03.06.16

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• ​SCO’s legal war against IBM and Linux comes to an end

  SCO lost its legal battle against IBM and Linux long ago, but now the final shovel of dirt has been thrown on its lawsuits’ grave.

• Desktop

  • 5 Lightweight Linux For Old Computers

    Do you have old computer? Have you kept your old computer somewhere in a rack? So this is the time to take it out and start using it. In this article I will walk you through the list of 5 Lightweight Linux distributions that you can install and use on old computers. All of these 5 Linux distributions require less resources therefore can be run on old desktops or laptops. So without any further delay let’s dive in.

  • Microsoft finally throws Miguel de Icaza a bone

    De Icaza has been talking for years about reproducing parts of Microsoft’s .NET development environment as an open source effort, in the mistaken belief that it would pull open source developers to build software using .NET technologies. He was obsessed with Microsoft from the time he interviewed for a job there and was not chosen. He was acquainted with Friedman before the pair met at Microsoft where the latter was an intern on the IIS team.

    [...]

    With Microsoft having failed to gain any traction in the mobile market, it is desperate for some means to gain a foothold, any foothold. What it has forked out for Xamarin is small change, even though the revenue stream at Redmond is not half as healthy as it once used to be.

    But de Icaza has always been a loyal lapdog for Microsoft and needed to be rewarded. So Microsoft has thrown him a bone.

  • Be like Them

    The problem is when we want to be like them. “Give me the free-as-beer Windows” attitude towards Linux (intentionally not using GNU/Linux, but that’s another discussion) is repeated here with “Give me the Facebook/Twitter which doesn’t bother me with spam”. There is no such thing. Yes, certainly there is that we have to accept the limitations of our platform (no latest kewl games on Linux, no participants on pump.io/gnu social/diaspora), but there is a way deeper issue.

    The only defense against “Give me the free-as-beer Windows” (or the first question being “How to run Wine on this?”) is IMHO in not caring about what other people do. I didn’t care when I started to use Linux and I don’t care still whether Linux takes over the world, or whether I am able to get laid because of using Linux. I do care, whether while using Linux I can do things which I want to do with computer, and whether there is sufficient community which will maintain for me the platform in future.

  • RuckZuck: Linux-style package manager for Windows to update and install Software [Ed: so much better than Windows that the Windows world is trying to mimic/imitate GNU/Linux]

  • This quirky Russian all-in-one PC skips traditional CPUs for a MIPS chip and Linux

    Russia isn’t known as the PC capital of the world, but when a new homegrown machine comes along it’s sometimes curious enough to get our attention.

    Last year brought the Elbrus-4C, a PC with a processor so slow that it might have been left over from 1999. The latest entrant seems more promising but is still one to file under “curiosity.”

  • Linux desktop gets MIPS processor

    Russian company T-Platforms has announced a Linux desktop PC based around a MIPS processor – as Baikal-T1 chip from Baikal Electronics, also of Russia.

• Server

  • Docker Steps into Large-Scale Container Orchestration with Conductant Purchase

• Kernel Space

  • The kernel column with Jon Masters

    Linus Torvalds announced the first few release candidate (RC) kernels for what will become Linux 4.5. In his announcement,

    he noted that 4.5 was shaping up to be “a fairly normal release – neither unusually big or unusually small”. One element he specified in the 4.5-rc1 announcement was the tremendous work done over the past five years by the 32-bit ARM Linux community towards “multi-platform” kernel support that has culminated in 4.5. Linus giving the ARM community praise is a far cry from his outbursts just a few years ago about the state of platform support.

  • Linux BPF Superpowers

    These bcc tools are still in development and require at least Linux 4.1, which many people aren’t running yet. You can think of them as a preview of things to come. But they are coming sooner rather than later: Ubuntu 16.04 (for example) will have a 4 series kernel, and isn’t far away.

  • Kernel 4.4.4 Is Now The Most Advanced Stable Kernel Available

  • Kernel 4.5 RC 6 Has Been Released

  • Kernel 4.1.19 Has Been Released

  • Linux 4.6 Will Enable Intel FBC & PSR By Default To Reduce Power Consumption

    Intel’s Daniel Vetter on Friday sent in another batch of DRM-Next changes for the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel cycle.

  • India Nixes Software Patents, Linux Foundation Embraces Diversity & More…

  • Graphics Stack

    • Why Wayland anyway ?

      The Fedora Workstation working group decided this week that we’re not quite there yet for making the Wayland session the default in Fedora 24.

      That is a bit of a disappointment for me, since we have worked very hard this cycle to close the gaps; you can see the progress we’ve made here: primary selection, kinetic scrolling, drag-and-drop, startup notification, pointer confinement have all landed this cycle. Not to mention countless smaller bug fixes and robustness improvements. But gaps are gaps, so we will take one more cycle to address them.

    • Nvidia release another new Vulkan beta driver with Linux support

      Nvidia are keeping up their great support of Vulkan with yet another new build of their Vulkan driver which supports Linux.

    • Intel Adds Native One-Copy Texture Uploads To Chrome OS

    • Screensaver Inhibition Support Is Being Worked On For Wayland/Weston

      Among the features not putting Wayland at feature parity with X11/X.Org is screensaver inhibition. You know, when you’re watching a movie or gaming and don’t want the screensaver to interrupt the experience? It’s now being worked on for Wayland’s reference compositor.

    • Two More Bits Of OpenGL 4.4 Get Tidied Up In Mesa

    • NVIDIA Sends Out Latest PRIME Synchronization Patches

    • AH TechTalk: Industry Bodies Discuss Vulkan Graphcs API

    • Nvidia 355.00.29 Linux Driver Brings Support for Vulkan 1.0.4

      Nvidia has released a third set of drivers that are Vulkan-compatible, and they seem to put a lot of effort into this new endeavor.

    • Vulkan 1.0.5 API Specification Released

    • NVIDIA Not Planning To Offer Vulkan API Support on Fermi Graphics Cards – Cites Low GeForce 400 and 500 Series Install Base as Issue

  • Benchmarks

    • What Linux Distros Would You Like To See Compared This Month For A Huge Comparison?

      I’m in the middle of working on a large Linux distribution performance comparison that is similar to January’s A 10-Way Linux Distribution Battle To Kick Off 2016. This time around though there’s more interesting hardware and will likely do more than ten Linux distributions in this comparison.

      The hardware used for this comparison is with a Xeon E3-1280 v5 “Skylake” CPU that boosts up to 4GHz (from our recent 9-Way Skylake Xeon CPU Linux comparison), MSI Radeon R7 370 graphics card, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and Samsung 850 EVO SSD.

• Applications

  • Miam Player: Another Open-Source Qt5 Audio Player

    There are lots of audio players available and you might already have your favorite one, but we should always give a try to new applications, you may prefer over your favorite one’s. Here comes Miam Audio Player which is easy-to-use, open source, free and cross-platform available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, it is based on Qt. Unlike some other players it offers GUI customization individually such as: themes, icons, fonts, size of items, etc but some other players do support GUI theme.

  • Cairo Dock Available For All Current Ubuntu/Linux Mint Versions

    Cairo-Dock, a fast and customizable desktop interface that takes the shape of docks, desklets, panel, etc, which can be used as alternative or addition to Unity, Gnome-Shell, Xfce-panel, and KDE-panel, is now at 3.4 version. It is designed to be light, fast and customizable, and is desktop-agnostic. It has a powerful DBus interface, to be controlled from a terminal or another application. Features can be added by plug-ins or applets, and applets can be written in C or in any language. Cairo-Dock has now a basic Wayland support.

  • Inkscape: A Great Open Source Vector Graphics Editor

    Are you looking for a program that can allow you create or edit vector graphics? Then you are visiting right page, the program called “Inkscape”, it is free and open source similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. It is cross-platform (available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) program used to create or edit vector graphics such as illustrations, diagrams, line arts, charts, logos and complex paintings. Inkscape’s primary vector graphics format is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) version 1.1.

  • [Shotcut has] New Release, Web Site & Forum

    Version 16.03 is now available for download.

  • First public beta for wallabag v2

  • Spotify for Linux Sucks, But At Least We Now Know Why

    In a post to the Spotify community forum, company rep ‘Jooon’ reveals that: “…since after September, we have had no developers working on the linux client”.

    Spotify launched its native Qt-based app for Linux back in 2010 and has kept it up-to-date since, introducing new features and integrating with Linux desktop technologies, like the Ubuntu sound menu.

  • MComix Is A Great Linux Comic Book Reader (Latest Version Available In PPA)

    MComix is a versatile comic book reader that supports both western comics and manga, in a variety of container formats, including CBR, CBZ, CB7, LHA and PDF. The application is available for Linux and Windows.

  • Translate Any Text You Select On Your Linux Desktop With A Keyboard Shortcut And Notifications

    I recently stumbled upon an interesting tiny old script which can translate any text you select. After highlighting the text, be it in a web browser, Libreoffice or PDF document and so on, upon using a keyboard shortcut, its translation is displayed in a desktop notification.

  • Smuxi 1.0 (Open-Source IRC Client) Is Now Available For Ubuntu 16.04 And Ubuntu 15.10 Via PPA

    As you may know, Smuxi is an open-source IRC IRC, Twitter, XMPP and JabbR client developed in GTK+3. Among others, it has support for notifications, integrated spell checking, unified nickname colors, browser mode, word completion, full keyboard control, word wrapping, clickable URLs, intentation and full screen mode.

  • Blender 2.77 RC1 Brings Small Fixes Only

  • Corebird 1.2 (Twitter Client) Has Been Released

  • Transmission 2.90 Brings A Big List Of Changes

  • cool-retro-term terminal emulator mimics the looks of old CRT screens (Ubuntu PPA)

  • Quickly Batch Rename Files In Linux With These 3 GUI Tools

    Thunar, the default Xfce file manager, comes with a built-in tool that allows bulk file renaming. This is among the easiest to use GUI tools for bulk renaming files under Linux and it also offers enough options for most use cases, including live preview so you can see what the new filename will look like before making any changes.

  • Oracle VirtualBox 5.0.16 Brings More Fixes

    There’s not yet any word on the next major release of Oracle’s VM VirtualBox software, but at least now available is a new maintenance update.

    VirtualBox 5.0.16 was released on Friday as the newest maintenance release for VirtualBox 5.0 and their first since January.

  • Avidemux 2.6.12 Brings VP9 & H.265 Improvements

  • Orcus 0.11.0

    I’m very pleased to announce that version 0.11.0 of the orcus library is officially out in the wild! You can download the latest source package from the project’s home page.

  • gunsales 0.1.1

    A minor update to our recently released gunsales package is now on the CRAN network. The changes are completely internal and deal with automagic discovery of the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program via our associated x13binary package. More precisely, we let Solaris and the Windows old-release builds fail more gracefully. Others, ie current Windows builds, OS X and Linux, are entirely unaffected in their functionality. For simplicity, all examples now have an \dontrun{} wrapper, and the vignette makes its code conditional on the platform it is running on.

  • Calliope – helping you keep a diary – in LaTeX!

    The script generates your source LaTeX files and puts them in the folders in diary/. Then you write up and use the script to compile it – the generated pdfs are collected in the pdfs/ folder. The script can also generate an anthology for a year you pick.

  • Proprietary

    • Storage Made Easy Enhance Linux Cloud Apps for Enterprise File Share and Sync

      Storage Made Easy today announced that it has released an updated version of its Linux Cloud Apps Suite that is compatible with several different versions of Linux and which works with over 50 different public / private cloud storage vendors including OpenStack, Office35, Ceph, Google Drive, Amazon S3 and more.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Poor man’s Guide to Remote Linux Desktop Support

    • A Very Aptly Ruby API

    • How to get more storage in Android: Not enough storage on your Android phone or tablet? Here’s how to get more space for apps, photos, video and music

    • How to virtualise Linux – Part 1

    • How to virtualise Linux – Part 2

    • Query all registered repositories in Red Hat Satellite

    • Praise of component reuse

    • Gigabyte MP30-AR0

    • Mysteriously flapping network connection

    • How to enable time tag in History command ?

    • From a diary of AArch64 porter — system calls

    • How to Configure and Manage Network Connections Using ‘nmcli’ Tool

    • blinking cursor of death

    • 17 Linux df command examples to understand it

    • Setup DVR on RDO Liberty Controller && 2(x)Computes ML2/OVS/VLAN landscape

    • Gettting started with the many ways to Docker

    • Install and configure Jenkins with Nginx as a reverse proxy on CentOS 7

    • How To Create Your Own Website Or Blog

    • How to Easily Back Up and Restore Linux File Permissions How to Easily Back Up and Restore Linux File Permissions

    • How To Install GNU Emacs in Ubuntu

    • Be Familiar with Zotero User Interface

    • How To Add Citation and Bibliography Manually from Zotero

    • How To Collect References with Zotero Connector in Chromium Browser

    • How To Install Zotero Connector in Chromium Browser

    • How To Backup & Restore Zotero Library Completely

    • How To Install Budgie Desktop In Ubuntu 16.04 Or 15.10 Via PPA

    • LFCS: How to Manage and Create LVM Using vgcreate, lvcreate and lvextend Commands – Part 11

    • How To Install Kernel 4.4.4 on CentOS 7, Via Repository

    • How To Install Curlew 2.1.2 On Ubuntu Systems

    • Configure Postfix to use Gmail as a Mail Relay

    • Increase your IPv4 security with Fail2Ban and Tinyhoneypot on Debian Jessie

    • How to Install a Mumble Voice Chat Server on Ubuntu 14.04

    • How to setup an NFS Server and configure NFS Storage in Proxmox VE

    • How To Optimize Ubuntu for Speed

    • How to install Chromium browser on Fedora 23

    • How to install multimedia codecs on Fedora 22/23

    • How To Install GNOME Extensions with Zip Files

    • Copy And Paste Images From The Clipboard In Nautilus And Nemo

    • Fix `Failed To Fetch` Google Chrome Repository After Google Dropped Support For Its Browser On Linux 32bit

    • nload Command Examples for Personal Bandwidth Monitoring

    • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) Installation Guide

    • 25 Useful IPtable Firewall Rules Every Linux Administrator Should Know

    • Install Mod_Pagespeed to Speed Up Apache and Nginx Performance Upto 10x

    • 30 smashing Things to do after installing Ubuntu 15.10

    • What happens when a modern Linux system boots without /bin/sh

    • Some musl for you C programs

    • Bash One Liner – Compose Music From Entropy in /dev/urandom

    • Debugging why ping was Broken in Docker Images

    • Connecting Docker Containers, Part One

    • Connecting Docker Containers, Part Two

    • Cloning Linux from a Bundle

    • setting up Linux Lab – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 installation

  • Wine or Emulation

    • Wine 1.9.5 Starts Landing The D3D Command Stream Work

      Wine 1.9.5 was released today and it’s a rather exciting bi-weekly update to the Wine stack.

  • Games

    • A chat with the developer of Quest of Dungeons about their Linux sales

      I asked on twitter for developers to get in touch about their games, and first up is Quest of Dungeons from Upfall Studios. A turn based dungeon crawler game featuring a good old 16-bit retro artistic look.

    • Linux usage on Steam continues to fall

      Valve’s considerable efforts on behalf of Linux-based gaming just aren’t paying off. Valve and its hardware partners released the first Steam machines running the Linux-based SteamOS about four months ago. And there are now more than 1,900 games available for Linux on the Steam store. But Linux usage on Steam just keeps falling.

    • 1900+ games for Linux on Steam, Europa Universalis IV extension announced, and more

      Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at 1900+ games available for Linux on Steam, extension of popular Europa Universalis IV announced, and new games out for Linux.

    • Microsoft wants to monopolise games development on PC. We must fight it

      In my view, this is the most aggressive move Microsoft has ever made. While the company has been convicted of violating antitrust law in the past, its wrongful actions were limited to fights with specific competitors and contracts with certain PC manufacturers.

    • Epic CEO: “Universal Windows Platform can, should, must, and will die”

      In a scathing editorial in The Guardian, Epic Games cofounder Tim Sweeney spoke out about Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative, calling it a “fiasco” and “the most aggressive move Microsoft has ever made.”

      “With its new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative, Microsoft has built a closed platform-within-a-platform into Windows 10, as the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem,” said Sweeney. “Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem.”

    • Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney Is Warning Of Microsoft’s Closed Gaming Ecosystem

    • Epic Games creator warns against closed-door gaming from Microsoft

      GAMING VETERAN Tim Sweeney, co-founder of Epic Games, which gave the world the Unreal Engine and games like Gears of War, is worried that Microsoft will ruin the games industry if the firm is allowed to continue its closed platform proposition.

      Sweeney was given room to write about this in The Guardian (Tim, if you’re reading this you can come to us first next time) and made the most of the noises from Microsoft about bringing console and PC gaming closer together.

      “With its new Universal Windows Platform initiative, Microsoft has built a closed platform within a platform in Windows 10 as the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem and monopolising app distribution and commerce,” he wrote.

    • SpeedRunners now in open beta for Linux

      SpeedRunners is a rather popular Early Access multiplayer running game that pits 4 players against each other. There’s been a lot of people asking for a Linux version, and they have begun to deliver.

    • Linux usage on Steam is better than people think

      There’s some key things here that people just aren’t covering (or they just aren’t aware which is possible).

      - The first and most important thing is that SteamOS and Steam Big Picture just don’t show a survey, and that’s a fact we actually covered.

    • Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition expansion Siege of Dragonspear delayed for Linux

    • Overlord, Overlord: Raising Hell and Overlord II look set for Linux ports soon

      Our friends over at Virtual Programming are hard at work on porting Overlord, Overlord: Raising Hell and Overlord II to Linux. They left a funny little message for us on SteamDB too.

    • Police Infinity, an interesting looking FPS coming to Early Access & Linux soon

    • Iconic Roguelike Survival RPG UnReal World released on SteamOS & Linux

      UnReal World is a roguelike 2D survival game which was first released in 1992. Although version 1.00 was released about 24 years ago(!) the Steam release only marks one of the many regular updates it got until now and there are more to come. The developers also consider adding trading cards, cloud saves and achievements.

    • STRAFE, an epic looking retro themed FPS coming to Linux in 2017

      This is exactly the type of retro theme I like to see. I’m not usually a fan of “retro” inspired games, but this genuinely looks fun. It also looks reasonably pleasing on the eyes too, so that’s a bonus.

    • RVGL Makes Racing Fun on the Pandora

      So there you have it. Probably the best racing game you will ever get on Pandora. Even months before the Pyra release, the Pandora is far, far from dead.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Gadgets!

    The merge finally happened, and the new system is in git. I’ll be doing some posts over the coming days/weeks about various topics, such as how to write gadgets.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • My collaboration on WikiToLearn

    • Introduction to WikiToLearn and me

    • WikiToLearn:the rebellion I was looking for.

    • W2L: What my scholar career just needed

    • An unearthly child: my WikiToLearn welcoming experience

    • Wikitolearn Sprint2016: let the countdown begin!

    • The WikiToLearn revolution: sprint2016, here we come!

    • WikiToLearn – Blender & Inkscape manual

    • The birth of the mith

      Yes, here we talk about something concerning WikiToLearn, even if it’s hard to trust. Most of the potential of W2L (our abbreviation of WikiToLearn, which I will use in the following cases) is in its communication channels on Telegram: they are great tools through which people meet other developers, editors or interested persons who collaborate; I had some interesting debates with them, noone was banal.

    • The project that will change the world

    • The decalogue of the sysadmin

    • Ciao, I’m a sysadmin

      Hello everyone, I’m Luca Toma, I was stutent at the ITIS E. Mattei in Sondrio and now I’m student of physics at the University of Milano-Bicocca and today I want to talk about my contribution in WikiToLearn.

    • I am going to CERN!

      In less than a week I will be at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Genève (Switzerland) to attend a Sprint: for a whole week I will work with great people on WikiToLearn an even greater project!

    • KDE Plasma 5.6 Beta Release

    • KDE has been selected as a Google Summer of Code 2016 mentor organization

      Mentors are presenting their ideas for students here; remember this is only a starting place for your proposal. Most of your communication should be in the team’s preferred channels, but ask general questions in #kde-soc on freenode IRC, or KDE-Soc Telegram group.

    • KDE: A final call for testers. And yes we have PIM!

    • Kubuntu: KDE: Where oh where have I been? Busy I say.

    • Effective Qt @ Meeting C++ 2015: talk is now online

      After the guys at Qt World Summit last year managed to mess up the recording of exactly one of the many, many talks there (my Effective Qt one, of course), this is to let you know that Jens Weller of Meeting C++ has uploaded the recording of my Effective Qt talk to his conference channel on YouTube.

    • KDEPIM KDE and opensource

      As QWebKit is deprecated now (it’s not in official 5.6 package, but we still able to build by hand for 5.6 as distro will do) I investigated how to replace it by QWebEngine.

    • Debugging and Profiling Qt development with Milian Wolff

    • TaskWarrior and Evernote

      For some time I used the Mirakel application to manage tasks on my phone and to synchronize it to the TaskWarrior on my main system. Unfortunately, Mirakel devs do not have the time to fix all the issues the application has with TW synchronization, so I’m unable to use it anymore. (yes, I could contribute to the app, but I’m not a fan of Android as a development platform)

    • Seasons of KDE – the end

    • Interview with Mozart Couto

      It was a long time ago. I used a Brazilian Linux distribution called “Kurumin”, which is very famous here. As this distribution used KDE, I did find Krita. Then I started using GIMP and also MyPaint. I liked Krita but thought it needed improvement. Currently, I use it again because I think that the program is much more robust now and can better serve the digital illustrator.

    • Kubuntu Packaging Party

      That’s right friends, we’re going to have a Kubuntu Packaging Party.. and everyone is invited.

    • Br-Print3D: Why we stopped?

    • KDE updates in Area51

      While I have been quiet on the blogging front, KDE on FreeBSD has not rested.

    • We’re experienced in nuclear fusion!

      In less than 24 hours more than 40 people, including me, from various KDE projects will gather in beautiful Geneva at CERN to shape the future of KDE.

    • New Plasma generators coming to CERN

      Starting on Monday, the Swiss part of CERN will become a home to a dozen Plasma generators. Apart from that, it will also have to store quite a few VDG and W2L components.

    • Sprint at CERN: it’s coming….

    • Sprint at CERN, hey you wanna help?

    • Getting physical

      Topics range from our Wayland support to Plasma Mobile, documentation, how we can improve our desktop experience, and general planning for the next months. I’m also looking forward to some face-time with my fellow hackers, and discussions with the artists and usability experts who are holding a meeting of the visual design group in KDE. Only good stuff can come out of this.

    • Qt 5.7 Alpha Being Prepped For Release

      Qt 5.6 hasn’t even been released yet but with it running behind schedule, The Qt Company is looking to move Qt 5.7 along concurrently. As such, the Qt 5.7 Alpha source is now available while the official binaries are expected for release next week.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME 3.20 Beta 2 Is Now Ready for Download and Testing

      The GNOME development team has revealed today that the second Beta for GNOME 3.20 has been released and is now ready for testing.

      The GNOME team is getting closer to the 3.20 stable version of the desktop environment, and the devs have just hit a new milestone. The second Beta means that they are pretty much done with active development, and they are now focusing more on bug fixes.

    • GNOME.Asia Summit

      We invite sponsors to connect with the local market, discover new business opportunities, and increase awareness about their products. About 500 participants are expected to attend the Summit from Asia and other parts of the world.
      In previous years GNOME.Asia Summit has been held in Beijing, China in 2008 and HoChiMinh City, Vietnam in 2009, co-hosted with COSCUP Taipei, Taiwan in 2010, Bangalore, India in 2011, Hong Kong in 2012 and Seoul, Korea in 2013. The joint GNOME.Asia Summit & FUDCon APAC 2014 conference was hosted in Beijing, China and in 2015 Depok, Indonesia.

    • GNOME 3.20 Beta 2 Released

      Prolific GNOME developer Matthias Clasen has announced the release of the GNOME 3.20 Beta 2 (v3.19.91) Milestone.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Subgraph OS: Secure, Free, Open Source Linux Operating System For Non-technical Users

      To answer your security related concerns, Subgraph OS is here as a free, secure, open source Linux operating system for the non-technical users. This security-focused distro comes with complete TOR integration, full-disk encryption, OpenPGP mail integration, system hardening and other features. Know more about the OS and make your system secure.

    • Subgraph OS — Secure Linux Operating System for Non-Technical Users

      Information security and privacy are consistently hot topics after Edward Snowden revelations of NSA’s global surveillance that brought the world’s attention towards data protection and encryption as never before.

    • This Week in Solus – Install #22

    • Solus 1.1 Shannon Released

    • Pinguy OS 14.04.4 Is Now Based on Linux Kernel 3.13.0-79, Drops Closed Repos

      The Pinguy development team has revealed that their latest Pinguy OS 14.04.4 point release has arrived and is now ready for download.

  • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Chakra GNU/Linux 2016.02 Screencast and Screenshots

  • Gentoo Family

    • Composer vs. Linux Distributions: A Mental Model Battle

      Recently, Gentoo documented what they view as the Composer Problem: Basically, PHP projects using Composer can’t be packaged the way they want to package it, with system-level shared libraries. This is not a new complaint; Other distributions have complained about Composer’s impact before. But fundamentally I think the issue stems from having the wrong mental model of how modern PHP works when viewed from a distribution or sysadmin perspective.

  • Arch Family

    • Beautiful Manjaro Deepin 16.03 Is Now Based on Linux Kernel 4.1

      Manjaro Deepin, one of the latest additions to the Manjaro family, has been upgraded to version 16.03 and is now ready for download.

  • Ballnux/SUSE

    • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2016/9

    • SUSE Debuts OpenStack Cloud 6 for Open Source Private Cloud Computing

      SUSE says its latest OpenStack offering, SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6, finally makes open source private clouds enterprise-friendly and easy to adopt without fear of vendor lock-in.

  • Slackware Family

    • Package recompilation effort underway

      Two things recently happened to Slackware-current that you need to be aware of if you are using my Plasma5 packages from the ‘ktown‘ repository.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Gigabyte MP30-AR0 RHEL is running

    • Notes on booting RHELSA on the Gigabyte MP30-AR0

      After that you should see lots of kernel messages, and with luck you’ll arrive in Anaconda and it will print details of the VNC server. Finally, I have a RHELSA installer …

    • Brokerages Set Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) 52-Week Price Target At $88.63

    • Analyst Views: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)’s EPS Target Set At 1.86

    • Red Hat Incorporated (NYSE:RHT) Sellers Covered 8.6% of Their Shorts

    • Lucrative Stocks in today’s market:Red Hat, Inc., (NYSE:RHT)

    • Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Growth Score At 16

      Zacks Group follows a system of specifying Growth Style Scores to publicly listed companies on the WallStreet. Recently, the group included Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) in the list of firms with positive score. This group’s unique methodology examines the fundamentals including the earnings to give the growth estimates.

    • Zurcher Kantonalbank Zurich Cantonalbank Boosts Position in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    • Morning Alert: CytRx Corporation (NASDAQ:CYTR), Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), MSCI Inc. (NYSE:MSCI), Planet Fitness, Inc. (NYSE:PLNT), Nielsen Holdings N.V. (NYSE:NLSN)

    • Fedora

      • If You Like Fedora, You’ll Love Korora

        Korora’s use-it-out-of-the-box philosophy is one of the reasons the distro keeps getting better. If you want a better, more user-friendly Linux distro that reaches beyond Fedora’s enterprise appeal, you can’t go wrong with any of Korora’s five desktop versions. It leaves little for users to desire and makes choosing another distro unnecessary to get your preferred interface.

        Korora stays true to its mission. It promised an easier Linux for new users without sacrificing either power or features for seasoned Linuxers.

      • Korora Love, Why Wayland, Microsoft Monopoly

        Korora 23 was released February 7 and today Jack Germain said you’ll love it. Matthias Clasen today blogged that Wayland would still not be the default in Fedora 24 and Ubuntu convergence is starting to impress. Tim Sweeney, founder Epic Games and creator Gears of War, said Microsoft is (shockingly) trying to create a monopoly and a new startup is creating something on which users can run their choice of Windows or Ubuntu.

      • Wayland Will Not Be The Default Of Fedora 24

        While many developers worked very hard in trying to make GNOME 3.20 default to using Wayland rather than an X.Org Server for Fedora 24, this isn’t going to happen.

      • Find Fedora at BrickHack 2016

        BrickHack is a hackathon event at the Rochester Institute of Technology over the weekend of March 5 – 6, 2016. What is BrickHack exactly?

      • Running Fedora off a USB flash drive (performance tips)

        I wanted to try running Fedora outside of chroot on my Chromebook. Because I didn’t want to mess with the complicated ChromeOS partition structure I decided to install Fedora to a USB flash drive.

      • Dotclear 2.9

      • F23-20160303 Updated Lives Available NOW. (4.4.3-300 Kernel)

      • 4.4.y kernel and XFS. Sometimes being Fast and First is hard

        The second thing to do was to make sure the kernel package took this into account. Originally we discussed adding a Requires on the appropriate xfsprogs version. That actually isn’t a great idea though. The kernel package doesn’t actually Require any of the filesystem creation tools packages and it shouldn’t. Users don’t want to be forced to drag around xfsprogs if they aren’t even using XFS filesystems, or btrfs-progs if they aren’t using btrfs, etc. So we quickly realized that we needed to use Conflicts.

      • HACK CAMP 2016 FEDORA-GNOME [Session Two]

        Today, we celebrated the session two of the HACK CAMP 2016 FEDORA-GNOME in Residencia. This time we did have attendances from Provinces of PERU. Thanks to Alvaro for supporting the event from HACK SPACE PERU and Fabian Orccon from GNOME PERU, who gave an explanation of the PITIVI technology, GSTREAM, GES, media library and all the PITIVI libraries related like TIMER.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian “Stretch” release delayed slightly

    • Introduction to Internal Structure of A Debian Package

      The /usr directory here is equal with /usr directory in every Debian system. This directory contains some other directories such as bin, lib, share, etc. The bin (/usr/bin) directory contains the binary file. In Debian package context, here is where the program stored. The lib (/usr/lib) directory contains library file. The share (/usr/share) directory contains another directories such as icons, doc, etc. Note that the explanations here are just in general. A special case when bin contains shell script or lib contains binary executable is possible.

    • Debian Ruby Sprint 2016 – day 5: More Reproducible Builds, Retrospective, and A Little Bit of Tourism

    • Debian Ruby Sprint 2016 – day 4: Steady Progress, Deferred Spring Cleaning, and Capital Sins

    • Reproducible builds: week 44 in Stretch cycle

      Didier Raboud uploaded pyppd/1.0.2-4 which makes PPD generation deterministic.

      Emmanuel Bourg uploaded plexus-maven-plugin/1.3.8-10 which sorts the components in the components.xml files generated by the plugin.

      Guillem Jover has implemented stable ordering for members of the control archives in .debs.

      Chris Lamb submitted another patch to improve reproducibility of files generated by cython.

    • Current status of iptables & nftables in Debian

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • JasPer Vulnerabilities Fixed in Ubuntu

          A couple of JasPer issues have been found and repaired in the Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

        • Ubuntu convergence finally impresses me

          It’s taken me a long time to get on board the Ubuntu convergence train. I’ve been very pessimistic about the whole platform, based on the terrible state of Ubuntu Phone (as run on the Bq Aquaris handset).

          But then, I happened to watch a video, by the wonderful people of XDADEVELOPERS, from Mobile World Congress (Video A), in which John Lee (of Canonical) demonstrates convergence with Ubuntu Phone running on an older Nexus 4 handset.

        • An Ubuntu Tablet, Or A Windows Tablet, Your Choice: MJ Technology One Step Closer

        • Fairphone Fans Show Strong Interest in Ubuntu Phone Port

        • Ubuntu Is Close To Finally Removing Python 2 From Their Desktop ISO

          Going back a few years have been an aim by Ubuntu developers to remove Python 2 from their ISOs in favor of Python 3. While some other distributions have made good on their transition to Python 3, the Ubuntu desktop ISO still has been held back in keeping Python 2.

        • Tiny fanless mini-PC runs Ubuntu on Braswell NUC

          Logic Supply unveiled a tiny, Intel NUC based “CL100” mini-PC that runs Ubuntu on a quad-core “Braswell” Celeron N3150, and has no vents or moving parts.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Low cost add-on board lets Pi Zero do robotics

    PiBorg.org has Kickstarter-funded a “ZeroBorg” 4-motor robotics motor controller and sensor board designed to work with the Raspberry Pi Zero.

    The Raspberry Pi has been widely used in Linux robotics projects with the help of controller boards and kits such as the CoroBot Spark, Roboteq RIO, RoboPi, and PinBall. So it was only a matter of time before robot makers jumped on the $5 and up Raspberry Pi Zero, which measures only 65 x 30mm and weighs just 23 grams. UK-based PiBorg,org, which has launched Pi-based robotics kits such as the 6-motor DiddyBorg and smaller 4Borg, has tapped the Zero for its new ZeroBorg controller. It’s not a full robot kit like the DiddyBorg or 4Borg, but a robotics motor controller and sensor board designed to fit snugly with the Zero.

  • Raspberry Pi 3 has 64-bit CPU, but 32-bit Raspbian OS (for now)

    Hacker friendly SBCs like the Raspberry Pi 3 and Odroid-C2 may have 64-bit CPUs, but for now their default Linux OSes remain at 32-bits.

    The arrival of the $35, wireless-enabled, Raspberry Pi 3, following a similarly 64-bit, $40 Odroid-C2 SBC a few weeks ago, represent a big speed boost for Linux hacker boards but not a sudden switch to 64-bit ARM computing. The default Linux distributions released by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Hardkernel’s Odroid project are still 32-bit.

  • Raspberry Pi 3 Benchmarks vs. Eight Other ARM Linux Boards

    On Friday my Raspberry Pi 3 arrived for benchmarking. For our first benchmarks of this Cortex-A53 64-bit ARM $35 development board is a comparison against eight other ARMv7 and ARMv8 development boards running their official Linux distributions while carrying out a range of benchmarks. Here are those raw performance results along with a performance-per-dollar comparison for additional insight into this low-cost ARM development board.

  • Dude, Where’s My Community?

    In this post I want to tell you about the challenges we faced in getting open source community traction and what I would call the “tyranny of numbers” (wink) The data presented is not scientific by any measure but is based on actual data from the Parallella project over the last 3 years.

  • VC4/RPi3 status update

  • $40 ODROID-C2 is faster, has more memory than Raspberry Pi 3

  • First 64 bit Raspberry Pi 3 released and here are the complete specs and pricing

  • Ubuntu MATE for the Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android N leak shows revamped Settings menu

      • 500 Million Android Devices At Risk Of Accessibility Clickjacking Malware: What You Should Know

      • Pioneer XDP-100R Android Audio Player review: Break free from mediocre sound

        The XDP-100R is a solid DAP and I would definitely recommend it to someone in search for an Android music player. Only, if you’re not committed into the HiFi practice, the $699 asking price may steer you away pretty quickly. But in its defense, you do get a lot: a build as premium as they come, considerable storage, tons of sound features, and the fantastic audio quality that you’ve come for.

      • Android to rule smartphone market with 85% share in 2020 says IDC report

        “Android shipments will grow to 1.62 billion in 2020, and its share of the smartphone industry will grow from 81% to 85%. The biggest volume opportunity for Android is clearly within the low-cost space,” noted the report.

      • Android N System app gets previewed

      • BlackBerry’s Priv Android phone comes to Verizon

      • Amazon Upsets People By Removing Encryption From Its Fire Tablets

      • Galaxy S7 Liquid Cooling Has No Liquid?? Open Source Android Wear Alternative – XDA TV

      • Rock, Paper, Scissors: Google’s Latest Android Ad Is The Best Thing You’ll See Today

      • Android’s Fastboot Tool Is Now Able To Connect To Networks

      • Electrum Launches Mobile Wallet for Android, iOS Coming

      • Bitcoin wallet – Electrum – arrives on Android

      • The Triada trojan could affect 60 per cent of all Android devices

      • Android 4.4.4 KitKat smartphones face trojan Triada threat says Kaspersky [Ed: "Once established in the mobile" - one actually has to INSTALL the malware]

      • Half a billion Android devices are impacted by the latest evolution of mobile malware [Ed: Media uses big numbers to scare the public about things one actually has to install to face risk from]

      • New Malware, Accessibility Clickjacking, affects 65% of Android devices

      • WhatsApp for Android Now Shows End-to-End Encryption Notification, and More

      • Android N: What to expect from Android 7.0

      • Android Circuit: Galaxy S7′s Big Problem, How LG Can Defeat Samsung, Falling Prices Killing Android

      • Don’t Miss These Android Stories: March 4, 2016

      • This tool makes Android easier to hack for the good guys

      • Android Candy: Digital Funnies

      • Android device updates: Verizon Galaxy Note 5 and Droid Turbo 2 score Marshmallow

      • Verizon, T-Mobile Set To Roll Out HTC One M8 Android Marshmallow Update On March 7

      • HTC 2016 Nexus Will Come With 3D Touch Display, Run On Android N: Rumor

      • Android N To Be Finally Named ‘Nutella?’ Next Version To Remove The App Drawer?

      • Android N: Mockups give a glimpse of the refreshed system settings

      • Learn a New Language With These 10 Android Apps

      • Top Android news of the week: Google I/O, BlackBerry Priv, charger recall

      • Telus delays Android Marshmallow updates for Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, S6 Edge+ and Note 5

      • VLC for Android Beta Can Now Browse Your Files On Your Local Network

      • Before Android and Chrome merge, they should at least talk to each other

      • Remix OS Beta Brings Android to the Desktop with 32-Bit Support

        The Android-x86-based Remix OS has just entered Beta, and a new version of this new Linux distribution has been made available.

Free Software/Open Source

• ReactOS Participation in Google Summer of Code 2016

• ReactOS: Building a Free-Licensed Windows

  From dual-booting to WINE, free software has always struggled to provide a solution for running Windows applications. However, few of these efforts have been more ambitious than ReactOS, a free-licensed implementation of Windows. The project has been at work since 2006 and, in February 2016, ReactOS finally released its first alpha version, after a decade of difficult and necessarily cautious development.

• ReactOS Gains Btrfs File-System Support

  ReactOS, the project aiming for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows (Server 2003), now has Btrfs file-system support.

  While there’s just a primitive Btrfs driver for Windows, ReactOS has already gained native Btrfs file-system support.

• MAME is now Free and Open Source Software

  After 19 years, MAME is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license! Many thanks to all of the contributors who helped this to go as smoothly as possible!

  We have spent the last 10 months trying to contact all people that contributed to MAME as developers and external contributors and get information about desired license. We had limited choice to 3 that people already had dual-license MAME code with.

• 10 months later, MAME finishes its transition to open source

  Almost a year after the folks who maintain the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator or (MAME) said they would make the project completely open source, they’ve declared the transition a success.

  MAME is seen by many developers to be the foremost emulator of arcade games, and while MAME source code has long been freely available for use, it hasn’t technically been open source.

• MAME is now free as well as free of charge

  MAME, the arcade emulator originally created by Nicola Salmora 19 years ago, is now comprised entirely of free and open-source software. It’s taken a lot of wrangling, reports MAMEDev.org, due to the large number of contributors and interlinked components.

• After 19 Years, MAME Goes Open Source

  The MAME Team has announced that after 19 years – MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) has gone open source.

  The arcade emulator is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license. This means the source code for the long-running emulator is readily available to fans – you’ll now be able to modify, utilize, and distribute it for a variety of purposes.

• Machine Learning for Hackers with Debian and Ubuntu

  Data Science and Machine Learning are hot topics at the moment. Many people are considering how to extend their skills into these areas and many solutions have appeared, including full online degrees, free online courses combined with free software and for those who prefer hard copy, a staggering choice of books on the topic.

• Machine Learning and Open Source: What You Need to Know Now

  The basic goal with most machine learning tools is to take a vast quantity of data and reduce it to manageable, actionable insights. Now, some of the biggest tech companies are putting the tools in place to let the community advance these efforts. Expect much more in this space as 2016 continues.

• Serro unveils new open source SDN framework, AuSM

  Serro Solutions, a San Francisco-based technology services firm, has made its new SDN framework open source. Automated Service Manager, or AuSM, is aimed at connecting network tools via API. AuSM creates a single platform from which users can write unified business policies and implement them consistently across data center networks, WANs and storage systems.

• The One thing you can do to Ensure Success in Open Source Deployments

  What is it about an Open source project that gets business excited? and more importantly, is – ROI- under the hype?

  The primary reason most enterprises focus on Open source solutions is the potential cost savings. This is followed closely by the abilityto fix or modify the technology to something specific for the business, without having to wait for enterprise software updates. Thereare more Open source middleware products, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings and application development frameworks, with the ability to change out an underlying, closed source vendor.

• HFOSS: Quiz #1

  In the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development (HFOSS) course at the Rochester Institute of Technology, quizzes are in the form of blog posts submitted during the class period. The room stays quiet, but it is an open IRC quiz, so many of the students collaborated with each other in #rit-foss on freenode for the quiz.

• VoIP Supply Bolsters its PBX Appliances via Three Open-Source Models

• NFV/SDN Reality Check: DDoS attack security for NFV- and SDN-powered networks – Episode 49

• DDoS attack security for NFV- and SDN-powered networks

• OPNFV Unveils Second Release of Open-Source NFV Platform

  “Brahmaputra” brings a range of new features that come from collaboration with other projects, including OpenDaylight and OpenStack.

  The industry consortium developing an open-source platform for network-functions virtualization is unveiling the second release of its software, which not only brings an array of new features and use cases but also is an indication of the growing maturity of the group.

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Chrome 49 released to stable channel, smooth scrolling now enabled by default

    • Taint Tracking for Chromium

      For future work in the Web context, the approach presented here can be made compatible with server-side taint tracking to persist taint information beyond the lifetime of a Web page. A server-side Web application could transmit taint information for the strings it sends so that the client could mark those strings as tainted. Following that idea it should be possible to defeat other types of XSS. Other areas of work are the representation of information about the data flows in order to help developers to secure their applications. We already receive a report in the form of structured information about the blocked code generation. If that information was enriched and presented in an appealing way, application developers could use that to understand why their application is vulnerable and when it is secure. In a similar vein, witness inputs need to be generated for a malicious data flow in order to assert that code is vulnerable. If these witness inputs were generated live while browsing a Web site, a developer could more easily assess the severity and address the issues arising from DOM-based XSS.

  • Mozilla

    • Introducing the WebVR 1.0 API Proposal

      2016 is shaping up to be a banner year for Virtual Reality. Many consumer VR products will finally be available and many top software companies are ramping up to support these new devices. The new medium has also driven demand for web-enabled support from browser vendors. Growth in WebVR has centered on incredible viewing experiences and the tools used to create online VR content.

    • Mozilla Jumps On IoT Bandwagon

      Mozilla has been clarifying some of its plans to convert the Firefox OS project into four IoT based projects. At a casual glance this seems like a naive move that is doomed to failure.

• SaaS/Big Data

  • ODPi: The Open Ecosystem of Big Data – Update and Next Steps

  • Heavy-Hitting Keynote Speakers Head for Upcoming Big Data Conferences

    With Big Data much in the news, some notable conferences are taking shape, and they include opportunities to hear from some of the most advanced users of tools such as Hadoop and Apache Spark. The Linux Foundation, has announced the keynote speakers and program for Apache: Big Data, taking place May 9-12, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Meanwhile, on 21 and 22 June at Hotel ICON in Hong Kong, Marketing magazine is hosting a two-day conference offering insights into Big Data and marketing practices.

  • The Linux Foundation Announces Keynote Speakers for Apache: Big Data

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Collabora Office 5.0 Release

  • Bruce Byfield Interview: Designing With LibreOffice

    Our colleague Bruce has a book coming out! It’s called Designing with LibreOffice. It tackles the subject of how to make documents look good and professional, while taking advantage of all the design features LibreOffice has to offer. So I got together with Bruce and we talked about his book, LibreOffice, design, and the eternal struggle of documenting Open Source projects.

  • Collabora Office 5.0 Released As Its LibreOffice Enterprise Flavor

    The folks at Collabora have released version 5.0 of Collabora Office, their downstream distribution of LibreOffice.

    Collabora Office 5.0 pulls in features from upstream LibreOffice 5.0 as well as some backported features from LibreOffice 5.1. Collabora Office 5.0 features improvements to the Microsoft filters, UI enhancements, remote file open/save support, security fixes, and much more.

  • Losing the Art of Wiki

    The past few months I read here and there around the LibreOffice community complaints about our wiki. According to these sources, our wiki is unusable, chaotic and poorly maintained. As we have a full time team dedicated to infrastructure management I am pretty sure that last criticism is unjustified to a large extent at least, but it also dawned on me that very few people around the LibreOffice project or any other community, for that matter, hail wikis as their most important tool or platform. Obviously, we are no longer in 2007. But what’s happening here is interesting, because it seems that people may have actually forgotten about the basic reasons wikis are around.

  • How To Cite PDF & Make Bibliography with Zotero & LibreOffice

  • How to create list for LibreOffice Calc cell

• Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Perforce ‘swarms’ into Slack comms

    The new open source Slack integration plugin is available now for the latest version of Helix Swarm. Developers can contribute to its ongoing development, along with many other open source projects.

  • LinkedIn open sources WhereHows metadata management tool

  • LinkedIn Open Sources Data Discovery Portal WhereHows

  • LinkedIn Makes Its WhereHows Data Manager Open Source

    LinkedIn couldn’t find a data set tracker to match all the data sets it was creating, so it invented one, WhereHows

• BSD

  • FreeBSD 10.3-RC1 Brings Security Fixes, Hyper-V Tweaks

    FreeBSD 10.3-RC1 was released today as the newest development milestone leading up to FreeBSD 10.3 that should be officially released later this month.

    FreeBSD 10.3-RC1 has a number of OpenSSL security fixes, Hyper-V driver changes, regression fixes, and other bug fixes.

  • Pre-orders for 5.9 are up!

    OpenBSD 5.9 is shaping up to be quite a big release, and pre-orders for the CD sets have just been activated.

• Public Services/Government

  • Helsinki region utilities turn to open source

    Helsinki Region Environmental Services Authority (HSY) is turning to open source software solutions for its web applications and other online services. The first open source-based service to go live is the one for water metering. Others will follow soon, says Risto Sipilä, who works for Cybercom, an IT consultancy contracted by HSY to help build the services.

  • Basque open source sector almost doubles

    The revenue and number of IT workers employed by open source service providers in the Basque Country has nearly doubled in 2015, according to figures published by a regional trade group for the sector, ESLE. The combined 2015 revenue of the nearly 40 companies that ESLE represents is 58 million compared to 31 million the year before. The number of workers grew by 413 new staff members. Altogether, ESLE members now employ 1033 people.

• Licensing

  • Email from BMW Australia refusing to comply with terms of GNU Public License

  • BeeGFS looking for the right licence

    The source code of the BeeGFS cluster file system has been published by its developers, the Fraunhofer Center for High Performance Computing in Kaiserlautern (Germany). The project is hesitating to making the code available under an open source licence, but is encouraging others to download and use the software.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Source on another level

    BrewDog, a UK brewery which soon celebrates its tenth anniversary, has decided to “open source” all of their 215 beer recipes. From their original and still extremely popular (and tasty) beer “PUNK IPA“, moving on to “Hops Kill Nazis“, “Doodlebug” and finally arriving at their latest “Jet Black Heart” which was first brewed last month (!)

  • Raspberry Pi 3, Linux Mint security breach, Google data processing for the Zika virus, and more

  • This Open Source Script Lets You (and Police) Search Twitter For Guns

    It’s now possible to do both of these things, thanks to a free, open-source tool designed by security researcher Justin Seitz as a part of his larger open-source intelligence project.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Open Source Textbooks and Resources Are Poised to Transform K-12 Education

      The higher-education community was the first to grasp the potential of open source textbooks, which students can legally access online, download and self-print for free, or have printed on demand at low cost.

  • Open Hardware

    • First Open Source GPU Could Change Future of Computing

      Nyami is significant in the research, computing and open source communities because it marks the first time open source has been used to design a GPU, as well as the first time a research team was able to test how different hardware and software configurations affect GPU performance. The results of the experiments the researchers performed are now part of the open source community, and that work will help others follow in the original research team’s footsteps. According to Timothy Miller, a computer science assistant professor at Binghamton, as others create their own GPUs using open source, it will push computing power to the next level.

    • We are happy to share our FREE and OPEN-SOURCE microprocessor system PULPino!

      Not a toy design: PULPino is a mature design: it has been taped-out as an ASIC in UMC 65nm in January 2016. The PULPino platform is available for RTL simulation as well for FPGA mapping. It has full debug support on all targets. In addition we support extended profiling with source code annotated execution times through KCacheGrind in RTL simulations.

      And it is free, no registration, no strings attached, you can use it, change it, adapt it, add to your own chip, use it for classes, research, projects, products… We just ask you to acknowledge the source, and if possible, let us know what you like and what you like and don’t like.

    • Wiring was Arduino before Arduino

      Hernando Barragán is the grandfather of Arduino of whom you’ve never heard. And after years now of being basically silent on the issue of attribution, he’s decided to get some of his grudges off his chest and clear the air around Wiring and Arduino. It’s a long read, and at times a little bitter, but if you’ve been following the development of the Arduino vs Arduino debacle, it’s an important piece in the puzzle.

Leftovers

• Health/Nutrition

  • WHO To Hold Stakeholder Consultation On Status Of Zika Research Next Week

    The meeting will be followed by a press briefing with Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO Assistant Director General, Health Systems and Innovation, and others. Stakeholders include a range of representatives of academic institutions, foundations and others. The following is the WHO agenda with list of participants of the meeting.

• Security

  • Friday’s security updates

  • Top 10 Critical CVEs That Can Lead To A Data Breach And How To Fix Them

  • CacheBleed: A Timing Attack on OpenSSL Constant Time RSA

  • How Mature is Your Vulnerability Coordination?

    Among the many best practices for security professionals is to have some process for handling inbound vulnerability reporting. So if someone finds a bug or exploit in a product or service, the company with the vulnerability is able to respond to a researcher and knows what to do with a report.

    It’s a topic that security industry luminary Katie Moussouris, chief policy officer at HackerOne, is well versed in, as she is the author of the Vulnerability Coordination Maturity Model.

  • The Risk of Open WiFi on Display at RSA

    Security experts from around the globe descended on the Moscone Center here this week for the annual RSA Conference, which provided free WiFi throughout the sessions and exhibit halls. While the WiFi has been generally available, there has been one key problem with it–it’s unencrypted.

  • A Day in the Life of Google’s Security Chief

    Gerhard Eschelbeck, vice president of security engineering at Google, has one of the toughest jobs in IT security: He has to keep Google secure. In a session at the RSA Conference here March 1 titled “My Life as Chief Security Officer at Google,” Eschelbeck gave attendees insight into how he spends his days working and his nights worrying about IT security.

  • DROWN Flaw Illustrates Dangers of Intentionally Weak Crypto

    Calls for encryption backdoors that date back to the 1990s are coming back to haunt the industry 20 years later with DROWN, security experts say. The flaw that researchers found with DROWN center around the fact that during the so called Crypto Wars of the 1990s President Bill Clinton’s administration insisted that US government have a way to break the encryption that was exported outside of the United States.

  • Truly Random Number Generator Promises Stronger Encryption Across All Devices, Cloud

    Before, Entropy Engine only worked on the local device. With NetRandom, they can feed randomness through the network and strengthen the encryption used by virtual machines, cloud instances, clients, servers, and embedded systems in Internet of Things devices. “One of them could support tens of thousands of virtual machines,” says Newell.

  • RSA 2016: 4 Data Issues Faced by States, Localities in the Digital Age

    Industry experts discussed the risks, benefits and next steps around data in the government space during the 2016 RSA Conference in San Francisco.

  • How To Disable (Blacklist) Your Laptop Webcam & Microphone in Linux

    Since Linux isn’t spyware and do not contain any backdoor like other popular operating system, that’s another reason we all love to use this operating system. It is bit difficult for surveillance people to install an application on your Linux without special permissions or spyware doesn’t work obviously on Linux like does on other OS’s but if you install something from untrusted source or you physically gave access to somebody to your system then there might be chances that you can be victim of surveillance and the whole could be nightmare for you. There are couple of things you can do to prevent it like do a OS re-install or blacklist ports and non-removable devices like webcam and microphone, by the way you should physically cover your laptop and phone camera with sticker. So without further we go, lets start doing it.

  • Trouble at Linux Mint — and beyond [Ed: no more paywall]

    When the Linux Mint project announced that, for a while on February 20, its web site had been changed to point to a backdoored version of its distribution, the open-source community took notice. Everything we have done is based on the ability to obtain and install software from the net; this incident was a reminder that this act is not necessarily as safe as we would like to think. We would be well advised to think for a bit on the implications of this attack and how we might prevent similar attacks in the future.

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • NYT Contributor Has Multiple Motives for Denying Drone Crimes

    Yes, “critics”—that is to say, people who have actually investigated the results of drone strikes, like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism—have found that at least 10 percent, and perhaps 24 percent or more, of people killed in Pakistan by US drones since 2004 were civilians. US drones have killed at least 172 Pakistani children, the BIJ found.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Why BP has no place in our arts

    Why are the national portrait gallery allowing a corporate criminal to paint its logo over their walls?

• Finance

  • New Study Confirms: Private ‘Trade’ Courts Serve the Ultra-Wealthy

    A new study confirms what many activists have suspected for a long time: The private courts set up by international “trade” deals heavily favor billionaires and giant corporations, and they do so at the expense of governments and people.

    Smaller companies and less-wealthy individuals don’t benefit nearly as much from these private courts as the extremely rich and powerful do. Other interested parties – whether they’re governments, children, working people, or the planet itself – are unable to benefit from these private courts at all.

  • Tax Plan Showdown: Now We Have Bernie Sanders Too

    As before, the Republican plans are all the same: a tiny tax cut for the middle class as a sop to distract them from the enormous payday they give to the rich, and a massive hole in the deficit.

  • Follow the money, if you can

    IT WAS a striking move from a country better known for hiding iffy foreign wealth than for exposing it. Frustrated by a lack of co-operation from Malaysian counterparts, Switzerland’s attorney-general declared in late January that there were “serious indications” that $4 billion had gone astray from Malaysian state concerns, some of it into accounts held by current or former Malaysian and Middle Eastern officials. The announcement fuelled an already combustible scandal that has transfixed Malaysians, battered their prime minister, Najib Razak, and could yet ensnare banks around the world.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Donald Trump’s Policies Are Not Anathema to U.S. Mainstream, but an Uncomfortable Reflection of It

    The political and media establishments in the U.S. — which have jointly wrought so much destruction, decay, and decadence — recently decided to unite against Donald Trump. Their central claim is that the real estate mogul and longtime NBC reality TV star advocates morally reprehensible positions that are far outside the bounds of decency; relatedly, they argue, he is so personally repellent that his empowerment would degrade both the country and the presidency.

  • Article on Sanders’ Complaints About Journalism Demonstrates Why Sanders Complains About Journalism

    If the New York Times really were what the New York Times pretends to be, when it or its industry was criticized, it would bend over backwards to make sure it was being fair to the critics. That’s the true test of “objectivity,” isn’t it—how you act when it’s your own ox being gored?

    Instead, the Times typically reacts to criticism the way a cat typically reacts to being given a bath.

  • Bernie Sanders Still Has a Path to Victory. Here It Is.

    The main media narrative coming out of Saturday’s Nevada caucus was clear: Hillary Clinton’s got her inevitability back, and Bernie Sanders’ campaign is toast. You can see it across a broad swath of the political spectrum, from Salon (“Hillary Clinton’s Path Is Clear: Barring a catastrophe, her nomination is inevitable”) to the Drudge Report (“Bern Out: Hillary could end it all in two weeks!”).

  • NYT Used to Report Delegate Count as if It Was Voters Who Mattered

    In other words, as far as voters are concerned, Sanders and Clinton are exactly tied so far. It’s only when you count the intentions of superdelegates—party insiders who by virtue of their position get to weigh in on the nominee—that Clinton has any sort of delegate lead, insurmountable or otherwise.

  • Hit Piece on Sanders Proposals Relies on Pro-Clinton Economists Mislabeled as ‘Leftists’

    As Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination continues to strengthen, so do the attacks on him by the establishment corporate media, which are reflexively backing the status quo corporatocracy.

  • A ‘Blistering Critique’ With a ‘Great New Metaphor for Hippie-Punching’

    Dollars & Sense (2/19/16) also included Henwood’s piece for FAIR on a reading list on the controversy over projections of increased growth and employment under Sanders’ proposed economic policies. It describes the FAIR piece as “a very good critique of the Calmes NYT piece, plus a great new metaphor for hippie-punching–the ‘unicorn hunt.’”

• Censorship

  • Another Ruling Against Kazakhstan in its Attempt to Use U.S. Courts as Censorship and Harassment Tool

    The Kazakhstan government had its third major setback in its attempt to use the U.S. legal system to pursue one of its fiercest critics, the independent newspaper Respublika. A federal judge in California quashed a subpoena issued to Facebook for information about users associated with Respublika’s Facebook account. The judge found that Kazakhstan lacked the appropriate judicial authorization to pursue such discovery, rejecting Kazakhstan’s claims that its ongoing Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) lawsuit essentially gave it free rein to obtain information about its critics.

    As we previously reported, EFF is representing Respublika—a longtime target of Kazakhstan intimidation and persecution because of its investigative reporting on President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s regime—which has been dragged as a non-party into a CFAA lawsuit Kazakhstan filed in federal court in New York against unnamed and unknown hackers Kazakhstan believes broke into its email system.

  • California Prisons Are Deleting Records of Social Media Censorship

    Up until last spring, Facebook had maintained a semi-secret channel for corrections facilities to file “Inmate Takedown” requests. A prison official could fill out a simple online form, hit submit, and Facebook would begin the account suspension process without ever creating a public record. Since Facebook wouldn’t publish the number of inmate takedown requests it received (and still hasn’t), the entire censorship regime was essentially invisible.

  • The country’s film censorship system a nonsense

    One aspect of the issue that the Lightbox affair didn’t touch on directly is how the board and its obscene charges deny the New Zealand public access to perfectly innocuous material on DVD. A single example should serve to illustrate the point.

    As a young, budding film buff, I used to watch old Hollywood movies on television. One title I found particularly moving. Stage Door is based on a stage play and tells the tale of a group of aspiring actresses who board together in New York. A bona fide classic, it co-stars Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers.

    As a 1937 film made under the industry censorship of the day, there is nothing in Stage Door beyond a subtlety suggested suicide that should trouble anyone. I watched it at 4pm or thereabouts one afternoon in the early 1980s. The classification given it by the all-knowing board for its VHS release is PG.

  • Google Agrees To Complicated Worldwide “Right To Be Forgotten” Censorship Plan

  • Google “Right to be Forgotten” changes further muddy privacy

  • Google makes changes in ‘right to be forgotten’ policy

  • Google Tweaks ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ in EU Searches

  • Google now uses geolocation to hide ‘right to be forgotten’ links from its search results

  • Google changes how it scrubs ‘right to be forgotten’ people

  • Google will apply the ‘right to be forgotten’ to all EU searches next week

  • Google confirms it will extend EU right-to-be-forgotten to all Google Search domains from next week

  • Google search motors in accordance to the “right to be forgotten”

  • Google Will Further Restrict EU Users From Finding Delisted Content

  • F-Patterns No More: How People View Google & Bing Search Results

  • Google makes narrow expansion of ‘right to be forgotten’ official

  • Let’s keep remembering the ‘Right to Be Forgotten’

  • Google To Comply With “Right To Be Forgotten” Next Week

  • Google gives ringing endorsement to US VPN providers with ‘right to be forgotten’ expansion

  • Google will soon censor a lot more ‘damaging’ search results in Europe

  • Google to use geolocation data to block Right To Be Forgotten links around the world

  • Google clarifies how it’s complying with European ‘right to be forgotten’ policies

  • Google Will Begin Using Geolocation Signals to Restrict Access to Delisted URLs on Its Domains

  • NooG is a compact web search bar for your PC desktop

  • Why Copying Campaigns Between Search Engines Misses Opportunities

  • Earnest Uses Conservative’s Free Speech Question To Lecture Republicans About The Supreme Court [VIDEO]

  • Conservative firebrand crashes White House press briefing, grills Earnest: Why are we being silenced?

  • WATCH: Milo Yiannopoulos Quizzes White House Press Secretary On Free Speech Online

  • Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopolous Crashes WH Press Briefing, Asks About Twitter Censorship

  • China bans depictions of gay people on television

  • China bans depictions of gay people on TV in crackdown on ‘vulgar, immoral and unhealthy content’

  • China’s new television rules ban homosexuality, drinking, and vengeance

  • Chinese Censors Crack Down on Gays on Television

  • EU pushed to speak out on Turkish media censorship

  • Index condemns seizure of Zaman

  • Turkish police fire tear gas and plastic pellets at protesters outside newspaper offices

  • Turkish government seizes newspaper

  • Turkish court orders takeover of media group

  • Petition calls on court to reverse decision on Zaman, urges Erdoğan to end crackdown on free press

  • Turkey police raid critical Zaman newspaper in Istanbul

  • Turkey seizes control of Zaman newspaper critical of President Erdogan

  • Turkey Seizes Opposition Newspaper in Growing Crackdown

  • Turkish police raid major newspaper following court order approving ‘government takeover’

  • Turkish authorities seize newspaper close to cleric Gulen – state media

  • Turkish court orders seizure of Zaman news group

  • Swearing and Censorship At Its Finest

  • ‘Censorship’ of sexual content bill heads to governor, amid student objection

    High school students have asked the governor to veto a bill they believe amounts to censorship in classrooms.

    The legislation, HB516, is backed by state House speaker and moved from the House to Senate with unanimous approval.

  • Film and video censorship a ‘rort’

    At last someone speaks sense about film censorship in this country.

    Recent tension between on line television provider Lightbox and that self-serving body of bureaucrats known as the Film and Video Labelling Board has exposed something more than the impossibility of micromanaging broadcasting “standards” in the internet age.

    It has brought into greater focus a rort that has been going on for years.

  • Stockholm District Court refuses to issue blocking injunction against access provider

    The rightholders in this case (Universal Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music, Nordisk Film, and others) brought a joint action, claiming that B2 – by supplying internet connection to its own customers (thus enabling access to The Pirate Bay and Swefilmer) – was aiding and abetting (objectively) infringements of copyrights belonging to the claimants.

• Privacy

  • UK spy agency admits it is LOSING cyber-security battle – despite Government spending almost £1bn

    UK spy agency GCHQ has admitted it is losing the cyber-security battle on a national level despite throwing money at the problem.

    Alex Dewedney, director of cyber security at CESG – the information security arm of GCHQ – warned that it will take a lot more than cash to bring cybser security threats under control.

  • GCHQ: We Failed On Cybersecurity Despite £1bn Spend

    The UK spy agency will spend another £1.9bn in the next five years but is being “killed” by legacy IT problems

    UK spy agency GCHQ has admitted it is losing the cybersecurity battle on a national level, despite throwing money at the problem.

    Alex Dewedney, director of cybersecurity at CESG – the information security arm of GCHQ – warned that it will take a lot more than cash to bring cybersecurity threats under control.

  • China looks to ramp up internet growth, its controls

    Chinese economic planners called for a more secure and better managed Web, with enhanced Internet control systems, Internet security laws and real-name registration policies.

  • China seeks to become tech powerhouse with improved internet infrastructure, encryption, censorship

    China’s government has highlighted big data, encryption technology and “core technologies” such as semiconductors as the key elements of its push to grow into a tech powerhouse, according to a new five-year plan released today that envisages the internet as a major source of growth as well as a potential risk.

  • Amazon Quietly Disabled Encryption in Latest Version of Fire OS

    Locally stored data on Amazon Fire devices is no longer encrypted. Anyone who upgrades their Kindle Fire, Fire Phone, Amazon Fire HD, or Amazon Fire TV Stick to Fire OS 5 will have local information left vulnerable to cyber attacks and stored in plain text. Amazon forum members first flagged the encryption removal and were later followed by Twitter user David Scovetta last night.

  • Remote Snooping

    It is nine years since I published in Murder in Samarkand that the security services can listen to you through your mobile telephone, even when it is apparently switched off. You could only prevent this by removing the battery. Shortly thereafter many mobile phone manufacturers started producing sealed phones from which you could not easily remove the battery. That was not especially a result of my publication. But I know for certain that the western security services had cooperated with the mobile phone companies in securing the software backdoor which enabled them to switch on the microphone when the phone appeared to be off. I am therefore inclined to believe the development of phones where it was hard to take the battery out was also encouraged by the security services.

  • Data Is a Toxic Asset

    Sometimes it’s stolen for purposes of embarrassment or coercion, as in the 2015 cases of Ashley Madison and the US Office of Personnel Management. The latter exposed highly sensitive personal data that affects security of millions of government employees, probably to the Chinese. Always it’s personal information about us, information that we shared with the expectation that the recipients would keep it secret. And in every case, they did not.

  • Whole lotta onions: Number of Tor hidden sites spikes—along with paranoia

    In recent weeks, the number of “hidden services”—usually Web servers and other Internet services accessible by a “.onion” address on the Tor anonymizing network—has risen dramatically. After experiencing an earlier spike in February, the number of hidden services tracked by Tor spiked to 114,000 onion addresses on March 1. They then dropped just as quickly, falling to just below 70,000 hidden services seen by Tor on Thursday—still twice the number that Tor had held steady at for most of 2015.

    “We don’t know what’s causing this,” said Kate Krauss, the director of communications and public policy for the Tor Project. “But it’s not difficult for even one person—a researcher, for instance—to create a lot of new onion addresses—which is not the same as actual websites or services. In fact, we want the process of creating onion addresses to be as easy as possible to encourage the creation of more onion services. These spikes are typically temporary—and as you see from the chart, this one is already going away.”

  • Google-US government nexus widens with Schmidt sinecure

    The cosy nexus between Google and the US government has been underlined yet again with the appointment of Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive of Google and now chairman of Google’s parent Alphabet, to a government sinecure.

    Overnight, Schmidt was appointed as the chairman of the US Defence Innovation Advisory Board, according to an announcement from the Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook.

    The board’s brief is to “provide department leaders independent advice on innovative and adaptive means to address future organisational and cultural challenges… including the use of technology alternatives, streamlined project management processes and approaches – all with the goal of identifying quick solutions to DoD problems”.

  • The new frontier of voter tracking

  • How this company tracked 16,000 Iowa caucus-goers via their phones

    On Thursday morning, I listened to an interview with the CEO of “a big data intelligence company” called Dstillery; it “demystifies consumers’ online footprints” to target them with ads. The CEO told public radio program Marketplace something astounding: his company had sucked up the mobile device ID’s from the phones of Iowa caucus-goers to match them with their online profiles.

  • Company Tracks Iowa Caucusgoers by their Cell Phones

    Okay, so it didn’t collect names. But how much harder could that have been?

  • FBI vs. Apple Establishes a New Phase of the Crypto Wars

  • Law Enforcement Groups File Amicus Brief In Favor Of FBI… But Which Undermines DOJ’s Claim That This Is Just About One Phone

  • GOP lawmaker introduces bill that would ban iPhones in government

  • Congressman Proposes Law Banning Government From Purchasing Apple Devices

    Global terrorism has accomplished one thing: the continual generation of stupid legislation. Add some panicked law enforcement voices to the mix and some lawmaker is going to feel compelled to throw a Kneejerk Convention.

  • History of GCHQ union dispute and Grayson Perry work feature at subversive exhibitions at The Wilson

    Accompanying the exhibition is an oral history project documenting the GCHQ trade union disputes from the 1980s and 1990s; this is funded by The Friends of The Wilson.

  • John Yoo’s Legal Rationale: Warrantless Surveillance Is Basically A DUI Checkpoint, But For Terrorism

    Mike Masnick took a very in-depth look at the recently declassified legal rationale for warrantless surveillance, authored by torture aficionado John Yoo back in 2002. The long and the short of the letter is this: executive power trumps everything, even the Constitution. The letter was “given” to the FISA court, much in the way an expensive and fragile item is “given” to a toddler. FISC Judge Kollar-Kotelly was allowed to look at it, but not keep a copy or take notes.

    One of the more darkly entertaining aspects of the letter is Yoo’s “kitchen sink” approach to justifying the warrantless searches and seizures. USA Today’s Brad Heath pointed out the long list of rough comparisons Yoo included in the letter, claiming that warrantless domestic surveillance was roughly comparable to searching high school kids’ lockers for drugs… among other things.

  • The NSA & Encryption

    It is ironic that the NSA paid millions in fees to Apple and other high tech companies to weaken their encryption standards by supplying a back door access. The same companies are now feigning outrage over government demands to allow them access to their devices thereby weakening their encryption standards for all their customers.

  • We Read All 20 Filings In Support Of Apple Against The FBI; Here Are The Most Interesting Points

  • Why isn’t the NSA helping the FBI unlock iPhones?

    The hackers at the National Security Agency have repeatedly shown themselves to be some of the most talented in the world and have hacked into the private data centers of both Google and Microsoft. Why, then, hasn’t the FBI turned to the NSA for help in unlocking the iPhone 5c used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook? The Intercept has written an interesting article asking that very question and it concludes that the NSA likely does have the technical means to break into an iPhone that was released all the way back in 2013.

  • San Bernardino DA Tells Judge To Side With FBI Over Apple Because iPhone May Have Mythical Cyber Weapon

    There’s been lots of press coverage over the fact that basically a ton of organizations and experts have filed amicus briefs in support of Apple in its legal fight with the FBI/DOJ — and we’ll have a post on that shortly — but on the flip side, the District Attorney for San Bernardino Country, hilariously arguing that he represents “the people of California” as his client, has filed one of the nuttiest amicus briefs you’ll see in favor of the FBI. The full brief is incredibly short and basically makes no actual legal argument pertaining to the actual questions in the case, involving the power of the All Writs Act, or the necessity of Apple’s involvement. Instead, it tosses out two insane reasons why it’s necessary to get into this phone — which, again, is the work iPhone of Syed Farook (the DA spells it Sayed) — both of which are speculative in the extreme…

  • Why are the intelligence agencies revealing their spying techniques?

    Legalised hacking in the UK now allows a third party to take control remotely of a phone’s camera or microphone and record video and conversations taking place, the Guardian’s Alan Travis reported this week. What’s the point of Apple trying to encrypt its iPhones if the spooks can switch them on remotely and monitor what we are doing?

    Until recently, the security services have gone to great lengths not to disclose their operational capabilities. If the bad guys know how their communications can be monitored, they’ll look for other ways of exchanging information.

    So it’s something of a surprise to see how open the agencies have now become. Ciaran Martin, director of cybersecurity at GCHQ, gave evidence recently to the investigatory powers tribunal about what’s now called “equipment interference”. If the new investigatory powers bill becomes law, warrants permitting interference with equipment will be issued by a secretary of state and approved by a judicial commissioner. Under clause 88, this would include “observing or listening to a person’s communications or other activities”.

  • Frequent NSA Partner AT&T is Backing Apple in its Fight Against the FBI

    AT&T filed an amicus brief today (March 3) backing Apple in its fight against the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    The telecom provider joins a growing list of organizations, includingGoogle, Facebook, Mozilla, Twitter, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Electronic Frontier Foundation, that have stood by Apple in its fight with the FBI. Apple has refused to comply with a Feb. 16 order from a federal judge to help the FBI break into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California shooters.

  • Forget Apple’s fight with the FBI – our privacy catastrophe has only just begun

    For privacy advocates, the Apple-FBI standoff over encryption is deja vu all over again.

    In the early 1990s, they fought and won a pitched battle with the Clinton administration over the Clipper chip, a proposal to add mandatory backdoors to the encryption in telecommunications devices.

    Soon after that battle was won, it moved overseas: in the UK, the Blair government brought in the Regulatory of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Privacy advocates lost that fight: the bill passed in 2000, enabling the government to imprison people who refused to reveal their cryptographic keys.

  • Full Brief From San Bernardino District Attorney Even More Insane Than Application About ‘Dormant Cyber Pathogen’

  • Apple vs FBI: The privacy disaster is inevitable, but we can prevent the catastrophe

    My new Guardian column, Forget Apple’s fight with the FBI – our privacy catastrophe has only just begun, explains how surveillance advocates have changed their arguments: 20 years ago, they argued that the lack of commercial success for privacy tools showed that the public didn’t mind surveillance; today, they dismiss Apple’s use of cryptographic tools as a “marketing stunt” and treat the proportionality of surveillance as a settled question.

  • Letter: Enlist NSA to prevent, fight terrorism [Ed: Erin Karnik is easy to fool. She’s not even reading the news, I guess.]

  • Does Giving Up Privacy Keep Us Safe From Terrorism?

  • Apple-FBI Case Has “Serious Global Ramifications,” UN Human Rights Chief Says

    The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, today issued a statement urged United States law enforcement authorities to exercise caution in their legal fight against Apple computer company, saying it could have “extremely damaging implications for the human rights of many millions of people, including their physical and financial security.”

  • Memphis Mayor Ushers In New Era Of Transparency By Refusing To Discuss City’s Stingray Devices

    Multiple Stingray nondisclosure agreements between law enforcement agencies and the FBI have been obtained by FOIA requesters. They all contain the same boilerplate stating that law enforcement officers must do everything up to swallowing their cyanide pills (let suspects walk, route FOIA requests through the FBI, engage in parallel construction, etc.) to prevent information about the technology from making its way into the hands of defendants, judges or peskily inquisitive members of the public.

    These agreements are usually signed by a handful of law enforcement officers and FBI reps. The documents are never signed by city legislators or officials… which makes the claims of Memphis mayor Jim Strickland either ignorant, misleading, just plain old politican bullshit.

• Civil Rights

  • Human Rights Watch Film Festival preview: Censorship in China and the refugee crisis take centre stage

  • ‘Her Life Hung by a Thread Because of This Work’

  • Human Rights Watch Film Festival preview: Censorship in China and the refugee crisis take centre stage

    The themes for the London film event with a social conscience are migration, the environment, artists as agitators as well as LGBT, children and women’s rights. “In a given year, we screen around 500 films around the world. That gives you quite a perspective on what topics are bubbling up in terms of popularity,” Andrea Holley, HRWFF strategic director told IBTimes UK.

    “We’ve had films on refugees and migration for the past ten years – so that’s been an ongoing issue. We don’t ever reject a film because of point of view or it’s not pulling in line with Human Rights Watch’s narrative. The first criteria above all is storytelling.”

  • US Contribution to Death of Honduran Activist Goes Unmentioned in US Coverage

    Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres was shot and killed in her home in La Esperanza, Intibuca, Wednesday. While the killers’ ID remains unknown, activists, media observers and the Cáceres family pointed to the increasingly reactionary and violent Honduran government, which has frequently clashed with Cáceres over her high-profile activism against land dispossession and mining, and her defense of indigenous rights.

    There was widespread outcry and grief over her death, and the story was covered by major media in the United States. But there was a glaring problem with the coverage: Almost none of it mentioned that the brutal regime that likely killed Cáceres came to power in a 2009 coup d’etat supported by the United States, under President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

  • Hillary Clinton Will Likely Be Asked About Libya In Tomorrow’s Debate. Here’s Why.

    As Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton prepares to take the stage for the next Democratic debate on Sunday night, she can be certain that she’ll be asked about one thing: Libya.

    The New York Times recently published two pieces on the 2011 intervention in Libya and Hillary Clinton’s significant role in the U.S. decision to join NATO forces in bombing the country.

  • Justice Dept Grants Immunity to Staffer Who Set Up Clinton’s Email Server

    In addition to everything else swirling in the cesspool of that email server, there are also questions about whether or not whether the State Department spent taxpayer money to manage Hillary’s email server. See, Pagliano was working for both State as a government employee and Hillary as a private employee at the same time. One wonders if he always kept the two tasks fully separate, and of course what a government employee was doing working privately for the Clintons at the same time.

  • US Chamber of Commerce sues to stop Seattle from unionizing Uber drivers

    The US Chamber of Commerce sued Seattle yesterday, objecting to that city’s recent passage of a law allowing Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize.

    It’s the latest round in a growing battle over whether workers in the on-demand app economy should be treated as employees or independent contractors. The Chamber of Commerce lawsuit (PDF) says they’re contractors and therefore can’t unionize under the National Labor Relations Act. The Chamber claims that the Seattle law also violates the Sherman Antitrust Act.

  • Heidi Beirich on White Supremacy

    This week on CounterSpin: It seems telling that when leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was slow to disavow the Ku Klux Klan, elite media called it a “stumble”—as though Trump had misspoken, had misrepresented himself or was truly confused about the existence of white supremacy and its role in political campaigns like his own.

  • ‘You Shouldn’t Appoint Someone Like Scalia to Any Office’

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Public Knowledge: Comcast’s Usage Cap Shenanigans Violate Neutrality, NBC Merger Conditions

    Consumer group Public Knowledge has waded into the zero rating debate by filing a formal complaint with the FCC (pdf) over Comcast’s use of usage caps to give its own streaming video service a notable advantage in the market. As we’ve long noted, Comcast hits less competitive markets with usage caps and overage fees its own documents suggest are entirely unnecessary. The company then announced it would be launching a new creatively-named “Stream” streaming video platform that would not count against these usage limitations.

  • Tech Companies Ask European Commission Not To Wreck The Internet — And You Can Too

    Late last year, we told you about a worrisome effort by the European Commission to saddle the internet with unnecessary regulations. They had released an online “consultation” which was ostensibly part of the effort to create a “Digital Single Market” (a good idea in the world of a borderless internet), but which appears to have been hijacked by some bureaucrats who saw it as an opportunity to attack big, successful internet companies and saddle them with extra regulations. It’s pretty clear from the statements and the questions that the Commission is very much focused on somehow attacking Google and Facebook (and we won’t even get into the fact that the people who are looking to regulate the internet couldn’t even program a working online survey form properly). However, as we noted, Google and Facebook are big enough that they can handle the hurdles the EU seems intent on putting on them: it’s the startups and smaller tech firms that cannot. The end result, then, would actually be to entrench the more dominant players.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Alleged R&D Costs: Not A Transparent Driver Of Drug Prices

    Whether laws enforcing transparency on costs would help curb extortionate drug prices in today’s world is hardly predictable now that pharma companies and their allies are lobbying governments to scupper any rules that would require them to disclose the real R&D costs and profits of their medicines and the rationale for charging what they do.

  • Sounds emitted by 3D printers could put Intellectual Property at risk [Ed: This is science fiction. It would only make sense, to a low degree, under particular conditions.]

    A new study from the University of California, Irvine, has revealed the surprising fact that the sounds emitted from a 3D printer could be enough to compromise valuable intellectual property, allowing cyber attackers to reverse-engineer and re-create 3D printed objects based off of nothing more than a smartphone audio recording.

  • Trademarks

    • Rage Against The Convoluted ‘Rage’ Trademark Dispute

      While Id Software is not a complete stranger to lame and opportunistic intellectual property disputes, I have to say the latest dispute involving the video gaming giant has me scratching my head. Via Newsweek, we learn that a small three-person game studio out of Costa Rica, called Green Lava Studios, is being forced to change the name of a port of its PC game, Fenix Rage, for its console release. Have you guessed why yet? No? Well, that’s probably because the issue is over Id Software’s game R.A.G.E., originally released in 2011. Id Software sent Green Lava Studios a cease and desist letter, citing its trademark on the word “rage” for the purposes of video games.

    • USPTO ‘asks examiners’ to suspend offensive trademarks

      The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has reportedly advised examiners to suspend trademark applications that are potentially offensive in light of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s In re Tam ruling.

      The guidance comes ahead of the US Supreme Court’s expected review of the case.

    • ‘Drumpf’ trademark application filed

      A trademark application has been filed for the term ‘Drumpf’, in reference to US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s alleged real surname.

      The trademark was applied for on February 26 at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) by a company called Drumpf Industries, based in Delaware.

  • Copyrights

    • Play: A P2P Distributed Torrent Site That’s Impossible to Shut Down

      An interesting torrent site has just debuted which has the honor of being almost shutdown-proof. ‘Play’ has just appeared on Zeronet, a server-less P2P network that utilizes Bitcoin cryptography and BitTorrent technology. As a result Play might well be the first torrent site that offers magnet links while being hosted by its users.

    • Carnival Copyright Confusion – rival collecting societies baffle party promoters

      Kat readers are of course familiar with the annual Carnival celebration in February in Rio, but this festival is also prevalent throughout the Caribbean. Behind the revelry and partying is an unappreciated copyright backstory, concerning sometimes acrimonious and complicated licensing issues regarding the music and live performances that are central to the festivities. A particularly illustrative example of how Carnival copyright plays out can be found in Trinidad and Tobago, where conflicting collecting societies go head to head every year, causing chaos and uncertainty when it comes to securing licences.

    • Feds Bust Man For Pirating Movie Audio at Drive-In Theater

      A Pennsylvania man is facing up to five years in prison for recording the audio of several Hollywood movies at a local drive-in theater. The man allegedly worked for a release group and was caught after the MPAA tipped off the theater owner. He now faces up to five years in prison.

    • Google accused of ‘dumping’ music onto streaming service

      Google Play Music is the latest streaming service to face a class action lawsuit, following claims it is “dumping” recordings onto its platform without permission from right owners.

      The lawsuit, filed by Yesh Music, accuses Google of not issuing notices of intent (NOIs) to musicians to use their works before reproducing them on the service.

      Yesh argued that Google’s failure to issue NOIs is widespread and has particularly harmed independent musicians and deprived them of royalties. It is seeking class action status for the lawsuit.