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Links 28/4/2017: Subsurface 4.6.4, GNOME Shell & Mutter 3.25.1





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • GitHub open sources OctoDNS, new tool for managing DNS records
    The frailty of the DNS system became all too evident last year, when DNS host Dyn was hit by a major Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that brought down large swaths of the internet. With the threat of DDoS attacks only expected to grow, experts urge organizations to build redundancy into their DNS services.


  • 10 Pioneers taking open source to the next level
    Open source changed the software game, introduced in the mid-1980’s but really making an impact in the late 1990’s and introducing a free, collaborative approach to software development.


  • Open Source MANO Supports Public and Hybrid Cloud Deployments
    The ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM) group today launched the second version of its open source code that includes new software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) plugin to support public and hybrid cloud deployments.

    OSM, which aims to deliver an open network functions virtualization (NFV) management and orchestration (MANO) stack that can be implemented across different technologies, announced Release One in October 2016.


  • Events



  • SaaS/Back End



    • The Future of Big Data: Distilling Less Knowledge Per Bit
      Until recently, the word data didn’t require a modifier. But we passed a watershed moment when we started referring to big data. Apparently, that wasn’t a sufficient description for some chunks of data, because people grasped for bolder terms, such as humongous data. Sadly, now, it appears that we have run out of appropriate adjectives. And yet data keeps getting bigger and bigger.


    • OpenStack User Survey Indicates Growth in Most Sectors
      A look at the numbers released last week by the OpenStack Foundation from its ninth user survey should be of interest to anyone considering the platform as part of a cloud solution. The platform's percentage of the overall cloud market remains level, at about two-thirds of the total clouds in deployment. That in itself represents a large increase in total deployments, as cloud use continues to rise. Add to that a rapid increase in proof-of-concept and test use, and it's clear that OpenStack's place in the cloud continues to strengthen.


    • 4 types of OpenStack Neutron networks you must understand
      If your OpenStack hosted virtual instances need network connectivity you’re going to have to create a network. There are multiple kinds of networks and in order to make the right choice you will need to understand at least two very important network attributes: ‘router:external’ and ‘shared.’ Unless you know what these attributes and their combinations mean, it will be difficult to make the optimal network choice.




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



    • News about the migration to ODF in Taiwan
      The migration of ODF keeps going in many different fields in Taiwan. Since 2016 the Ministry of Education in Taiwan entrusts the Information Service Association of Chinese Colleges (ISAC) and Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT) with the task of promoting and migrating ODF/LibreOffice in universities in Taiwan. Among all the university, National Chi-Nan University (NCNU) is the earliest one, which started migrating LibreOffice since 2014 and has been working on it for three years.

      Then on April 20, 2017, a student from NCNU posted an article on Dcard forum saying that, according to her teacher, NCNU “Will not use Microsoft Office anymore due to the budget issue. LibreOffice will be used to replace Microsoft Office.” The student strongly questioned, “LibreOffice is totally unknown to everyone. I don’t know what the administrative staffs of our school are thinking about. Microsoft’s software is a very basic skill for enterprises to recruit people. This decision will make students lost their core competitiveness.”




  • Healthcare



    • Open source experts to VA: Keep VistA, it can be fixed
      While the resounding opinion is that the Department of Veterans Affairs should replace the proprietary VistA with a commercial EHR, perhaps choosing Cerner as the Defense Department did, that idea does not hold so true within the open source community.

      “When you look at the big trends in the IT industry, open source is used everywhere. In fact, some of the most successful mega IT systems have a significant open source component,” said Seong Mun, CEO of the Open Source EHR Record Alliance. “We believe it’s the right methodology to get to where we need to go.”




  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)



  • Funding



    • Cloudera’s IPO is overshadowed by a rival it won’t mention
      One of the original poster children of the big data software craze, Cloudera, is due for its long-awaited IPO this week. Sometime Thursday afternoon, its shares will price somewhere between $12 and $14 and will open for trading on the New York Stock Exchange the following morning, raising about $200 million in the process.

      Make no mistake, this IPO qualifies as what’s known in venture capital circles as a down round. Essentially the new investors are buying shares in a company that is worth less than it was during its prior funding rounds.




  • BSD



  • Licensing/Legal



    • Ignorance of open source law is no defense [Ed: uses fear of security and licensing issues to sell its services. Proprietary software is even worse in that regard.]
      While Open Source Software (OSS) has been around for decades, commercial software companies have had their traditional software design process flipped upside down in the last 10 years. When classic commercial software packages were first created years ago, there was very little third-party compliance that was required.




  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration



    • Open Access/Content



      • Open source is the future of teaching


        The work of teaching in developing countries is often hindered by an absence of basic resources, a lack of infrastructure, as well as underfunding, corruption and sociopolitical instability.

        Given these realities, how can we develop teachers in a way that promotes quality education for all?

        Open education resources (OERs) are freely accessible, openly licensed materials that are available online for anyone to use in teaching and learning. They have the potential to build capacity by providing educators with direct access, at low or no cost, to ways in which they can develop their competence.






  • Programming/Development



    • Announcing Rust 1.17
      The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.17.0. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.


    • Rust 1.17 Released
      Judging by the massive Rust fan base in our forums, those of you reading this will be delighted today about the newest version of Rustlang, v1.17.


    • SourceForge: Let's hold hands in a post-CodePlex world [Ed: Microsoft Gavin needlessly interjects Microsoft into it. Like CodePlex was EVER relevant…]
      President Logan Abbott has said he’ll seek tighter integration between SourceForge’s tools and those of others – including giant rival GitHub.


    • Banks should let ancient programming language COBOL die [iophk: "easy money"]

      Despite the fact that three trillion dollars run through COBOL systems every single day they are mostly maintained by retired programming veterans. There are almost no new COBOL programmers available so as retirees start passing away, then so does the maintenance for software written in the ancient programming language.



    • Cross-platform development with Python and BeeWare
      If you want to develop for Android, you have to use Java. If you want to develop for iOS, you have to use Objective C. And if you want to develop for the web, you have to use JavaScript. Right?

      These may be the preferred languages for these platforms, but at the end of the day, mobile phones and web browsers are computing platforms, and with a little work, you can use any language you want. With the BeeWare suite of libraries and bridges, you can use just Python. And, you can use the same code to deploy on all these platforms.






Leftovers



  • 'Today at Apple' Sessions About Art, Music, and Coding Expanding to Every Apple Store in May

    "Today at Apple" will offer programs with more than 60 different hands-on sessions in creative skills. The free sessions, which have been offered at Apple's flagship Union Square store in San Francisco since last year, will cover topics such as photography, videography, music, coding, art, and design.



  • Health/Nutrition



  • Security



    • Pros and Cons of System Update and Integrity Protection Schemes
      Given the increasing malware attacks against Linux-based IoT devices, there is growing interest in integrity protection schemes, as well as system update mechanisms that support over-the-air (OTA) field upgrades. At the recent Embedded Linux Conference, Patrick Ohly, a software engineer at Intel GmbH, Germany, who works on the Yocto Project and the IoT Reference OS Kit for Intel(r) architecture, surveyed both topics and explained how they interrelate.

      With attacks on the rise, embedded developers need a combination of proactive hardening with integrity protection schemes and regular system updates, among other security precautions. “Integrity protection ensures that your device only runs software that has been verified to be unmodified,” said Ohly. “But you can’t count on catching everything in advance, and there will be new vulnerabilities and attack methods, so that’s why you need system updates.”


    • Security updates for Thursday


    • nomx: The world's most secure communications protocol
      I was recently invited to take part in some research by BBC Click, alongside Professor Alan Woodward, to analyse a device that had quite a lot of people all excited. With slick marketing, catchy tag lines and some pretty bold claims about their security, nomx claim to have cracked email security once and for all. Down the rabbit hole we go!


    • New Linux SSH Brute-force LUA Bot Shishiga Detected in the Wild


    • Hackers exploited Word flaw for months while Microsoft investigated
      To understand why it is so difficult to defend computers from even moderately capable hackers, consider the case of the security flaw officially known as CVE-2017-0199.

      The bug was unusually dangerous but of a common genre: it was in Microsoft software, could allow a hacker to seize control of a personal computer with little trace, and was fixed April 11 in Microsoft's regular monthly security update.



    • Study Links Flawed Online Tutorials with Vulnerable Open Source Software
      German researchers have published a paper finding that developers do indeed copy and paste code directly into their open source software, which can lead to the introduction of security vulnerabilities if that code comes from flawed online tutorials.


    • Russian-controlled telecom hijacks financial services’ Internet traffic

      On Wednesday, large chunks of network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services companies were briefly routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom under unexplained circumstances that renew lingering questions about the trust and reliability of some of the most sensitive Internet communications.



    • Microsoft took so long to fix a Word flaw that someone blew the bloody doors off it


    • Warning: Cyber espionage, ransomware attacks a rising global threat

      The Verizon 2017 Data Breach Investigation Report reveals that cyber espionage is now the most common type of attack seen in manufacturing, the public sector and now education, with much of this due to the high proliferation of proprietary research, prototypes and confidential personal data, which are “hot-ticket items” for cyber criminals.



    • Open source IoT protects Mexican bank


    • Kali Linux can now use cloud GPUs for password-cracking
      Think passwords, people. Think long, complex passwords. Not because a breach dump's landed, but because the security-probing-oriented Kali Linux just got better at cracking passwords.

      Kali is a Debian-based Linux that packs in numerous hacking and forensics tools. It's well-regarded among white hat hackers and investigators, who appreciate its inclusion of the tools of their trades.




  • Defence/Aggression



    • Terror arrest near Houses of Parliament
      A man carrying knives near the Houses of Parliament has been wrestled to the ground by armed police and arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences.

      The man, aged 27, was detained as part of an intelligence-led operation on Parliament Street.

      A witness described seeing two knives on the ground, one of which he described as a large bread knife.


    • Armed police swooped on terror suspect as he headed for Downing Street with bag packed with knives
      A suspected jihadist carrying a rucksack packed with knives was heading towards Downing Street when he was dramatically arrested by armed police, security sources have told The Telegraph.

      The ‘lone wolf’ suspect had been under close surveillance when counter-terrorism officers ordered his immediate detention as he came within 300 yards of the gates of the Prime Minister’s residence.




  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting



    • CIJ Statement On Prosecution Threats Against Wikileaks
      The Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) unequivocally condemns any renewed attempt by the United States government to prosecute or otherwise silence WikiLeaks, its staff or its editor, Julian Assange.

      As a charity that champions critical, in-depth reporting and the defence of the public interest, the CIJ came into being in 2003 to address a deepening crisis in investigative reporting.


    • News Conference at Department of Justice on Threats to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange by Attorney General Jeff Sessions


      CIA Director Mike Pompeo recently called WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently stated that Julian Assange’s arrest is a “priority” of the Trump administration. This has caused numerous individuals — with differing perspectives on WikiLeaks — to warn of a growing threat to press freedom.


    • Ron Paul To Interview Julian Assange Today On His Liberty Report
      Libertarian stalwart Ron Paul will broadcast an interview with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange today, following recent news of President Trump’s Department of Justice potentially pursuing criminal charges against the controversial whistleblower.


    • Police illegally obtained journalist's phone records under new metadata retention regime


      The Australian Federal Police illegally obtained a journalist's phone records under the Turnbull government's new metadata retention regime, the agency announced on Friday.

      The breach took place as part of an investigation into a leak of confidential police material - and the incident will now be investigated by the Commonwealth Ombudsman.


    • CIA's New "Mayor" Comes From Finance Firm, Not Intelligence World
      Brian Bulatao, a private equity investor from Dallas, is slated to become the No. 3 official at the CIA, according to current and former intelligence officials.

      The job has traditionally, but not always, been filled by career intelligence officers. It is not subject to Senate confirmation.

      The position has long been known as "executive director," but CIA Director Mike Pompeo is changing the title to "chief operating officer." The executive director has been called the CIA’s "mayor," responsible for the internal workings of the agency that employs an estimated 20,000 personnel worldwide.




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature



    • Yes, We Can Live Without Fossil Fuel


      On this blog, I’ve promoted use of renewable energy as possible, practical and efficient. Still, the doubters rail on about how it’s not even possible. Here’s the thing. A country that has depended on coal for more than a century managed to live without it for electrical generation for a whole day. Extend that. Multiply that. We get a whole world able to live without coal. Repeat, and we can do it for natural gas and oil too.






  • Finance



    • Mexican bank intervenes after woman, 116, deemed 'too old' for card

      She went three months without state support for poor elderly Mexicans after she was turned away from a branch of Citibanamex in the city of Guadalajara for being too old, said Miguel Castro, development secretary for the state of Jalisco. Welfare beneficiaries now need individual bank accounts because of new transparency rules, Castro said.

      “They told me the limit was 110 years,” Félix said with a smile in the plant-filled courtyard of her small house in Guadalajara.



    • Follow the money: how Microsoft evades the taxman

      Microsoft has used regional sales units in Ireland, Singapore and Puerto Rico to build up a cash stash of US$108 billion outside the US, according to court papers that have emerged during a case between the software giant and the US Internal Revenue Service.

      [...]

      The papers revealed in the IRS case showed that between 2001 and 2006, Microsoft had done a series of internal deals that took money upfront to switch the rights to code and other assets created mostly in the US to subsidiaries in Bermuda, Ireland, Singapore and Puerto Rico.





  • Censorship/Free Speech



  • Privacy/Surveillance



    • Tor 0.3.0.6 is released: a new series is stable!
      Tor 0.3.0.6 is the first stable release of the Tor 0.3.0 series.

      With the 0.3.0 series, clients and relays now use Ed25519 keys to authenticate their link connections to relays, rather than the old RSA1024 keys that they used before. (Circuit crypto has been Curve25519-authenticated since 0.2.4.8-alpha.) We have also replaced the guard selection and replacement algorithm to behave more robustly in the presence of unreliable networks, and to resist guard- capture attacks.


    • NSA Makes Pitch For Section 702 Approval While Its 702 Requests Aren't Being Approved By The Court
      Section 702 -- the statute that allows the NSA to collect internet communications and data in bulk -- is up for renewal at the end of this year. The NSA, thanks to Ed Snowden, faced more of an uphill battle than usual when renewing Section 215 (bulk metadata collections). For the first time in its existence, the NSA ended up with a compromise (the USA Freedom Act), rather than a straight renewal.

      The Intelligence Community appears to be trying to get out ahead of straight renewal opponents. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released a Section 702 Q&A at millennial watering hole Tumblr. By returning its own soft serve questions with canned talking points, the ODNI is hoping to show just how lawful its upstream collection is.




  • Civil Rights/Policing



    • Police story differs from videos of man dragged from United flight [Updated]

      None of this is visible on the videos that passengers posted online. The videos show some type of skirmish and then an officer dragging the bloody man out of the plane to the backdrop of a passenger screaming about the ordeal. One video shows Dao saying, "No I'm not going. I am not going." An officer responds, "Well, we'll have to drag you."



    • Formerly Imprisoned Journalist Barrett Brown Taken Back Into Custody Before PBS Interview

      Award-winning journalist Barrett Brown was re-arrested and taken into custody Thursday, the day before he was scheduled to be interviewed for a PBS documentary.



    • Barrett Brown Arrested for the Most Ridiculous Reason Ever

      They arrested him for giving interviews.



    • Ars Technica Live: Why it’s important to defend hackers, even the not nice ones

      It’s so important that anybody charged with a crime—regardless of what it is and regardless of who they are—has a lawyer fighting for them. It’s one of the most important things that we put in the Constitution.



    • Political correctness has gone mad

      The police, whose job it is to protect the public, stood by and watched and allowed the angry Muslims to carry on. Since then they have been allowing ‘angry Muslims’ to carry on with a number of things that would see non-Muslims jailed.



    • Does anyone really need to hear from Saudi Arabia about women’s rights?


    • Turkey arrests 1,000 and suspends 9,100 police in new crackdown

      Turkey has detained more than 1,000 people and suspended over 9,100 police in a new crackdown against alleged supporters of the US-based preacher accused of orchestrating the coup bid against president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.



    • Lauri Love Opens Up About His Fight Against Extradition to the US
      Lauri Love, the alleged British hacker facing extradition to the United States on multiple charges after the country accused him of breaking into top federal computer networks, will now have a chance to appeal his extradition to the UK's High Court.

      Britain's Home Secretary Amber Rudd authorized Love's extradition last September, but Love's defence argued that he would not be able to cope with a maximum sentence of 99 years in prison if found guilty in a US court.

      The US Department of Justice believes Love was part of a series of hacks on US systems that were carried out in retaliation for the arrest and subsequent suicide of internet activist Aaron Swartz, who had been facing up to 35 years in prison for downloading millions of academic journal articles so he could share them, flouting restrictive copyright laws.


    • Teen blogger Amos Yee placed on suicide watch in the USA


    • Amos Yee has been on suicide watch for the past 2 weeks in American jail
      Six months in fact, which in addition to the five months he has already spent there, means nearly a full year of imprisonment before he even gets another hearing.


    • Response To Facebook Video Of Murder Is The Call For An Actual 'Godwin's Law'
      Anyone familiar with internet culture will be familiar with Godwin's law. It goes roughly something like this: the longer a discussion goes on on the internet, the higher the probability that a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis will be made. This axiom enjoys lofty status on the internet -- so often have we seen its claim played out in threads and discussions.

      Godwin's Law is, of course, not a real law. But there may soon be a real Godwin's Law on the books, stemming from the murder of Robert Godwin Sr. and the subsequent video upload to Facebook of the murder.


    • Barrett Brown Re-Arrested For Giving Media Interviews Without Permission
      The weird, sickening persecution of Barrett Brown continues. Whether or not you like the guy (and every time we post about him, we hear from people who provide reasons why they dislike him), the way he's been treated by our justice system is despicable. If you don't recall, Brown is an award winning journalist, who certainly went deep with Anonymous and other online groups. Eventually that resulted in him being arrested and harassed by prosecutors for sharing a link. When the infamous Stratfor hacks were released, he shared a link to the files to get people to sift through them. Because some of the files included swiped credit card numbers, he was charged with "trafficking" in stolen credit cards. Oddly, right before trial -- realizing how insane it was to charge him over this -- the feds dropped the charges around linking, but pushed forward on other charges because he hid a laptop in a cabinet and (stupidly...) got angry at the FBI when they came to investigate. The odd part is that following a plea deal, the judge sentenced him to an astounding 63 months in jail -- and cited the sharing of the link (again, those charges were dropped, but it sometimes appeared the judge didn't realize that) to explain why.


    • Yemen: Joint Public Statement: Immediately release Baha’i man at risk of death sentence
      Huthi-Saleh authorities in Yemen should immediately and unconditionally release Hamid Haydara as he is a prisoner of conscience who is being held and tried on account of his conscientiously held beliefs and peaceful activities as a member of the Baha’i community, said Amnesty International and Mwatana Organization for Human Rights (Mwatana) today, after he was transferred to solitary confinement.




  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality



    • Republican-controlled FCC pushes for net neutrality takedown

      Full text of the plans will be available later today, with a vote planned for 18 May, after a public consultation. Unfortunately, with the republicans controlling both houses and the wire-wool satsuma at the helm, there's a good chance this is going to pass.

      The main points, though, is that the internet will be reclassified as 'Type I - information service's, which means it'll lose that safe status of, say telecoms.



    • Throttling of websites and online services might help customers, FCC says

      The FCC today opened the docket, titled "Restoring Internet Freedom." Clicking "New Filing" takes you to a form for uploading documents, while an "Express" filing lets you write a brief comment without uploading a document. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai also released the draft text of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that will be voted on at the May 18 FCC meeting. There will be another three months for public comments after that preliminary vote, and the FCC will make a final decision sometime after that.

      It's already pretty clear where this is going, though: Pai intends to overturn the 2015 net neutrality order, and the only question is whether anything will replace it.



    • 5 Things to Know About the Next Battle Over Net Neutrality

      What Is Happening? First, it helps to explain what net neutrality is: a concept that internet providers should treat all traffic they handle equally. The existing FCC rules ban ISPs from blocking or throttling content, or from favoring one type of website over another, in the way that traffic is delivered to the consumer.



    • Net Neutrality Under Threat as FCC Opens Doors to Internet Barriers

      'Our companies should be able to compete with incumbents on the quality of our products and services, not our capacity to pay tolls'



    • Over 800 Startups Tell FCC's Ajit Pai Not To Kill Net Neutrality
      As we noted yesterday, FCC Chair Ajit Pai has officially kicked off his plan to kill net neutrality -- and unfortunately did so by spouting debunked myths and fantasies about how much damage net neutrality was causing for investment. As we pointed out that, that's complete hogwash. If you actually looked at what telcos and ISPs were spending it showed no impact from the open internet rules. And, really, why should it have changed investment plans? As we've noted, the rules had basically no impact on ISPs unless those ISPs were looking to screw over consumers. And if it harmed those ISPs' investment plans, that doesn't seem like a very big loss. Otherwise, the open internet rules just provided clear "rules of the road" for ISPs to treat internet data fairly and to not screw over end users.

      Either way, that's not the only "investment" that Pai should be looking at. Because one of the other key aspects of having an open internet is the massive amount of investment that has resulted for companies that operate on the internet. Pai seems (bizarrely) exclusively focused on investment in the infrastructure (which, again, has not dropped despite his claims) and totally ignores all the investment layers above (which also helps funds the infrastructure). So, just as Pai is (wrongly) whining that net neutrality harmed investment, over 800 startups, from all 50 states, sent him a letter urging him not to get rid of the open internet rules (and, yes, we were among those who signed onto the letter).


    • Open Internet Advocates Vow to Fight Trump FCC’s Plan to Kill Net Neutrality
      Ten years of fighting for internet freedom, potentially out the window because Donald Trump was elected president and chose as his top telecom regulator a former Verizon lawyer who's hell-bent on killing federal rules safeguarding net neutrality, the internet's open access principle.

      That's the prospect facing open internet advocates following Wednesday's announcement that Trump's Federal Communications Commission chief, Republican Ajit Pai, intends to dismantle the legal basis for the FCC's landmark 2015 policy protecting net neutrality, the principle that all internet content should be treated equally.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • Australia Readies New Copyright Safe Harbor Consultation

        Last month Australia dropped plans to extend its copyright safe harbor provisions to include platforms such as Google, Facebook and YouTube. A little over a month later and the topic is back on the agenda, with the government announcing a new consultation aimed at encouraging the growth of the digital economy while protecting copyright holders.



      • Australia's Copyright Agency Keeps $11 Million Meant For Authors, Uses It To Fight Introduction Of Fair Use
        In other words, schools and universities have effectively been paying to lobby against changes to Australian copyright laws that would be very much in the interest of themselves, the public, and writers, who could use copyright materials more freely under a fair use system. According to the Sydney Morning Herald article, the top three executives at Australia's Copyright Agency are all paid around $200,000 a year to come up with these kinds of ideas. It would be interesting to know whether Australian authors consider that $600,000 well spent.








← Kather Augenstein and Bristows Shift Attention to Germany in an Effort to Ram the Dying UPC Down Everyone's Throats | Links 29/4/2017: Endless OS, Pinebook, and New Mozilla Foundation Board Members →

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