One of the most puzzling questions about the history of free and open source is this: Why did Linux succeed so spectacularly, whereas similar attempts to build a free or open source, Unix-like operating system kernel met with considerably less success? I don't know the answer to that question. But I have rounded up some theories, which I'd like to lay out here.
Linux 4.6 has officially been announced and guess which are the first operating systems to provide support for the newly announced kernel?
The Linux Foundation offers many resources for developers, users, and administrators of Linux systems. One of the most important offerings is its Linux Certification Program. The program is designed to give you a way to differentiate yourself in a job market that's hungry for your skills.
How well does this certification prepare you for the real world? To illustrate that, the Linux Foundation is featuring some of those who have recently passed the certification examinations. These testimonials should help you decide if either the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) or the Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) certification is right for you. In this installment of the series, we talk with LFCS William Brawner.
This weekend Toby Churchill kindly hosted a hacking weekend for OpenTAC – myself, Michael Grzeschik, Steve McIntyre and Andy Simpkins got together to bring up the remaining bits of the hardware on the current board revision and get some of the low level tooling like production flashing for the FTDI serial ports on the board up and running. It was a very productive weekend, we verified that everything was working with only few small mods needed for the board . Personally the main thing I worked on was getting most of an initial driver for the EMC1701 written. That was the one component without Linux support and allowed us to verify that the power switching and measurement for the systems under test was working well.
Jiri Kosina sent in the pull requests today for the subsystems he is responsible for, including the HID area.
Not long after gaining OpenGL 4.0 support, Intel's Mesa driver is now able to support OpenGL 4.2 and it's not far off 4.3.
To gain OpenGL 4.3 support, they only need "GL_ARB_robust_buffer_access_behavior".
Really impressive work as always and awesome to see the Intel driver finally supporting some more modern OpenGL. Great news for laptop users.
Countless bug fixes (thanks to the bug reports of my colleagues Diego, Moustapha, Matteo + Matteo).
Today we are releasing 5.0.3, 4.4.12, and the unstable development snapshot 5.1.1.
Recently Dave Täht wrote a blog post investigating latency and WiFi scanning and came across NetworkManager’s periodic scan behavior. When a WiFi device scans it obviously must change from its current radio channel to other channels and wait for a short amount of time listening for beacons from access points. That means it’s not passing your traffic.
The headlining feature of the new Varnish Massive Storage Engine (MSE) 2.0 from Varnish Software is cache persistence. This new capability in MSE, an exclusive module of Varnish Plus Web optimization suite, allows Web sites to retain data across restarts and reboots and ensures that, in the case of a system crash, cache content will not be lost. Furthermore, users can repair and maintain their sites as quickly as possible.
Insync, the excellent Google Drive native client, is once again available for free as the company behind the project is currently running a promotion for Gmail users.
Group sharing isn’t easy. From book clubs to house hunts to weekend trips and more, getting friends into the same app can be challenging. Sharing things typically involves hopping between apps to copy and paste links. Group conversations often don’t stay on topic, and things get lost in endless threads that you can’t easily get back to when you need them.
I follow several web comics. Every morning, I used to open my browser and check out each comic's web site to read that day's comic. That method worked well when I read only a few web comics, but it became a pain to stay current when I followed more than about ten comics.
First up, if you're looking for my upcoming Vive unboxing video, this isn't it!
When my Vive arrived earlier this month, I'd decided to let it sit in its box for a while. The most recent communication regarding official support was "We are working on it but it's not ready yet," and I had a lot of other work to focus on.
About a month ago, an OSVR contributor had mentioned in the OpenHMD IRC channel that OSVR had a driver that interfaced with Valve's Vive driver and allowed OSVR to support the Vive under Linux. I didn't have time to look into it, but was glad to know that even if Linux support wasn't being advertised as ready by Valve, that there was something tangible to work with.
The Vive's official launch came and went without advertised Linux support and it seemed that those users who did have Vives hadn't managed to jump through the correct hoops to get it functioning on Linux until last night when Linux user and developer SketchStick nudged me to take a look at some successes he'd had.
Shadwen the brand new action and stealth game from Frozenbyte is now officially available. I can't wait to give it a go.
I have requested review codes, so I will have to wait and see if Frozenbyte reply on that. Samsai has a copy so hopefully he will livestream it for you guys on Friday. Update: Frozenbyte have given me a copy. Thoughts to come when I've put time into it.
It's nice to see Frozenbyte do something a bit different after Trine, so hopefully it's as good as it looks.
Paradox fans may want to know that Hearts of Iron IV is officially available to pre-order and there's a trailer.
It will release on June 6th with a basic price of €£34.99 for the smallest edition available right up to €£67.99.
I've not played any of the previous games (which don't have Linux support), so I look forward to seeing what all the fuss is about. I am sure quite a number of people are excited by having this on Linux.
For those that don't know, or forgot, the new Unreal Tournament does in fact have a Linux version. I check on it now and then and it's really starting to come together.
The current release 5.22 of KDE Frameworks gained a new framework: KWayland. So far KWayland got released together with Plasma. KWayland entered as tier 1/integration and is only available on Linux (and other Linux-like systems).
For us working on the Wayland stack in Plasma and KDE this is a very important step. Now we can use KWayland also in other frameworks. Also with KWayland in frameworks we expose it to a larger audience. We hope that it is a useful framework for anyone using Wayland with Qt. It’s not a replacement for QtWayland, rather an addition and way more flexible by being closer to the Wayland API.
KDE Frameworks 5.22 was released this week and with this frameworks update comes the addition of KWayland.
KWayland up to now was distributed with Plasma but with KDE Frameworks 5.22 has moved on so it can also be used by other frameworks. Adding it to KDE Frameworks also makes it relevant to anyone working with the Qt toolkit on Wayland, although it's not a replacement for QtWayland.
another friendly reminder to everyone interested in running for this year's Board of Directors elections. The final date for submitting candidacies is tomorrow (18th of May) at 23:59 UTC, the deadline is very close already!
I would like to speak about my very first bug fix which wouldn’t have been possible at all without the awesome GNOME community.
My name is Gabriel IvaÃâ¢cu and I am a third year student at University Politehnica of Bucharest pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.
Ever since I joined university and got introduced to Linux I immediately became an avid fan of free and open source software, my passion evolving constantly since then. I’ve been using GNOME under Fedora as my standard desktop environment for about two years now.
My very first introduction to Linux was in eighth grade when I booted the Live CD (Yes, CD’s used to be much popular at that time due to low penetration of Internet) of Fedora 13 on my Desktop. I was very much impressed by it’s user interface and started hacking on it. It was my first introduction to GNOME Desktop. At that time , in high school, I was mostly interested in installing various distros and trying out new desktop environments. What a wonderful life back then , wasn’t it ?:)
I have made a new version of ExTiX – The Ultimate Linux System. I call it ExTiX 16.2 KDE Live DVD. (The previous version was 15.4).
Today, May 17, 2016, SUSE, a pioneer in open source software and the maker of the SUSE Linux operating system, has had the great pleasure of announcing the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching.
Just as Adwords changed the face of SEO in the early 2000s, Mintigo has empowered marketers with big data through their self-service platform. Today, the company announced its 5,000th model, awarding Red Hat with its Data Super Hero Award.
Back in March, when the Alpha version of the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating system was about to be seeded to public testers and early adopters, Fedora kernel maintainer Justin Forbes announced the plans for Fedora 24's default kernel.
For those that have been requesting some fresh benchmarks looking at the system power consumption / efficiency of modern Linux distributions/kernels and how they're working out for laptops/ultrabooks, here are some fresh benchmarks on two Intel devices when comparing Fedora 23 to Fedora 24 Beta and also testing out the power performance with the Linux 4.6 kernel.
We have already covered in our previous article about additional YUM repository such as EPEL, RPMFusion, Copr, etc.., for CentOS/RHEL & Fedora. In this list we are going to add UnitedRPMs – Brand New unofficial Fedora repository. Fedora UnitedRPMs Project was born as a Google+ community made by David Vásquez and they are going to maintain the multimedia and other software and addons which is missing in original repositories of Fedora. UnitedRPMs supports from Fedora 24 & Fedora 25 now.
You can get the Devuan Jessie beta download and all installers.
The Xfce desktop is a perfectly fine environment. In combination with the installed base, Xfce worked fine with the Devuan beta release.
More polish and growth of the Jessie version is needed, however, before Devuan can succeed as an independent Linux distro in its own right. Until then, the beta and what may follow are an interesting footnote in yet another Linux family line.
The Debian GNU/Linux distribution will include the ZFS filesystem as a choice from now on, according to an announcement by Petter Reinholdtsen, the developer responsible.
ZFS is a filesystem developed by Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle. The licence under which it is released, the Common Development and Distribution Licence, is not compatible with the GNU General Public Licence under which the Linux kernel is released.
According to Ana Guerrero López, a member of the Debian publicity team, the inclusion of ZFS was announced slightly more than a year ago, in April 2015 by the project leader at the time, Lucas Nussbaum.
In an email, Nussbaum wrote "We received legal advice from Software Freedom Law Centre about the inclusion of libdvdcss and ZFS in Debian, which should unblock the situation in both cases and enable us to ship them in Debian soon."
O'Reilly OSCON 2016, the long-anticipated Open Source convention, is upon us, and it looks like Canonical is there to showcase its latest Snappy Ubuntu Core innovations.
The Good
The developers do appear to listen to their users. Everything that people have asked for in the past few years has been implemented in one way or another.
The Bad
This is a long term support release and it feels like it isn't quite ready. I find it hard to believe that nobody working on Ubuntu tried a clean install, followed by installing some of the more popular applications like Chrome, Dropbox and Steam.
The Not Quite So Ugly
The Software Centre has gone.
This would have been great as a point release, say a 16.10 or a 17.04 because you expect some experimentation and you expect the odd cock-up.
The LTS release should be ready to go from day one with only minor issues. Sadly that isn't the case.
We promised to keep our Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet readers informed about the latest developments in the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, and today we have interesting news to share.
Earlier today, May 17, 2016, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth published a new blog entry on his website to thank the Ubuntu Community Council for their hard work.
According to Mark Shuttleworth, the Community Council (CC) has done a great job lately at keeping the Ubuntu community happy, unblocked, and healthy. Their role in the grandiose Ubuntu project, for those not in the known, is a critical one if Ubuntu, as a community, wants to be at the top of its game.
While Firefox is currently the default web browser for Ubuntu 16.04, there are many alternative and special-purpose browsers available to install on Linux. If you're looking for a break from Firefox or need a browser to accomplish a special task, there's probably an alternative browser out there for you.
Distributor Farnell element14 has what it positions as the first all-in-one development platform for industrial IoT applications, the mangOH Green Open Hardware Platform. The “all-in-one Hardware, Software and Cloud-based solution for Industrial IoT applications” uses silicon from Sierra Wireless
Just when we were thinking that the Samsung NX1 and NX500 Tizen Smart Cameras were no longer receiving any firmware updates, then two drop all at once. The NX1 has now been updated to version 1.41 and the NX500 version 1.11. The upgrade was necessary to resolve a bluetooth connection issue with Android version 6.0 marshmallow. You also need to update the Android Samsung Camera Manager App to v1.6.07.160510 or later version in order to connect to the camera.
The Commission can fine firms up to 10 percent of their annual sales, which in Google's case would be a maximum possible sanction of more than 6 billion euros. The biggest antitrust fine to date was a 1.1 billion-euro fine imposed on chip-maker Intel (INTC.O) in 2009.
The iPhone is the most popular smartphone in the United States, but globally, folks globally prefer Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy, Google Nexus and LG’s G series.
I recently acquired an ODROID XU4. Despite being 32-bit, it's currently at the upper end of cheap SoC-based devboards; it's based on Exynos 5422 (which sits in Samsung Galaxy S5), which means 2 GHz quadcore Cortex-A15 (plus four slower Cortex-A7, in a big.LITTLE configuration), 2 GB RAM, USB 3.0, gigabit Ethernet, a Mali-T628 GPU and eMMC/SD storage. (My one gripe about the hardware is that you can't put on the case lid while still getting access to the serial console.)
Google, unfortunately, hasn’t given a specific date for its UK Android Pay launch. However, the company did announce that the service would arrive in the “upcoming months” back in March. And with Google I/O scheduled for Wednesday, May 18, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear more on the matter.
Interestingly, UK coffee chain Pret A Manger has already started putting up Android Pay tags in at least one of its London stores, suggesting the launch may be imminent.
Google's Android smartphone operating system has reported impressive growth as competition with Apple intensifies in the months before the release of the iPhone 7.
Android's market share increased 7.1 per cent across Europe in the first three months of the year, where it now holds 75.6 per cent of the market to Apple's 18.9 per cent, which fell from 20.2 per cent.
In Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, Android grew largely at the expense of Windows Phone, whose sales fell 5 per cent, while close to 7 per cent of first time Android users were migrating from Windows, according to research from analysts Kantar Worldpanel.
Open source’s inherent flexibility maximises IT value, says Mikael Norberg, CTO at Sweden’s Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan). Thanks to free software licences, information technology can be used effectively. Last year, Försäkringskassan completed its transition to open source in its data centre in Sundsvall, “driving down costs while increasing IT value”, the CTO says.
RethinkDB, an open-source database, wants to help developers prototype and build cross-platform, real-time Web, mobile and IoT apps. The company announced Horizon, a new open-source JavaScript platform, is coming out of a closed developer preview today.
Though the data regarding connected devices is anything but cohesive, a broad overview of IoT stats affords a clear picture of how quickly our world is becoming a connected ecosystem: In 1984, approximately 1,000 devices were connected to the Internet; in 2015, Gartner predicted 4.9 billion connected things would be in use; and by 2020 analysts expect we’ll have somewhere between 26 and 50 billion connected devices globally. Said Padmasree Warrior, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at Cisco, “In 1984, there were 1,000 connected devices. That number rose up to reach a million devices in 1992 and reached a billion devices in 2008. Our estimates say… that we will have roughly 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020.”
Ziliang Guo from the ReactOS project today announced the availability for download of the first maintenance release of the ReactOS 0.4 open-source operating system.
While not a GNU/Linux distribution, ReactOS is an open source project whose main design goal is to offer users a computer operating system built from scratch that clones the design principles of Microsoft Windows NT's architecture.
Among technology categories creating sweeping change right now, cloud computing and Big Data analytics dominate the headlines, and open source platforms are making a difference in these categories. However, one of the biggest open source stories of the year surrounds newly contributed projects in the field of artifical intelligence and the closely related field of machine learning.
The software is now available on Github where the tech giant hopes developers and researchers will expand its functionalities.
Blockchain, the company behind the world’s most popular bitcoin wallet, has been quietly working on an interesting project called Thunder. The Thunder network is an alternative network of nodes that lets you make off-chain bitcoin payments in seconds and settle back to the bitcoin blockchain every now and then. And it makes me excited about bitcoin all over again.
This sounds complicated but it’s quite neat and could be a powerful innovation for bitcoin transactions. But first, let’s take a step back.
If you’ve ever tried sending a couple of bitcoins from one wallet to another, you know it can take ten or twenty minutes before the blockchain confirms the transaction.
Wichita State University will host a statewide conference for enthusiasts of the computer operating system Linux this weekend, according to a news release.
When you couple lightning-fast Internet with innovative projects in the realms of education and workforce development, amazing things can happen.
That’s the philosophy behind the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund, our joint initiative with the National Science Foundation and US Ignite. The Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund brings funding and staffing to U.S. cities equipped with gigabit connectivity, the next-generation Internet that’s 250-times faster than most other connections. Our goal: Spark the creation of groundbreaking, gigabit-enabled educational technologies so that more people of all ages and backgrounds can read, write, and participate on this next-generation Web.
For JJ Asghar, senior partner engineer of OpenStack at Chef, there is one issue that continues to hamper OpenStack’s success: Operations. It’s no secret in the Ops community that there is a large barrier to entry involved in becoming a part of the OpenStack community. When it comes to submitting bugs, reporting issues, and ensuring one’s OpenStack cloud runs smoothly, operations teams find themselves facing an uphill battle.
When Lew Tucker, vice-president and CTO of cloud computing at Cisco first got Cisco involved with OpenStack, networking wasn't even a separate project, it was just part of the Nova compute project. OpenStack has since evolved with the Neutron networking project and more recently, a large focus on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) with some of the world's largest carriers supporting the effort.
As the OpenStack arena consolidates, there are still many business models evolving around it, and OpenStack-as-a-Service is emerging as an interesting choice. Platform9, which focuses on OpenStack-based private clouds, has announced a new release of its Platform9 Managed OpenStack, which is a SaaS-based solution with integration for single sign-on (SSO) solutions. The company also updated its private-cloud-as-a service offering from OpenStack Juno to OpenStack Liberty.
For all the complexity underlying software-defined networking (SDN) — the shift to a DevOps culture, the ending of siloed organizational habits — one recurring gripe is that all these “open” and “standards-based” networking products don’t operate cleanly with one another.
Companies are tackling surging bandwidth requirements by adding bigger network pipes and adopting newer technologies such as cloud and software-defined networking, according to a new study released today.
LinkedIn today announced that it has open-sourced Ambry, a piece of software it built to store and serve up media files like photos, videos, and PDFs. The system is available on GitHub under an open source Apache license.
LinkedIn previously relied on a complex architecture involving closed source technology that was not cheap to scale, even as user numbers and data have both kept increasing. It wasn’t easy to expand, either.
Last week alone, investors—aiming to profit from the new approach to building, deploying and managing apps—poured $63M into container vendors. The evolving market for application containers isn't just about developer adoption anymore; it's now very much about investors, too.
The week of May 9, in particular, highlights the intense interest that venture capitalists (VCs) have in containers and the potential to profit from the new approach to building, deploying and managing applications at scale.
FreeBSD is a venerable operating system, often deployed on servers due to the project's focus on performance and stability. At the beginning of April the FreeBSD project released version 10.3 of their operating system. The release announcement for FreeBSD 10.3 mentioned several features and improvements which caught my attention. Specifically the availability of ZFS boot environments, 64-bit Linux compatibility and jail improvements were of interest to me. I was especially eager to try out FreeBSD's new jails technology using the iocage front-end. The iocage software has been presented as an improvement on (and replacement for) Warden, a friendly front-end for handling jail environments.
I already reviewed FreeBSD 10.0 when it was launched and so I plan to skip over most aspects of the new 10.3 release and focus on the key features I listed above, along with the notable changes I encounter. The new release is available in many different builds, ranging from x86 and ARM, to SPARC and PowerPC. For the purposes of my trial I downloaded the 2.6GB DVD image of FreeBSD's 64-bit x86 edition.
We'd appreciate any feedback on problems with the installation or any kind of bugs you find - if they are critical or easy to fix, we'll do so before the release.
GNU tar version 1.29 is available for download.
The chassis is made to cradle a smartphone. Fire up your favorite videoconferencing software and you have a way to see where you’re going as well as hear (and speak to) your surroundings. Bluetooth communications between the phone and the chassis provides wireless control. That being said, this unit is clearly designed to be able to deal with far more challenging terrain than the average office environment, and has been designed to not only be attractive, but to be as accessible and open to repurposing and modification as possible.
Citizens with a say — or even a vote — in their municipal budgets are part of a silent democratic revolution. Participatory budgeting started 25 years ago in Brazil and, since then, has been spreading slowly but steadily from South America to cities all over the world. At the moment, more than 1,500 municipalities involve their citizens in the budget-making process, according to an article on participatory budgeting recently published in the Dutch online newspaper 'De Correspondent'.
Open source. Open access. Open society. Open knowledge. Open government. Even open food. Until quite recently, the word “open” had a fairly constant meaning. The over-use of the word “open” has led to its meaning becoming increasingly ambiguous. This presents a critical problem for this important word, as ambiguity leads to misinterpretation.
The publication of the so-called Panama Papers will only help to further the discussion on open government. "Things like hidden company ownership and strict secrecy have fuelled questions on links between world leaders and offshore jurisdictions," write Koen Roovers, and Henri Makkonen, EU Advocacy Lead and EU Advocacy Intern, respectively, at the Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC).
Big Data is a game changer for businesses, Alla Morrison, International Development Specialist, Digital Economy and Solutions at the World Bank, recently wrote in a blog posting. She quoted Harvard professor Michael Porter, a globally recognised authority on competitiveness, who said: "Data now stands on par with people, technology, and capital as a core asset of the corporation and in many businesses is perhaps becoming the decisive asset."
Earlier this month, the Open Government Research Exchange (OGRX) was launched. The portal brings together research on on government innovation, and already indexes hundreds of publications (though many of them are only available for purchase).
Basically, Smart Sterea can be seen as a set of technological tools. Central Greece deployed a data visualisation portal, which mixes data for budgets, political projects and public consultations. This “Open Dashboard of Central Greece” makes use of Open Data to allow citizens to monitor public revenue and expenditure, political programs and their progress, and allocations – among other types of information. Data are updated in real-time.
Ninety dollars, sometimes over a hundred, even. Walking away from the bookstore with a full set of math textbooks for a calculus course can easily set a student back by over two hundred. Add in online components, and that number only grows. The College Board estimates that the average full-time student would have to spend $1,200 alone in books and materials. The textbook industry costs already financially overburdened students massive amounts of money, and the solution is clear: Open source textbooks must become commonplace in De Anza classrooms.
To understand and address issues such as land degradation, deforestation, food security, and greenhouse gas emissions, countries need access to high-quality and timely information. As these challenges have become more urgent over the past decade, the need for more information has also increased. At the recent 2016 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, we introduced a new open source project called moja global, supported by the Clinton Foundation and the governments of Australia, Canada and Kenya, that aims to provide the tools necessary to help address these issues.
For decades the annual television industry ritual known as the upfronts has gone the same way.
Thousands of advertising and television executives trudge between New York’s great cultural centers — Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, Lincoln Center — where network executives screen premieres of their hottest new shows (“24: Legacy” on Fox! “Designated Survivor” on ABC!); trot out their biggest stars (Jennifer Lopez! Kerry Washington!), and disclose which programs will go where on the prime-time schedules being set for the fall.
After successive nights of upscale hedonism — steaks at Peter Luger, mango chili martinis at Tao and Nicki Minaj at Terminal 5 — the ad people and the TV people get down to the real business of cutting deals for the 30-second spots that run during prime time’s commercial breaks.
But when the whole shebang kicks off in earnest on Monday morning, there will be an underlying sense of seasickness because of the inexorable, existential question that now faces television this time of year: How long can it go on like this?
This queasiness was your doing.
We all know the internet is for porn, right? But the implication in that age-old internet commandment is that it's for porn and nothing else. But that's not true! The internet is also for cats, for business-ing, for Techdirt, and for political messages. But what you really shouldn't do is mix any of those formers with the latter, which it appears is what congressional candidate Mike Webb did on his Facebook page.
News headlines today suggest that a UN report on glyphosate residues has given the controversial herbicide a clean bill of health, writes Georgina Downs. But that's seriously misleading: the panel concludes that exposure to the chemical in food is unlikely to cause cancer. But that does not apply to those exposed to it occupationally or who live near sprayed fields.
John Sanders worked in the orange and grapefruit groves in Redlands, California, for more than 30 years. First as a ranch hand, then as a farm worker, he was responsible for keeping the weeds around the citrus trees in check. Roundup, the Monsanto weed killer, was his weapon of choice, and he sprayed it on the plants from a hand-held atomizer year-round.
US beekeepers lost 44 percent of honey bee colonies in 2015; microplastics might be contaminating the air we breathe; an atmospheric measuring station is picking up CO2 levels that are on the verge of breaking 400 parts per million for the first time in human history; and more.
As anticipated in public comments, the Linux Foundation is already beginning a campaign to rewrite history and mislead Linux users. Their latest PR release can be found at: https://www.linux.com/news/greg-kh-update-linux-kernel-46-next-week-new-security-features, which I encourage you to read so you can see the spin and misleading (and just plain factually incorrect) information presented. If you've read any of our blog posts before or are familiar with our work, you'll know we always say "the details matter" and are very careful not to exaggerate claims about features beyond their realistic security expectations (see for instance our discussion of access control systems in the grsecurity wiki). In a few weeks I will be keynoting at the SSTIC conference in France, where a theme of my keynote involves how little critical thinking occurs in this industry and how that results in companies and users making poor security decisions. So let's take a critical eye to this latest PR spin and actually educate about the "security improvements" to Linux 4.6.
A misconfiguration in the PAM subsystem in CoreOS Linux Alpha 1045.0.0 and 1047.0.0 allowed unauthorized users to gain access to accounts without a password or any other authentication token being required. This vulnerability affects a subset of machines running CoreOS Linux Alpha. Machines running CoreOS Linux Beta or Stable releases are unaffected. The Alpha was subsequently reverted back to the unaffected previous version (1032.1.0) and hosts configured to receive updates have been patched. The issue was reported at May 15 at 20:21 PDT and a fix was available 6 hours later at 02:29 PDT.
By now, most of you have heard about the "Let's Encrypt" initiative. The idea being that it's high time more websites had a simple, easy to manage method to offer https encryption. As luck would have it, the initiative is just out of its beta phase and has been adding sponsors like Facebook, Cisco, and Mozilla to their list of organizations that view this initiative as important.
In this article, I want to examine this initiative carefully, taking a look at the good and the bad of Let's Encrypt.
After taking down the controversial DevShare program in early February, the new owners of popular software repository, SourceForge, have begun scanning all projects it hosts for malware in an attempt to regain trust that was lost by Dice Holdings, the site’s previous owners.
Back in February, the judge presiding over the FBI's case against Jay Michaud ordered the agency to turn over information on the hacking tool it used to unmask Tor users who visited a seized child porn site. The FBI further solidified its status as a law unto itself by responding that it would not comply with the court's order, no matter what.
Unfortunately, we won't be seeing any FBI officials tossed into jail cells indefinitely for contempt of court charges. The judge in that case has reversed course, as Motherboard reports.
In February, a judge ordered the FBI to reveal the full malware code it used to identify visitors of a dark web child pornography site, including the exploit that circumvented the protections of the Tor Browser. The government fought back, largely in sealed motions, and tried to convince the judge to reconsider.
Security holes in antivirus software are nothing new, but holes that exist across multiple platforms? That's rare... but it just happened. Google's Tavis Ormandy has discovered a vulnerability in Symantec's antivirus engine (used in both Symantec- and Norton-branded suites) that compromises Linux, Mac and Windows computers. If you use an early version of a compression tool to squeeze executables, you can trigger a memory buffer overflow that gives you root-level control over a system.
The newly announced Apache Milagro (incubating) project seeks to end to centralized certificates and passwords in a world that has shifted from client-server to cloud, IoT and containerized applications.
Mustafa Badreddine, the Hizbullah commander responsible for Syria, was killed Friday in an explosion near Damascus. It wasn’t clear whether he was hit by artillery fire or what.
The US now has a tacit alliance of convenience with Lebanon’s Hizbullah against Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), but continues to keep the organization on a terrorism list.
Just about one half of the year 2016 is in the world’s history books. The 16th year of the 21st Century, a century that was supposed to usher in a new era of democracy, opportunity, “green thinking”, and income for all, has thus far been a bust for much of the citizens of the world. Some 40.8 million displaced people roam the continents of the world due to the effects of climate change and the fallout from varying degrees of conflict/war ranging from the War on Terror and War on Drugs, to covert-overt regime changes in Brazil, Ukraine, Egypt, Paraguay, Iraq, Libya and Honduras. Syria remains a work in progress.
The popular narrative is that is that the Western powers dropped these bombs out of humanitarian concern, but this claim falls apart once the distorted lens of Western saviourism is dropped and actual facts are presented. In truth, NATO intervention in Yugoslavia was predicated on the imperialist, colonialist economic and ideological interests of the NATO states, masquerading for the public as a humanitarian effort, that in fact served to dismantle the last remnant of socialism in Europe and recolonize the Balkans. This becomes apparent when the economic interests and actions of the NATO bloc in the decades leading up the breakup are analyzed, when what actually occurred during the intervention is further explored, and when the reality of life in the former Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the ‘humanitarian’ intervention is more closely examined. It becomes clear that the most suffering endured by the Yugoslav people since Nazi occupation was the result of the actions of NATO with the United States at its helm.
Canada's troubled submarine fleet has been hit with another headache: hundreds of potentially dangerous welds
The text of Hillary Clinton’s speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in March runs 3,301 words, almost every one of them praising Israeli policy in one way or another, and expounding on taking the “U.S.-Israel alliance to the next level.”
Only a single sentence — 15 words to the effect that “everyone has to do their part by avoiding damaging actions, including with respect to settlements” — could possibly be interpreted as criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist right-wing government.
A century ago, Britain and France secretly divided up much of the Mideast, drawing artificial boundaries for Iraq and Syria, but Muslim resentment of Western imperialism went much deeper, as historian William R. Polk described in 2015.
The first story concerns President Xi Jinping’s warning of cabals, cliques and conspirators which came to light in the first week in May. The speech, delivered in January, confirmed what many suspected.
Xi chose his words carefully. “Some officials have been forming cabals and cliques to covertly defy the CPC [Communist Party of China] Central Committee’s decisions and policies,” which risked “compromising the political security of the Party and the country’’.
As the West is sucked deeper into the Syrian conflict and starts a new Cold War with Russia, the mainstream U.S. news media has collapsed as a vehicle for reliable information, creating a danger for the world, writes Robert Parry.
Donald Trump is on the record calling for the ban of all Muslims entering the United States until U.S. representatives can figure out what is going on. London’s new Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, says Trump is ignorant about Islam and assures that mainstream Islam and Western liberal values are compatible.
Conditions for refugees seeking asylum in Europe descended to new depths this week, as residents of a Greek refugee camp launched a hunger strike to protest inhumane living conditions, the United Nations warned Greece to stop imprisoning refugee children in police cells, and deported Syrian refugees said they were being illegally detained in Turkey and stripped of their rights.
Following the suspension of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff last week—in what some called a coup by conservative opponents—her supporters warned that the interim government, led by Vice President Michel Temer, may use the opportunity to push through neoliberal legislation.
According to the advocacy group the Alliance of Leading Environmental Researchers and Thinkers (ALERT), they were right.
The Brazilian Committee of the Constitution, Justice, and Citizenship on April 27 "quietly" passed an amendment known as PEC 65, which would ban any public works project from being cancelled or suspended, as long as the contractor has submitted an environmental impact study. Amid the political uproar, the measure is now poised to pass.
As protests continue in Brazil over the Legislature’s vote to suspend President Dilma Rousseff and put her on trial, Noam Chomsky notes that "we have the one leading politician who hasn’t stolen to enrich herself, who’s being impeached by a gang of thieves, who have done so. That does count as a kind of soft coup." Rousseff’s replacement, Brazil’s former vice president, Michel Temer, is a member of the opposition PMDB party who is implicated in Brazil’s massive corruption scandal involving state-owned oil company Petrobras, and has now appointed an all-white male Cabinet charged with implementing corporate-friendly policies.
In an interview with Democracy Now, Chomsky says that Saudi Arabia is a "a source of not only funding for extremist radical Islam and the jihadi outgrowths of it, but also, doctrinally, mosques, clerics and so on, schools, you know, madrassas, where you study just Qur’an, is spreading all over the huge Sunni areas from Saudi influence."
he Senate defied a veto threat by the Obama administration Tuesday, passing the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which if signed into law would allow the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia for its alleged involvement in the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center that killed almost 3,000 people.
Setting up a likely veto fight and opening a potential Pandora's Box, the U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed a bill that allows victims of 9/11 to sue Saudi Arabia for any role the government may have played in the attacks.
Although it sounds like something straight out of Hollywood, the story behind “Operation Popcorn” is not fiction. It is, in fact, a tale of violence and desperation spanning several generations.
The feature-length documentary, directed by David Grabias, follows businessman-turned-activist Locha Thao as he embarks on a quest to help Hmong communities in Laos, eventually working with an arms dealer and a retired U.S. Army officer to supply weapons for a rebellion. Eventually, Thao, the Army officer and 10 other Hmong-American community leaders, including renowned Hmong war hero Gen. Vang Pao, are indicted on charges of conspiracy.
The purge of Mongolian 'nationalists' stopped in 1969. The official death-toll among Mongolians is 50,000, but many Mongols believe the true figure is much higher. To pacify the discontent of the Mongol victims of the purge, the authorities at the time gave various forms of compensation to their families. My parents received a family trip to Beijing and Shanghai for a health check and treatment. I spent a few months living with them in a hotel in Shanghai, where we met many other long-term resident guests, many of whom who, permanently maimed in industrial accidents, were on medical trips paid by the state. At the time, Shanghai was the only big city where the radical leftists had taken complete control, while in other places they were checked by the army. I remember walking past the Shanghai workers' militia headquarters and seeing militia sentry standing outside holding automatic rifles with shiny bayonets.
A diplomatic incident between Brazil and Israel shows how Netanyahu is prisoner of his extreme-right and ultra-nationalists coalition friends.
Perhaps Elon Musk’s innovative venture into the cosmos through SpaceX finally exposes excessive waste so common in the Pentagon’s bloated budget — an enormous chunk of which remains unaccounted for. A report last June found the Pentagon has essentially ‘lost track’ of around $8.5 trillion — yes, trillion — in taxpayer funded programs granted by Congress, just since 1996. As it turns out, the Pentagon has simply never complied with audits required by the government since that time; but as its fealty to ULA’s bloated space contracts shows, taxpayers are getting the shafted at every turn.
Barack Obama has now been at war longer than any president in United States history, as the New York Times pointed out on Sunday. Barring some sort of peace miracle in the next six months, he will be the only president who ever served two full terms in office while constantly being at war. And given how he has transformed how the US fights overseas, his wars will likely continue long after he leaves office.
Anytime the media writes about Obama and war, it’s apparently a rule that the author must mention that Obama supposedly fights his wars more reluctantly than his predecessors. But in many contexts, this is misleading. Obama hasn’t attempted to avoid war; he has merely redefined it. In some ways, he has fought them in a far more aggressively than any president before him, just with different tools.
In an early May meeting with top Huffington Post managers, founder Arianna Huffington expressed an interest in finding the person who leaked a troubling email relating to the website’s coverage of Uber, according to three informed sources. Leaking internal documents is unacceptable and doesn’t comport with company values, Huffington argued. Also: Those who do such things must be malcontents who would be better off leaving their jobs.
The impression that Huffington imparted was that she was already pursuing the leaker and urged her colleagues to be mindful of problem employees, according to the sources.
On April 28, this blog reported that Huffington Post executive features editor Gregory Beyer had killed a story pitch about an Uber driver who had turned over the controls to a passenger while he took a nap. The substitute driver then led police on a highway chase. The pitch came just after the Huffington Post had consummated a partnership with Uber to combat drowsy driving, of all things. “Let’s hold on this one please as we’re partnering with Uber on our drowsy driving campaign,” Beyer wrote in an email secured by this blog.
Colleagues of Beyer later received this apology: “Hi everyone, just wanted to bump this because a few people have asked me about this email and I realize it gave off the wrong impression. Obviously our partnerships never affect our coverage, and I was moving quickly in the moment and sent the wrong message as I read it in hindsight. For any confusion or concern I caused with my note, I apologize.”
It was unseasonably cold in New Jersey when President Obama delivered his commencement speech at Rutgers University in Pitscataway on Sunday. It was so cold that in some areas of the state, small pellets of ice fell from the sky.
The cold weather, however, didn’t stop Obama from devoting a portion of his speech to human-caused global warming. In fact, Obama actually spent part of his speech rebuking politicians who deny climate science on the basis that sometimes it’s cold outside.
Last month, dignitaries from 175 countries applied the final seal of approval to the Paris Climate Agreement, setting a course for a low-carbon future. Experts say that, to meet the goals laid out in the pact, investors will need to funnel $1 trillion a year into clean energy and energy efficiency.
It should come as no surprise that clean energy companies have become such hot properties. Last year saw historic investment in renewables worldwide. Tesla’s recently-announced Model 3 broke records by garnering $14 billion in promised sales in a single week.
In what seems like an earlier life, I majored in Chemistry in college. I enjoyed the subject but as it sometimes happens, my life took a different direction and I became a writer.
But my Chemistry days taught me, among other things, the extent to which everything in and around us has a basis in Chemistry. What are our bodies but exquisitely balanced chemical factories (of sorts) under our skin? As science advances, we discover that our bodies, organ systems and mental faculties are sensitive to the chemicals we’re exposed to in our daily lives.
Aging and dangerous nuclear power plants are closing. This should be cause for celebration. We will all be safer now, right? Well, not exactly.
US nuclear power plant owners are currently pouring resources into efforts to circumvent the already virtually non-existent regulations for the dismantlement and decommissioning of permanently closed nuclear reactors.
And sad to say, many on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the industry’s ever compliant lapdog, are trotting happily by their side.
[...]
Using Vermont Yankee (a relatively small 620 MWe reactor) as an example, the decommissioning cost estimate in 2015 was $1.2 billion and rising. At the same time, Entergy, the plant’s owner, had just $625 million on hand.
In early May, Entergy was reprimanded (but not fined) by the NRC for violating “federal regulations last year when it prematurely took money out of the Vermont Yankee decommissioning trust fund to cover planning expenses associated with the handling of spent nuclear fuel at the closed reactor”, the Times Argus reported.
Another factor in the current struggle to pay for decommissioning is rooted in a decades-long practice by utilities of omitting the costs of decommissioning from electricity bills in order to artificially lower rates and stay competitive in the market.
Rather than preserve decommissioning trust funds for actual decommissioning work, utilities are now asking the NRC to let them raid the funds for activities outside the parameters of the reactor decommissioning process. These activities include the payment of taxes and the protracted management of orphaned nuclear waste left on site.
Major Alberta tar sands facilities have been shut down and 19 work camps are under a mandatory evacuation order, after weather conditions caused Canada's uncontrolled Fort McMurray wildfire to surge northward on Monday.
The order, which covers about 8,000 people and was issued late Monday evening, came due to the "unpredictable nature" of the fire and the fact that those camps could be isolated if the road was jeopardized, said Scott Long, executive director of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency.
The evacuation zone, stretching about 30 miles north of Fort McMurray to just south of Fort MacKay, included Syncrude and Suncor facilities, along with several smaller operations. As such, the Wall Street Journal reported, the order "is a setback for large oil-sands producers such as industry leader Suncor Energy Inc., which had said last week that it was in the process of planning to resume production at its oil sands sites."
The Clean Power Plan will get its day in court, but in September, not June — and by the full en banc D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, not the court’s normal three-judge panel that was scheduled to hear it in just over two weeks.
West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency is one of the most important environmental cases in almost a decade. The case will decide whether the EPA violated the law when it finalized its carbon rule to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector under the Clean Air Act.
Recent articles in the national media, such as yesterday's piece in the National Review, suggest that Charles and David Koch are less interested and less involved in national politics in the 2016 election cycle than in previous years.
This latest PR effort comes despite the fact that $400 million of the $889 pledge by the Kochs through their "Freedom Partners" network has already been invested in the outcome of the 2016 elections, with more money to be spent.
A close examination of recent campaign finance disclosures and other data reveals that Team Koch has already identified some of their candidates for 2016 and in many cases has already started spending big on behalf of candidates in races for the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, state Governorships and state Attorney General races--as the presidential tickets remain unsettled and controversial.
For example, the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch (CMD) looked at disclosed donations by Koch Industries' KochPAC. This is limited to the donations that are required to be disclosed under federal and state law but, as the Nation and others have documented, Koch Industries also attempts to indoctrinate its employees on who and what to vote for or against, as documented here.
This is the time of year with Spring in full bloom that here in Colorado, we are likely to see more wildlife. It has been my good fortune to see a fair amount these past few weeks – beaver (which I had never seen until now), muskrat, avocets and then a few days ago a herd of seven mule deer grazing on the side of a slope above Clear Creek just beyond the entrance to Clear Creek Canyon. We had been hiking. Nancy went on a bit; as usual, I waited behind and took a seat on an inviting rock, looked up; there were all seven of them making their way down along a stream bed not far from me.
Corporate mainstream media outlets are missing something very important as the general election draws closer and both Democrats and Republicans start freaking out that it'll be the end of the world if the other party gets into the White House. Media are completely ignoring the fact that unless we do something right now to fundamentally change what fuels our economy, it actually will be the end of the world as know it.
With no clear favorite in the 2016 U.S. presidential primary race--following Gov. Scott Walker's early exit and Trump's march toward the nomination--the Koch brothers have turned their attention (and opened their wallets) to races for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and state governorships.
But with the Kochs having already spent at least $400 million of $889 million committed to the 2016 election cycle, according to news reports, where is that money being spent?
An under-covered arm of the Koch political operations is a likely recipient of some of that cash and it's called Americans for Prosperity's "Grassroots Leadership Academy."
As attorneys general of Texas and Alabama pledge to assist oil giant with fraud probe, conservation group files first lawsuit since cover-up revealed
If you didn’t know better, you might think the State of Texas favors oil companies.
On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed for the second time in two weeks on the side of an oil company — this time Exxon, which is challenging a subpoena in the Virgin Islands’ Attorney General’s investigation over what the oil and gas giant knew about climate change, and when.
Paxton called the Virgin Islands’ investigation “ridiculous” in a statement Monday.
'This is an historic victory for young generations advocating for changes to be made by government,' said 17-year-old plaintiff Shamus Miller.
As reality dawns, even the continent’s oldest retail bank, Barclays, has just announced it will sell its African operations.
The most gloomy reason to fear Africa’s for future, climate change, was distorted beyond recognition at the Kigali WEF last week. Referring to the December 2015 UN climate summit in Paris, the director of the Africa Progress Panel (founded by Blair in his prime a decade ago), Caroline Kende-Robb, pronounced that the “COP 21 in Paris was an unambiguous success [because] African nations seized the chance to shift the climate narrative from one of dependence to one of opportunity and transformation.”
Investigators in New York will probe the resurgence of a dangerous housing finance practice that was historically used to target low-income black families who dreamed of owning their own home, the state’s Department of Financial Services announced Monday.
Investigators have sent subpoenas to at least four separate companies that are helping drive a boom in a long-dormant alternative to a traditional mortgage, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Financial regulators in New York have opened an investigation into housing deals marketed by investment firms to low-income buyers who don’t qualify for mortgages.
The grandson of Winston Churchill has accused Boris Johnson of “fundamentally dishonest gymnastics” for reversing his position on the planned multibillion-pound TTIP trade agreement between the US and the EU.
The former Mayor of London had previously called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership “Churchillian” in its brilliance.
A prominent shareholder activist is fed up with money manager BlackRock over the firm’s practice of rubberstamping obscenely large executive compensation packages at thousands of U.S. corporations.
It goes without saying that in a democracy everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also entitled to their own facts.
Away out West, on the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that most Americans take for granted (if they are aware of them at all), the trouble is deep, widespread, and won’t soon go away. Last winter’s armed take-over and 41-day occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon is a case in point. It was carried out by people who, if they hadn’t been white and dressed as cowboys, might have been called “terrorists” and treated as such. Their interpretation of the history of western lands and of the judicial basis for federal land ownership -- or at least that of their leaders, since they weren’t exactly a band of intellectuals -- was only loosely linked to reality.
At least some of them took inspiration from the notion that Jesus Christ wrote the Constitution (which would be news to the Deists, like James Madison, who were its actual authors) and that it prohibits federal ownership of any land excepting administrative sites within the United States -- a contention that more than two centuries of American jurisprudence has emphatically repudiated.
We speak with world-renowned political dissident Noam Chomsky about the Republican party, the rightward shift in U.S. politics and the 2016 election. "If we were honest, we would say something that sounds utterly shocking and no doubt will be taken out of context and lead to hysteria on the part of the usual suspects," Chomsky says, "but the fact of the matter is that today’s Republican Party qualify as candidates for the most dangerous organization in human history. Literally."
“Seeing the struggle of those folks to vote, I was reminded of my dilemma and not being able to vote,” he said, referring to the film and the movement that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Malone is one of more than 140,000 Kentuckians who are permanently disenfranchised because of felony convictions. The commonwealth is one of three states with the strictest felon disenfranchisement laws. Just over five percent of Kentucky’s voting-age population cannot vote because of a felony convictions, but for African Americans, that number is 16.7 percent.
'The Democratic Party has a choice,' says senator. 'It can open its doors and welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change... Or the party can choose to maintain its status quo structure.'
"Needless to say, what I hope we'll be seeing is a very large voter turnout," Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders told an Oregon newspaper over the weekend ahead of the state's closed primary on Tuesday.
It seems the Vermont senator may get his wish, with Oregon Secretary of State Jeanne Atkins saying Monday that voters are on track to cast more than one million votes in a primary election for only the second time in state history. The first time, according to The Oregonian, was in 2008 and "was driven most acutely by Obama-crazed voters wanting a say in the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama primary show-down."
“Mainstream” U.S. media is struck by the “strange bedfellows” phenomenon whereby a number of right wing foreign policy neoconservatives and top business elites – including at least one of the notorious hard right-wing Koch brothers – are lining up with Democrat Hillary Clinton against the Republican Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential race. But what’s so strange about it? Trump is off the elite capitalist and imperial leash. He channels some nasty things that have long been part of the Republican Party playbook: frustrated white nationalism, racism, nativism, and male chauvinism.
At the same time, however, he often sounds remarkably populist in ways that white working class voters appreciate. He has been critical of things that elite Republicans (and elite corporate Democrats) hold dear, including corporate globalization, “free trade’ (investor rights) deals, global capital mobility, cheap labor immigration. He questions imperialist adventures like the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, the destabilization of Syria, and the provocation of Russia. He’s a largely self-funded lone wolf and wild card who cannot be counted to reliably make policy in accord with the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire. And he’s seizing the nomination of a political organization that may have ceased to be a functioning national political party.
It is hard to think of bigger news than that the Electoral Commission is taking the governing party to court over alleged fraud in its election accounts, with possible disqualifications that could cost the government its majority. Yet the issue has received remarkably little coverage apart from the very dogged work of Channel 4 News. Why is that?
There are a number of reasons. The first is that the media has a major pro-Tory bias and minimises bad news for the Tories as a matter of course. The most remarkable example of this is the continual playing down of divisions within the Conservative Party over Europe, which run to extreme levels of personal hatred and abuse. But you do not see that hatred and abuse reflected, whereas divisions within the Labour Party are reported daily in extreme detail.
If you doubt what I say, consider the fact that it is quite openly acknowledged that, under pressure from No.10, the media are organising the televised debates for the EU referendum so that Conservatives are never seen to be debating each other. That is the most extraordinary piece of media connivance, and even entails the media excluding the official Leave campaign from at least one national debate. What is deeply worrying is that the UK has become a country where nobody is surprised or concerned at this kind of blatant state propaganda manipulation.
Throughout the 2016 primary elections season to date, the “mainstream media,” both “liberal” and “conservative,” along with the establishments of both the Republican and Democratic parties, have been desperately working — at times in a state of barely-concealed panic — to contain, divert, coopt and otherwise neutralize a tsunami of discontent among the “uneducated,” “working class” masses, many of whom are “stubbornly” refusing to cooperate with the extremely expensive simulation of democracy that the corporate plutocracy is forced to stage for us every four years.
These “discontents” have already handed the Republican presidential nomination to Donald Trump, a buffoonish billionaire real estate mogul whose incoherent demagogic ramblings make George W. Bush sound articulate in comparison, and are “childishly” dragging out the coronation of Democrat Hillary Clinton by continuing to vote for a 74-year-old self-proclaimed “socialist” who has had the audacity to talk about Clinton’s shady ties to Wall Street, and the rest of the transnational corporate elite that more or less rules the world at this point, and things like that.
When Donald Trump announced his monstrous and yet daffy plan to exlude Muslims from the United States (what with being, himself, both monstrous and yet daffy), British Prime Minister David Cameron called him out. The plan, he said, is “divisive, stupid and wrong.”
Trump gave an interview with Piers Morgan on British TV on Monday in which he threatened the United Kingdom with retaliation.
[...]
But what shouldn’t be lost in all this is that Cameron himself hasn’t exactly been good on Muslim issues in the UK. He’s been supercilious, condescending, and tone deaf. And he’s made some stupid and divisive proposals, as well.
If you listen to Donald Trump and his legions of supporters—a task you undertake at your own peril—you will inevitably hear about hordes of invading Mexicans arriving in the United States daily, and the border wall the billionaire presidential candidate has proposed to keep them out. Variously described by Trump as a "gorgeous wall,” a "great, great wall,” and the "greatest wall that you’ve ever seen,” this magnificent would-be eighth wonder of the modern world has become a cornerstone of the GOP presidential contender’s campaign, a majestic concrete testament to America’s renewed Trumpian greatness.
The run up to last week’s government white paper was filled with scare stories about a war against the BBC. The final document could scarcely have been more pleasing for the corporation.
Donald Trump has reduced Hillary Clinton's national lead to just three points—down from five last week—underscoring the grim prospects of the presidential election, a new poll released on Tuesday reveals.
The NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll finds that Clinton now leads Trump nationally 48 to 45 percent, an unsettling development as the candidates enter their final stretch of primaries, two of which are taking place Tuesday in Kentucky and Oregon. Last week, Clinton and Trump were found to be in a dead heat in three swing states.
In the Democratic primary, Clinton leads Sanders nationally by 14 points, 54 percent to 40 percent. But it’s the Vermont senator who beats Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head by a wider margin, 53 percent to 41 percent.
The March of Folly Defined: In 1984, Barbara W. Tuchman wrote the much acclaimed book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam in which she documented four cases where governments pursued policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives, and despite evidence that the chosen courses of action would have devastating consequences.
Still Marching Toward Folly: Since 1984 we have piled up a lot more marches of folly – the Iraqi invasion and regime change in general; the deregulation of banking leading to the Great Recession of 2008; an anti-terrorist strategy that generates more terrorists; an energy policy that advocated an “all of the above energy strategy” and discounted the threat of climate change; and a trade and tax policy that shifted wealth to the very few at the expense of the many, to name a few. (Extra credit question – which Democratic presidential candidate supported all of these follies)?
The mystery of whether Trump masqueraded as his own spokesman while owner of the New Jersey Generals endures.
China’s new Online Publishing Service Administrative Rules became effective on March 10, 2016. The law, which aims to “regulate the criteria of and promote the healthy development of internet publishing services”, has already curbed the online activity of several Western MNCs – including Apple’s iTunes and Disney’s DisneyLife – but what wider implications do the rules have for internet censorship in China?
As I’ve found today, GitHub doesn’t even try to hide its censorship. After active discussion in issue 118 on the WHATWG’s “URL Standard”, the user mark-otaris has completely disappeared. Not only have his posts been deleted, but his account is gone as well. Several open pull requests were also removed from the website. Through personal communication with mark-otaris, I know that he did not delete his account or his posts.
At this point, you’re thinking this was another case of manual censorship, right? Wrong. The user in question uses Tor to access GitHub, and GitHub has decided, because of his use of Tor, that he could have been a robot. Many websites seem to be punishing users who use Tor.
To celebrate this occasion, PT KCJ is giving away free books to lucky passengers on the KRL Commuterline this afternoon.
Today is Indonesia’s National Book Day! To celebrate, the KRL Commuterline is giving away free books. Meanwhile, the Director of the National Library is more than happy to support the censorship of books that make certain government officials uncomfortable, in light of the country’s latest “communist panic”.
The Opposition yesterday refused to present its response to the Home Affairs ministry's budget proposals in Parliament in protest at "excessive censorship" by the chair.
The decision came after chairman Mussa Azzan ordered the Opposition to drop some sections of its speech, saying they violated Parliament's Standing Orders.
A Hamburg court issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday banning re-publication of sections of a satirical poem by a German comedian mocking Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, saying they amounted to abuse and libel.
Comedian Jan Boehmermann recited a poem on television in March suggesting Erdogan engaged in bestiality and watched child pornography, prompting the Turkish leader to file a complaint with prosecutors that he had been insulted.
In a separate complaint, lawyers for Erdogan also asked a court in Hamburg to ban re-publication of the poem.
Three years ago, we wrote about a crazy story in which the Union of Jewish French Students (UEJF) was suing Twitter for $50 million, claiming that the fact that an anti-semitic hashtag started trendng violated some sort of anti-hate speech law in France. Twitter, somewhat ridiculously, actually agreed to remove the tweets in question, saying they were offensive. Even after that, UEJF demanded that Twitter also reveal the identities of everyone who tweeted the hashtag... and won (not the money, but Twitter was told to hand over the user info)! Yeah, France is not a big supporter of free speech, we get it, but this is still ridiculous.
It is a site known for open discussion and debate, but Reddit has now been accused of censorship.
The popular website and forum is said to have quarantined a subreddit – a forum dedicated to a particular topic - named 'European'.
It has been reported that the forum contained content which caused offence, including racist slurs.
There's no greater sin than being wrong on the internet. But can you build a federal case out of it? Thomas Robins tried to do exactly that by filing a potential class action lawsuit against Spokeo ("the people search engine") for posting incorrect information about him to its website.
Recent headlines warn that the government now has greater authority to hack your computers, in and outside the US. Changes to federal criminal court procedures known as Rule 41 are to blame; they vastly expand how and whom the FBI can legally hack. But just like the NSA’s hacking operations, FBI hacking isn’t new. In fact, the bureau has a long history of surreptitiously hacking us, going back two decades.
That history is almost impossible to document, however, because the hacking happens mostly in secret. Search warrants granting permission to hack get issued using vague, obtuse language that hides what’s really happening, and defense attorneys rarely challenge the hacking tools and techniques in court. There’s also no public accounting of how often the government hacks people. Although federal and state judges have to submit a report to Congress tracking the number and nature of wiretap requests they process each year, no similar requirement exists for hacking tools. As a result, little is known about the invasive tools the bureau, and other law enforcement agencies, use or how they use them. But occasionally, tidbits of information do leak out in court cases and news stories.
District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis and her colleagues argue that a new bill requiring tech companies to weaken the security of their products would assist law enforcement, but they fail to mention the cost: the safety of all Americans’ data.
As hardware and software advance, so facial recognition becomes more accurate and more attractive as a potential solution to various problems. Techdirt first wrote about this area back in 2012, when Facebook had just started experimenting with facial recognition (now we're at the inevitable lawsuit stage). Since then, we've reported on an increasing number of organizations exploring the use of facial recognition, including the FBI, the NSA, Boston police and even the church.
[...]
Of course, a 70% hit rate isn't that good: perhaps FindFace isn't really such a threat to public anonymity. The trouble is, the Guardian article reports that the company has performed three million searches on its database of around a billion photographs using just four common-or-garden servers. It's easy to imagine what might be achieved with some serious hardware upgrades, along with tweaks to the software, or with access to even bigger, more complete databases. For example government ones: according to the Guardian, FindFace's founders think the big money will come from selling their system to "law enforcement and retail." Although they've not yet been contacted by Russia's FSB security agency, they say they'd be happy to listen to offers from them.
NSA intelligence played a key role in preparing the UN for the US invasion of Iraq and aiding the subsequent occupation, while senior agency officials even met with interrogators at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, internal documents show.
Yes, that National Security Agency.
A recently leaked NSA advert encouraging its personnel to come to work in Guantanamo – and enjoy watersports nearby bounty-hunted people who are being waterboarded – is sickening, Annie Machon, a former MI5 intelligence officer, told RT.
New documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, claim that US National Security Agency (NSA) personnel worked alongside the military and the CIA to interrogate prisoners at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay.
Deeming their release "in the public interest," The Intercept on Monday published a large, download-ready batch of NSA internal documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden show the United States was training spies to influence events in the Americas.
One newsletter boasted about the previously disclosed FORNSAT program, where for more than 30 years the NSA tapped into foreign satellite communications. However, according to The Intercept, the program was "an intelligence gold mine" with the newsletter bragging that it "consistently provided … over 25 percent of end product reporting."
A language analyst wrote a column on the ethics of surveillance, called “SIGINT Philosopher.” (It must not have been very well written.) A very optimistic issue from June 2003 reflects on SIGINT’s shifting priorities “now that the situation in Iraq has entered the reconstruction phase.”
According to Intercept, "Neither the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's detention and rendition program (which confirmed the existence of two CIA facilities at Guantánamo) nor a 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse by the military addresses the role of the NSA, at least in the heavily censored versions that have been made public."
It was serious business, but in their off hours, NSA liaisons at scenic Guantanamo Bay could visit the "Tiki Bar," or enjoy water sports, such as sailing and snorkeling.
A new batch document dump from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden Archives of National Security Agency internal newsletters reveals that the NSA had a direct role in "interrogations" programs in Guantanamo at the outset of the “global war on terror.”
The full cache of secret documents from former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden is being opened to journalists and organizations willing to work with the news organization holding the archive.
People have pointed out that Facebook’s Reactions tool is helpful to advertisers since it was released. Though the site said as it was launched that it was a way of allowing people to react in more complex ways, it also provides valuable data to Facebook about how things make people feel, as well as encouraging them to interact with posts amid worries that people are becoming less and less personal on the site.
A former teacher at a private Christian Science high school in St. Louis claims she was fired from her job as part of a cover-up after reporting to police that her underage daughter had been sexually assaulted multiple times by a school employee.
The D.C Circuit Court today ruled against releasing the entire contents of the so-called “Senate torture report,” which describes the Central Intelligence Agency’s controversial post-9/11 interrogation and detention program.
A three-judge panel decided unanimously to deny a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act requesting release of the 6,000-plus page investigative report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The years-long battle to force the Obama administration to release the nearly-7,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee's report detailing the CIA's post-9/11 torture program just took an absurd new turn.
According to exclusive reporting from Yahoo News correspondent Michael Isikoff, the CIA inspector general's office says it "mistakenly" destroyed its sole copy of the mass document "at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved."
The CIA inspector general’s office — the spy agency’s internal watchdog — has acknowledged it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved, Yahoo News has learned.
While another copy of the report exists elsewhere at the CIA, the erasure of the controversial document by the office charged with policing agency conduct has alarmed the U.S. senator who oversaw the torture investigation and reignited a behind-the-scenes battle over whether the full unabridged report should ever be released, according to multiple intelligence community sources familiar with the incident.
There’s little to laugh about in the 166 documents from Edward Snowden’s treasure trove of NSA leaks The Intercept released to the public on Monday. As one might imagine, there’s a lot in there about how our government knowingly committed horrific human rights abuses and violated international law. But connoisseurs of the absurd could do worse than to read the leaked NSA newsletter from 2003 that made working at Guantanamo Bay sound like a fun Caribbean vacation. SCUBA diving and torture: Two great tastes that taste great together?
Many women who end up transporting drugs are co-opted by networks that use similar methods to those employed in human trafficking crimes. That is what happened to Liliana, a Venezuelan woman with two children who agreed to transport drugs under the threat that her family would be harmed if she refused. She is incarcerated at an Argentine federal prison and her children remain in Venezuela.
Iran has arrested eight people working for online modelling agencies deemed to be "un-Islamic", the prosecutor of Tehran's cybercrimes court has said.
The arrests are part of an operation that has seen women targeted for posting photos showing them not wearing headscarves on Instagram and elsewhere.
Women in Iran have been required to cover their hair in public since 1979.
The eight unnamed people were among 170 identified by investigators as being involved in modelling online.
They included 59 photographers and make-up artists, 58 models and 51 fashion salon managers and designers, according to a statement from the court.
US federal prosecutors urged a federal appeals court late Monday to keep a child-porn suspect behind bars—where he already has been for seven months—until he unlocks two hard drives that the government claims contain kid smut.
The suspect, a Philadelphia police sergeant relieved of his duties, has refused to unlock two hard drives and has been in jail ever since a judge's order seven months ago—and after being found in contempt of court. The defendant can remain locked up until a judge lifts the contempt order.
Michael Ratner, who died last week, was a champion on behalf of the world’s oppressed, giving the phrase “human rights” real meaning and defying its current propaganda application to justify endless war, as Marjorie Cohn explained at Truthdig.
We all know about the obvious examples of Swedish social democracy in relation to kids, such as the generous parental leave and the subsidized daycare. Loved or hated, these aspects are almost always discussed (at least in popular terms) in relation to the parents and how they enable successful careers or boost the economy. Rarely, however, do we think of how these programs send a long-term message to children that they are valuable members of society who, at this precise moment in time, simply cannot fend for themselves. So, the state steps in to make sure that their rights and well-being are respected, just as the rights and well-being of their larger fellow citizens are respected.
After Hoffa was jailed in 1967 for jury tampering, attempted bribery, and fraud, he left Frank Fitzsimmons in charge of the IBT. Gibbons did not fare well under Fitz, as he was known. To Gibbons’ credit, he was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War and played a key role in Labor for Peace, hosting its founding conference in St. Louis. He even joined a trade union delegation to Hanoi during the war, met with top North Vietnamese officials, and conducted Washington briefings on his trip when he returned.
The backpages will be full of hopeful optimism after the announcement of England’s provisional squad for Euro 2016. A squad full to bursting with youthful promise, it is the England fan’s lot to believe for 50 years it can never be as bad as the last time, but never as good as the first and only time either.
In reality, the black unemployment rate topped out at 30...
France is continuously rocked by debates around the meaning of the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and solidarity that predate the French Revolution.
Some important notions are widely shared. Most French citizens expect governments to meet the basic needs of all and promote individual expansion of talents and abilities.
It is generally agreed France should offer educational, cultural and recreational facilities to every child.
How the Enlightenment ideals should apply in the workplace is a matter of fierce dispute.
Unlike Canada, the U.K. or the U.S., France has not consistently favoured employers over labour.
Few events have gone from fact to fable as quickly and decisively as that of the 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese. For decades we’ve heard references to the poor young woman stabbed again and again on a New York City street while some 38 people—Genovese’s neighbors—watched from their windows without making a move to help. In some tellings, some of them pulled up chairs for a better view. But in all tellings, the community’s apathy was the reason for Genovese’s death, almost as much as her killer, Winston Moseley, whose death in prison last month brought the story briefly back into the headlines.
After January’s raids that tore teens from their families and plucked them off buses on their way to school, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is about to embark on a renewed quest to arrest and deport Central Americans who applied for refugee status in the United States in the summer of 2014. According to sources reported by Reuters on May 12, 2016 and confirmed by DHS a day later, the agency is sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents out on a second wave of raids against immigrants, this time with the specific aim of apprehending and imprisoning Central American women and their children, or “family units”, and unaccompanied minors.
In a crackdown on “un-Islamic dress,” Iranian authorities arrested eight individuals involved in Instagrams of women without headscarves. A former model was also questioned by the authorities on live state television as part of the operation which “targets Iran’s fashion elite for their use of social media.”
Prosecutor Javad Babei made the arrests public on TV, saying the operation was zeroing in on “threats to morality and the foundation of family.” A total of 29 people were notified about their allegedly problematic social media presence, but most had modified that behavior and, as a result, “did not face any judicial action,” Babei said. According to the BBC, the eight people who were arrested were among 170 identified by investigators as “being involved in modeling online”; in their ranks were 59 photographers and make-up artists, 58 models and 51 fashion salon managers and designers.
The ethics panel of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) is considering prohibiting members from designing “execution chambers and spaces intended for torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”
Although no final decision has been announced, the proposal has been lauded by Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), an architectural ethics and human rights group, as a huge leap forward on human rights,
A ban would reverse the AIA’s position from 2014, when it rejected a similar proposal, and put it in line with other professional groups’ decisions related to human rights.
The American Pharmacists Association and the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists, for instance, voted last year to prohibit members from “providing medical drugs to be used for executions.”
More dramatically, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced Friday that it would ban the sale of drugs that could be used in executions, and the American Psychological Association (APA) recently voted to prohibit member psychologists from participating in national security interrogations. The United Nations has declared the practice of solitary confinement in the United States a form of torture.
As I reported, during the passage of Intelligence Authorization last year (which ultimately got put through on the Omnibus bill, making it impossible for people to vote against), Congress implemented Intelligence Community wishes by undercutting PCLOB authority in two ways: prohibiting PCLOB from reviewing covert activities, and stripping an oversight role for PCLOB that had been passed in all versions of CISA.
Oh man. We can't even. So Obama gave a commencement speech at Rutgers where he actually praised "Facts. Evidence. Reason. Logic. An understanding of science," claiming, "These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy. These are qualities you want to continue to cultivate in yourselves as citizens." He went on, "So class of 2016, let me be as clear as I can be: in politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue. It's not cool to not know what you're talking about. That's not keeping it real or telling it like it is. That's not challenging political correctness, that's just not knowing what you're talking about."
Union members joined pro-democracy activists in widespread protests against new law that makes it easier to fire workers and move jobs offshore
Expected Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appears likely to be forced off the campaign trail in June to be deposed under oath in at least one of two lawsuits he filed after prominent chefs backed away from plans to open restaurants at the luxury Trump International Hotel under development in Washington.
A D.C. Superior Court judge approved a plan Tuesday to briefly extend court deadlines to allow Trump to give testimony June 16 in the case Trump's development company filed against a firm set up by restaurateur Geoffrey Zakarian to open a dining establishment called "The National."
The FCC recently voted 4-1 to approve Charter's $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. The agency just released its full order (pdf) pertaining to the deal, outlining the various conditions the FCC hopes to enforce to keep Charter from simply becoming another Comcast. Among them are a seven-year ban on usage caps, a seven-year ban on charging for direct interconnection (the heart of the telecom industry's battle with Netflix last year), and a ban on any attempt to pressure broadcasters into refusing deals with streaming video providers.
[...]
If history is any indication the ACA really doesn't need to worry all that much. Traditionally in telecom, FCC conditions requiring that an ISP "expand to X number of additional homes" are usually conditions that the merging companies volunteer themselves. Why? It's most frequently because that expansion either already happened (and the paperwork hasn't been filed yet) -- or was slated to happen as a matter of course. Or it may not happen at all; such expansion promises are usually never really independently audited by the FCC, which lets companies string the FCC along with an endless flood of expansion promises that more often than not aren't even real.
In other words, the ACA's decision to insult the intelligence of an already annoyed customer base by pretending competition would be bad for them -- only adds insult to injury. Instead of whining about competition, how about just competing? Better yet, how about competing with Charter using a strange, outdated idea known as better customer service?
When faced with a wall, you need to know when to stop banging your head against it. After years of legal violence, defeats and steady erosion of fundamental rights, and confronted with an elected political body whose only logic is to reinforce the security apparatus, La Quadrature du Net has decided to stop wasting time trying to appeal to the reason of those who won't listen, and is now taking a new direction for its actions.
Verizon's modus operandi has been fairly well established by now: convince state or local leaders to dole out millions in tax breaks and subsidies -- in exchange for fiber that's either only partially delivered, or not delivered at all. Given this story has repeated itself in New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York City and countless other locations, there's now a parade of communities asking somebody, anybody, to actually hold Verizon's feet to the fire. Given Verizon's political power (especially on the state level) those calls go unheeded, with Verizon lawyers consistently able to wiggle around attempts to hold the telco to account.
The Economic Espionage Act (EEA) includes a provision regarding its “applicability to conduct outside the United States.” 18 U.S.C. €§ 1837. Section 1837 was left unchanged with DTSA’s amendments to EEA, but seemingly applies to the new private civil cause of action for trade secret misappropriation. The provision offers important insight on how the new cause of action can be applied in the foreign context. Most importantly, a (1) U.S. corporation or citizen can be held liable for trade secret misappropriation under the DTSA regardless of whether the misappropriation occurred abroad; and (2) an entity can be held liable under the DTSA for foreign misappropriation if “an act in furtherance of the offense was committed in the United States.”
The International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC) board of directors sent a letter to members on May 13 saying it would like to address an anonymous letter that has been recently circulated that expressed concerns about the IACC President Bob Barchiesi, and the organisation’s operations and governance.
You may not be aware of this, but apparently Teresa Earnhardt, widow of Dale Earnhardt Sr., the NASCAR driver who died mid-race in 2001, is a staunch protector of her deceased husband's name. I was one of those not aware of this, primarily because NASCAR is every bit as foreign to me as curling (hi, Canadians!). Her latest attempt to block the use of the Earnardt name is particularly interesting, since those she is opposing are her dead husband's son and his son's wife.
[...]
It's also a strain to understand how much confusion is going to be caused by Kerry using his last name for a home and furniture business. Teresa's filing attempts to assert that there will be plenty, but the USPTO didn't buy it.
M&S responded that there was no likelihood of confusion, and counterclaimed for invalidity of both trade marks, and requested that both trade marks be revoked for lack of use.
In March, the Fourth Circuit reversed the Eastern District of Virginia’s dismissal for lack of standing and found that use of the Flanax mark is not a prerequisite to sue for unfair competition or false advertising under Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act or for cancellation under Section 14(3). The case was remanded to the district court.
One week into a high-stakes copyright trial, Oracle 's co-chief executive Safra Catz took the stand and described how Android had cut into Oracle revenue and how Google’s top lawyer made a spiteful comment to her at a party.
Oracle's legal battle against Google comes down to technical issues like software development and copyright law, but Oracle CEO Safra Catz on Tuesday framed the years-long conflict in biblical terms.
Oracle and Google are back in the courtroom again — the same court they started in back in 2010, when Oracle first sued Google over the company’s use of 37 Java APIs in its Android operating system. The case, first decided in favor of Google, bounced up to an appeals court and was reversed, then appealed to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. Now Oracle’s lawsuit, which could net the company $9 billion, is back where it started in U.S. District Court.
Anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp has just turned in another set of dismal results. During the past three months revenues plummeted 78% versus the same period last year with the company recording a net loss of $784,000. Pirates, it appears, are becoming harder to track and threaten.
The UK Intellectual Property Office is investigating how search engines and social media networks can step up their game to deter piracy. The Government is pushing for voluntary anti-piracy agreements between major Internet companies and entertainment industry groups, but will consider a legislative approach if these fail.
YouTube is guilty of criminal racketeering. That's the headline-grabbing claim of Grammy award winning musician Maria Schneider, who claims that the Google-owned site is abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to siphon money away from musicians into its own pockets.
Techdirt has been writing for some years about the illogical mess that is the European copyright levy system -- effectively a tax on blank media that is supposed to compensate copyright holders for an alleged "loss" from copies made for personal use. Last November, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), Europe's highest court, issued an important judgment in this area. It said that Belgium's levies on multifunctional printer sales were incompatible with EU law because they failed to distinguish between private use and commercial use, and between legal and illegal copying. Along the way, the CJEU said that copyright levies must be paid to authors only, and not go to publishers.
As Boing Boing points out, the effects of that decision are now being felt in Germany. An organization set up in 1958, called Wort (literally "word" in German), receives a portion of the German copyright levies that are collected, which it has been sharing between both authors and publishers in roughly equal amounts. The CJEU's decision last November ruled that was illegal, and Germany's top court, the Bundesgerichtshof, has confirmed that position in a recent judgment (original in German). As a result, German publishers now find themselves obliged to pay their authors the copyright levies the industry received over the last few years -- more than €100 million according to the German site ÃÅbermedien.
We're pleased to report that Sony Music backtracked on its accusation of copyright infringement against the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association, and HVBA's educational video remains freely available to the public. But the music label’s response leads us to think that Sony's misuse of copyright and of YouTube’s automated enforcement system will continue.