebook’s announcement this week that it shuttered hundreds of pages tied to foreign governments, with many of the pages — as well as accounts shut down on Twitter and Google — linked to the government of Iran.
The development boosted the Trump administration’s claim that other foreign groups, not just Russians, are intent to sow discord while putting a fresh spotlight on the need to ward against election meddling coming from any country.
Google is the latest Silicon Valley giant to find new evidence of misinformation campaigns by Iranian accounts.
The search giant said in a blog post Thursday that it removed 58 accounts with ties to Iran from YouTube and other sites.
They were the kind of social media posts that regularly get shared in liberal circles, but they were coming from sham accounts originating in Iran, the most recently uncovered attempt by a foreign adversary to sway U.S. voters.
A LEADING member of the Iranian opposition in exile has said Iran’s clerical regime has devoted “significant” funds and personnel to social media over the years, with the aim of spreading disinformation in pursuit of its own aims.
Accounts linked to an Iranian “influence operation” are being removed from major social media platforms. Facebook and Twitter announced their efforts to prevent the operation from levering their platforms earlier this week, and now Google has done the same for several of its sites.
The number of accounts Google removed from YouTube, Blogger and Google+ pales in comparison to the number of accounts Facebook and Twitter removed. Google cut some 39 channels with “13,466 total U.S. views on relevant videos” from YouTube, removed six blogs from Blogger and deleted 13 accounts on the Google+ social network.
The YouTube channels generated few views, according to Google, only 13,466 U.S. views in all. Walker said there was not much he could say at the moment because Google was working with law enforcement. He did say that the operation has been ongoing since 2017.
FireEye, a California-based cybersecurity firm, has been credited twice just this week with helping two of the biggest tech companies uncover midterm election threats — and got a stock bump as a result.
“Actors engaged in this type of influence operation violate our policies, and we swiftly remove such content from our services and terminate these actors’ accounts,” he added.
“In addition to the intelligence we received from FireEye, our teams have investigated a broader range of suspicious actors linked to Iran who have engaged in this effort,” the company said, referring to an alleged cybersecurity firm, on whose tip it had started the crackdown.
A group of students have filed a federal lawsuit against the College of Charleston for allegedly violating their right to free speech.
The lawsuit, filed by South Carolina Politics Club and members Jeremy Turner and Adam Gainey, alleges the College of Charleston repeatedly refused to recognize the group — which describes itself as “student-led” and “non-partisan” — as an official, registered student organization. Without that designation, the group is unable to reserve space, invite speakers or access school funds, according to the complaint, filed Tuesday.
A spokesman for the College of Charleston declined to comment, as the college does not comment on pending litigation.
The college denied the South Carolina Politics Club’s application because it is too similar to other, non-partisan, political student organizations, according to the complaint. When the club appealed the decision, the university told members in order to become a recognized group, it would have to either change its views or assimilate into another, existing group at the College of Charleston, according to the complaint.
The minister of information declared that the first edition of The Weekly Mail to be published under the new emergency regulations contained subversive material and ordered police to confiscate all copies of the newspaper from newsstands across the country. It was a devastating blow to the paper and revealed the lengths to which the government would go.
Nadine Strossen, the former president of the ACLU, argues that censorship does more harm than good—especially when it comes to social media platforms. In an interview filmed at the 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival in June, Strossen explains that hate speech is not a recognized legal concept in the United States. “That said,” she continues, “speech that conveys a hateful message—along with speech that conveys any message—may, in a particular context, be punished if it directly causes specific, imminent, serious harm.” Strossen goes on to demarcate the difference between free speech and hate speech. Ultimately, she makes a case for leaving the conversation about hate speech to citizens rather than government entities or social media platforms.
Pakistan’s newly elected Prime Minister, Imran Khan, commenced his work as the PM and as one of the first and welcome move, he ended the political censorship on the state run radio and television. Henceforth, Pakistan Television (PTV) and Radio Pakistan will be allowed to air shows without any political interference or discrimination.
The Intern­ational Press Institute (IPI) — a global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists — has welcomed the decision of Prime Minister Imran Khan to lift censorship on the state-run media.
In what seems like an attempt to “democratize” Pakistan, the main agenda of the recently held Pakistan Elections, the newly elected Prime Minister Imran Khan has lifted the censorship of state-run media outlets Pakistan Television (PTV) and Radio Pakistan.
Pakistan’s Information Minister Fawad Hussain Chaudhry announced that the Imran Khan-led PTI government has lifted all censorship that existed on the state-run media houses.
Google’s announcement comes days after Facebook suspended hundreds of accounts on its site and photo-sharing app, Instagram, that originated in Iran as well as Russia, and Twitter made a similar move. At the time, YouTube confirmed it had removed one account, called Liberty Front Press, which appeared to have connections to Iranian state media.
The news comes as President Trump tweets opposition to take-down efforts by the tech giants.
In the wake of influence-campaign takedowns by Facebook and Twitter, Google has issued a report detailing its own efforts to root out foreign influence operatives allegedly tied to an Iranian state-run media broadcaster.
Google followed in the footsteps of fellow tech giants Twitter and Facebook by blacklisting accounts a CIA-backed cybersecurity firm claims with “moderate confidence” are linked to Iran’s government.
Google banned 58 accounts allegedly linked to Iran from its platforms on Thursday after “working closely with FireEye,” a cybersecurity firm bankrolled by the Central Intelligence Agency.
“In recent months, we’ve detected and blocked attempts by state-sponsored actors in various countries to target political campaigns, journalists, activists, and academics located around the world,” he added.
Google issued a statement saying, “In addition to the intelligence we received from FireEye, a leading cybersecurity group, our teams have investigated a broader range of suspicious actors linked to Iran who have engaged in this effort.
“We’ve updated US lawmakers and law enforcement about the results of our investigation, including its relation to political content in the United States,” the statement continued.
Wead is not a member of the Ku Klux Klan or a neo-Nazi. He does not promote hate speech. Wead is a conservative commentator. He has taken positions supportive of President Donald Trump, and for that he has been punished by these social media platforms.
Free speech is a core value of this nation. So, why do these platforms think they have the right to silence voices that are contrary to the liberal narrative? Is it because they are not so confident in their arguments?
As China combines internal censorship and a major crackdown in its Xinjiang region, with aggressive verbal attacks and informal pressure on overseas academics, the self-censorship dilemma is becoming acute for overseas China scholars who comment China’s human rights, Tibet, Taiwan independence and other sensitive topics.
Self-censorship is rife and some who previously spoke out on China matters have gone silent fearing access to the country, on which much of their research depends, could be curbed if they irritate the Chinese authorities.
“There is a constant reminder with certain topics that this or that could get you into trouble with Beijing. It influences graduate topics and choices for academics and even their behaviour on social media. There is a very widespread concern about this,” says Kevin Carrico, a lecturer in Chinese studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.
An Auckland student newspaper fears university bosses censored them during a busy open day by hiding magazines critical of campus mental health services.
Debate magazine editor Julie Cleaver alleged “stifling freedom of speech” after magazine stands were moved from their usual prominent places inside AUT’s main building today.
But uni officials denied censorship, saying the magazine stands were only temporarily moved during the AUT Live open day.
“Magazine stands in the main building (WG) were not in their usual locations, but this was an issue of clearance rather than censorship,” a spokeswoman said.
Still, American leaders understood the need for a peacetime espionage agency and CIG lived on 20 months before the National Security Act took effect in September 1947, transforming the CIG into the CIA. For the next 70 years that agency would grow into the global spying, drone striking organization it is today.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most important – and controversial – privacy law passed in recent years. Despite its origin in the EU, its reach is truly global, since it affects anyone storing the personal data of EU citizens, no matter where the organization is located. In part because of a flurry of annoying pop-ups asking visitors to sites to agree to new terms and conditions, most people know about the GDPR by now. But few have heard of its sibling, the EU’s proposed ePrivacy Regulation, which in many respects will be even more far-reaching than the GDPR.
Where the GDPR protects personal data when it is gathered and stored, the ePrivacy Regulation protects personal data when it is transmitted. Traditional telecoms companies are already subject to laws in this area; the ePrivacy Regulation aims to extend that to the new generation of online services that transmit personal data over the Internet. In particular, the proposed law seeks to regulate how metadata is gathered and used, and to limit how people are tracked online, for example using cookies.
Facebook removed 652 pages, groups and accounts on Tuesday for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” after it was tipped off to the accounts by FireEye, a cybersecurity firm bankrolled by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Unlike Facebook’s last round of bans, the company has a attributed the operators of the newly removed accounts to the usual scapegoats: Russia and Iran.
“These were distinct campaigns, and we have not identified any links or coordination between them,” the company said.
You have been told that it is dangerous to trust yourself to move through life ungoverned by rules and authority and social pressures, but it isn’t dangerous. Rules and authority and social pressures are what got us to this point, and now we’re staring into the abyss of extinction because of them. Rules and authority and social pressures are what’s dangerous. Living authentically is safety. Once you move past all the voices telling you you mustn’t and you shouldn’t, you will find that your own inner truth is so much wiser and healthier than society’s dead ideas about how we all ought to live.
Trust yourself to be bravely and defiantly true to the truth, clear-eyed rebel. I trust you. Life trusts you. You can trust yourself. Climb up over that slaughterhouse rail and go live a life uninhibited by the painted lanes of a servile society, for the good of our species and for the honor of your own majesty. Leave the cage they built for you in a ditch by the freeway and stride out boldly into uncharted lands beneath the open sky.
Recently I was on a private mailing list thread where there was debate about whether or not the project should take on steps to improve diversity. One of the mailing list participants was very upset about this idea, and said that they didn’t like when people accused them of the “original sin” of having white male privilege.
I suspect this is at the root of a lot of misunderstanding and frustration around the term “privilege”. Privilege is not a sin… you are not a sinner for having privilege. However it is a responsibility and a debt to be repaid and corrected for, stemming from injustices in society.
A popular social narrative is that everyone has an equal place at the starting line, so the winners and losers of a race are equally based on their merit. Unfortunately this isn’t true. Privilege is being able to show up at the starting line having had sleep and a good meal and the resources to train… you still worked to be able to get to the finish line and having privilege does not take that away. But if we look at the other people on the track we could see that they not only maybe didn’t get enough sleep or were not able to allocate time to train (maybe they had to work multiple jobs on the side) or couldn’t afford to eat as healthily. Some of them actually may even have to start back farther from the starting line, there are rocks and weeds and potholes in their paths. If we really want to treat everyone based on merit, we’d have to give everyone an equal place at the starting line, an equal track, etc. Unfortunately, due to the way the race is set up, that does mean needing to correct for some things, and it requires actual effort to repair the track.
The Lithuanian government has decided not to appeal against the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling that Lithuania hosted a secret CIA detention facility.
“It was decided that it would make no sense to appeal the judgement to the Grand Chamber, because there are no legal criteria for that,” Karolina Bubnyte-Sirmene, the government’s representative at the ECHR, told BNS on Wednesday.
Although Lithuania has doubts about the standard for evaluating evidence used by the Strasbourg-based court, this cannot serve as a ground of appeal, Bubnyte-Sirmene said.
Under the rules, judgments can only be reviewed if it is proved that the court’s case law is unclear or that the case dealt with a matter of universal importance, she said.
The ECHR ruled on May 31 that Lithuania hosted a secret CIA prison for terror suspects between 2005 and 2006.
The court ordered Lithuania to pay 130,000 euros to Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi Arabia-born Palestinian, in compensation for his arbitrary detention in Lithuania.
Lithuania decided not to appeal the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that the Baltic country hosted a secret CIA jail, where the agency held and interrogated terrorism suspects, the press service of Lithuania’s representative at the court said in a statement on Thursday.
“A decision was taken not to refer to the Grand Chamber over the case Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania. Such a decision is a result of several factors which would ultimately prevent the appeal from achieving its goal and could possibly undermine Lithuania’s reputation on the international scene,” the statement read.
The ECHR ruled in late May that Lithuania was complicit in CIA’s secret rendition program which led to rights violations and arbitrary detention in CIA “black sites” of al-Qaeda* suspects, including Palestinian Abu Zubaydah.
The late Republican senator was a strong moral voice against torture. But his willingness to compromise his principles tarnished that legacy.
On August 21, North Dakota state prosecutors offered attorney and activist Chase Iron Eyes a plea deal for charges filed against him. They stem from protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline on February 1, 2017.
The plea agreement dropped all serious charges against Iron Eyes, which included inciting a riot and criminal trespass. He faced a maximum of six years in state prison and would have lost his license to practice law.
It reduces his charges to a class B misdemeanor of disorderly conduct, keeping him out of jail and removing the risk that he may lose his license to practice law.
North Dakota Supreme Court Judge Lee Christofferson approved the plea deal on August 23.
Private military contractor TigerSwan identified Chase Iron Eyes as one of the leaders of the No DAPL movement during the protests to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and conducted surveillance on him according to documents obtained by the Intercept. He ran as the Democratic candidate in the 2016 election to try to unseat incumbent Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer to represent North Dakota’s at-large congressional district.
In his first interview since the plea deal was offered and accepted, Iron Eyes explained why he accepted the deal.
While the concepts of ‘mainstream’ and ‘mainstreaming’ have commonly been invoked, their definition has been elusive, or rather avoided by scholars and experts on the topic – partly due to the fact that defining the mainstream is itself a challenge. Defining the mainstream is itself a challenge.
Intellectual Property ordinarily includes patent, design, trademark and copyright. Due to the technological growth and globalization. Intellectual Property (IP) has acquired an international character. The greater importance on Intellectual Property all over the world can be traced from the concern of different international organization. WIPO and WTO are playing the leading role jointly for the protection of Intellectual property. Under the WTO agreement developing countries and transition economies were given use years to ensure that their laws and practices conform with the TRIPS agreement (1995 to 2000). Least-developed countries had 11 years, until 2006 conform to the TRIPS agreement. This papers described about the critical review of Intellectual property and its issue, challenge and opportunity.
Is Intellectual Property ‘Disrupted’ by the Algorithm That Feeds You Information in an Era of Fake News?
In April, 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by members of Congress in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. in a series of questions about the company’s best effort to protect privacy and act against Russian interference in the 2016 election. For the reason that Facebook merely considers itself as “a technology company—one that has built a ‘platform for all ideas’,” it allows the News Feed Algorithm to respond to what the company deems the most important “kind” of information for the users. However, those contents in the information flow are sometimes cheaply generated by what we called “content farms” and can be intentionally manipulated by data analytics firms, such as Cambridge Analytica. Everyone is asking: everyone thinks Cambridge Analytica is dangerous, but no one can describe in great detail what it has done. Just the same as what we are facing now: everyone thinks Big Data is an ever-changing and far-reaching technology, but no one exactly knows why intellectual property (IP) laws should play an important part in regulating Big Data. Here, in a downright way, the issue is: is the function of IP laws “disrupted” or “undisrupted” by the News Feed Algorithm?
The insight to answer this question may be obtained from the classical debate, “law of the horse,” between Judge Easterbrook of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Professor Lawrence Lessig: do we have a special need to adjust IP laws specially for Big Data, or we should go back to the basics: what is IP law in general and what kind of role does IP play in the society and cyber-society? Significantly, the News Feed Algorithm is targeting the mass who read the information, while IP laws are about the protection of Big Data companies’ valuable IP assets, such as patent protection for the algorithm. All the issues have the same concern: does public law have the supremacy to “disrupt” private property protection?
Yochai Benkler is a giant within the intellectual history of IP law; some of his work will surely end up on my Classic Patent Scholarship page if I expand it to post-2000 works. Even though I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, I think IP scholars should at least be familiar with his arguments. For those who haven’t read his earlier works—or who just want a refresher on his take—you might enjoy his recent review article, Law, Innovation, and Collaboration in Networked Economy and Society, 13 Ann. Rev. L. & Soc. Sci. 231 (2017).
THE USPTO has fed the trolls. Yes, it has. By granting millions of patents that are of questionable validity it created an ‘underworld’ or a ‘black market’ of blackmail and extortion. Trolls with such dubious patents go after small businesses that are unable or unwilling to pursue legal defense; if the patent ‘protection’ sums (it’s really just a racket) don’t add up as much as litigation against large firms with deep pockets, then the trolls make up by ‘volume’ (targeting potentially thousands of small businesses with threatening letters).
“Bounties nowadays help invalidate patents of patent trolls (i.e. disarm/neutralise them), as we first noted some months back.”It is important to name and shame the trolls, which are often pseudo-(or poly-)nymous. They keep shifting shapes and names so as to better cover their tracks and hide who’s behind them (subsidising them and sometimes directing them, as Microsoft often does).
Several days ago when we wrote about patent trolls dropping like flies (because of legal challenges to their patents) we could just about predict/foresee Watchtroll writing in defense of these trolls. We don’t want to feed the (Watch)trolls, but let’s just say that it’s pretty revealing who supports them and props up their agenda. It’s often the sites sponsored by the trolls (like IAM) or authors to whom trolls are clients.
Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Nikhil Bhaskar, who received a cash prize of $2000 for his prior art submission for U.S. Patent 6,434,599, owned by Epic IP, an IP Edge subsidiary and well-known NPE. The ’599 patent, directed towards an online chatting method, has been asserted against numerous companies in district court litigation. To help the industry fight bad patents, we have published the winning prior art below.
Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Sachin Srivastava, who received a cash prize of $2000 for his prior art submission for U.S. Patent 8,023,647, owned by Cumberland Systems, LLC, a well-known NPE. The ’647 patent, directed to a password encryption system and method, has been asserted against numerous companies in 24 district court litigations. To help the industry fight bad patents, we have published the winning prior art below.
In a challenge to Facebook’s patent application for a method for arranging images contiguously in an array, a prior art reference—a patent application filed by Perrodin that related to placing images on a grid and did not require contiguity in response to resizing or rearranging in all cases—could not have disclosed the limitation of Facebook’s application that required all of the image elements to be contiguous, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled.
Last but not least, here’s an oddly-titled report, “Blackberry Patent War Mostly Survives Attack by Facebook, Snap” (very gross inversion of narratives).
A federal judge on Tuesday kept intact the bulk of Blackberry’s patent infringement claims against Facebook and Snap, finding it’s too early in the proceedings to say Blackberry’s patents aren’t valid.
Blackberry sued the social media titans in March, claiming it pioneered the “sense of real-time presence” that is now standard in instant messaging applications when it developed the first messaging platform with timestamps.
The Canada-based smartphone maker accused Snap and Facebook of copying patents covering the timestamp tool, message notification icons, push notifications for ads and mapping media activity by users for their services.
THE LEGALITY or rather the legitimacy of software patents was once the subject of interest in Europe, even more than a decade before EPO scandals. Can patents be granted which courts would, as a matter of law, repeatedly reject? Can patent offices and patent courts be so out of tune? The USPTO has, in recent years, faced a similar dilemma. What if US patents are granted on algorithms and these patents consistently get knocked out in the courtroom? What would be the effect on confidence in patents at large?
As we have been saying for a number of years, software patents are a waste of time and money; if disguised somehow as non-abstract, examiners might award them. But what kind of “award” are these really if granted patents aren’t admissible in courts? Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) inter partes reviews (IPRs) often eliminate these even outside the courts.
As always, the patent ‘industry’ does not like to acknowledge the above because it’s “not good for business” (their business). Don’t ask patent lawyers about software patents. These patent-centric lawyers will lie to anyone about needing a patents arsenal or portfolio (potentially billions to be made in the process of applying, selling and suing). Even if most of these patents are bunk, toothless and worthless, law firms stand to benefit financially.
For most software patents, particularly those focusing on algorithms, the claimed invention is typically embodied as a method that involves carrying out particular steps (e.g., according to an “algorithm”) to provide an inventive contribution to a technical field.
For example, a mathematical algorithm or function that can reduce the size of a data packet or encrypt that data packet, when recited as a series of steps applied to the data packet to create a compressed or encrypted data packet in a new way, could be patented as a method. Similarly, an algorithm that reduces the computational efforts in traversing a neural network or that creates a more accurate classifier in a machine learning application, could be patented as a method.
Furthermore, any system (i.e. machine) that includes the necessary technical components (transceivers, processors, memory, etc.) to carry out the method, and the computer-executed instructions, that when executed by a computer carry out the method, can also be patented. Far from being excluded from the patent system, here are three types of patent protection Alice and Bob can consider for their tool.
Don’t take lawyers’ advice on patents. They ‘sell’ lawsuits. Even ones to lose (both the plaintiff and the defendant need to hire lawyers). Notice that Alice isn’t being mentioned above, nor is the appalling track record of software patents in the courtroom.
“…nevertheless they continue to be filed and allowed,” says the summary.
THE U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), taking precedential Federal Circuit (CAFC) rulings into account, already limits patent scope — to the point of patent grants decreasing in number.
On July 22nd, the Federal Circuit issued its opinion in St. Regis Mohawk Tribe v. Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc., affirming the decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that denied the Tribe’s motion to terminate Mylan’s inter partes review (IPR) proceedings as being barred by tribal sovereign immunity. Yesterday, the Tribe filed its brief in support of its petition for rehearing en banc.
We are pretty certain that SCOTUS won't deal with this. It would be a total waste of the court’s time.
“They are trying to make it seem as though software patents still have some worth, but that’s patently untrue.”Be sure, however, that patent extremists would do anything they can to advocate even ‘scams’ (like the above). They hate PTAB with a passion, so they’d cling onto anything!
The difference is minuscule and we offered an explanation for it earlier this month. In a nutshell, fewer people even bother with their patents; only ‘stronger’ cases are even being tested.
Moving on to other anti-PTAB sites, Watchtroll again (and intentionally) conflates patents with innovation or “invention” (yesterday’s guest article from Trevor Day and Neil Ferraro). One can invent things without patent applications, as many have done for centuries. But let’s put this spin aside.
Dennis Crouch said it in relation to Smartflash v. Samsung, which saw a SCOTUS petition filed (“Smartflash Patents at issue here: U.S. Patent Nos. 7,334,720; 7,942,317; 8,033,458; 8,061,598; 8,118,221; 8,336,772; and 8,794,516.”).
Watchtroll’s Steve Brachmann wrote about a patent troll’s petition (Advanced Audio Devices) under “Supreme Court Petition Challenges PTAB’s Constitutionality Under the Takings Clause” (this issue or a similar issue was already challenged or tackled only months ago).
During prosecution, the USPTO (examiner then PTAB) rejected the patent — finding the claim indefinite and not enabled. The particular problem with the drawing is that it is a flat plan view and does not show the three-dimensional structure — what do these lines actually represent in terms of 3D hills and valleys? The figures below is more ordinary for a shoe sole design — showing more than just a plan-view of the base.
In the end, this means that Maatita’s patent will be much broader in scope because it is not limited to any particular three-dimensional shape, but rather only a to the appearance from a particular perspective.
The decision here is also in-line with the Federal Circuit’s ongoing undermining of the indefiniteness doctrine — what does “reasonable certainty” mean to the court?

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