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Links 9/3/2016: Tails 2.2, Developer Preview Of “Android N”





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Flash and Open Source in Datacenter: The Next Frontier
    Open Source Stacks: Both cloud providers and hyperscale companies have driven the use of open source in the data center. They have made it ready for production environments at scale. This creates an abundance of available open source projects for use in the modern data center with reference models to emulate.


  • Open Source Mathematica Compatible Mathics 0.9
    Mathematica is a big powerful math package, but what do you do when you can't justify its cost? Mathics is an open source math package that has just reached version 0.9 and it is a possible alternative.

    The Mathics project is small compared to the resources that Wolfram can throw at Mathematica so don't expect a full clone of the commercial program. However, it is close enough for many purposes.


  • Open Source SDN Orchestration: Real Time OSS Foundation for ICT Service Agility
    Next-generation networking technologies such as SDN, NFV and cloud computing are enabling autonomous, real-time telecom operations. However, many conventional operational support systems (OSS) are based on proprietary software, which leads to fragmented technologies and interoperability issues for carriers.

    To address this issue, The Linux Foundation, China Mobile and Huawei in February held a press conference, together with China Telecom, KT and 10 other industry partners, announcing the OPEN-Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O) to develop the first open source software framework and orchestrator.


  • Open source is programming the digital future
    What do Uber, Facebook, Alibaba, and AirBnB all have in common? They're all digital-first businesses and new leaders in long-established industries. They're proof that every industry is going digital, and at tremendous speed. Consider this:

    “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate,” writes Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media.


  • Events

    • The twisted road through right-to-left language support
      English is written left to right. Hebrew is written right to left. We know that. Browsers—for the most part—know that too, just like they know that the default directionality of a web page is left-to-right (LTR), and that if there is a setting that explicitly defines the direction to right-to-left, the page should flip like a mirror. Browsers are smart like that. Mostly.




  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla



      • Mozilla Firefox 45 Removes Tab Groups, Provides Security Updates


        Mozilla provides 21 security advisories for its Firefox 45 browser. New features in the browser include improvements to the Firefox Hello communication tool. Mozilla today released the Firefox 45 Web browser, which provides users with incremental feature updates and security fixes.


      • Updates to Firefox Hello Beta
        Firefox Hello Beta is a communication tool that lets you share tabs you’re browsing in Firefox with others and chat over video or text, free and without needing an account or login. Firefox Hello Beta in Windows, Mac and Linux helps you discuss and make decisions about anything online by sharing the website you’re browsing in your conversation. This makes it easier and faster to do things like to shop online together with friends, plan a vacation with the family or collaborate on work with a colleague.


      • Encryption, Journalism and Free Expression
        Over the past several weeks, Mozilla has been running an educational campaign about encryption. We believe it’s essential for everyday Internet users to better understand the technology that helps keep the Web a more secure platform.

        So far, we’ve explored encryption’s role in helping protect users’ personal, intimate information. We’ve created an animated short that uses plain language to explain how encryption works. And we’ve expressed our support for Apple in its ongoing case against the FBI.

        Today, we’re spotlighting how encryption can support not only our personal security, but also how it can play a role in promoting values like free expression that most of us hold dear.






  • SaaS/Big Data



    • Talligent Survey Points to More OpenStack Adoption, but Security is an Issue
      Talligent, which focuses on cost and capacity management solutions for OpenStack and hybrid clouds, has announced the results of its inaugural ‘2016 State of OpenStack Report,’ an independent survey focused on identifying the key use cases, barriers and what’s driving OpenStack adoption.

      Survey results were commissioned by Talligent through media firms CloudCow and VMblog, and the State of OpenStack Report surveyed 647 virtualization and cloud IT leaders from across the globe. The most notable finding was about shifts from evaluation of OpenStack to concrete usage: Respondents stated they expect use of OpenStack to quickly expand beyond development environments, with lab growth moving from 43 percent to 89 percent and QA/Test to grow from 47 percent to 91 percent, both within the next 12 months.




  • Databases



  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



    • Java evangelist leaves Oracle to save Java
      Java evangelist Reza Rahman has left Oracle, to help save Java.

      Rahman writes, on an Oracle blog, that he is “... certain that this is the way I personally can best help continue to advance the Java and Java EE communities.”

      On his personal blog he's more candid, saying he joined Oracle in part because he'd have the chance to work with Cameron Purdy, once senior veep of development at Big Red.




  • CMS



    • A Drupal-based platform for collaborative research
      Collaborating on scholarly research projects can sometimes become complicated and disorganized. For example, using Flickr for sharing and commenting on images while communicating via email and editing documents together in Google Docs works, but it places information about the research in way too many places.






  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)



  • BSD



  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC



  • Programming



    • Help us integrate GitLab and the Open Science Framework
      For years, the benefits of open source code development have been self-evident to the software development community: Transparency leads to collaboration, and collaboration leads to better and more secure code. The scientific community is just starting to understand these benefits.

      The growing open science movement is using these same lessons to make the scientific process more transparent, so that research findings will be more reproducible. In order to realize the benefits of open science, we must use a wide set of research tools to enable transparency, which will lead to increased discoverability, reuse, and collaboration.

      To that end, the Center for Open Science (COS) is funding the development of an integration between GitLab and the Open Science Framework (OSF), and is seeking interested members of the open source community to contribute to this effort.


    • Software dev 101: 'The best time to understand how your system works is when it is dying'
      William Hill is a Java shop; but its next-generation bet settlement system under development is written in Erlang, which is designed for concurrency. "The syntax is simple," said Stevenson, "and the supervisor hierarchy makes it really nice to work with."




  • Standards/Consortia



    • Local government and GDS open consultation for common digital standard
      The Government Digital Service (GDS) is asking council staff and other interested parties for their views on a draft standard for delivering digital services.

      The draft local government digital service standard has 18 key recommendations, including creating a service using the agile, iterative and user-centred methods set out in the Government Service Design Manual, using open source tools, making source code open where possible, and using open standards where available.






Leftovers



  • Health/Nutrition



    • Gilead Solvaldi Case Reveals Patent-Health Fissures In India
      Are patient groups, health activists and manufacturers of low-cost generic drugs always on the same page? Do India’s generic companies think alike? The short answer: not necessarily, though their interests have overlapped on many occasions.

      Both questions are once again being debated in India in the wake of the patent opposition hearings in case involving sofosbuvir (brand name Sovaldi).

      Last month, the Indian Patent Office in Delhi heard arguments by several parties on why US pharmaceutical Gilead Sciences’ patent application for the hepatitis C drug Sovaldi should be rejected. Sovaldi costs $1,000 per pill in the United States.




  • Security



  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



    • Limit the Next President’s Power to Wage Drone Warfare
      WHEN Barack Obama took office as the reluctant heir to George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” he renounced some of his predecessor’s most extreme policies. There is one Bush-era policy, though, that President Obama made emphatically his own: the summary killing of suspected militants and terrorists, usually by drone.

      In less than a year, the president will bequeath this policy, and the sweeping legal claims that underlie it, to someone who may see the world very differently from him. Before that happens, he should bring the drone campaign out of the shadows and do what he can to constrain the power he unleashed.


    • Now That We Know These Disturbing Numbers, Can We Trust Air Marshals?
      Seven and a half years ago, as a new reporter at ProPublica, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all reports of misconduct by federal air marshals.

      It had been several years since the US government rapidly expanded its force of undercover agents trained to intervene in hijackings after 9/11. And a source within the agency told me that a number of air marshals had recently been arrested or gotten in trouble for hiring prostitutes on missions overseas.

      I knew the FOIA request would take a while—perhaps a few months—but I figured I'd have the records in times for my first ProPublica project.

      Instead, I heard nothing but crickets from the Transportation Security Administration.


    • ‘Hate-Motivated Terrorism Is a Serious Problem in This Country’
      White supremacy in its various strains is among the most significant, least discussed phenomena in US media discourse. A news report may note that a pundit stated that black people are lazier and more violent than other people, and urged public policies premised on that idea, or that a candidate’s followers singled out African-Americans or Latinos to harass or assault, and that these things are concerning.


    • Nobody Knows the Identities of the 150 People Killed by U.S. in Somalia, but Most Are Certain They Deserved It
      The U.S. used drones and manned aircraft yesterday to drop bombs and missiles on Somalia, ending the lives of at least 150 people. As it virtually always does, the Obama administration instantly claimed that the people killed were “terrorists” and militants — members of the Somali group al Shabaab — but provided no evidence to support that assertion.


    • Tel Aviv Pins Hopes on Clinton
      There has never been such a fascinating US Presidential race, both I a good way and in a bad way. I would never have believed somebody as genuine and bright as Bernie Sanders could get this close to becoming President. I would never have believed something as florid and off the wall as Donald Trump could become this close to becoming President.

      One of the things that makes both Trump and Sanders so entirely different from the mainstream US political class is that neither of them genuflects to Tel Aviv and both of them take the idea that Palestinians have rights too. In fact the only chance of Israeli dominance of US foreign policy appears to rest with Hillary Clinton. She may be Goldman Sachs’ dog in this fight, but she is also Tel Aviv’s.

      Unfortunately, despite continuing wins and trouncing Clinton in debate, it seems most unlikely Sanders will get the nomination. Clinton control of party machinery and firm position with those who have made an extremely fat living for themselves personally out of identity politics (sorry heroes of the civil rights movement), should ensure that. Can I commend you to read The Catholic Orangemen of Togo to see how just one ride in a car with Jesse Jackson put me right off him.


    • Canada’s Changing Mission in Iraq
      Canada formally announced it had stopped all air strikes in Iraq and Syria on 15 February. They will continue to fly aerial refueling missions, and conduct reconnaissance from the air. More significantly, Canada will up its small ground forces, who are engaged in what has to be the longest and most thorough training mission in human history, inside Iraq.


    • Pink-Slipping Hillary: On Remembering the Victims of the Iraq War
      In March 2003, just before the US invasion of Iraq, about one hundred CODEPINK women dressed in pink slips weaved in and out of congressional offices demanding to meet with representatives. Those representatives who pledged to oppose going to war with Iraq were given hugs and pink badges of courage; those hell-bent on taking the US to war were given pink slips emblazoned with the words “YOU’RE FIRED.”




  • Transparency Reporting



    • It Took a FOIA Lawsuit to Uncover How the Obama Administration Killed FOIA Reform
      The Obama administration has long called itself the most transparent administration in history. But newly released Department of Justice (DOJ) documents show that the White House has actually worked aggressively behind the scenes to scuttle congressional reforms designed to give the public better access to information possessed by the federal government.

      The documents were obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports journalism in the public interest, which in turn shared them exclusively with VICE News. They were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — the same law Congress was attempting to reform. The group sued the DOJ last December after its FOIA requests went unanswered for more than a year.


    • FOIA Request Results In Details Of Administration's War On FOIA Reform
      Do you like irony? Documents obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (and shared with Jason Leopold of Vice) through an FOIA request show how the Obama administration and various agencies worked together to dismantle FOIA reform efforts. "Presumption of openness," my [REDACTED].




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying



    • Sanders scores Michigan upset; Trump tightens grip with wins
      Bernie Sanders won a huge upset in Michigan on Tuesday night, giving his campaign a jolt of momentum even as Donald Trump tightened his grip on the Republican nomination by scoring victories in Michigan and Mississippi.

      Entering Tuesday, not one public poll had shown Sanders leading in Michigan, and most had him down by double-digits, creating expectations that Hillary Clinton would cruise to victory.

      But Sanders took the lead from the moment polls closed in the state and never let go. News networks projected him the winner just before midnight, with the Vermont senator leading 50 to 48 percent.


    • Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours
      All of these posts paint his candidacy in a negative light, mainly by advancing the narrative that he’s a clueless white man incapable of winning over people of color or speaking to women. Even the one article about Sanders beating Trump implies this is somehow a surprise—despite the fact that Sanders consistently out-polls Hillary Clinton against the New York businessman.




  • Censorship



    • Standing up to censorship
      Students who find themselves on the second floor of Moffett Library are likely to see a poster featuring a stack of books with the question “Have you seen us?” in bold. The books in the stack have all been censored or restricted at some point since publication, and the poster is promoting the anti-censorship movement.

      Since 1990 there have been more than 18,000 attempts to remove books from libraries and schools across the United States. A significant number of these attempts are done by parent groups or religious organizations.


    • AG begs for time over ‘censorship’ law
      GIBA specifically wants the court to expunge regulations 3 to 12 and 22 of the NMC (Content Standards) Regulations 2015 (LI 2224) as being inconsistent with the 1992 Constitution which guarantees unfettered media freedom.

      The regulations in contention basically require media owners to apply for content authorization, submit programme guide and content for approval and go by a set of rules stipulated by the NMC or in default pay a fine or serve between two and five years in jail.


    • Digital TV broadcasting prone to censorship, says expert
      The House of Representatives has outlined a policy to digitize broadcasting in a draft revision of the 2002 Broadcasting Law, which could make it easier for the government to control television programs in the future, according to an expert.

      The revision was first proposed to the House in 2010, but has yet to make it into law. Last January, the House’s Legislation Body included the same bill in the 2016 National Legislation Program (Prolegnas). The House then started work on the draft before eventually discussing it with the government.

      “The migration of analog to digital TV broadcasting is one of the main points in the revision of the law,” lawmaker Meutya Hafid said on Monday.


    • SCMP's online presence in mainland China completely wiped out
      Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post has become the latest casualty of China’s tightening grip on the media as internet censors shut down its microblogging accounts on Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, as well as its WeChat page on Tuesday.

      The broadsheet's official Sina Weibo page now leads to an error message that reads, “Sorry, there is something wrong with the account you are currently trying to access, and it is temporarily inaccessible.” A similar error message can be seen on what used to be SCMP’s Tencent Weibo page.

      Over at SCMP’s official WeChat account, an empty shell is all that remains as all previous posts published on the page have been deleted.

      If past history is any indication, the shutdown doesn’t appear temporary, and there is little chance that the accounts will be restored.


    • Censorship Is Not All Bad [Ed: not that I agree with this...]
      Thus, hate speech is really anti-speech because it aims to shut down the speech of others. And in the United States, hate speech has shut down the speech of minorities and women for hundreds of years. Defenders of hate speech often disguise it as "pride," "state's rights" or "religious freedom." But we are mistaken to treat anti-speech as if it were normal speech, deserving of protection. We can and should be intolerant of intolerance.


    • Chinese govt deletes article, magazine publishes rejoinder in defiance
    • Caixin 'Won't Comment' on Deletion of Anti-Censorship Article
    • Chinese Financial Magazine Challenges Content Censorship
    • Top China Adviser Pushes for More Freedom of Speech
    • Caixin Challenges Censors After Xi Demands Loyalty
    • Article exposing censorship of interview on free speech gets censored
    • Article denouncing censorship censored from Chinese magazine’s English website
    • Caixin, censored by govt, exposes article’s removal


    • China magazine Caixin defiant on censorship of article
      Prominent Chinese financial magazine Caixin has highlighted censorship of its content, in a rare defiant move against the government.

      It claimed on Monday, in an article published on its English-language website, that censors had deleted an interview on the issue of free speech.

      But by Tuesday evening that article appeared to have been deleted as well.

      Chinese media is heavily regulated with government censors often removing content on websites and social media.


    • Chinese magazine challenges government over censorship
      One of China’s most respected current affairs magazines has lashed out at Communist party censorship of its work, just weeks after the president, Xi Jinping, demanded absolute loyalty from his country’s media.


    • Caixin 'Won't Comment' on Deletion of Anti-Censorship Article
      A spokesman for the highly regarded Chinese financial and economic magazine Caixin on Wednesday declined to comment on the deletion of a recent article hitting out at government censorship from its website in recent days.


    • UD faculty artist, student address creative censorship


    • Creating freedom in censorship
      In our last editorial, the Flyer News staff restated our ded€­ication to the pursuit of truths in the Dayton community. We pledged our support to the Mountain Echo, the student news€­paper of Mount St. Mary’s University, as they countered cen€­sorship from their new president, Simon Newman–as well as the University of Dayton faculty and students who petitioned against the president’s actions. Since our last issue was published, President Newman resigned–a testament to the power of collec€­tively speaking out against censorship.


    • Valley News: Man flies Confederate flag to fight censorship, but neighbors object
      At the dead end of Latham Works Lane, a flagpole bears a rectangle of red cloth dominated by a big blue X and 13 white stars.

      It’s the Confederate flag, a symbol of the Civil War-era American South that is increasingly seen as a sign of the South’s resistance to civil rights.


    • White House's Claims that the TPP Would Curb Internet Censorship are Fantasy


      One of the United States government's priorities in Internet policy is encapsulated by a term that's recently been making the rounds; the "free flow of information." It appears almost every time U.S. officials describe how they intend to protect the free and open Internet, especially when it comes to international law. The general idea is that bits of online data should not be discriminated against, hindered, or regulated across national boundaries. As a general principle, this sounds positive. It could be a helpful antidote against arbitrary data localization rules that threaten to break up the global Internet, or attempts by governments' to block and censor foreign websites using nationwide filters.




  • Privacy



  • Civil Rights

    • 'A woman died in my arms: her crime? To refuse FGM'
      Gift Abu is describing what she says was her most harrowing experience working as an anti-FGM activist in Nigeria. A mother-to-be was having complications but the cutters wouldn’t help her give birth safely unless she allowed them to cut her. “They left her for dead when she said no, and blamed me because I tried to stop them.”


    • What's Wrong With Feminism: Why I Call Myself A Humanist, Not A Feminist
      Above all, I am for what feminism is said to be -- equal rights for men and women. Yes, men, too.

      I see, far too often, that feminism is about hating, demeaning, and denying rights to men.

      I am for rights -- like the First Amendment right -- for neo-nazis (who marched in Skokie back when I was a young teen), and for all sorts of people I think are assholes and idiots.

      I am certainly for rights of people I like, and I like men.


    • Police warn women not to go out alone in Swedish town after spate of sex attacks
      Police in the icy Northern Swedish city of Ostersund have warned single women against venturing out alone after dark, following a space of violent attacks, with nine cases reported in less than three weeks.

      As yet another attack was reported on Tuesday, the local police chief Stephen Jerand told state broadcaster SVT that he was convinced that his warning, highly unusual in Sweden, had been justified.

      “It is always a consideration whether to go out with this kind of thing or not. But we don’t want to sit here for another week and have more crime victims on our desk,” he said.


    • New Mexico Attorney General Would Rather See Sexting Teens Treated As Sex Offenders Than See His Funding 'Jeopardized'
      Teens sexting can't be addressed by existing laws. Law enforcement -- which far too often chooses to involve itself in matters best left to parents -- bends child pornography laws to "fit" the crime. They often state they're only doing this to save kids from the harm that might result by further distribution of explicit photos. How exactly turning a teen into a child pornographer who must add his or herself to the sex offender registries is less harmful than the imagined outcomes cited by law enforcement is never explained.


    • New Mexico Attorney General Protests Bill That Would Decriminalize Teen Sexting
      New Mexico’s state legislature is considering a bill that would stiffen the penalties for people caught with child pornography while also legalizing consensual sexting between underage teenagers. But that’s an unacceptable tradeoff for the state’s Democratic attorney general, whose staff walked out of a hearing in protest of the bill’s leniency toward teen offenders.




  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Governments Agree To ICANN Accountability Proposals, Giving Green Light For IANA Transition
      Governments gathered at the 55th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Marrakesh this week have agreed to not object to the final proposal on enhancing ICANN accountability. By the move, the governments cleared the way to allow a potential handover of the management of the central root zone of the domain name system and other core databases to ICANN from the United States Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).




  • DRM



    • Show them the world is watching. Stop DRM in HTML.
      For years, Defective by Design and the anti-DRM movement have been fighting media and proprietary software companies who want to weave Digital Restrictions Management into the HTML standard that undergirds the Web. Winning this is a top priority for us -- the DRM proposal, known as EME (Encrypted Media Extensions), would make it cheaper and more politically acceptable to impose restrictions on Web users, opening the floodgates to a new wave of DRM throughout the Internet.

      The battle is coming to a head as EME approaches a final vote by the Web's standardization organization, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We need to make our voices heard now -- the W3C is convening March 20-22 and is scheduled to discuss the proposal.


    • Join the struggle to keep digital restrictions out of Web standards




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • BREAKING - Louboutin case referred to CJEU: can a colour be a shape?
      This Kat understands that not all language versions of the directive speak of 'shape'. Indeed, the French version refers to 'forme', the German version speaks of 'form', and the Italian version speaks of 'forma'. In Italian a 'forma' is not necessarily three-dimensional, but can also be two-dimensional, and the same is true in French and German as well.


    • Copyrights



      • Pub fined for illegal Sky transmission
        A UK pub has been fined nearly €£24,000 ($34,100) for illegally showing Sky television, following an investigation by trade body the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).


      • Norwegian Police Seize Popcorn-Time “Information” Site


        Norwegian economic crime police have seized the domain name of a local Popcorn-Time website. The site in question didn't offer any copyright infringing material, but featured news articles and links to external sites where the popular application could be downloaded. No arrests were made.


      • Stripping 4K Content Protection is Fair Use, Court Hears
        LegendSky, a hardware manufacturer that creates devices enabling consumers to bypass 4K copy protection, has informed a New York federal court that they're not breaking any laws. The company is being sued by Warner Bros. and Intel daughter company Digital Content Protection, who want to shut down their sales.








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