Everyone seems to be eager to pin the blame for the Sony hack on North Korea. However, I think it’s unlikely. Here’s why:1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesn’t exhibit any of the classic comprehension mistakes you actually expect to see in “Konglish”. i.e it reads to me like an English speaker pretending to be bad at writing English.
2. The fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale & language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea. Not least because they don’t speak traditional “Korean” in North Korea, they speak their own dialect and traditional Korean is forbidden. This is one of the key things that has made communication with North Korean refugees difficult. I would find the presence of Chinese far more plausible.
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The WHATWG Blog » Blog Archive » The Road to HTML 5: character encoding - 0 views
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To sum up: character encoding is complicated, and it has not been made any easier by several decades of poorly written software used by copy-and-paste-educated authors. You should always specify a character encoding on every HTML document, or bad things will happen. You can do it the hard way (HTTP Content-Type header), the easy way ( declaration), or the new way ( attribute), but please do it. The web thanks you. Good post, lots of links to other "MUST READ" commentaries and explanations of character encoding. Including Joel Spolsky and Tim Bray.
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Google's Real Chrome OS Problem: Who's Going To Buy It? (GOOG) - 0 views
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While i don't see Google or anyone else replacing the MSOffice productivity environment, i do see Google challenging Microsoft wherever the Web comes into play. And as far as i can see into the future, that pretty much means everywhere. The tricky part will be that re-purposing play. ChromeOS is a blockbuster announcement. Not a declaration of war, but a shot across the bow that shouts; Google will defend the Open Web, and profitable business they have there. ~ge~
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Red 4.0 - A Full Ruby Runtime in Your Browser « Trek - 0 views
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Javascript has a major advantage of being (likely) the most installed programming language in history. It's experiencing a renaissance lately where people actually learning it, not just copying code found on someone's website. ECMAScript Harmony will bring some much needed fixes to the language (although I think ECMAScript 4 would have been a true game-changer for the web). Regardless, until we have more mature tools for sever- and DB-side javascript, Javascript is really a browser language (and faces an army of entrenched programmers who'd rather use some other language). To the second argument, I say: Javascript is an amazing language, but you can't declare it off limits to people who prefer other languages. Programming is about choice. On the server we get to use whatever combinations of web server, database, programming language, and development environment we like. Not so for the browser. We're stuck with Javascript whether we like it or not. We can't stay away from it, we can't use something else. Everyone who dislikes working in Javascript is perfectly justified because he has no other avenue. When all browsers support and are prepackaged with VMs for many languages, I'll be the first to sound the clarion: if you don't like JS, get the hell away from it. Until then, you're stuck with us and we're stuck with you. To the third: again, it's really all about to choice. If you prefer Javascript keep using it, make it better, steal ideas from other languages, and seed the community with new ideas of your own. Nobody will complain about a better overall development community. If you'd like to see Red in Python, PHP, C#, or language X then steal Jesse's code. Red was a herculean effort on Jesse's part. I know he's worked on nothing else for two months and future ports of Red to other languages will benefit from this effort.
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shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 20 Oct 14
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The incoming European Commissioner Andrus Ansip declares his support for free software ... - 0 views
www.april.org/...ares-his-support-free-software
incoming european commissioner support free software
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 20 Oct 14
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"Paris, October 8th, 2014, press release. During the course of his European Parliament hearing, Andrus Ansip, the designated EU Commissioner for the Digital Single Market, expressed his support for free software several times. April hopes that this is a sign towards the implementation of proactive policies in favour of free software." -
"Paris, October 8th, 2014, press release. During the course of his European Parliament hearing, Andrus Ansip, the designated EU Commissioner for the Digital Single Market, expressed his support for free software several times. April hopes that this is a sign towards the implementation of proactive policies in favour of free software."
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Why the Sony hack is unlikely to be the work of North Korea. | Marc's Security Ramblings - 0 views
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3. It’s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sony’s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While it’s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occam’s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider. It also fits with the pure revenge tact that this started out as. 4. Whoever did this is in it for revenge. The info and access they had could have easily been used to cash out, yet, instead, they are making every effort to burn Sony down. Just think what they could have done with passwords to all of Sony’s financial accounts? With the competitive intelligence in their business documents? From simple theft, to the sale of intellectual property, or even extortion – the attackers had many ways to become rich. Yet, instead, they chose to dump the data, rendering it useless. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that a “Nation State” which lives by propaganda would be so willing to just throw away such an unprecedented level of access to the beating heart of Hollywood itself.
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5. The attackers only latched onto “The Interview” after the media did – the film was never mentioned by GOP right at the start of their campaign. It was only after a few people started speculating in the media that this and the communication from DPRK “might be linked” that suddenly it became linked. I think the attackers both saw this as an opportunity for “lulz” and as a way to misdirect everyone into thinking it was a nation state. After all, if everyone believes it’s a nation state, then the criminal investigation will likely die.
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6. Whoever is doing this is VERY net and social media savvy. That, and the sophistication of the operation, do not match with the profile of DPRK up until now. Grugq did an excellent analysis of this aspect his findings are here – http://0paste.com/6875#md 7. Finally, blaming North Korea is the easy way out for a number of folks, including the security vendors and Sony management who are under the microscope for this. Let’s face it – most of today’s so-called “cutting edge” security defenses are either so specific, or so brittle, that they really don’t offer much meaningful protection against a sophisticated attacker or group of attackers.
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8. It probably also suits a number of political agendas to have something that justifies sabre-rattling at North Korea, which is why I’m not that surprised to see politicians starting to point their fingers at the DPRK also. 9. It’s clear from the leaked data that Sony has a culture which doesn’t take security very seriously. From plaintext password files, to using “password” as the password in business critical certificates, through to just the shear volume of aging unclassified yet highly sensitive data left out in the open. This isn’t a simple slip-up or a “weak link in the chain” – this is a serious organization-wide failure to implement anything like a reasonable security architecture.
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The reality is, as things stand, Sony has little choice but to burn everything down and start again. Every password, every key, every certificate is tainted now and that’s a terrifying place for an organization to find itself. This hack should be used as the definitive lesson in why security matters and just how bad things can get if you don’t take it seriously. 10. Who do I think is behind this? My money is on a disgruntled (possibly ex) employee of Sony.
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EDIT: This appears (at least in part) to be substantiated by a conversation the Verge had with one of the alleged hackers – http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/25/7281097/sony-pictures-hackers-say-they-want-equality-worked-with-staff-to-break-in Finally for an EXCELLENT blow by blow analysis of the breach and the events that followed, read the following post by my friends from Risk Based Security – https://www.riskbasedsecurity.com/2014/12/a-breakdown-and-analysis-of-the-december-2014-sony-hack EDIT: Also make sure you read my good friend Krypt3ia’s post on the hack – http://krypt3ia.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/sony-hack-winners-and-losers/
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Seems that the FBI overlooked a few clues before it told Obama to go ahead and declare war against North Korea.
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Box extends its enterprise playbook, but users are still at the center | CITEworld - 0 views
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The 47,000 developers making almost two billion API calls to the Box platform per month are a good start, Levie says, but Box needs to go further and do more to customize its platform to help push this user-centric, everything-everywhere-always model at larger and larger enterprises.
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Box for Industries is comprised of three parts: A Box-tailored core service offering, a selection of partner apps, and the implementation services to combine the two of those into something that ideally can be used by any enterprise in any vertical.
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Box is announcing solutions for three specific industries: Retail, healthcare, and media/entertainment. For retail, that includes vendor collaboration (helping vendors work with manufacturers and distributors), digital asset management, and retail store enablement.
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Ted Blosser, senior vice president of Box Platform, also took the stage to show off how managing digital assets benefit from a just-announced metadata template capability that lets you pre-define custom fields so a store's back-office can flag, say, a new jacket as "blue" or "red." Those metadata tags can be pushed to a custom app running on a retail associate's iPad, so you can sort by color, line, or inventory level. Metadata plus Box Workflows equals a powerful content platform for retail that keeps people in sync with their content across geographies and devices, or so the company is hoping.
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It's the same collaboration model that cloud storage vendors have been pushing, but customized for very specific verticals, which is exactly the sales pitch that Box wants you to come away with. And developers must be cheering -- Box is going to help them sell their apps to previously inaccessible markets.
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More on the standard enterprise side, the so-named Box + Office 365 (previewed a few months back) currently only supports the Windows desktop versions of the productivity suite, but Levie promises web and Mac integrations are on the way. It's pretty basic, but potentially handy for the enterprises that Box supports.
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The crux of the Office 365 announcement is that people expect that their data will follow them from device to device and from app to app. If people want their Box files and storage in Jive, Box needs to support Jive. And if enterprises are using Microsoft Office 365 to work with their documents -- and they are -- then Box needs to support that too. It's easier than it used to be, Levie says, thanks to Satya Nadella's push for a more open Microsoft.
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"We are quite confident that this is the kind of future they're building towards," Levie says -- but just in case, he urged BoxWorks attendees to tweet at Nadella and encourage him to help Box speed development along.
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Box SVP of Enterprise Annie Pearl came on stage to discuss how Box Workflow can be used to improve the ways people work with their content in the real world of business. It's worth noting that Box had a workflow tool previously, but it was relatively primitive and seems to have only existed to tick the box -- it didn't really go beyond assigning tasks and soliciting approvals.
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This will be very interesting. Looks like Box is betting their future on the success of integrating Microsoft Office 365 into the Box Productivity Cloud Service. Which competes directly with the Microsoft Office 365 - OneDrive Cloud Productivity Platform. Honestly, I don't see how this can ever work out for Box. Microsoft has them ripe for the plucking. And they have pulled it off on the eve of Box's expected IPO. "Box CEO Aaron Levie may not be able to talk about the cloud storage and collaboration company's forthcoming IPO, but he still took the stage at the company's biggest BoxWorks conference yet, with 5,000 attendees. Featured Resource Presented by Citrix Systems 10 essential elements for a secure enterprise mobility strategy Best practices for protecting sensitive business information while making people productive from LEARN MORE Levie discussed the future of the business and make some announcements -- including the beta of a Box integration with the Windows version of Microsoft Office 365; the introduction of Box Workflow, a tool coming in 2015 for creating repeatable workflows on the platform; and the unveiling of Box for Industries, an initiative to tailor Box solutions for specific industry use-cases. And if that wasn't enough, Box also announced a partnership with service firm Accenture to push the platform in large enterprises. The unifying factor for the announcements made at BoxWorks, Levie said, is that users expect their data to follow them everywhere, at home and at work. That means that Box has to think about enterprise from the user outwards, putting them at the center of the appified universe -- in effect, building an ecosystem of tools that support the things employees already use."
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Verizon Will Now Let Users Kill Previously Indestructible Tracking Code - ProPublica - 0 views
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Verizon says it will soon offer customers a way to opt out from having their smartphone and tablet browsing tracked via a hidden un-killable tracking identifier. The decision came after a ProPublica article revealed that an online advertiser, Turn, was exploiting the Verizon identifier to respawn tracking cookies that users had deleted. Two days after the article appeared, Turn said it would suspend the practice of creating so-called "zombie cookies" that couldn't be deleted. But Verizon couldn't assure users that other companies might not also exploit the number - which was transmitted automatically to any website or app a user visited from a Verizon-enabled device - to build dossiers about people's behavior on their mobile devices. Verizon subsequently updated its website to note Turn's decision and declared that it would "work with other partners to ensure that their use of [the undeletable tracking number] is consistent with the purposes we intended." Previously, its website had stated: "It is unlikely that sites and ad entities will attempt to build customer profiles.
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However, policing the hundreds of companies in the online tracking business was likely to be a difficult task for Verizon. And so, on Monday, Verizon followed in the footsteps of AT&T, which had already declared in November that it would stop inserting the hidden undeletable number in its users' Web traffic. In a statement emailed to reporters on Friday, Verizon said, "We have begun working to expand the opt-out to include the identifier referred to as the UIDH, and expect that to be available soon." Previously, users who opted out from Verizon's program were told that information about their demographics and Web browsing behavior would no longer be shared with advertisers, but that the tracking number would still be attached to their traffic. For more coverage, read ProPublica's previous reporting on Verizon's indestructible tracking and how one company used the tool to create zombie cookies.
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Here's How You Can Find Out If The NSA Shared Your Data With British Spies - Forbes - 0 views
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In the UK earlier this month, human rights groups Liberty and Privacy International were cheered by a tribunal decision that declared GCHQ’s access to NSA spies’ data illegal. Though it was a hollow victory, as the tribunal also declared all current activities, including all those blanket surveillance projects much derided by free speech activists, entirely legal. The practices previously broke the law because the public was unaware of what safeguards were in place for the UK’s access to data from NSA programs like Prism; as soon as Snowden blew everything wide open the snoops had to explain themselves, and that was enough for the tribunal to confirm the legality of GCHQ’s operations. But the case has had one significant effect: anyone can now figure out if their data was illegally shared by the agencies. Privacy International has set up a simple webpage that anyone in the world can sign up to. You can visit the page here.
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Once the UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal has determined whom was affected, it has to inform them. Though participants should find out whether their data were unlawfully obtained by GCHQ from the millions of private communications hoovered up by the NSA up until December 2014, it won’t be anytime soon. Privacy International warned in its FAQs: “Count on it being many months, and likely years before this action is completed.” And somewhat ironically Privacy International has to collect participant’s information, including their name and email address, to supply the service. They may ask for more information from willing participants once the group has determined if more is required from the IPT. Anyone who wants to submit directly to the tribunal can do so here.
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shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 29 Nov 15
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Microsoft and Linux: True Romance or Toxic Love? | Linux Journal [# ! Note] - 0 views
www.linuxjournal.com/...x-true-romance-or-toxic-love-0
microsoft linux true romance toxic love attacks open source cynism to conquer lost mobile AND servers market .NET trick
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 29 Nov 15
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"On the other hand, Microsoft continues to launch legal attacks on open-source projects directly and through puppet corporations. It's clear that Microsoft hasn't had some big moral change of heart over proprietary vs. free software, so why the public declarations of adoration? "
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The Wifi Alliance, Coming Soon to Your Neighborhood: 5G Wireless | Global Research - Ce... - 0 views
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Just as any new technology claims to offer the most advanced development; that their definition of progress will cure society’s ills or make life easier by eliminating the drudgery of antiquated appliances, the Wifi Alliance was organized as a worldwide wireless network to connect ‘everyone and everything, everywhere” as it promised “improvements to nearly every aspect of daily life.” The Alliance, which makes no pretense of potential health or environmental concerns, further proclaimed (and they may be correct) that there are “more wifi devices than people on earth”. It is that inescapable exposure to ubiquitous wireless technologies wherein lies the problem.
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Even prior to the 1997 introduction of commercially available wifi devices which has saturated every industrialized country, EMF wifi hot spots were everywhere. Today with the addition of cell and cordless phones and towers, broadcast antennas, smart meters and the pervasive computer wifi, both adults and especially vulnerable children are surrounded 24-7 by an inescapable presence with little recognition that all radiation exposure is cumulative.
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The National Toxicology Program (NTP), a branch of the US National Institute for Health (NIH), conducted the world’s largest study on radiofrequency radiation used by the US telecommunications industry and found a ‘significantly statistical increase in brain and heart cancers” in animals exposed to EMF (electromagnetic fields). The NTP study confirmed the connection between mobile and wireless phone use and human brain cancer risks and its conclusions were supported by other epidemiological peer-reviewed studies. Of special note is that studies citing the biological risk to human health were below accepted international exposure standards.
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""…what this means is that the current safety standards as off by a factor of about 7 million.' Pointing out that a recent FCC Chair was a former lobbyist for the telecom industry, "I know how they've attacked various people. In the U.S. … the funding for the EMF research [by the Environmental Protection Agency] was cut off starting in 1986 … The U.S. Office of Naval Research had been funding a fair amount of research in this area [in the '70s]. They [also] … stopped funding new grants in 1986 … And then the NIH a few years later followed the same path …" As if all was not reason enough for concern or even downright panic, the next generation of wireless technology known as 5G (fifth generation), representing the innocuous sounding Internet of Things, promises a quantum leap in power and exceedingly more damaging health impacts with mandatory exposures. The immense expansion of radiation emissions from the current wireless EMF frequency band and 5G about to be perpetrated on an unsuspecting American public should be criminal. Developed by the US military as non lethal perimeter and crowd control, the Active Denial System emits a high density, high frequency wireless radiation comparable to 5G and emits radiation in the neighborhood of 90 GHz. The current Pre 5G, frequency band emissions used in today's commercial wireless range is from 300 Mhz to 3 GHZ as 5G will become the first wireless system to utilize millimeter waves with frequencies ranging from 30 to 300 GHz. One example of the differential is that a current LANS (local area network system) uses 2.4 GHz. Hidden behind these numbers is an utterly devastating increase in health effects of immeasurable impacts so stunning as to numb the senses. In 2017, the international Environmental Health Trust recommended an EU moratorium "on the roll-out of the fifth generation, 5G, for telecommunication until potential hazards for human health and the environment hav
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Trump Declares War On Silicon Valley: DoJ Launches Google Anti-Monopoly Probe | Zero Hedge - 0 views
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Just before midnight on Friday, at the close of what was a hectic month for markets, WSJ dropped a bombshell of a story: The paper reported that the DoJ has opened an anti-trust investigation of Alphabet Inc., which could "present a major new layer of regulatory scrutiny for the search giant, according to people familiar with the matter." The report was sourced to "people familiar with the matter," but was swiftly corroborated by the New York Times, Bloomberg and others. For months now, the FTC has appeared to be gearing up for a showdown with big tech. The agency - which shares anti-trust authority with the DoJ - has created a new commission that could help undo big-tech tie-ups like Facebook's acquisition of Instagram, and hired lawyers who have advanced new anti-monopoly theories that would help justify the breakup of companies like Amazon. But as it turns out, the Trump administration's first salvo against big tech didn't come from the FTC; instead, this responsibility has been delegated to the DoJ, which has reportedly been tasked with supervising the investigation into Google. That's not super surprising, since the FTC already had its chance to nail Google with an anti-monopoly probe back in 2013. But the agency came up short. From what we can tell, it appears the administration will divvy up responsibility for any future anti-trust investigations between the two agencies, which means the FTC - which is already reportedly preparing to levy a massive fine against Facebook - could end up taking the lead in those cases.
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Though WSJ didn't specify which aspects of Google's business might come under the microscope, a string of multi-billion-euro fines recently levied by the EU might offer some guidance. The bloc's anti-trust authority, which has been far more eager to take on American tech giants than its American counterpart (for reasons that should be obvious to all), has fined Google over its practice of bundling software with its standard Android license, the way its search engine rankings favor its own product listings, and ways it has harmed competition in the digital advertising market. During the height of the controversy over big tech's abuses of sensitive user data last year, the Verge published a story speculating about how the monopolistic tendencies of each of the dominant Silicon Valley tech giants could be remedied. For Google, the Verge argued, the best remedy would be a ban on acquisitions - a strategy that has been bandied about in Congress.
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shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 24 Dec 12
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Robert McDowell: The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom - WSJ.com - 5 views
online.wsj.com/...4792404577229074023195322.html
un internet threat freedom itu control internet governance
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 24 Dec 12
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[Top-down, international regulation is antithetical to the Net, which has flourished under its current governance model. ...]
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I wish it were a matter to "fix" anything... The issue is trying to Control something that comes working fine without such 'control'...
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You're right. The desire to censor is the real driving force here, I think.
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A further thought: There is binding and enforceable international law on the subject of freedom of speech and access to information in a treaty that has been ratified by all nations other than China, which has signed but not yet ratified the treaty. That treaty's terms might provide a rallying point for at least limiting the ITU's desire to grab power over the Internet. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ("ICCRR") Article 19 provides: "1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference. "2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice. "3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary: (a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others; (b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals." http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm The last exception is broader than what I would prefer. However, while the rights created by by the ICCRR transcend national boundaries, the quoted provision unquestionably stands for the proposition that exception (b) applies only to nations and not to a U.N. body itself. Therefore, there is a very strong argument that content-based both content-based restrictions and changes in the internet's functioning to facilitate such restrictions are beyond the legal jurisdiction of the ITU. I.e., changes in the internet's functioning to facilitate content-based restrictions require consideration of the content types to be restricted. The treaty permits only national level restrictions and arguably, it thereb
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*Oh, we got -even from before- The Art 27 of The THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS https://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a27 [(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. ...] And, as 'NOBODY' (Repeat 'NOBODY') has demonstrated that sharing affects negatively to creators (more yet, all the contrary), saying that SHARING (in any way the technology allows) is an EXCELLENT way to "participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits." is The Ultimate Truth. http://www.p2pnet.net/story/7566 *'Authorities only want to control the Information Flow... ...Nothing related with the "Defence" of Anything... but their own craving of control.
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National Security Agency Tasked with Targeting Adversaries' Computers for Attack Since ... - 0 views
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Since at least 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been responsible for developing ways to attack hostile computer networks as part of the growing field of Information Warfare (IW), according to a recently declassified internal NSA publication posted today by the non-governmental National Security Archive ("the Archive") at The George Washington University. Declaring that "the future of warfare is warfare in cyberspace," a former NSA official describes the new activity as "sure to be a catalyst for major change" at the super-secret agency. The document is one of 98 items the Archive is posting today that provide wide-ranging background on the nature and scope of U.S. cyber activities.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Jan 17
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A New Era of Mass Surveillance is Emerging Across Europe | Just Security - 1 views
www.justsecurity.org/...s-surveillance-emerging-europe
surveillance state Europe legislation Germany France UK
shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Jan 17
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The world was a different place when, in October 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) struck down the “Safe Harbour” data-sharing agreement that allowed the transfer of European citizens’ data to the US. The Court’s decision concluded that the indiscriminate nature of the surveillance programs carried out by U.S. intelligence agencies, exposed two years earlier by NSA-contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, had made it impossible to ensure that the personal data of E.U. citizens would be adequately protected when shared with American companies. The ruling thus served to further solidify the long-standing conventional wisdom that Continental Europe is better at protecting privacy than America. However, Europe’s ability to continue to take this moral high ground is rapidly declining. In recent months, and in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks across Europe, Germany, France and the United Kingdom — Europe’s biggest superpowers — have passed laws granting their surveillance agencies virtually unfettered power to conduct bulk interception of communications across Europe and beyond, with limited to no effective oversight or procedural safeguards from abuse.
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Wyden Amendments to House's JOBS Act Would Halt ACTA, Force TPP Transparency | Bloomber... - 0 views
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An amendment to the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, H.R. 3606, submitted by Sen. Ronald L. Wyden (D-Ore.) March 19 was aimed at preventing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement from going into force in the United States without first getting formal approval from Congress.Another amendment would require the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to disclose its position regarding to the ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement negotiations.The amendments were introduced a day before the Senate was scheduled to take a procedural vote on whether it would consider the House's controversial JOBS bill.
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As a condition to the United States putting forward any official instrument that accepts ACTA, Wyden asked in his earlier letter that Obama “formally declare that ACTA does not create any international obligations for the U.S.—that ACTA is not binding.” If Obama declined to make such a statement, then Wyden requested a “legal rationale for why ACTA should not be considered by Congress.”
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Wyden's first March 19 amendment JOBS Act amendment, S.A. 1868, would prevent the president from accepting, and the United States from entering into, any “legally binding trade agreement that imposes obligations on the United States … including the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, without the formal and express approval of Congress.”
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U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right | Threat Level | Wired.com - 0 views
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A United Nations report said Friday that disconnecting people from the internet is a human rights violation and against international law. The report railed against France and the United Kingdom, which have passed laws to remove accused copyright scofflaws from the internet. It also protested blocking internet access to quell political unrest (.pdf).
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» Obama Signs Global Internet Treaty Worse Than SOPA Alex Jones' Infowars: Th... - 2 views
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Months before the debate about Internet censorship raged as SOPA and PIPA dominated the concerns of web users, President Obama signed an international treaty that would allow companies in China or any other country in the world to demand ISPs remove web content in the US with no legal oversight whatsoever.
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The White House has circumvented the necessity to have the treaty confirmed by lawmakers by presenting it an as “executive agreement,” although legal scholars have highlighted the dubious nature of this characterization.
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In presenting ACTA as an “international agreement” rather than a treaty, the Obama administration managed to circumvent the legislative process and avoid having to get Senate approval, a method questioned by Senator Wyden. “That said, even if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement?” asks TechDirt. “The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the president legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.”
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The End of the Internet As We Know It - 2 views
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We owe everything we love about the Web to net neutrality, the principle that the Internet is an open platform and service providers like AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner can’t dictate where you go and what you do online. Without net neutrality, the Web would look a lot like cable, with the most popular content available only on certain tiers or with certain providers. (Imagine AT&T as the exclusive home of Netflix and Comcast as the sole source of YouTube.)
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In 2010, the Federal Communications Commission tried to establish concrete rules to protect net neutrality. But the agency ended up caving to pressure from the biggest phone and cable companies and left huge loopholes standing in the way of a truly open Internet. And now Verizon is in court challenging those rules — and the FCC’s authority to draft and enforce them to protect consumers and promote competition. That’s because under the Bush administration, the FCC decided to give away much of its authority to oversee our broadband networks. The current FCC could fix the problem by reclaiming this authority, but it hasn’t yet. If the FCC loses the case and fails to take the necessary action to reverse course, the agency will be toothless as the biggest Internet providers run amok and destroy everything we love about the Internet. Indeed, the second it looks like the FCC is going to be defeated, you can expect all the telecoms and ISPs to join hands and declare they’ve reached an agreement to self-regulate.
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If this happens, they’ll win and we’ll lose. Online privacy will be a thing of the past. (If you thought it already was, believe me, things could get worse.) The ISPs will try to read all of your content so they can sell you to advertisers. New “troll tolls” will force content creators and others to pay discriminatory fees just to reach people online — and will require the rest of us to pony up for “premium” content. Does that sound Orwellian? That’s because it is. But this is no far-fetched scenario. It’s time for us to stand up and fight for our online rights. We need to tell the FCC to stop messing around. It’s time for the agency to fix its past mistakes — and establish strong net neutrality protections that are 100 percent loophole-free.
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The True Story of How the Patent Bar Captured a Court and Shrank the Intellectual Commo... - 1 views
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The change in the law wrought by the Federal Circuit can also be viewed substantively through the controversy over software patents. Throughout the 1960s, the USPTO refused to award patents for software innovations. However, several of the USPTO’s decisions were overruled by the patent-friendly U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, which ordered that software patents be granted. In Gottschalk v. Benson (1972) and Parker v. Flook (1978), the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, holding that mathematical algorithms (and therefore software) were not patentable subject matter. In 1981, in Diamond v. Diehr, the Supreme Court upheld a software patent on the grounds that the patent in question involved a physical process—the patent was issued for software used in the molding of rubber. While affirming their prior ruling that mathematical formulas are not patentable in the abstract, the Court held that an otherwise patentable invention did not become unpatentable simply because it utilized a computer.
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In the hands of the newly established Federal Circuit, however, this small scope for software patents in precedent was sufficient to open the floodgates. In a series of decisions culminating in State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group (1998), the Federal Circuit broadened the criteria for patentability of software and business methods substantially, allowing protection as long as the innovation “produces a useful, concrete and tangible result.” That broadened criteria led to an explosion of low-quality software patents, from Amazon’s 1-Click checkout system to Twitter’s pull-to-refresh feature on smartphones. The GAO estimates that more than half of all patents granted in recent years are software-related. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court continues to hold, as in Parker v. Flook, that computer software algorithms are not patentable, and has begun to push back against the Federal Circuit. In Bilski v. Kappos (2010), the Supreme Court once again held that abstract ideas are not patentable, and in Alice v. CLS (2014), it ruled that simply applying an abstract idea on a computer does not suffice to make the idea patent-eligible. It still is not clear what portion of existing software patents Alice invalidates, but it could be a significant one.
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Supreme Court justices also recognize the Federal Circuit’s insubordination. In oral arguments in Carlsbad Technology v. HIF Bio (2009), Chief Justice John Roberts joked openly about it:
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The Opportunity of the Commons
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As a result of the Federal Circuit’s pro-patent jurisprudence, our economy has been flooded with patents that would otherwise not have been granted. If more patents meant more innovation, then we would now be witnessing a spectacular economic boom. Instead, we have been living through what Tyler Cowen has called a Great Stagnation. The fact that patents have increased while growth has not is known in the literature as the “patent puzzle.” As Michele Boldrin and David Levine put it, “there is no empirical evidence that [patents] serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless productivity is identified with the number of patents awarded—which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity.”
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While more patents have not resulted in faster economic growth, they have resulted in more patent lawsuits.
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Software patents have characteristics that make them particularly susceptible to litigation. Unlike, say, chemical patents, software patents are plagued by a problem of description. How does one describe a software innovation in such a way that anyone searching for it will easily find it? As Christina Mulligan and Tim Lee demonstrate, chemical formulas are indexable, meaning that as the number of chemical patents grow, it will still be easy to determine if a molecule has been patented. Since software innovations are not indexable, they estimate that “patent clearance by all firms would require many times more hours of legal research than all patent lawyers in the United States can bill in a year. The result has been an explosion of patent litigation.” Software and business method patents, estimate James Bessen and Michael Meurer, are 2 and 7 times more likely to be litigated than other patents, respectively (4 and 13 times more likely than chemical patents).
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Software patents make excellent material for predatory litigation brought by what are often called “patent trolls.”
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Trolls use asymmetries in the rules of litigation to legally extort millions of dollars from innocent parties. For example, one patent troll, Innovatio IP Ventures, LLP, acquired patents that implicated Wi-Fi. In 2011, it started sending demand letters to coffee shops and hotels that offered wireless Internet access, offering to settle for $2,500 per location. This amount was far in excess of the 9.56 cents per device that Innovatio was entitled to under the “Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory” licensing promises attached to their portfolio, but it was also much less than the cost of trial, and therefore it was rational for firms to pay. Cisco stepped in and spent $13 million in legal fees on the case, and settled on behalf of their customers for 3.2 cents per device. Other manufacturers had already licensed Innovatio’s portfolio, but that didn’t stop their customers from being targeted by demand letters.
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Litigation cost asymmetries are magnified by the fact that most patent trolls are nonpracticing entities. This means that when patent infringement trials get to the discovery phase, they will cost the troll very little—a firm that does not operate a business has very few records to produce.
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But discovery can cost a medium or large company millions of dollars. Using an event study methodology, James Bessen and coauthors find that infringement lawsuits by nonpracticing entities cost publicly traded companies $83 billion per year in stock market capitalization, while plaintiffs gain less than 10 percent of that amount.
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Software patents also reduce innovation in virtue of their cumulative nature and the fact that many of them are frequently inputs into a single product. Law professor Michael Heller coined the phrase “tragedy of the anticommons” to refer to a situation that mirrors the well-understood “tragedy of the commons.” Whereas in a commons, multiple parties have the right to use a resource but not to exclude others, in an anticommons, multiple parties have the right to exclude others, and no one is therefore able to make effective use of the resource. The tragedy of the commons results in overuse of the resource; the tragedy of the anticommons results in underuse.
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In order to cope with the tragedy of the anticommons, we should carefully investigate the opportunity of the commons. The late Nobelist Elinor Ostrom made a career of studying how communities manage shared resources without property rights. With appropriate self-governance institutions, Ostrom found again and again that a commons does not inevitably lead to tragedy—indeed, open access to shared resources can provide collective benefits that are not available under other forms of property management.
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This suggests that—litigation costs aside—patent law could be reducing the stock of ideas rather than expanding it at current margins.
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Advocates of extensive patent protection frequently treat the commons as a kind of wasteland. But considering the problems in our patent system, it is worth looking again at the role of well-tailored limits to property rights in some contexts. Just as we all benefit from real property rights that no longer extend to the highest heavens, we would also benefit if the scope of patent protection were more narrowly drawn.
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Reforming the Patent System
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This analysis raises some obvious possibilities for reforming the patent system. Diane Wood, Chief Judge of the 7th Circuit, has proposed ending the Federal Circuit’s exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals—instead, the Federal Circuit could share jurisdiction with the other circuit courts. While this is a constructive suggestion, it still leaves the door open to the Federal Circuit playing “a leading role in shaping patent law,” which is the reason for its capture by patent interests. It would be better instead simply to abolish the Federal Circuit and return to the pre-1982 system, in which patents received no special treatment in appeals. This leaves open the possibility of circuit splits, which the creation of the Federal Circuit was designed to mitigate, but there are worse problems than circuit splits, and we now have them.
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Another helpful reform would be for Congress to limit the scope of patentable subject matter via statute. New Zealand has done just that, declaring that software is “not an invention” to get around WTO obligations to respect intellectual property. Congress should do the same with respect to both software and business methods.
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Finally, even if the above reforms were adopted, there would still be a need to address the asymmetries in patent litigation that result in predatory “troll” lawsuits. While the holding in Alice v. CLS arguably makes a wide swath of patents invalid, those patents could still be used in troll lawsuits because a ruling of invalidity for each individual patent might not occur until late in a trial. Current legislation in Congress addresses this class of problem by mandating disclosures, shifting fees in the case of spurious lawsuits, and enabling a review of the patent’s validity before a trial commences.
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What matters for prosperity is not just property rights in the abstract, but good property-defining institutions. Without reform, our patent system will continue to favor special interests and forestall economic growth.
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"Libertarians intuitively understand the case for patents: just as other property rights internalize the social benefits of improvements to land, automobile maintenance, or business investment, patents incentivize the creation of new inventions, which might otherwise be undersupplied. So far, so good. But it is important to recognize that the laws that govern property, intellectual or otherwise, do not arise out of thin air. Rather, our political institutions, with all their virtues and foibles, determine the contours of property-the exact bundle of rights that property holders possess, their extent, and their limitations. Outlining efficient property laws is not a trivial problem. The optimal contours of property are neither immutable nor knowable a priori. For example, in 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the age-old common law doctrine that extended real property rights to the heavens without limit. The advent of air travel made such extensive property rights no longer practicable-airlines would have had to cobble together a patchwork of easements, acre by acre, for every corridor through which they flew, and they would have opened themselves up to lawsuits every time their planes deviated from the expected path. The Court rightly abridged property rights in light of these empirical realities. In defining the limits of patent rights, our political institutions have gotten an analogous question badly wrong. A single, politically captured circuit court with exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals has consistently expanded the scope of patentable subject matter. This expansion has resulted in an explosion of both patents and patent litigation, with destructive consequences. "
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I added a comment to the page's article. Patents are antithetical to the precepts of Libertarianism and do not involve Natural Law rights. But I agree with the author that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit should be abolished. It's a failed experiment.