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06.29.16

Links 29/6/2016: SteamOS 2.83 Beta, Alpine Linux 3.4.1

Posted in News Roundup at 11:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Glyphosate: one pesticide, many problems

      The latest episode in the glyphosate saga just took place, with the EU’s Health and Food Safety Commissioner, V. Andriukaitis, announcing that the European Commission would extend the current market authorisation of glyphosate by 18 months. [this article is an updated version of the same piece on June 24.]

    • Brexit: Vote Leave wipes NHS £350m claim and rest of its website after EU referendum

      The cached version includes a banner image touting the pledge to ‘give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’ – which has already been walked back by Leave supporters

    • Private docs remain popular despite rising fees

      Costs of private doctors’ services have risen much faster than inflation, the newspaper Savon Sanomat reports on Tuesday. However reimbursements by the Social Insurance Institution (Kela) have not risen at the same pace. For instance prices at paediatric receptions rose by more than 23 percent within five years. Nearly one in three Finns visits a private doctor at least once a year.

      Whereas general inflation was around nine percent in the years 2010-15, some doctors’ fees rose by three times that much during the same period.

      The biggest spike, 28 percent, was in psychiatrists’ fees. Other significant price rises were in visits to paediatricians (23.5 percent) as well as to gynaecologists and general practitioners (both 22 percent).

    • Flint water crisis probe costs triple, may hit $5 million

      Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette’s wide-ranging probe into the Flint water crisis could cost as much as $4.9 million, more than triple the amount allocated by the state in a contract in March, according to a posting on the state Administrative Board website.

      Earlier this year, Schuette received approval from the board to expand the contract to up to $1.5 million, from the original $249,000, with Flood Law, a Royal Oak legal firm. Todd Flood is the lawyer Schuette tapped to head his investigation into whether any state laws were violated in the lead contamination of Flint drinking water, which has led to state and federal emergency declarations and instructions to Flint residents not to drink tap water without using a lead filter.

  • Security

    • Security Analysis of TSA PreCheck

      The Transportation Security Administration’s PreCheck program is risk-based screening that allows passengers assessed as low risk to be directed to expedited, or PreCheck, screening. We begin by modelling the overall system of aviation security by considering all layers of security designed to deter or disrupt a terrorist plot to down an airliner with a passenger-borne bomb. Our analysis suggests that these measures reduce the risk of such an attack by at least 98%. Assuming that the accuracy of Secure Flight may be less than 100% when identifying low and high risk passengers, we then assess the effect of enhanced and expedited (or regular and PreCheck) screening on deterrence and disruption rates. We also evaluate programs that randomly redirect passengers from the PreCheck to the regular lines (random exclusion) and ones that redirect some passengers from regular to PreCheck lines (managed inclusion). We find that, if 50% of passengers are cleared for PreCheck, the additional risk reduction (benefit) due to PreCheck is 0.021% for attacks by lone wolves, and 0.056% for ones by terrorist organisations. If 75% of passengers rather than 50% go through PreCheck, these numbers are 0.017% and 0.044%, still providing a benefit in risk reduction. Under most realistic combinations of parameter values PreCheck actually increases risk reduction, perhaps up to 1%, while under the worst assumptions, it lowers risk reduction only by some 0.1%. Extensive sensitivity analyses suggests that, overall, PreCheck is most likely to have an increase in overall benefit.

    • Security updates for Monday
    • Tuesday’s security advisories
    • The future of security
    • Prepare to be hacked: Information security for small organizations

      Information security is challenging, and can be breathtakingly expensive in money and staff energy. Smaller organizations may not have the money or staffing expertise to do the job right, even when the need is the greatest. At OSCON 2016, Kelsey Gilmore-Innis of Sexual Health Innovations (SHI) gave a really interesting talk on how her small nonprofit has done some creative thinking about security, and how that influences the deployment and operation of their application.

    • DDoS Attack Powered by 25,000 CCTV Cameras

      Security researchers have revealed a unique new DDoS attack launched against a small business, which was powered entirely by thousands of compromised CCTV units.

      Sucuri founder Daniel Cid explained in a blog post that 25,513 IP addresses were spotted, with a plurality in Taiwan (24%), the US (12%) and Indonesia (9%) – although they spread out over 105 countries in total.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Tony Blair responds to war criminal claims with astonishing attack on Jeremy Corbyn

      Jeremy Corbyn represents the “politics of protest” and is standing by while people are “bombed, beaten and starved into submission” in Syria, Tony Blair has said, in his most vehement attack on the Labour leader yet.

    • Moment Istanbul airport attacker is shot before detonating suicide bomb

      A triple suicide bombing and gun attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport has killed at least 36 people, including foreigners, with Turkey’s prime minister saying early signs pointed to an assault by the Islamic State group.

      The attackers began spraying bullets at the international terminal entrance before blowing themselves up at around 10.00 pm local time on Tuesday, Turkish authorities said.

      It is the deadliest of four attacks to rock Turkey’s biggest city this year, with two others blamed on Isil and another claimed by a militant Kurdish group.

      Though there was no immediate claim of responsibility for Tuesday’s carnage, “the evidence points to Daesh,” Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told journalists at the scene, using another name for the jihadists.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • This Could Be the Biggest Threat To Our Climate If We Don’t Act Fast

      When you think “peatland,” you probably picture water, or mosquitoes, or creepily preserved human artifacts. What most of us don’t consider are catastrophic wildfires—but that’s precisely what scientists are now worried about when it comes to one of the most carbon-rich ecosystems on Earth.

      Mike Waddington is a forest ecologist at McMaster University in Ontario. He’s been studying the peatlands that pepper the Canadian boreal forest for going on thirty years, and he’s begun to notice an alarming trend. When peatlands that have been drained by humans for forestry or mining catch on fire, they burn like crazy, eating through meters of carbon-rich soil over the course of months.

      “I always tell people to think about the fire swamp from Princess Bride,” Waddington told Gizmodo. “Peat fires are very difficult to put out because they just keep smoldering down into the soil.”

  • Finance

    • Scottish MEP receives standing ovation in European Parliament after passionate speech saying Scotland ‘voted to remain’

      A Scottish MEP has received a lengthy standing ovation from hundreds of members of the European Parliament after asking members “not to let Scotland down”.

      Alyn Smith, from the Scottish National Party (SNP), addressed a special session on the Brexit in Brussels moments after Nigel Farage hailed Britain’s “independence day”.

    • The 2016 Abolition Act

      I think it is time for parliamentary democracy to re-establish itself, and this legislation will be just the thing to bring sense back to British politics.

    • Trump vows to reopen, or toss, NAFTA pact with Canada and Mexico

      Trump criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement as a U.S. job killer, saying he would be willing to scrap the pact if Canada and Mexico were unwilling to budge. He also tried to link Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to the deal on the eve of a meeting in Ottawa of the “three amigos,” the leaders of the three NAFTA signatories: the United States, Mexico and Canada.

    • Trump Plans To Ruin USA

      I imagine Canadian trade with Mexico will do really well if USA agrees to stop trading with both of us, although we may have to trade by sea.

    • Democratic Party Platform Committee Undermines Clinton On TPP

      The Democratic party’s elites must not think that trade and jobs will be big issues in the coming election. Apparently, they’ve never listened to a Donald Trump speech, and didn’t notice that working-class people in the United Kingdom just voted to “brexit” from the European Union (EU) over these issues.

      The Democratic platform writing committee has voted not to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), with the pro-TPP majority saying that doing so would undercut President Obama’s efforts to pass the agreement.

    • Hillary Clinton Hints at Giant, Trump-Like Giveaway to Corporate America

      Hillary Clinton gave a big speech in Raleigh on her plans for the economy on June 22. It was full of Bernie Sanders-like rhetoric about “outrageous behavior” by business and Wall Street.

      But it also included a dog whistle that only huge multinational corporations would hear, telling them that she plans to deliver on one of their greatest dreams and slash their longterm taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars.

    • JP Morgan says Scottish independence, new currency now its ‘base case’

      U.S. bank JP Morgan said on Wednesday it now expects Scotland to vote for independence and introduce its own currency before Britain leaves the European Union in 2019.

      “Our base case is that Scotland will vote for independence and institute a new currency at that point (2019),” JP Morgan economist Malcolm Barr said in a note to clients on Wednesday.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Angela Eagle’s Local Party Has Backed Jeremy Corbyn

      Angela Eagle’s local Labour party has come out in support of Jeremy Corbyn, HuffPost UK can reveal.

      The chair and secretary of Wallasey constituency Labour party have written to express their backing for the leader.

      Kathy Miller and Kathy Runswick said that their local party had decided at their annual meeting on Friday to urge their MP to oppose the ‘motion of no confidence’ in Corbyn.

      MPs voted by 81% today to back the motion and Eagle, the former Business Secretary, is expected to announce she will stand in a leadership contest.

    • Bernie Sanders influences the Democratic Party platform — with some limits

      Over the weekend, the Democratic National Committee began drafting the party’s official policy platform, which will be rolled out next month at the organization’s national convention in Philadelphia. Though it’s virtually impossible that Sen. Bernie Sanders would become the Democratic nominee, he’ll still have a big influence on the party’s agenda going forward.

    • Scalia’s Lurch to the Left–and Other New York Times Pipe Dreams

      That’s the message of a chart that takes up a good chunk of some of the most valuable journalistic real estate in the world, the top half of the front page of the New York Times (6/28/16). Looking at the chart, you can see that just about every justice has moved to the left over time: Of the Democratic appointees, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Bryer are all well to the left of where they were when they were appointed; only Elena Kagan is more or less where she started out.

    • Another Media Setup?

      This picture has been all over twitter, promoted by every high level Blairite you can think of, from JK Rowling down. Yet all may not be what it seems.

    • Brexit: Who governs Britain? This is the UK’s new 10-party system

      Who governs Britain? Farage? Boris? Gove? Cameron? May? Sturgeon? Corbyn? Corbyn’s critics? Never have so many actors mattered and so few had any actual power.

      In the wake of Brexit, the old party divisions no longer apply. Britain is now a ten-party system, with the major parties cleaved in two between leavers and remainers.

      Using data from YouGov, who have reweighted their final EU referendum poll to reflect Thursday’s 52:48 vote for Brexit, we can discover the proportion of each party’s supporters who voted for leave or remain.

      And if we take the vote shares for each party at last year’s general election (the latest polls suggest similar shares), we can see where power really lies.

    • Donor promised to make Clinton ‘look good’ if appointed to board

      A major Democratic donor personally lobbied then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office for a seat on a sensitive government intelligence board, telling one of her closest aides that if appointed he would make Clinton “look good.”

      Rajiv Fernando acknowledged that he may not have the experience to sit on a board that would allow him the highest levels of top-secret access, but he assured deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin in newly released 2009 emails that he was talking to two professors who were “getting me up to speed on the academics behind the field.”

      Fernando, who contributed to Clinton, her family’s foundation and Barack Obama, described himself as one of “Hillary’s people” and mentioned that he recently had sent an ailing Clinton flowers to wish her a speedy recovery.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Twitter Deletes SCOTUSblog Twitter Account Briefly Thinking Its Running Of The Trolls Meant It Was Hacked

      We’ve mentioned and linked to the wonderful SCOTUSblog many times in the past, and have even mentioned its annual running of the trolls, in which the site’s Twitter account responds sarcastically to people who think that it is the Supreme Court’s twitter account, rather than a blog of some journalists and lawyers covering the court. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the Supreme Court doesn’t have its own Twitter feed, combined with Twitter’s eagerness to suggest alternate accounts when people are assuming SCOTUS must have a Twitter feed. But, really, a big part of the problem is people tweeting inane things at SCOTUSblog without realizing it’s not SCOTUS.

    • Twitter debacle

      Today we had our annual running of the trolls — wherein we respond to people who direct mostly hateful and sometimes cute things to our @SCOTUSblog account, thinking it is the official Twitter account of the Supreme Court. We’ve done this for several Terms without incident. But this Term, Twitter — probably through some automated system — decided that our account had been hacked. So it kicked us out of our account — thinking we were the hackers — and then blocked all the tweets, so they have disappeared. We’re trying to get our account back — so far without success. But for posterity, and for those who thought we had deleted the tweets ourselves, here are some screen shots captured from our Twitter followers (many others are blocked by Twitter so even retweets don’t show them):

    • Will Murdoch’s new media outlet bow to UAE’s censorship rules?

      Have you heard of Vice Media? Rupert Murdoch has – in 2013 he called the internet and print publishing upstart a “wild interesting effort to interest millennials” and a “global success.” Not long after, he bought a five per cent stake in what is known as the “hipsters bible”, and his son, James, now sits on its board. The company, which runs dozens of websites and magazines, is said to be at least as valuable as the New York Times.

      Last week it was announced that Vice is moving into the Middle East with a major new partnership with Moby Group, an Afghan media company which has also been a long-term collaborator. Together, the companies hope to bring the Vice brand to much of the Arab world, including all the Gulf Cooperation Council states, Jordan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt and Algeria as well as to Afghanistan.

    • Artist Updates Ancient Indian Erotica To Show Just How Messed Up Censorship Is

      The Khajuraho temples are a group of Hindu and Jain holy shrines built between 950 and 1050 in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Although 85 were originally built, only 22 remain today.

      The holy structures are known for housing an extensive array of erotic images — from Kamasutra-style entangled sex positions to sculptures of curvaceous, nude women celebrating their sensual forms. The temples even included some wonderfully nasty depictions of orgies and bestiality.

    • S. African broadcaster in censorship battle

      A simmering row at public broadcaster SABC could soon boil over into renewed protests. Just weeks before crucial polls, journalists, civil society, and trade unions accuse SABC of political meddling and censorship.

    • Allegations of censorship at SABC

      There are no issues within the SABC according to its Chief Operating Officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng – despite the public broadcaster having decided to censor public protest visuals on television.

      For the past few weeks, the SABC’s decision not to show footage of violent service delivery protests has raised some concern. The media believe that the broadcaster is engaging in censorship, but Motsoeneng has denied it. According to him, censorship is English, and he added that he doesn’t know what it is.

    • Behave or go, says Hlaudi

      Controversial SABC boss Hlaudi Motsoeneng has effectively told frightened employees to make peace with being dutiful lapdogs or walk out.

      Motsoeneng, the chief operating officer, allegedly made these remarks during a staff meeting at the SABC headquarters in Auckland Park, Joburg, on Tuesday.

    • We welcome Matthews’s decision to resign – NUMSA

      The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) strongly condemns the suspension of three South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) journalists – economics editor, Thandeka Gqubule, Radio Sonder Grense executive producer Foeta Krige and senior journalist Suna Venter – for the “offence” of questioning the ban on visual coverage of protests, in particular a protest against censorship at the public broadcaster itself.

    • These brave SABC employees have publicly spoken out against Hlaudi

      The recent editorial shakeup that has been taking place at the SABC is a very serious issue, with the media freedom of the public institution being threatened. Journalists have been censored by the banning of showing violent protest and the threat of suspension and dismissal hanging over their heads. However through all this, there have been a number of brave journalists from the SABC who have spoken out against Hlaudi Motsoeneng and the recent editorial decisions being made at the public broadcaster.

    • Journalists mutiny over SABC censorship

      South Africa’s public broadcaster is battling to quell a journalist revolt over censorship of programmes that portrayed the government in a negative light and its ban on screening footage of protesters destroying property because it didn’t want to encourage violence.

    • ACLJ Demands Answers, Files FOIA Request to Expose Obama Administration’s Censorship of Jihadist’s 911 Transcript
    • ACLJ Files FOIA Lawsuit Against Obama Administration, Seeks Records on Iran Negotiation Cover-up

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Facebook Privacy Status Hoax Is Back To Fool You. Don’t Fall For It.

      Facebook privacy hoax status update is back to fool you. Before going into the details, let me tell you one thing — DON’T fall for this hoax and copy-paste some privacy message on your wall. You are in full control of your Facebook content and you can take a privacy checkup anytime to confirm it.

    • Facebook backtracks, saying it isn’t stalking you to recommend friends

      SOCIAL ADVERTISING PORTAL Facebook has made a dramatic U-turn. Despite confirming to The INQUIRER on Tuesday that the site tracks your location to recommend new friends, the firm has since changed its mind and said that it’s not.

      News broke this week, courtesy of news site Fusion, that Facebook has been taking it on itself to recommend hooking up with people in the same area. People did this organically in the old days by meeting or speaking.

      The report said that the privacy-unaware company has already exposed a couple of concerned parents and identified them following a hook-up at an anonymous help session.

    • Facebook’s Flip-Flop: Is It a Law Enforcement Thing?

      One part of this comment is easy: Facebook is not using locations you mark for yourself (so if I said I was in Grand Rapids, they wouldn’t use that to find new Grand Rapids friends for me). But it’s not really clear what they mean by “device location.” Determined by what? GPS? Cell tower? IP location? Wifi hotspot colocation?

      Which got me thinking about the way that federal law enforcement (in both the criminal and FISA context, apparently) are obtaining location data from social media as a way to tie physical location to social media activity.

    • Snowden: Norway gives no guarantees

      Norway can issue no guarantee that Edward Snowden will not be extradited to the US, should he visit the country. This a Norwegian court decided Monday. The court argues that such guarantees can not be given when it comes to someone who is not presently inside the country.

    • India goes from village to village to compile world’s biggest ID database

      The digital revolution arrives in remote Indian villages such as Akbarpur by communication methods old and new: a WhatsApp message buzzes through to the village chief; he notifies his fellows via megaphone.

      The world’s biggest biometric ID programme is coming to town.

      The next day, two men arrive at the village in Palwal district, Haryana state, with devices the residents have never seen: an iris scanner, a fingerprint machine, a camera and laptop. They are here to register the people of Akbarpur.

    • People Can’t Tell What Apps Use Encryption, And Don’t Really Care, Study Finds

      Is your messaging app using encryption? And, actually, do you even care about that?

      Even though people have more choices than ever when using mobile messaging apps billed as secure and private, and surveillance and encryption have been steadily in the news for the last few years, some consumers don’t seem to really grasp what an encrypted app actually is, and they might not really care that much, according to a new study.

      [...]

      The researchers conducted the study trying to figure out how much users, both security experts and regular people, cared about security and privacy when choosing and using messaging apps.

      As it turns out, when choosing apps, the main motivation is whether other people, mainly “friends,” use it, not whether it’s secure or private, according to the study.

      [...]

      Another participant said he or she stopped using an (unnamed) app after news of a privacy incident, switching to a more secure alternative. But eventually, he or she had to go back to the original messenger because it’s “too dominant” among his friends.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • US Suddenly Discovers Why Supranational Tribunals Are A Problem, Just As It Starts Losing In Them

      As the article explains, that’s not going down too well with other WTO members, including Brazil, the European Union, Japan, and South Korea, who are traditionally allies of the US in trade matters. So what exactly has Chang done to incur the wrath of the US?

    • White Supremacists Are Met With Rocks in Sacramento and Scorn in Newcastle

      As my colleague Glenn Greenwald argues, it is too simple to suggest that last week’s rejection of the European Union by more than half of the British electorate, like Donald Trump’s victory in the Republic primary, can be explained by dismissing the voters as racists.

      In both countries, and across the Western world, xenophobic bigots who pin the blame on foreigners, and promise to restore prosperity by walling us off into ethnic-nationalist enclaves, have grown in prominence only after decades of failure by the traditional parties of left and right to find solutions for the suffering caused by the globalization.

      At the same time, however, it seems clear that the rhetoric of the referendum campaign in Britain, like Trump’s demonization of Mexican and Muslim immigrants, has emboldened the white supremacist fringe in ways too dangerous to ignore.

      As the British historian Victoria Stiles observed, the referendum result, which has been followed by a 57 percent spike in reported hate crimes, seems to have encouraged the kind of public displays of racism in Britain that make physical assaults more likely.

    • A Week in the Life of the American Police State

      Not content with merely spying on our emails and phone calls, the NSA wants to spy on thermostats, refrigerators, and pacemakers.

    • Canadian jailed in Iran over ‘feminism and security’ issues

      A Montreal-based university professor being held in an Iranian jail is being investigated for ‘dabbling in feminism and security matters,’ according to her family.

      Homa Hoodfar’s niece, Amanda Ghahremani, said the Tehran public prosecutor made a statement to Iranian media on the case on Friday.

      Ghahremani said the family doesn’t know whether Hoodfar has been charged with a crime.

      She said the prosecutor’s statement was the first indication of why the 65-year-old professor has been held in Iran’s notorious Evin prison since her arrest on June 6.

      “We’re very concerned that we have no news from her, that the family hasn’t been able to see her, that the lawyer hasn’t been able to see her, and we don’t know her mental state, her health, or the conditions of her detention,” Ghahremani told The Canadian Press.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Europe’s ‘Net Neutrality’ Rules Fail to Ban BitTorrent Throttling

      After years of negotiating Europe has agreed on a set of Net Neutrality rules. While the legislation is a step forward for some countries, experts and activists warn that it may leave the door open for BitTorrent and VPN throttling. With the “EU Slowdown” campaign that launches today, they encourage the public to have their voice heard to improve the current rules.

    • Why ISPs’ fight against net neutrality probably won’t reach Supreme Court

      The US appeals court decision upholding the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules wasn’t quite the final word on the matter, as ISPs immediately vowed to appeal the ruling, with AT&T saying it “expect[s] this issue to be decided by the Supreme Court.”

      But while ISPs will give it their best shot, there are reasons to think that the Supreme Court won’t take up the case. The appeal probably won’t even make it to a rehearing by the full appeals court, a potential intermediate step before a Supreme Court case, legal expert Andrew Jay Schwartzman wrote last week in a Benton Foundation article titled, “Network Neutrality: Now What?” Schwartzman is a Georgetown Law lecturer, an attorney who specializes in media and telecommunications policy, and a longtime consumer advocate who previously led the Media Access Project.

  • DRM

    • Netflix hurt by Australian competitors and VPN blocking

      The news of explosive SVOD growth in Australia over the past year has not been good for the global market leader Netflix which finds that two well-resourced local competitors are nipping at its heels, while it appears to have cut off its nose to spite its face by blocking access to its big differentiator.

      As reported in iTWire this week, SVOD subscriptions would have grown by almost 900,000 during the 12 months to the end of June 2016.

      However, the main beneficiaries of that growth have been local players Stan (jointly owned by Nine Entertainment and Fairfax Media) and Presto (jointly owned by Foxtel and Seven West Media).

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • A Comprehensive And Fair Solution To The Price Of Medicines

      Marie-Paule Kieny, World Health Organization Assistant Director-General, Health Systems and Innovation, writes: Amid public outcry, political battles and media articles, no one seems to understand how, exactly, medicines prices are set. For years, pharmaceutical research companies have cited the large investment of time and resources that go into bringing a drug to market. More recently, they argue that their medicines are actually saving money by preventing expensive medical interventions like surgery and hospitalization.

      But whatever the argument used, the price setting mechanisms for commodities that are inextricably linked to people’s health and survival must be made more transparent so that we can, as a global community, devise effective solutions.

    • Embassy In London Under Siege, IP A ‘Neo-Liberal Pillar’, Ecuador Minister Says

      Guillaume Long, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility of Ecuador, who was fresh from a three-day visit to the UN in Geneva with several meetings, including with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said during a press briefing that he paid a visit to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on 19 June in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, on the 4th anniversary of his taking refuge in the embassy.

      Four years ago, Long said, Julian Assange walked into the embassy and asked for asylum. After two months of studying his request, Ecuador decided to grant Assange asylum on human rights grounds, Long said, in particular because there were fears of significant political persecution of Assange, he said.

      In particular, Ecuador was unable to obtain a guarantee that Assange would not be extradited to a third country, he said. Ecuador is not seeking to interfere with the Swedish judicial system but have been told by the United Kingdom government that it can neither confirm nor deny that Assange would be extradited.

      [...]

      On a separate issue, access to health and access to medicines are pillars of Ecuadoran policy, Long said today, answering a question from Intellectual Property Watch on the leading role that Ecuador has said it wanted to have in the management of intellectual property policy. In particular, Ecuador has issued a number of compulsory licences, allowing the production of generic versions of expensive brand name drugs.

      When criteria for compulsory licences are met, Ecuador will carry on issuing compulsory licences when the country has to do so. “We are in the confines of the WTO [World Trade Organization] and other bodies,” he said, as he underlined the country’s “progressive approach to IP.”

      “Intellectual property is the new free trade agenda, the new neo-liberal pillar,” he said. In most trade agreements, “intellectual property is massive.”

      “We are in a knowledge economy and a science and technology age, and a patenting age,” he added.

      Unfortunately, since the 1980s, he said, patenting has become much more recurrent and more lenient. There is a greater privatisation of knowledge which affects countries that are low producers of knowledge and do not have an innovation economy, he said.

      The more knowledge circulates, the more it becomes a public good, and the more innovation you can have, he explained. Although intellectual property is legitimate, the right balance should be struck, he said.

    • Copyrights

      • Two Judges Punch Holes In Copyright Trolls’ Claims That An IP Address Is The Same Thing As A Person

        Fight Copyright Trolls has tracked down two more court decisions that reach an obvious conclusion: an IP address is not a person. In both cases, the normal trolling tactics were used: legal threats against alleged infringers, based on nothing more than IP addresses. In the first case, New Jersey Judge Kevin McNulty disagreed with Malibu Media’s request for default judgment, pointing out that the limited info it was working with could not rule out a successful defense being raised by the accused infringer.

06.28.16

Links 28/6/2016: Red Hat Summit 2016, Hadoop Events

Posted in News Roundup at 6:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • The gift and curse of CEO ego

    After a leader effectively keeps her or his ego in check, where does he or she begin delegating decisions and problem solving? To find the answer to that question, one must simply explore where value is created. The people involved in creating value are the people who should be most involved in the decision-making process. Having maturity, curiosity and determination, our newly-open CEO should be willing to open up that decision-making process and give decision making power and trust to those individuals, whether within the company or outside. The leader’s role should be to support those people and groups, and to create an environment in which they can come up with the solutions that best suit their immediate situations, and the company as a whole—not an environment that lets the CEOs ego spiral out of control.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • WHO Names New Head Of Health Emergencies

      The World Health Organization has named veteran health crisis expert Peter Salama of Australia the next head of the Health Emergencies Programme, a high-profile position for the UN agency’s leadership against outbreaks and disasters.

  • Security

    • Libarchive Security Flaw Discovered

      When it comes to security, everyone knows you shouldn’t run executable files from an untrustworthy source. Back in the late 1990s, when web users were a little more naive, it was quite common to receive infected email messages with fake attachments.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Glorious Dictatorship of Uzbekistan

      A very curious puff piece has turned up in the Guardian for holidays in Uzbekistan, which fails entirely to mention that it is one of the world’s least free countries and most repressive dictatorships. Nor is this irrelevant to tourism, as there could well be serious problems for visiting religious muslims or gays, and it very definitely impinges on everybody’s freedom to move around.

    • Trading Places: Neocons and Cockroaches

      Neocons want a new Cold War – all the better to pick the U.S. taxpayers’ pockets – but this reckless talk and war profiteering could spark a nuclear war and leave the world to the cockroaches, writes Robert Parry.

  • Finance/Brexit

    • EU referendum: MEPs discuss Brexit negotiations
    • Nigel Farage jeered and booed as he tells MEPs they are ‘in denial’ over Brexit

      Ukip leader Nigel Farage was jeered by the European Parliament after he told MEPs that they were “in denial” about Brexit and that they had “never had a proper job before”.

      His astonishing speech at a special meeting of the European Parliament today ended with boos echoing through the Brussels chamber.

    • The Calm Stroll to Independence

      Scottish nationals have two supra-national citizenships. One is UK citizenship, the second is EU citizenship. In democratic referenda over the past two years, Scots have voted clearly to retain both citizenships.

    • The EU may drop English as their official language

      English, the world’s second language and the main working tongue of EU institutions, may no longer be an official language of the European Union once Britain leaves the bloc, a senior EU lawmaker said on Monday.

    • Romanians for Remainians: an ‘adoption’ offer for bewildered Brits

      If the Brexit fallout has left you reeling and combing your family tree for alternative passport options, it might be time to consider adoption by a Romanian family.

      A daily newspaper in Bucharest has launched a “Romanians for Remanians” campaign, offering a new home to the 48% of Britons who voted to stay in the European Union.

      The Gandul website tells Brits who believe in a united Europe to “leave the Brexiters, the quarrelling and the weather behind” and “start brand new life” in Romania.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Kuenssberg Goes Into Overdrive

      170,000 Labour members voted against Jeremy Corbyn in the last leadership election. Any of them can expect to be made briefly famous by Laura Kuenssberg as she deliriously seeks to promote her “Labour members turn against Corbyn” message.

      She broadcasts that Andy Slaughter’s resignation from an obscure shadow junior ministerial post is “different”, because he uses the word “comrade”, and is a sign that even Corbyn’s supporters are turning against him.

      Let’s consider that a moment. Slaughter’s voting record shows that he is a strong supporter of nuclear missiles and Trident replacement, and voted consistently against an inquiry into the Iraq war. So Kuenssberg’s characterisation of Slaughter is false.

      And did Slaughter support Corbyn for leader last time? No. Andy Slaughter actually nominated Yvette Cooper for leader.

      But worry not. Kuenssberg has another, killing example that Corbyn has lost it. The former leader of Dudley Council, councillor Dave Sparks, is going to vote against him! Kuenssberg evidently expects this bombshell to move financial markets. And did Bob Sparks vote for Corbyn the first time? Er, no. But, Kuenssberg announces, some other Labour councillors will vote against Corbyn too! Amazing!

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Web content blocking plan for EU’s draft anti-terrorism law hits stumbling block

      A controversial vote over planned Web blocking rules—recently squeezed into the EU’s draft anti-terrorism law—has been postponed by a week.

      It was due to take place on Tuesday in the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee, but the vote has now been pushed back to Monday June 27.

      The latest draft of the directive on combating terrorism contains proposals on blocking websites that promote or incite terror attacks. Member states “may take all necessary measures to remove or to block access to webpages publicly inciting to commit terrorist offences,” says text submitted by German MEP and rapporteur Monika Hohlmeier.

    • Vanuatu Daily Digest condemns ‘blanket state censorship’ of social media

      Vanuatu’s Public Service Commission is forbidding government workers from accessing social media, Radio Vanuatu News reports today.

    • Arab Atheists Decry Facebook Censorship on Posts Critical of Islam

      Atheist groups in the Middle East and North Africa region are demanding that Facebook, which has deleted numerous pages with more than 100,000 members for criticizing Islam, change the way it addresses violation claims so that members’ freedom of speech is preserved.

      In April, Facebook removed more than six Arabic-speaking atheist pages due to “violations” of Community Standards, after deactivating 10 of the largest Arabic-speaking atheist groups with a total of about 100,000 members, in February, according to The News Hub.

      The censorship is a result of organized efforts by “cyber jihadist” groups to get anti-Islamic groups or pages removed, atheist groups say.

    • Chaos escalates and CEO quits at SABC headquarters over censorship

      According to Tech Central, veteran journalist and SABC acting CEO Jimi Matthews has quit, saying in his resignation letter that what is happening at the state-owned broadcaster is “wrong” and that he can “no longer be a part of it.”

    • I don’t even know what censorship is – Hlaudi Motsoeneng

      SABC COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng has scoffed at suggestions that the public broadcaster is engaging in censorship, saying censorship is an English concept, so he “doesn’t know it”.

      Speaking at a media briefing at the SABC’s Johannesburg head office in Auckland Park, Motsoeneng took to the microphone to deliver a customary diatribe against his detractors.

      “I don’t even know what censorship is,” an exasperated Hlaudi Motsoeneng said.

      “What is this censorship thing? It is English so I don’t know it. There is no censorship here,” he declared.

    • Journalists take a stand against SABC censorship

      An online petition aimed at freeing the SABC from censorship and political interference has been started.

      It is calling for the public broadcaster to stop intimidating and purging staff with opposing views.

      The petition, initiated by worker union Bemawu, is asking for the independence of journalists to be guaranteed and for the SABC board to be replaced.

      It also wants the newscaster to comply with its own charter, the constitution and the Broadcasting Act.

      The petition calls for the withdrawal of the alleged financial reward of R100,000 to anyone who informs on staffers leaking information to the media.

    • Journalists under fire and under pressure: summer magazine 2016

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NSA advises White House, federal agencies on cybersecurity

      One of the National Security Agency’s most important roles in government cybersecurity is advising the White House and other federal agencies about potential risks and opportunities. Philip Quade, special assistant for cybersecurity to the NSA director, leads that effort.

    • German government proposes shorter leash for intelligence agency
    • Germany puts a (long) leash on its spooks
    • German cabinet agrees to tighten control over spy agency
    • German Cabinet agrees upon new controls for spy agency
    • Germany to further curb activities of spy agency in wake of NSA scandal
    • He Was a Hacker for the NSA and He Was Willing to Talk. I Was Willing to Listen.

      The message arrived at night and consisted of three words: “Good evening sir!”

      The sender was a hacker who had written a series of provocative memos at the National Security Agency. His secret memos had explained — with an earthy use of slang and emojis that was unusual for an operative of the largest eavesdropping organization in the world — how the NSA breaks into the digital accounts of people who manage computer networks, and how it tries to unmask people who use Tor to browse the web anonymously. Outlining some of the NSA’s most sensitive activities, the memos were leaked by Edward Snowden, and I had written about a few of them for The Intercept.

    • What Price Security Surveillance Now?

      A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting of the Manchester branch of the Open Rights Group to discuss the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill known as the IPBill and currently about to be discussed and voted on by the House of Lords.

      [...]

      One important additional question is “how did we get here?” It seems likely that we have boxed our politicians into a corner: when there is a bad news story (such as a terrorist attack), we, or the Press supposedly on our behalves, demand to know why it wasn’t prevented. The politicians, therefore, go to the security services and police and ask what tools they want in order to ensure it doesn’t happen again. And, of course, this puts the spies and law enforcers in a tight spot because now they will be held responsible, so they obviously ask for strong powers. Pervasive bulk surveillance is just one of the arrows they demand for their quiver.

    • Russian ISPs will need to store content and metadata, open backdoors

      Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, has approved a series of new online surveillance measures as part of a wide-ranging anti-terrorism law. In a tweet, Edward Snowden, currently living in Russia, wrote: “Russia’s new Big Brother law is an unworkable, unjustifiable violation of rights that should never be signed.”

      As well as being able to demand access to encrypted services, the authorities will require Russia’s telecom companies to store not just metadata, but the actual content of messages too, for a period of six months. Metadata alone must then be held for a total of three years, according to a summary of the new law on the Meduza site. Authorities will be able to access the stored content and metadata information on demand.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Appeals Court Rejects Revenge Pornster’s Appeal; Another Bad Section 230 Ruling

      We’ve noted in the last month or so a series of court rulings in California all seem to be chipping away at Section 230. And now we’ve got another one. As we noted last month, revenge porn extortion creep Kevin Bollaert had appealed his 18-year sentence and that appeal raised some key issues about Section 230. As we noted, it seemed clear that the State of California was misrepresenting a bunch of things in dangerous ways.

      Unfortunately, the appeals court has now sided with the state, and that means we’ve got more chipping away at Section 230. No one disagrees that Bollaert was a creep. He was getting naked pictures of people posted to his site, along with the person’s info, and then had set up a separate site (which pretended to be independent) where people could pay to take those pages down. But there are questions about whether or not Bollaert could be held liable for actions of his users in posting content. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230) is pretty damn clear that he should not be held liable — but the court has twisted itself in a knot to find otherwise, basically arguing that Bollaert is, in part, responsible for the creation of the content. This is going to set a bad precedent for internet platforms in California and elsewhere.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Airbnb Goes To Court To Stop San Francisco’s New Anti-Airbnb Law

      Back in May, we noted that large cities around the country were rushing to put in place anti-Airbnb laws designed to protect large hotel companies. In that post, we noted that many of the bills almost certainly violated Section 230 of the CDA by making the platform provider, Airbnb, liable for users failing to “register” with the city. Section 230, again, says that a platform cannot be held liable for the actions (or inactions) of its users. San Francisco was the first city to get this kind of legislation pushed through. And while the city’s legislators insisted that Section 230 didn’t apply, they’re now going to have to test that theory in court. Airbnb has asked a court for a preliminary injunction blocking the law, based mainly on Section 230, but also mentioning the Stored Communications Act and tossing in a First Amendment argument just in case.

    • Senate Hearing Shows Cable Companies Routinely Overbill Customers, Do Little To Correct Errors

      If you’ve been distracted by something like a coma, you may have noticed that the cable industry has developed an atrocious reputation for poor customer service, built over a generation of regulatory capture, prioritizing growth over customer service, and just generally not giving much of a damn. By and large, a Congress slathered in telecom and cable campaign contributions has ensured that nothing much changes on that front, with most politicians taking every opportunity to in fact defend this dysfunctional status quo from innovation, competition, or change.

  • DRM

    • Xbox Fitness users will soon lose access to workout videos they bought

      Xbox users who purchased training videos through the Xbox Fitness app probably thought they were buying a workout program they’d be able to use regularly for the life of the Xbox One, at the very least. Instead, those videos will soon be completely unavailable to those who paid for them up front, according to a “sunset” plan announced by Microsoft yesterday evening.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • National Parliaments Not Needed For CETA Approval, European Commission President Juncker Says

      European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said today that the European Union would not include national parliaments of EU member states in the final decision on the Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA). Juncker’s CETA statement was made during the post-Brexit meeting of EU heads of state in Brussels today (28 June), several German newspapers reported quoting the German News Agency (DPA).

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Another Dumb Idea Out Of The EU: Giving Robots & Computers Copyright

        It’s a good thing to think about the technology of the future. Especially if you’re politicians and the future may have a big impact. Considering how frequently we see politicians ignore future technological change, it might be encouraging that the EU Parliament is at least considering what happens when our new robot overlords enslave us. Except that the report that the EU Parliament has come out with… is ridiculous. Most of the headlines are focusing on the ideas raised around making robots “electronic persons” for the purposes of paying social security or taxes, but the part that gets me is the plan to give them access to copyright as well.

      • This Song Belongs To You And Me: Lawsuit Filed To Declare Woodie Guthrie’s Classic In The Public Domain

        And yet, his most famous song, “This Land,” keeps coming up in copyright disputes. Over a decade ago, we wrote about how the organizations claiming to hold the copyright on that song went after the company JibJab, which had made a clear parody of the song during the 2004 Presidential election. In that case, once the EFF got involved, the case was settled out of court.

      • US Courts Split On Legality Of Music Sampling
      • Stairway to Heaven copyright decision is music to Led Zeppelin’s ears

        The Central District of California’s June 23 verdict in Skidmore v Zeppelin will ease fears raised after last year’s Blurred Lines case that juries are more likely to find infringement in copyright cases involving songs

Links 28/6/2016: Vista 10 Updategate, OpenMandriva 3.0 Beta 2

Posted in News Roundup at 4:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Linux Practicality vs Activism

      One of the greatest things about running Linux is the freedom it provides. Where the division among the Linux community appears is in how we value this freedom.

      For some, the freedom enjoyed by using Linux is the freedom from vendor lock-in or high software costs. Most would call this a practical consideration. Others users would tell you the freedom they enjoy is software freedom. This means embracing Linux distributions that support the Free Software Movement, avoiding proprietary software completely and all things related.

      In this article, I’ll walk you through some of the differences between these two freedoms and how they affect Linux usage.

    • When A Computer Is Ready for the Junk Pile

      To that point, there was a report that a mail server failure in a large business office remained a mystery for two days until someone found an old Pentium II back in the corner of some obscure closet with a burned out power supply. It is reported that the Slackware/Debian/Red Hat machine had been plugging away as a mail server for a number of years, completely unattended. That’s feasible I suppose, but I further suppose that it’s a modern day parable about how open source can indeed, carry the day.

    • Microsoft draws flak for pushing Windows 10 on PC users

      With about a month left for many PC users to upgrade to Windows 10 at no charge, Microsoft is being criticized for its aggressive — some say too aggressive — campaign to get people to install the new operating system.

    • Microsoft forks out thousands over forced Windows 10 upgrade

      Microsoft has had to pay a Windows user in California US$10,000 over a forced upgrade to Windows 10, according to a report in the Seattle Times.

      The user, Teri Goldstein, runs a travel agency in Sausalito, a San Francisco Bay Area city in Marin County, California.

    • A lawsuit over an unwanted Windows 10 upgrade just cost Microsoft $10,000

      Microsoft recently paid a (very small) price for its Windows 10 upgrade tactics, and that was before they became increasingly aggressive.

    • Updategate: California woman awarded $10,000 for borked Windows 10 upgrade

      A CALIFORNIA woman has set a precedent after a court ruled that she was entitled to damages over the installation of Windows 10 on her machine.

      Teri Goldstein, a travel agent, testified that the new operating system had auto-downloaded, started to install, failed, and left her Windows 7 computer running painfully slowly and often unusable for days.

      “I had never heard of Windows 10,” Goldstein told reporters. “Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to update.”

    • Microsoft pays out $10,000 for automatic Windows 10 installation

      Company withdraws appeal leaving it liable for $10,000 compensation judgment after botched automatic upgrade of travel agent’s computer

    • Microsoft Pays Woman $10,000 Over Its Forced Windows 10 Upgrade

      As a result of a legal suit, Microsoft has paid a woman $10,000 over the forced Windows 10 upgrade.

    • ‘I urge everyone to fight back’ – woman wins $10k from Microsoft over Windows 10 misery

      A California woman has won $10,000 from Microsoft after a sneaky Windows 10 update wrecked the computer she used to run her business. Now she’s urging everyone to follow suit and “fight back.”

      Teri Goldstein – who manages a travel agency in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco – told The Register she landed the compensation by taking Microsoft to a small claims court.

      Rather than pursue a regular lawsuit, she chose the smaller court because it was better suited to sorting out consumer complaints. Crucially, it meant Microsoft couldn’t send one of its top-gun lawyers – or any lawyer in fact: small claims courts are informal and attorneys are generally not allowed. Instead, Redmond-based Microsoft had to send a consumer complaints rep to argue its case.

  • Server

    • Docker 1.12 Linux Container Engine Promises Built-in Orchestration Capabilities

      The Docker developers are working hard these days to bring us one of the biggest releases of the widely-used open-source and cross-platform container engine, Docker 1.12.

    • Docker Expands Container Networking Capabilities

      When Docker 1.0 debuted in June 2014, it was missing a key feature: fully integrated networking that works. In June 2016, networking in Docker containers is a very different story, with a host of new capabilities now present in the Docker 1.12 milestone, which was officially released last week.

      At the core of Docker’s networking capabilities is the libnetwork stack, which first debuted in the Docker 1.7 release in June 2015 and became fully integrated in the Docker 1.9 update. Libnetwork is based on technology built and since expanded by SocketPlane, a company that Docker acquired in March 2015.

    • Sony Settles in Linux Battle

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • antiX 16 & OpenMandriva 3.0 Beta 2 Release, openSUSE Numbers

        It was a busy day in Linux with Slack, antiX, and OpenMandriva all working towards their next releases. Sam Varghese quoted Alberto Planas who said openSUSE sees about 1600 new installations each month and Gentoo’s Donnie Berkholz posted his retirement notice. Bruce Byfield posted two interesting articles today, one explaining the difference between an Open Source user and a Free Software Activist and the other describing the stringent Debian packaging policies. As a bonus, a lady in California won a $10,000 award in small claims court from Microsoft over its Windows 10 behavior.

      • OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 Beta2 is here!

        OpenMandriva is a cutting edge distribution compiled with LLVM/clang. Combined with the high level of optimisation used for both code and linking (by enabling LTO) used in its building, this gives the OpenMandriva desktop an unbelievably crisp response to operations on the KDE Plasma5 desktop which makes it a pleasure to use.

      • New Releases!

    • Gentoo Family

      • Time to retire

        I’m sad to say it’s the end of the road for me with Gentoo, after 13 years volunteering my time (my “anniversary” is tomorrow). My time and motivation to commit to Gentoo have steadily declined over the past couple of years and eventually stopped entirely. It was an enormous part of my life for more than a decade, and I’m very grateful to everyone I’ve worked with over the years.

        My last major involvement was running our participation in the Google Summer of Code, which is now fully handed off to others. Prior to that, I was involved in many things from migrating our X11 packages through the Big Modularization and maintaining nearly 400 packages to serving 6 terms on the council and as desktop manager in the pre-council days. I spent a long time trying to change and modernize our distro and culture. Some parts worked better than others, but the inertia I had to fight along the way was enormous.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Why Debian Policy is important to package quality

        Unless you are a Debian maintainer, you probably haven’t read the Debian Policy Manual. However, when Ubuntu started promoting Snappy packages as a more secure solution to package management, the claim was challenged, not by reference to the technical structure of Debian packages, but to the Debian Policy Manual.

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Google “Project Bloks” education kit starts with RPi Zero

      Google’s “Project Bloks” education platform is built around a Raspberry Pi Zero that controls baseboards that talk to “Puck” inputs via a capacitive sensor.

      Google announced a Project Bloks hacker platform for kids, developed with IDEO and Paulo Blikstein of Stanford University. A prototype has been built based on the Linux-driven Raspberry Pi Zero SBC, and now Google is seeking researchers, developers, and designers who are interested in using the technology “to build physical coding experiences.” Later this year, Google will conduct a remote research study with the help of these partners.

    • 96Boards SBC showcases Mediatek’s deca-core Helio X20

      MediaTek launched the fastest open-spec SBC to date with a 96Boards development board that runs Android on its deca-core Cortex-A53 and -A72 Helio X20 SoC.

      The “Helio X20 Development Board” is MediaTek’s first 96Boards form-factor single-board computer, and the most powerful open-spec hacker SBC to date. Although we’ve seen some fast 64-bit SoCs among 96Boards SBCs, such as the HiKey, based on an octa-core, Cortex-A53 HiSilicon Kirin 6220, the Helio X20 Development Board offers an even more powerful Helio X20 system-on-chip processor.

    • RaspEX Linux Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Supports the Raspberry Pi Touch Display

      After informing us the other day about the availability of a new release of his RaspAnd distro that brings the Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system to Raspberry Pi 3 devices, Arne Exton is happy to announce that his RaspEX OS works with the official Raspberry Pi Touch Display.

    • Dual-core MCU Arduino compatible SBC has WiFi and audio

      T-Firefly’s open-spec, Arduino Uno compatible Fireduino SBC offers Rockchip’s dual-core, Cortex-M3 RKNanoD MCU, plus WiFi, RTC, and MP3 audio.

      Chinese embedded firm T-Firefly is apparently the new name for T-Chip Technology, which sponsors the Firefly open source hardware project. Its Arduino I/O- and IDE-compatible, dual-core Fireduino board is supported by the Firefly project along with Linux/Android hacker boards like the Rockchip RK3128 based Firefly-RK3288 Reload and Firefly FirePrime. Schematics and the like have already been posted.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Modern Hardware’s Role in a Software Driven Data Center

      Peterson also noted HPE has a variety of servers built around the Helion OpenStack world, which dovetails well with its contributions to the Open Compute Project. The teams at Helion and Cloudline have continued to join forces in order to provide a better experience for developers, end users, and IT teams working with these servers in their own architecture.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Truck Full of Dead Bees Delivered to the EPA

      The Keep Hives Alive Tour, a traveling protest of farmers, agriculture scientists, and activists, has been traveling around the country bringing its message to the masses.

      Keep Hives Alive is a two-fold group: Their aim is both to educate about the desperate need for honeybees and to advocate for concrete legislation that could help protect them. As part of that effort, the tour includes an awfully stark reminder of just how bad things are out there in bee-world: a truck full of 2.6 million dead bees.

  • Security

    • Chrome vulnerability lets attackers steal movies from streaming services

      A significant security vulnerability in Google technology that is supposed to protect videos streamed via Google Chrome has been discovered by researchers from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Cyber Security Research Center (CSRC) in collaboration with a security researcher from Telekom Innovation Laboratories in Berlin, Germany.

    • Large botnet of CCTV devices knock the snot out of jewelry website

      Researchers have encountered a denial-of-service botnet that’s made up of more than 25,000 Internet-connected closed circuit TV devices.

      The researchers with Security firm Sucuri came across the malicious network while defending a small brick-and-mortar jewelry shop against a distributed denial-of-service attack. The unnamed site was choking on an assault that delivered almost 35,000 HTTP requests per second, making it unreachable to legitimate users. When Sucuri used a network addressing and routing system known as Anycast to neutralize the attack, the assailants increased the number of HTTP requests to 50,000 per second.

    • Study finds Password Misuse in Hospitals a Steaming Hot Mess

      Hospitals are pretty hygienic places – except when it comes to passwords, it seems.

      That’s the conclusion of a recent study by researchers at Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania and USC, which found that efforts to circumvent password protections are “endemic” in healthcare environments and mostly go unnoticed by hospital IT staff.

      The report describes what can only be described as wholesale abandonment of security best practices at hospitals and other clinical environments – with the bad behavior being driven by necessity rather than malice.

    • Why are hackers increasingly targeting the healthcare industry?

      Cyber-attacks in the healthcare environment are on the rise, with recent research suggesting that critical healthcare systems could be vulnerable to attack.

      In general, the healthcare industry is proving lucrative for cybercriminals because medical data can be used in multiple ways, for example fraud or identify theft. This personal data often contains information regarding a patient’s medical history, which could be used in targeted spear-phishing attacks.

    • Making the internet more secure
    • Beyond Monocultures
    • Dodging Raindrops Escaping the Public Cloud

  • Defence/Aggression

    • It’s Still the Iraq War, Stupid.

      No rational person could blame Jeremy Corbyn for Brexit. So why are the Blairites moving against Corbyn now, with such precipitate haste?

      The answer is the Chilcot Report. It is only a fortnight away, and though its form will be concealed by thick layers of establishment whitewash, the basic contours of Blair’s lies will still be visible beneath. Corbyn had deferred to Blairite pressure not to apologise on behalf of the Labour Party for the Iraq War until Chilcot is published.

    • Mufti confirms classifying DAP as ‘can be slain’ kafir harbi

      It is an Islamic belief that kafir harbi refers to non-believers who can be slain for waging war against Islam.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • WSJ Fakes a Green Shift Toward Nuclear Power

      The Wall Street Journal (6/16/16) published an article headlined “Environmental Groups Change Tune on Nuclear Power: Focus on Climate Change Has Raised Profile of Reactors, Now Viewed as Reliable, Carbon-Free Source of Energy.” Written by Amy Harder, the approximately 600-word piece appeared on the front page of the Journal’s B section.

    • Iran cracks down on ‘vulgar Western’ dog owners by seizing pets for ‘vaccination’ then destroying them

      Iranian pet lovers are in uproar after dogs were confiscated in a crackdown on ‘vulgar Western culture’.

      One unnamed dog owner in the Isfahan province, central Iran, said officials had shown up suddenly at his house.

      Officers who claimed to be from a veterinary practice took the dog away because it needed to have ‘vaccinations’.

      The owner told Iran’s Shahrvand newspaper: ‘We were shown a piece of paper indicating they were from the municipal veterinary office.

      ‘They came in and took away our dogs under the pretext of vaccination. Ever since our dog was taken away, you only hear the sound of crying and sobbing in our house.’

  • Finance

    • People are really, really hoping this theory about David Cameron and Brexit is true

      As the dust settles on the EU referendum battleground, some 33 million voters await with bated breath to see what the victors will do now that the nation has spoken to leave.

      Political commentators forecast a dark future for the UK: Jeremy Corbyn has just sacked Hilary Benn to head off a coup, and Boris Johnson could be prime minister come November.

    • Why the British said no to Europe

      Immigration was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism, not only by populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour politicians drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and nurturing racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the top. The reason millions of refugees have fled the Middle East – irst Iraq, now Syria – are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the United States, France, the European Union and Nato. Before that, there was the wilful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there was the theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.

    • Brexit is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions

      The decision by UK voters to leave the EU is such a glaring repudiation of the wisdom and relevance of elite political and media institutions that – for once – their failures have become a prominent part of the storyline. Media reaction to the Brexit vote falls into two general categories: (1) earnest, candid attempts to understand what motivated voters to make this choice, even if that means indicting one’s own establishment circles, and (2) petulant, self-serving, simple-minded attacks on disobedient pro-leave voters for being primitive, xenophobic bigots (and stupid to boot), all to evade any reckoning with their own responsibility. Virtually every reaction that falls into the former category emphasizes the profound failures of western establishment factions; these institutions have spawned pervasive misery and inequality, only to spew condescending scorn at their victims when they object.

    • Political Elites’ Program of Austerity Set the Stage for Brexit

      At 4 am, following the UK referendum on EU membership, Nigel Farage, the leader of the Eurosceptic UK Independence Party, gave a tentative victory speech. Bullish and beaming, but couching his cheer in caveats that not all areas had declared results, flanked by young men in suits jeering and pogoing, Farage announced that if the Leave campaign had won, “We will have done so without a single bullet being fired.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Multiple Crises in Democracy

      There is a strong strand of belief among the political class that Boris Johnson has no intention of taking the UK out of the EU. His aim was to see off Cameron and install himself in No. 10, after which he will discover that leaving the EU is proving far too dangerous and call for a second referendum. I suspect that this credits Johnson with a Machiavellian genius he is far from possessing, though as a prediction of future events it is in with a chance. (Personally I am hoping for Theresa May, the reaction to whose elevation will speed up Scottish Independence).

    • On Brexit, Experts Leave Much to Be Desired

      Actually, the pound’s fall was a necessary and good development in the long run, even if it would have been better had it occurred over a longer period of time. The UK was running a trade deficit in the neighborhood of 5.0 percent of GDP (equivalent to about $900 billion in the US); this was unsustainable. And, contrary to what Legrain claims in this piece, the best way to get the trade deficit down is to lower the value of the pound.

      Legrain incorrectly asserts that the drop in the pound in 2008 did not lead to a reduction in the trade deficit. In fact, it led to a substantial reduction, although with a 1–2 year lag, as would be expected. (The pound fell from a peak of more than 1.5 euros in 2007 to just over 1.0 euro at its trough in 2008. It remained low until it began to rise sharply in 2013, reaching values of more than 1.4 euros last year, hence the large rise in the trade deficit.)

      An inflow of money from abroad was fueling a housing bubble in the UK. This has priced many people out of the real estate market. Bubbles do burst, often with very bad outcomes. The problem with bubbles is not the factor that causes them to burst; the problem is allowing them to grow in the first place.

    • Putin Conspiracies, Obama Nonintervention Blamed for Brexit

      The referendum results in favor of Britain leaving the European Union seemed to have caught most Western media off guard. Betting markets and the pundit class had heavily favored a vote to keep the UK in the EU, but at around midnight on the US East Coast, it became increasingly clear Britain would be supporting “Brexit” by a roughly 52–48 percent margin. Per usual, the more cynical writers and pundits—no matter how contrived the task would be — would take the opportunity to take a story about a nationalistic British response to a pro-austerity EU, and make it about Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.

    • Private Prison CEO Unconcerned About Hillary Clinton’s Pledge to End His Industry

      After The Intercept revealed that the Clinton campaign had received campaign donations from private prison lobbyists, a number of activist groups confronted Clinton, leading her to announce that she would no longer accept the money and later declaring that “we should end private prisons and private detention centers.”

    • Thousands of Jeremy Corbyn supporters march on Parliament against Labour Party leadership challenge

      The Labour leader called on people to unite together to oppose racism but did not address the challenge to his leadership

    • The problem with the Corbyn strategy

      Corbyn’s uncompromising ‘anti-austerity’ stance has certainly tapped into some Labour members’ discomfort with the direction taken by their party in recent years. If these misgivings predated the 2008 fiscal crisis, the resulting austerity effectively brought to a head criticisms many had of New Labour.

    • Jeremy Hunt ‘highly likely’ to launch leadership bid – Spectator magazine

      Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is “highly likely” to launch a bid to succeed David Cameron as prime minister, the political editor of the Spectator magazine tweeted on Monday, without citing sources.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • SABC implosion: Staff threaten ‘blackout’ over censorship
    • WATCH: Lukhanyo Calata on SABC censorship

      SABC journalist Lukhanyo Calata says he is saddened by what he’s calling the disturbing direction being taken by his employer, the SABC.

      His father, Fort Calata, was a member of the so-called Cradock Four, who were killed exactly 31 years ago.

      “Today is quite an important day for me and my family because 31 years ago on June 27, 1985, my father and his three colleagues went from Cradock to Port Elizabeth and they never returned,” he said.

      “When I woke up today and I checked Twitter and saw that my former boss Jimi Matthews had resigned I just thought this was not what my father died for,” said Calata.

    • Opinion: Orlando tragedy reveals troubling censorship

      There were many proposed reasons, but the prevailing theory appeared to be the mods began deleting posts after finding out the killer was Muslim. That, combined with the fact the victims were part of the LGBT community, appeared to have caused mods to delete posts out of some fear of offending or appearing to be racist, xenophobic or homophobic rather than a duty to present the conversation as it is happening.

    • China to regulate search results following man’s death

      China has issued new regulations demanding search engines clearly identify paid search results, months after a terminally-ill cancer patient complained that he was misled by the giant search engine Baidu

    • German politicians, activists file complaint against Turkey’s Erdogan

      German lawmakers, rights activists and celebrities said on Monday they had filed a civil suit against Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and some of his aides for what they called “war crimes” in counter-terrorism operations against Kurdish militants.

      Turkish-German relations have been deteriorating lately over a resolution passed by the German parliament declaring the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide.

      Chancellor Angela Merkel now faces mounting domestic pressure to hold Erdogan accountable for human rights abuses after last year’s collapse of a ceasefire between Ankara and PKK militants seeking autonomy in Turkey’s main Kurdish southeast. Thousands have been killed in the renewed conflict.

    • Man who depicted Erdoğan as Gollum given suspended sentence

      A man who depicted Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as the Lord of the Rings character Gollum has been convicted of insulting the Turkish president and handed a suspended jail sentence.

      According to Turkish media reports, a court in the south-west province of Antalya on Thursday sentenced Rifat Çetin to a year in prison, suspended for five years. The court also stripped Cetin of his parental custody rights.

      Çetin posted an image on Facebook in 2014 in which he combined three pictures of Erdoğan with Gollum, the newspaper Hürriyet said.

      Çetin told another newspaper, the daily BirGün, that he planned to appeal against the verdict as Erdoğan had been prime minister, not president, when the image was posted.

    • Actor Fakhre Alam resigns as Sindh Censorship Board chief
    • Fakhr-e-Alam resigns as chairman Sindh censor board
    • Fakhr resigns as chairman Sindh Censor Board
    • Courts May Have Come to Udta Punjab’s Rescue, But Let’s Not Ignore Judicial Censorship of Cinema

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Nirej Sekhon on Illegal Searches, Jamila Michener on Expanding Voting Rights

      This week on CounterSpin: In her forceful dissent from a ruling on the admissibility of illegally obtained evidence, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision “implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be catalogued.” The defendant in Utah v. Strief is white, but the suspicionless stops at the case’s heart disproportionately affect black and brown and poor people, marginalized in media as elsewhere. The press are quoting Sotomayor’s words, but do they really hear the message? Nirej Sekhon is associate professor at Georgia State University College of Law. He’ll join us to discuss the ruling.

    • ‘Minority Communities Bear the Brunt of Police Abuses’

      From the media accolades for Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in a recent Supreme Court case involving the use of illegally obtained evidence, it’s almost unclear if media realized that the ruling represents a loss for her point of view. With a 5-3 decision in the case Utah v. Strief, the Court said that a police officer may detain someone without cause and run their identification, and, if they uncover a warrant, may arrest them and charge them with additional crimes, based on what they find in a search. Previously, the fact that the initial stop was illegal would mean evidence unearthed would be inadmissible. Sotomayor, Kagan and Ginsburg dissented, with Sotomayor especially powerfully noting the disproportionate impact the ruling will have on communities of color.

    • ‘It’s Amazing How Little These Issues of Unequal Access Come Up’
    • Congress: Protect Every American’s Right to Vote this November

      This year, we will hold the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act. Not coincidentally, 17 states will have new restrictions on voting in effect that were not in place during the last presidential election. Collectively, these states contain over 114 million people and have 189 votes in the Electoral College – about 70 percent of the votes needed to be elected president. Congress can take action now to strengthen voter protections that have been weakened by the Supreme Court to ensure that every American vote counts this November.

    • Digital Dystopia: Egyptian Civil Society At Risk

      Digital rights defenders are amongst those who have been targeted. In March’s Digital Citizen, a monthly review published by EFF and five other organizations, we’ve covered the judicial harassment of and travel bans imposed on Gamal Eid and Hossam Baghat, two prominent advocates whose organizations—ANHRI and EIPR—have been instrumental in the fight for human rights in Egypt. More recently, OTF fellow Wafa Ben Hassine published a paper that demonstrates how four Arab countries—including Egypt—use legal means to silence freedom of expression and its advocates online.

    • As Austin Struggles To Understand Life Without Uber & Lyft, DUI Arrests On The Rise

      A month ago, folks in Austin Texas voted against a proposition that Uber and Lyft supported, concerning a number of new rules that would be put on ride hailing operations. Given that, both companies immediately shut down operations in Austin — a city with over a million residents and only 900 cabs. In response, people are so desperate for rides that they’re seriously trying to recreate the Lyft/Uber experience by using a Facebook group where people can post their location, negotiate a fee, and have someone pick them up (something that seems a lot more dangerous than typical Uber/Lyft).

    • Erdogan: EU doesn’t want Turkey because ‘majority is Muslim’

      Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Europe doesn’t want his country to join the EU because the majority of the nation’s population is Muslim. He said his government will ask the public whether negotiations with Brussels should continue.

      “Europe, you don’t want us because the majority of our population are Muslim…we knew it but we tried to show our sincerity,” Erdogan said at a graduation ceremony in Istanbul on Wednesday, as quoted by Reuters.

    • Afghanistan’s Dwindling Sikh, Hindu Communities Flee New Abuses

      On a bright day in downtown Kabul, Jagtar Singh Laghmani was in his traditional herb shop when a man turned up, drew a knife and told him to convert to Islam or he would cut his throat. Bystanders and other shopkeepers saved his life.

      The incident earlier this month was the latest attack on a dwindling community of Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan, a deeply conservative Muslim country struggling with growing insecurity caused by an Islamist insurgency and economic challenges.

    • Dear Chief Justice John Roberts, Search and Seizure: Does Innocence Matter?

      The United States Constitution’s 4th amendment supposedly protects us from illegal search and seizure. This constitutional right against illegal search and seizure has been tested time and again in the highest court in America. Chief Justice John Roberts, who was nominated by President George W. Bush and a nominee whom then-Senator President Barack Obama voted against, is one of many pushing for an update to Rule 41. Roberts has submitted a letter to Mr. Paul Ryan describing the proposed change that any US Government Judge may “issue a warrant to use remote access to search electronic storage media and to seize or copy electronically stored information located within or outside that district.”

    • Berlin imam files complaint against teacher who insisted on handshake

      A conflict between an imam and a female teacher at a Berlin private school over a handshake has escalated into a legal complaint against the woman, German media outlet RBB24 reports.

      The preacher, Kerim Ucar, was initially called in for a conversation over his sons’ involvement in brawls at the Platanus School in the Berlin district of Pankow. The female teacher tried to greet the father with a handshake, but Ucar rejected the gesture citing religious reasons.

    • AFDI Muhammad Ads Roll Out on London Taxis Tomorrow

      After the Muslim mayor banned advertisements on buses and subways of bikini-clad women, what could be more appropriate (or needed) then our new ad campaign?

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Net neutrality advocates to FCC: Put the kibosh on internet freebies [iophk: "nasty title. These schemes are just cost shifting, penalizing the open Internet"]

      Representatives from Fight the Future, the Center for Media Justice and Free Press on Friday hand-delivered a 6-foot tall package containing 100,000 letters of complaint to the Federal Communications Commission. They ask the agency to take action against AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile and Verizon for violating the agency’s Open Internet order by offering so-called zero-rating service plans.

  • DRM

    • Researchers Crack ‘Social DRM’ EBook Watermarks

      Researchers have released a report dissecting the BooXtream ‘Social DRM’ eBook watermarking system. Inspired by publisher Verso who refused to remove the DRM from an Aaron Swartz book, the Institute for Biblio-Immunology responded by tearing down the privacy-busting system.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The Secret to the Incredible Wealth of Bill Gates

      This point may be simple and obvious, but it seems to have been lost on most of the people arguing about inequality. In these discussions we hear continual expressions of concern over how technology is behind the massive upward redistribution of income we have seen in the last four decades. This upward redistribution is usually treated as an unfortunate fact of nature. Even if we don’t like to see the rich continually get richer at the expense of the rest of society, what can we do, stop technology? A little serious thinking could go a long way.

      The story of Bill Gates’ copyright protection, along with patent protection for prescription drugs and all sorts of other things, are a big part of the story of inequality. The key issue is that these protections are created by the government. They don’t come from the technology. It is the protections that make some people very rich, not the technology.

      We grant patent and copyright monopolies in order to provide an incentive for innovation and creative work. It is arguable whether these mechanisms are the best way to provide these incentives. For example, in addition to making drugs very expensive, even when they would be cheap in a free market, patent protection also provides an enormous incentive for drug companies to misrepresent the safety and effectiveness of their drugs. But the key point for the inequality issue is that the strength and length of these monopolies is set by government policy.

    • Russia Centralizes State Power In The Field Of IP Rights

    • Trademarks

      • CafePress Takes Down T-Shirt Calling Donald Trump A Cheeto-Faced Shitgibbon, Saying It Violates Frito-Lay’s Trademark

        As I write this, it has over 6,000 retweets and over 7,000 likes. Not bad. Based on all of this, Jay Lender, a writer/director for SpongeBob SquarePants, Phineas and Ferb… and also his own movie, They’re Watching, created an image in the style of Shepard Fairey’s famous (and legally disputed) Obama Hope poster.

        [...]

        It’s not at all clear if Frito-Lay made this request or if it’s just CafePress worrying about future Frito-Lay concerns. Lender asked CafePress for clarification, and all they sent back was a link to Frito Lay’s corporate contact page, telling him to contact Frito Lay to ask for authorization, implying that Cafe Press made this decision on its own. But, really, there appears to be a ton of other merchandise hosted at CafePress that mentions Cheetos in some form or another, so if the company is suddenly concerned about trademark threats from Frito-Lay, it seems to be targeting rather selectively.

      • Registration of a trademark license: the result of the CJEU is reasonable, but what about the Court’s reasoning?

        In the best of circumstances, the law of licensing is the murky side of trademark law.

      • 800-pound Comodo tries to trademark upstart rival’s “Let’s Encrypt” name

        Comodo, the world’s biggest issuer of browser-trusted digital certificates for websites, has come under fire for registering trademarks containing the words “let’s encrypt,” a phrase that just happens to be the name of a nonprofit project that provides certificates for free.

        In a blog post, a Let’s Encrypt senior official said Comodo has filed applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office for at least three such trademarks, including “Let’s Encrypt,” “Let’s Encrypt with Comodo,” and “Comodo Let’s Encrypt.” Over the past few months, the nonprofit has repeatedly asked Comodo to abandon the applications, and Comodo has declined. Let’s Encrypt, which is the public face of the Internet Security Research Group, said it has been using the name since November 2014.

    • Copyrights

      • Judge Dismisses Movie Piracy Case, IP-Address Doesn’t Prove Anything

        In what’s believed to be a first of its kind ruling, a federal court in Oregon has dismissed a direct infringement complaint against an alleged movie pirate from the outset. According to the judge, linking an IP-address to a pirated download is not enough to prove direct copyright infringement.

      • Rightscorp Pressures ISPs to Hijack Pirates Browsers

        Piracy monetization firm Rightscorp is promoting its browser hijacking system to ISPs. In a proposal revealed by Internet provider RCN, Rightscorp suggests a gradual approach where pirating subscribers eventually have to pay a fine to regain Internet access.

      • From file-sharing to prison: A Megaupload programmer tells his story

        Soon after the domain was registered in Hong Kong, the now-defunct Megaupload.com grew into one of the world’s most popular file-sharing sites. At its peak, the site engaged nearly 50 million users a day and took up around four percent of the world’s Internet traffic. Users uploaded nearly 12 billion files overall.

      • Judge Calls Out Malibu Media For Its Attempt To Cut And Run When Faced With Challenge To Its Infringement Claims

        IP trolls are about 90% cardboard facade. They puff themselves up with blustery legal threats written on serious-looking legal letterhead, but it’s really no different than the defensive mechanisms of many creatures found on the lower end of the food chain. For most, the slightest of pushes back results in the whole charade collapsing.

        There’s a great future in speculative invoicing, said no one ever in any seminal coming-of-age, post-college disillusionment film. Just look at Prenda Law, which resorted to fraudulent behavior when its aggressive, but incompetent, trolling failed to pay the bills. And yet, nothing stops the trolls from trolling. The occasional speed bump surfaces, but trolls dismiss these rather than meet the challenge head on. They’re in it for settlements, not wins… and certainly not precedent.

      • If Extradited, How Might Kim Dotcom Be Treated in the US?

        More than four years after the Megaupload raids, Kim Dotcom continues to fight extradition to the United States. However, if that battle fails, how might he be treated by authorities there? Revelations from a previously jailed Megaupload programmer show that things could get pretty miserable.

06.27.16

Links 27/6/2016: Linux 4.7 RC 5, OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 Beta 2

Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The heartbeat of open source projects can be heard with GitHub data

    GitHub released charts last week that tell a story about the heartbeat of a few open source, giving insights into activity, productivity and collaboration of software development.

    Why are these important? Enterprises increasingly define software development as a top priority to gain competitive advantage or defend against disruption. They often turn to open source software because it is fast and agile. Enterprise IT decision makers should understand GitHub because it is the backbone of most open source projects.

  • 7 myths about open sourcing your company’s software

    Many companies benefit from open source, and countless companies have opted to open source components of their infrastructure (or even their bread and butter) in an effort to give back. However, there are a lot of misconceptions about what happens when you open up your business’ code and workflows to the public, and as companies delve into how to apply open principles within their organization, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Here are some common misconceptions about what happens when you open source your code.

  • Open source software has to sell user experience

    Open source software that is to succeed in this new world is going to have to be better than anything else. You can’t sell just openness anymore; it is added value, not a unique selling point. Open source software now has to sell user experience. In a way it is a simpler metric, and probably one that is going to change open source forever—for the better.

  • Top 7 open source business intelligence and reporting tools

    In this article, I review some of the top open source business intelligence (BI) and reporting tools. In economies where the role of big data and open data are ever-increasing, where do we turn in order to have our data analysed and presented in a precise and readable format? This list covers tools which help to solve this problem. Two years ago I wrote about the top three. In this article, I will expand that list with a few more tools that were suggested by our readers.

    Note that this list is not exhaustive, and it is a mix of both business intelligence and reporting tools.

  • Six free open source alternatives to Windows 10

    Windows 10 has generally be viewed as a welcome successor to Windows 8, both by businesses and individuals. However it has also come under scrutiny from users that are concerned about data privacy. So why not opt for a free Windows 10 alternative?

    We’ve listed open source Windows 10 alternatives based on features and user reviews. Here’s some of the best.

  • Obsidian Systems brings open source monitoring with Icinga
  • Obsidian offers Open Source monitoring with Icinga

    Obsidian Systems is now the exclusive African reseller partner for Icinga, a scalable and extensive monitoring system that checks the availability of resources, notifies of outages and provides business intelligence data.

  • Open source connects the dots in the digital transformation

    Developments in cloud, big data, analytics, and social and mobile technologies are all happening to a large extent because the underlying technology is evolving quickly, and Red Hat believes that this is happening because a lot of it is based on open source and is developed collaboratively between multiple communities and companies. Much of the cloud is based on Linux and open source based technologies, consequently open source is a key driving force in these changes and the rapid innovation cycles.

  • Lime hits crowdfunding target, a milestone in open source mobile hardware

    UK RF specialist Lime Microsystems has raised almost $624,000 in a crowdfunding campaign to bring its LimeSDR software defined radio to market, and will now begin production of the radios, which enable open source, programmable ‘network in a box’ devices for low cost coverage, especially in rural or temporary networks.

  • Nokia is traditional telecoms’ fifth column, embracing open source disruption

    One of the most important trends in the current reinvention of the mobile network is the introduction of open source to infrastructure hardware. Open source processes have been creeping into this formerly tightly closed world in software (from Android to carrier Linux) and in devices, but the network equipment itself remained the preserve of proprietary vendors and formal standards bodies. Now that is changing. From small innovators like Lime Microsystems (see separate item), to entrenched guardians of the old ways, like Nokia, suppliers are finding new ways to work with open source.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Pushes Online Privacy with New Open Source Funding Awards

        Mozilla is funneling yet more money into the open source ecosystem. This week, the organization best known for the Firefox Web browser announced an award of $385,000 to fund eight open source projects, including several important online privacy platforms.

      • Mozilla to Rebrand Itself, and You’re Invited to Help

        Mozilla has been involved in reinventing itself for some time now. Known for the venerable Firefox browser, it has made forays into several other open source arenas, and was even known for its dalliance with the smartphone business. The company is currently involved in a broad rebranding effort, and the way it is going about rebranding comes directly from the open source playbook.

      • “Branding without walls”: Mozilla’s open-source rebrand

        Internet advocacy and software group Mozilla is rebranding with help from johnson banks. In an unusual move, the company has decided to document the process online – from strategy and concept development to refinement – inviting its community to help shape its new positioning

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.1.4 Released with Over 130 Fixes

      The first release candidate represented 123 fixes. Some include a fix for a crash in Impress when setting a background image. This occurred with several popular formats in Windows and Linux. Caolán McNamara submitted the patches to fix this in the 5.1 and 5.2 branches. David Tardon fixed a bug where certain presentations hung Impress for extended periods to indefinitely by checking for preconditions earlier. Laurent Balland-Poirier submitted the patches to fix a user-defined cell misinterpretation when using semicolon inside quotes.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open source. Open science. Open Ocean. Oceanography for Everyone and the OpenCTD

      Nearly four years ago, Kersey Sturdivant and I launched a bold, ambitious, and, frankly, naive crowdfunding initiative to build the first low-cost, open-source CTD, a core scientific instrument that measures salinity, temperature, and depth in a water column. It was a dream born from the frustration of declining science funding, the expense of scientific equipment, and the promise of the Maker movement. After thousands of hours spent learning the skills necessary to build these devices, hundreds of conversations with experts, collaborators, and potential users around the world, dozens of iterations (some transformed into full prototypes, others that exist solely as software), and one research cruise on Lake Superior to test the housing and depth and temperature probes, the OpenCTD has arrived.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

  • Programming/Development

    • PHP 7.1 Alpha 2 Released

      Succeeding the PHP 7.1 Alpha release that happened earlier this month is now the second alpha build of this significant update to the PHP programming language.

    • 4 languages poised to out-Python Python

      Nothing lasts forever — including programming languages. What seems like the future of computing today may be tomorrow’s footnote, whether deserved or undeserved.

      Python, currently riding high on the list of languages to know, seems like a candidate for near-immortality at this point. But other languages are showing that they share Python’s strengths: convenient to program in, decked out with powerful ways to perform math and science work, arrayed with a huge number of convenient third-party libraries.

    • ECMAScript 2016: The Latest Version Of JavaScript Language Has Arrived

Leftovers

06.26.16

Links 26/6/2016: IceCat 38.8.0, Wine 1.9.13

Posted in News Roundup at 2:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Q&A with Tracy Hinds: Improving Education and Diversity at Node.js

    To increase developer support and diversity in the Node.js open source community, the Node.js Foundation earlier this year brought in Tracy Hinds to be its Education Community Manager. She is charged with creating a certification program for Node.js, increasing diversity, and improving project documentation, among other things.

  • Startup Snyk Aims to Lockdown Open Source Code in Real Time

    Eight months ago, without a lot of fanfare, a startup company called Snyk, with roots in London and Israel, started talking about its unique focus on helping developers keep open source code secure. Specifically, Snyk monitors vulnerabilities and dependencies in open source code and integrates securing open source into common developer workflows. The bottom line is that code vulnerabilities get checked in real-time, rather than getting focused on during official audits.

    Now, Snyk is coming out of beta with its tools, and releasing some metrics on how successful it has been at finding probems and patching them.

  • Best Open Source Software for Windows 10
  • Open Source Replacements for Windows XP
  • Open Source Business Intelligence Software [Ed: rather old]
  • Open Source Software: Top Sites
  • A DevOps dashboard for all: Capital One’s Hygieia project offers powerful open source resource

    When do you know a technology or process has reached the peak of its hype cycle and crossed over to the mainstream? When there’s an executive dashboard to track key performance indicators.

    US-based financial services company Capital One birthed an open source project that provides a dashboard for DevOps projects. The project, called Hygieia, is notable for several reasons.

  • EU Researchers Are Making a Tool That Fact-Checks Tweets

    Back when people were still using the term “Web 2.0,” everyone was excited about Twitter‘s impact on journalism. After all, anyone could use it. Maybe it could crowd-source journalism starting from the exact moment a newsworthy event happened across the globe!

  • A team of researchers from 7 countries is building an open-source tool to help verify claims on Twitter

    Social media newsgathering and verification are no longer novel practices in the newsroom. But even if publishers now have a person or a team of reporters tasked with monitoring conversations on these platforms and verifying their accuracy, there have still been instances of fake rumours or misrepresented facts spreading online when news breaks.

    A team of researchers, developers and journalists is hoping to solve this through the EU-funded project Pheme, an open-source dashboard they are currently building to help newsrooms detect, track and verify facts and claims the moment they start spreading on Twitter.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Open Source NFV Part Four: Open Source MANO

      Defined in ETSI ISG NFV architecture, MANO (Management and Network Orchestration) is a layer — a combination of multiple functional entities — that manages and orchestrates the cloud infrastructure, resources and services. It is comprised of, mainly, three different entities — NFV Orchestrator, VNF Manager and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM). The figure below highlights the MANO part of the ETSI NFV architecture.

    • After the hype: Where containers make sense for IT organizations

      Container software and its related technologies are on fire, winning the hearts and minds of thousands of developers and catching the attention of hundreds of enterprises, as evidenced by the huge number of attendees at this week’s DockerCon 2016 event.

      The big tech companies are going all in. Google, IBM, Microsoft and many others were out in full force at DockerCon, scrambling to demonstrate how they’re investing in and supporting containers. Recent surveys indicate that container adoption is surging, with legions of users reporting they’re ready to take the next step and move from testing to production. Such is the popularity of containers that SiliconANGLE founder and theCUBE host John Furrier was prompted to proclaim that, thanks to containers, “DevOps is now mainstream.” That will change the game for those who invest in containers while causing “a world of hurt” for those who have yet to adapt, Furrier said.

    • Is Apstra SDN? Same idea, different angle

      The company’s product, called Apstra Operating System (AOS), takes policies based on the enterprise’s intent and automatically translates them into settings on network devices from multiple vendors. When the IT department wants to add a new component to the data center, AOS is designed to figure out what needed changes would flow from that addition and carry them out.

      The distributed OS is vendor-agnostic. It will work with devices from Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Juniper Networks, Cumulus Networks, the Open Compute Project and others.

    • MapR Launches New Partner Program for Open Source Data Analytics

      Converged data vendor MapR has launched a new global partner program for resellers and distributors to leverage the company’s integrated data storage, processing and analytics platform.

    • A Seamless Monitoring System for Apache Mesos Clusters
    • All Marathons Need a Runner. Introducing Pheidippides

      Activision Publishing, a computer games publisher, uses a Mesos-based platform to manage vast quantities of data collected from players to automate much of the gameplay behavior. To address a critical configuration management problem, James Humphrey and John Dennison built a rather elegant solution that puts all configurations in a single place, and named it Pheidippides.

    • New Tools and Techniques for Managing and Monitoring Mesos

      The platform includes a large number of tools including Logstash, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, and Kibana.

    • BlueData Can Run Hadoop on AWS, Leave Data on Premises

      We’ve been watching the Big Data space pick up momentum this year, and Big Data as a Service is one of the most interesting new branches of this trend to follow. In a new development in this space, BlueData, provider of a leading Big-Data-as-a-Service software platform, has announced that the enterprise edition of its BlueData EPIC software will run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds.

      Essentially, users can now run their cloud and computing applications and services in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) instance while keeping data on-premises, which is required for some companies in the European Union.

  • CMS

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 11 Alpha 1 — New Features Coming To This Open Source OS

      For those unfamiliar with FreeBSD, it is considered one of the few operating systems left to be true UNIX. It is a direct descendant of the BELL/AT&T labs UNIX. Much of the software available for Linux is also available for FreeBSD as well, including Gnome and KDE desktop environments and much more user and server software. Despite the amount of software available, it is often thought of as an obscure system with a rather small software library. This is simply

    • FreeBSD 11.0 Alpha 5 Released, Schedule So Far Going On Track

      The fifth alpha release of the huge FreeBSD 11.0 operating system update is now available for testing.

      FreeBSD 11.0 is bringing updated KMS drivers, Linux binary compatibility layer improvements, UEFI improvements, Bhyve virtualization improvements, and a wide range of other enhancements outlined via the in-progress release notes.

    • DragonFly’s HAMMER2 File-System Sees Some Improvements

      The HAMMER2 file-system is going on four years in development by the DragonFlyBSD crew, namely by its founder Matthew Dillon. It’s still maturing and taking longer than anticipated, but this is yet another open-source file-system.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • North American Cities Are Slow To Adopt Open Source Software

      Government IT departments are often one of the last places that politicians or the general public look to when trying to squeeze more out of the limited public purse. This is not likely intentional. Elected officials and their constituents understand when roads and bridges are in need of repair. But the IT department is often just seen as a bunch of people in a far off building who make desktops work so that employees at the municipality can get their work done.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • In-demand dev skills, understanding licensing, and more open source news

    • Open Access/Content

      • Higher ed systems expanding access to open-source materials

        Open-source learning technology is at the core of higher education for institutions that want to reach broader audiences with very strict ideas about how convenient learning should be. But developing these initiatives does not happen quickly or easily. It requires strong leadership in information technology, expertise to determine which solutions work best for a campus, and a financial commitment to making sure the technology is sustainable.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Proxmark Pro Proxmark3 Standalone Open Source RFID Tester (video)

        Rysc Corp has unveiled a new open source board in the form of the Proxmark Pro which now offers a true standalone client and RFID test instrument, check out the video below to learn more.

        The Proxmark Pro will feature an FPGA with 5 times the logic cells of the Proxmark3 and will remove the need to switch between HF and LF bit streams during operation, to use developers.

  • Programming/Development

    • Python gains functional programming syntax via Coconut

      Many Python fans have longed for the language to adopt functional programming features. Now they can get those features without having to switch to a new Python implementation.

      Coconut, a newly developed open source dialect of Python, provides new syntax for using features found in functional languages like Haskell and Scala. Programs written in Coconut compile directly to vanilla Python, so they can be run on whatever Python interpreter is already in use.

    • ECMAScript 2016: New Version of the JavaScript Language Released

      Ecma International, the organization in charge of managing the ECMASCript standard, has published the most recent version of the JavaScript language.

      ECMAScript 2016, or JavaScript 2016, is the first release in the organization’s new release schedule that it announced in 2015, when it promised to provide yearly updates to the JS standard instead of updates years apart.

    • PowerNex: A Kernel Written In The D Programming Language
    • ErupteD Brings Vulkan To The D Programming Language

      The D programming language is just the latest to have support for Vulkan alongside C++, Rust (via Vulkano, if you missed that project), Go, and many other modern languages getting bindings for this Khronos Group high performance graphics API. Should you not be familiar with the D language, see Wikipedia.

Leftovers

  • Printing At Night

    I haven’t touched a Mac in over a decade but one came to my home yesterday in the hands of a visitor. A party was being planned and a document was produced on the Mac. It should have been simple to print over my LAN. I allow all comers. Somehow, it didn’t work. The printer was seen but no driver could be found and there was the “locked” icon beside it. The last time I was in a school that used Mac OS (Pre UNIXy version) printing kept failing to a bog standard HP Laserjet printer so the Macs e-mailed a Mac which had been liberated by me to GNU/Linux. A tech arrived eventually and made the Macs print again but within an hour of his departure printing failed again. Besides connectivity, the Macs butchered every file with a MacOS header of some kind which I had to strip off… MacOS/X is apparently much more sane.

  • Meanwhile, In An Alternate Universe, M$ Defines Reality

    The slaves of Microsoft accept that upgrading a motherboard is “essentially building a new PC”.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Linux Kernel 4.6.3 Has Multiple Networking Improvements, Better SPARC Support

      Today, June 24, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the general availability of the third maintenance release for the Linux 4.6 kernel series.

      Linux kernel 4.6.3 is here two weeks after the release of the second maintenance update in the series, Linux kernel 4.6.2, to change a total of 88 files, with 1302 insertions and 967 deletions. Unfortunately, very few GNU/Linux distributions have adopted the Linux 4.6 series, despite the fact that Greg Kroah-Hartman urged everyone to move to this most advanced kernel branch as soon as possible from Linux 4.5, which reached end of life.

    • Teardrop Attack: What Is It And How Does It Work?

      In Teardrop Attack, fragmented packets that are sent in the to the target machine, are buggy in nature and the victim’s machine is unable to reassemble those packets due to the bug in the TCP/IP fragmentation.

    • Updating code can mean fewer security headaches

      Organizations with high rates of code deployments spend half as much time fixing security issues as organizations without such frequent code updates, according to a newly released study.

      In its latest annual state-of-the-developer report, Devops software provider Puppet found that by better integrating security objectives into daily work, teams in “high-performing organizations” build more secure systems. The report, which surveyed 4,600 technical professionals worldwide, defines high IT performers as offering on-demand, multiple code deploys per day, with lead times for changes of less than one hour. Puppet has been publishing its annual report for five years.

    • Over half of world’s top domains weak against email spoofing

      Over half of the world’s most popular online services have misconfigured servers which could place users at risk from spoof emails, researchers have warned.

      According to Swedish cybersecurity firm Detectify, poor authentication processes and configuration settings in servers belonging to hundreds of major online domains are could put users at risk of legitimate-looking phishing campaigns and fraudulent emails.

    • Friday’s security updates
    • A couple of unpleasant local kernel vulnerabilities

      As part of a kernel fuzzing project by myself and my colleague Tim Newsham, we are disclosing two vulnerabilities which have been assigned CVEs. Full details of the fuzzing project (with analysis of the vulnerabilities) will be released next week.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Emails Show Hillary Clinton’s Email Server Was A Massive Security Headache, Set Up To Route Around FOIA Requests

      While trial-and-error is generally useful when solving connection problems, the implication is undeniable: to make Clinton’s private, insecure email server connect with the State Department’s, it had to — at least temporarily — lower itself to Clinton’s security level. The other workaround — USE A DAMN STATE DEPARTMENT EMAIL ADDRESS — was seriously discussed.

      This latest stack of emails also exposed other interesting things… like the fact that Clinton’s private email server was attacked multiple times in one day, resulting in staffers taking it offline in an attempt to prevent a breach.

    • Post Gag Order, Lavabit Founder Reveals Non-Secret That Feds Were After Ed Snowden’s Emails

      Want some unsurprising news? Apparently a three year gag order has just lapsed, allowing Ladar Levison, the founder and former operator of Lavabit, the secure email service Ed Snowden famously used, to finally say that yes, the feds asked him to turn over his encryption key in order to access Ed Snowden’s emails.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Democrats Ignore Urgency Of Climate Crisis, Vote Against Adding Fracking Ban To Platform

      Democrats appointed to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee by Hillary Clinton and the party’s chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, defeated a ban on fracking on June 24.

      Former U.S. Representative Howard Berman, American Federation of State, County, and Muncipal Employees executive assistant to the president, Paul Booth, former White House Energy and Climate Change Policy director Carol Browner, Ohio State Representative Alicia Reece, former State Department official Wendy Sherman, and Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden all raised their hands to prevent a moratorium from becoming a part of the platform.

      Those who voted against the ban were met with a cry of, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” from the audience.

  • Finance

    • European Parliament to Britain: Don’t let the door hit you as you Leave

      The leaders of three of the European Parliament’s largest groups have called for exit talks with Britain to begin immediately, and Members of Parliament are likely to vote on a resolution on the matter at a voting session on Tuesday, sources told POLITICO.

    • The British are frantically Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

      The whole world is reeling after a milestone referendum in Britain to leave the European Union. And although leaders of the campaign to exit Europe are crowing over their victory, it seems many Britons may not even know what they had actually voted for.

      Awakening to a stock market plunge and a precipitous decline in the value of the pound that Britain hasn’t seen in more than 30 years, voters now face a series of economic shocks that analysts say will only worsen before they improve. The consequences of the leave vote will be felt worldwide, even here in the United States, and some British voters say they now regret casting a ballot in favor of Brexit.

    • British Lose Right to Claim That Americans Are Dumber

      Across the United Kingdom on Friday, Britons mourned their long-cherished right to claim that Americans were significantly dumber than they are.

      Luxuriating in the superiority of their intellect over Americans’ has long been a favorite pastime in Britain, surpassing in popularity such games as cricket, darts, and snooker.

    • Brexit could be Scotland’s ticket into the EU as an independent state

      In times like these, political journalists like me tend to reach for the collected works of WB Yeats. “All changed, changed utterly,” he wrote after Ireland’s Easter rebellion, and those words could not be more appropriate as a description of Scottish politics in the wake of yesterday’s Brexit vote. The Yeats poem captured a decisive moment that altered everything in its wake; for Scotland that moment was the 2014 independence referendum.

    • Blimey, it is Brexit!

      A striking victory for what I dubbed ‘Maggyism’ has taken place. It seeks the “liberation” of Europe from a ‘super-state’, not isolation. It might even succeed, this being a time of surprise, as the EU is struggling with a dysfunctional currency and has other electorates already enflamed by its rigid policies and lack of democracy. In England for sure, under the banner of Maggyism’s alluring yet chilling command to ‘take back control’, a new form of populist Toryism will be tested. The challenge for the left across England will go deep and it will have to discard its attachment to the ruins of Labourism if it is to recover.

    • Oil prices plunge 5 percent as Britain votes to leave EU

      Oil prices settled 5 percent lower on Friday after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union spurred massive risk aversion and a rally in safe havens like the U.S. dollar that threatened to cut short a three-month-long recovery in global oil markets.

      Financial markets have been worried for months about what a British exit from the European Union, dubbed widely as ‘Brexit,’ would mean for Europe’s future, but were clearly not fully factoring in the risk of a ‘leave’ vote.

    • Five legal points about the Leave victory
    • Reality Check: ‘Do I need a new passport?’ and other Brexit questions

      A Reality Check reader gets in touch to ask about what happens to his Italian wife. “My wife has lived and worked in the UK for 15 years having come over from Sardinia, Italy. We got married in March of this year.”

      It seems unlikely that your wife will be forced to return to Italy – nobody has suggested there will be deportations of people already living and working in the UK.

      If there were to be problems, she may be eligible to apply for British citizenship as she is married to a British citizen and has been in the country for more than three years.

    • DisUnited Kingdom

      This is a man-made disaster. The EU is a mess but it is fixable. Breaking up the UK will be a bigger mess and it isn’t fixable.

    • Brexit won the vote, but for now we remain in the EU

      The most significant announcement David Cameron made this morning was not that he plans to resign in October. It was that he will not be triggering article 50 of the Lisbon treaty in the meantime. When to “start the formal and legal process of leaving the EU” would be a matter for the new prime minister, he said.

    • Petition for London independence signed by thousands after Brexit vote

      A petition calling for Sadiq Khan to declare London an independent state after the UK voted to quit the EU has been signed by thousands of people.

      The petition’s organiser James O’Malley, said the capital was “a world city” which should “remain at the heart of Europe”.

      Nearly 60% of people in the capital backed the Remain campaign, in stark contrast to most of the country.

    • Post-Brexit – The What Now?

      Out of 46,500,001 electorate 17,410,742 voted to leave, which is a mere 37.4% or just over a third.

    • To mitigate poverty, Y Combinator set to launch minimum income plan

      Earlier this month, Y Combinator, the famed Silicon Valley incubator dropped a bombshell: it had selected this city to be the home of its new “Basic Income” pilot project, to start later this year.

      The idea is pretty simple. Give some people a small amount of money per month, no strings attached, for a year, and see what happens. With any luck, people will use it to lift themselves out of poverty.

      In this case, as Matt Krisiloff of Y Combinator Research (YCR) told Ars, that means spending about $1.5 million over the course of a year to study the distribution of “$1,500 or $2,000″ per month to “30 to 50″ people. There will also be a similar-sized control group that gets nothing. The project is set to start before the end of 2016.

    • America’s national priorities: Police thuggery, broken schools, and the ‘wages of whiteness’

      A budget is a statement of priorities and values. In a political community, a budget also prioritizes the interests of some individuals and groups over those of others.

      For example, the city of Chicago has spent more than $ 500 million since 2014 in literal blood money for the victims of police brutality. Collectively, the 10 largest American cities have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars to settle police misconduct cases during the same time period.

      These sums of money are the macro-level reflections of individual tragedies and needless deaths that include names such as Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, and Rekia Boyd.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Republican delegate sues to avoid voting for Donald Trump at convention

      One of Virginia’s delegates to the Republican National Convention has filed a federal lawsuit in an effort to avoid voting for presumptive nominee Donald Trump at the party convention next month.

      The delegate, Carroll Correll Jr of Winchester, Virginia, argued in the suit that being forced to vote against his conscience was a violation of his constitutional rights.

    • Osborne Told LBC Last Week He Had No Plan For Brexit

      The Chancellor told LBC earlier this week that he has no plan for the UK economy should the nation vote to leave the European Union.

      He said: “Britain does not have a plan for Brexit. It’s not for me to come up with [Leave's] plan.

      “It wouldn’t just be when we left in two years time that the economic hit would come,” said Osborne. “It would start to come this coming Friday.

      “That’s when the uncertainty would start.”

      Iain says that means he shouldn’t stay in his job.

      Speaking on Britain Decides, LBC’s results show, Iain said: “As far as I’m concerned – and I like the man and have a lot of respect for him – but his credibility has to be shot after this.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • New Service Sends Summaries of Your Social Media to Landlords, Employers to ‘Assess’ You

      Here’s a shout out to all of you who said “If I’ve got nothing to hide I’ve got nothing to fear” after the Snowden revelations. And this little gem deals only with publicly available information about you. Imagine what it’s like when it gets into the good stuff you think is private.

      An Orwellian startup called Tenant Assured will to take a deep dive into your social media, including chats, check-ins, how many times you’ve posted words like pregnant, wasted, busted, no money, broke, moving back in with the parents, weed, or loan, and deliver to potential landlords and employers a “personality score.”

    • Judge Says FBI Can Hack Computers Without A Warrant Because Computer Users Get Hacked All The Time

      The FBI’s use of a Network Investigative Technique (NIT) to obtain info from the computers of visitors to a seized child porn site has run into all sorts of problems. The biggest problem in most of the cases is that the use of a single warrant issued in Virginia to perform searches of computers all over the nation violated the jurisdictional limits set down by Rule 41(b). Not coincidentally, the FBI is hoping the changes to Rule 41 the DOJ submitted last year will be codified by the end of 2016, in large part because it removes the stipulation that limits searches to the area overseen by the magistrate judge signing the warrant.

      For defendant Edward Matish, the limits of Rule 41 don’t apply. He resides in the jurisdiction where the warrant was signed. He had challenged the veracity of the data obtained by the NIT, pushing the theory that the FBI’s unexamined NIT was insecure (data obtained from targets was sent back to the FBI in unencrypted form) and info could have been altered in transit.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • OECD Ministerial On Internet Wraps Up: Openness A Concern

      The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) should not wait 8 or 10 years before its next Internet Ministerial, said OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria at the closing session in Cancun Mexico yesterday. Gurria called for a faster pace for government and regulators to adapt to the digital markets. Better data on the data economy will help, as reflected in the new Cancun Declaration.

    • Tell Europe’s regulators: Net neutrality isn’t just for the US and India!

      Net neutrality exists when Internet service providers (ISPs) must allow equal access to everything on the Web, rather than favoring some sites over others. It’s a bedrock condition for Internet freedom, but ISPs generally oppose it because it prevents them from charging companies extra for privileged access to the network — making a video from one Web site load faster than video on other sites, for example.

  • DRM

    • Oculus reverses course, dumps its VR headset-checking DRM

      The Oculus team has reversed course on one of its most unpopular decisions since launching the Rift VR headset in April: headset-specific DRM. After weeks of playing cat-and-mouse to block the “Revive” workaround that translated the VR calls of Oculus games to work smoothly and seamlessly inside of the rival HTC Vive, Oculus quietly updated its hardware-specific runtime on Friday and removed all traces of that controversial DRM.

    • Oculus Reverses DRM Course After Public Backlash

      Weeks back, Karl Bode wrote about the curious position Oculus Rift had taken in updating its software to include system-checking DRM. VR headset technology and game development, experiencing the first serious attempt at maturity in years, needs an open ecosystem in which to develop. What this DRM essentially did was remove the ability for games designed to run on the Rift from running on any other VR headset, with a specific targeting of community-built workarounds like Revive, which allowed HTC Vive owners to get Rift games running on that headset. Oculus, it should be noted, didn’t announce the DRM aspect of the update; it just spit out the update and the public suddenly learned that programs like Revive no longer worked.

      The backlash, to put it mildly, was swift and severe. Oculus having been acquired by Facebook likely didn’t help what were already negative perceptions, supercharging the outcry with allegations of the kind of protectionism and the lack of care for the public that Facebook has enjoyed for roughly ever. Still, many saw the whole thing as peons screaming at a feudal lord: Oculus would simply ignore the whole thing. Just weeks ago, in fact, Oculus was working journalists at E3 in defense of the DRM.

    • Sony agrees to pay millions for removing Linux support from the PlayStation 3
    • Sony settles with PS3 owners over Linux lawsuit

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Sequencing the future of IP in genomics [Ed: Bristows cannot see the issue with patents on genomics yet?]

      Genomic technology has rapidly created a multi-billion dollar growth industry. With life sciences companies scrambling in US and European courts for a share of the lucrative market, in-house IP counsel should start preparing for the next wave of IP litigation, explain Dominic Adair and Annsley Merelle Ward

    • Key amendments to Russian patent legislation

      Federal Law No 35-FZ of March 12 2014 introduced several substantial amendments into Part IV of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation which regulates intellectual property. Some of the amendments came into force on October 1 2014, and others did so on January 1 2015. We provide a review of the key amendments that involve patents.

    • Trademarks

      • Dweezil Zappa Renames His Tour Again: Dweezil Zappa Plays Whatever The F@%k He Wants; The Cease & Desist Tour

        Oh boy. A few weeks back, we wrote about the absolutely ridiculous story in which the four children of Frank Zappa appear to be fighting over the Zappa name. The story is somewhat complex and involved and is actually somewhat more nuanced than the unfortunately-all-too-typical “heirs of famous artist fight over splitting up the proceeds of that artist’s legacy.” In that original article, we noted that the dispute seemed to focus on two specific claims: first that the Zappa Family Trust (run by Ahmet and Diva, but to which all four children are beneficiaries) had a trademark on the tour name “Zappa Plays Zappa,” under which Dweezil Zappa had toured for years. After some fairly public back and forth online, it became clear that there was an underlying dispute that had simmered for years here: Frank’s wife Gail, who had controlled the ZFT, had trademarked Zappa Plays Zappa and charged Dweezil to use it, but had (according to Dweezil) then reneged on an agreement to share the proceeds from
        merchandise sales. Ahmet insisted that he’d allow Dweezil to continue to use the name for just $1, but it didn’t seem that there was any interest in clearing up the older dispute about merch sales, or to allow Dweezil to get some of the proceeds from ongoing merch sales.

      • Is it safe to bring abandoned brands back to life?

        What trade mark issues arise with the resurrection of zombie brands? Carrie Bradley and Tony Dylan-Hyde examine the position in Europe and the United States

      • Super Slimey: Comodo Tries To Trademark ‘Let’s Encrypt’ [Updated]

        Almost two years ago, we excitedly wrote about the announcement behind Let’s Encrypt, a free certificate authority that was focused on dramatically lowering the hurdles towards protecting much more of the internet with HTTPS encrypted connections. It took a while to launch, but it finally did and people have been gobbling up those certificates at a rapid rate and getting more and more of the web encrypted. This is a good thing.

        [...]

        Update: And… of course, after this goes public, Comodo suddenly backs down. Of course that doesn’t explain why it refused to do so when asked months ago.

    • Copyrights

      • A Bug in Chrome Makes It Easy to Pirate Movies

        For years Hollywood has waged a war on piracy, using digital rights management technologies to fight bootleggers who illegally copy movies and distribute them. For just as long, hackers have found ways to bypass these protections. Now two security researchers have found a new way, using a vulnerability in the system Google uses to stream media through its Chrome browser. They say people could exploit the flaw to save illegal copies of movies they stream on Chrome using sites like Netflix or Amazon Prime.

      • As CBS/Paramount Continue Lawsuit Over Fan Film, It Releases Ridiculous & Impossible ‘Fan Film Guidelines’

        We’ve been covering the still going lawsuit by CBS and Paramount against Axanar Productions for making a crowdfunded fan film that they claim is infringing because it’s looking pretty good. Things got a little weird last month when the producer of the latest Star Trek film, JJ Abrams, and its director, Justin Lin, basically leaked a bit of news saying that after they had gone to Paramount, the studio was going to end the lawsuit. At the time, Paramount said that it was in “settlement discussions” and that it was “also working on a set of fan film guidelines.”

        We pointed out that we were concerned about what those guidelines might entail, and worried that they would undermine fair use. In the meantime, as settlement talks continued, the case moved forward. I’m still a little surprised that the two sides didn’t ask the court for more time to continue settlement talks, as that’s not that uncommon, and it’s something that a judge often is willing to grant if it looks like the two sides in a dispute can come to an agreement. But, without that, the case has continued to move forward with ongoing filings from each side.

06.24.16

Links 24/6/2016: Xen Project 4.7, Cinnamon 3.0.6

Posted in News Roundup at 6:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Coach of world 1500m champion arrested as part of EPO probe released but forfeits passport as investigation continues

      Somalian coach Jama Aden and two other detainees has been instructed to report to court once a month and have had their passports forfeited after being released by police as an investigation into the alleged doping of athletes continues in Spain.

      A Moroccan physiotherapist, who was also arrested as part of the initial operation on Monday (June 20), and Qatari 800 metres runner Musaeb Balla were placed under the same conditions by a judge.

      The operation had been carried out by police, in collaboration with the Spanish Anti-Doping Agency (AEPSAD) and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), at a hotel where the Somali coach was staying with his training group.

    • Nigel Farage: £350 million pledge to fund the NHS was ‘a mistake’

      Nigel Farage has admitted that it was a “mistake” to promise that £350million a week would be spent on the NHS if the UK backed a Brexit vote.

      Speaking just an hour after the Leave vote was confirmed the Ukip leader said the money could not be guaranteed and claimed he would never have made the promise in the first place.

    • EU referendum: Nigel Farage disowns Vote Leave ‘£350m for the NHS’ pledge hours after result

      Nigel Farage has disowned a pledge to spend £350 million of European Union cash on the NHS after Brexit.

      The Ukip leader was asked on ITV’s Good Morning Britain programme whether he would guarantee that the money pledged for the health service during the campaign would now be spent on it.

    • Waukesha gets permission to draw water from Lake Michigan

      The governors of the eight U.S. states surrounding the Great Lakes, including Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, today in Chicago unanimously approved diverting Lake Michigan water to supply a Wisconsin community just outside the Great Lakes basin — but only with conditions, including that water withdrawn must be treated and returned to the basin.

      The controversial decision to allow Waukesha, Wis., access to Lake Michigan water marks the first test case of the Great Lakes Compact, an agreement ratified by the lake states in 2008 to protect the Great Lakes from large-scale water diversions out of the Great Lakes basin.

    • This US City’s Move to Divert Great Lakes Drinking Water Is Just the Beginning

      The drinking water of Waukesha, Wisconsin, is contaminated. On Tuesday, the suburban city won its 13-year-long-bid to divert water from the Great Lakes, by way of Lake Michigan, to appease its thirsty inhabitants. Environmentalists are worried the diversion will have a devastating impact on the lakes that so many people rely on—and critics say it could pave the way for similar requests.

      It’s just the beginning of what many worry will be growing fights over who has the right to clean drinking water from the Great Lakes.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Armed police at scene of Germany cinema shooting

      An armed man has reportedly been shot dead by police officers after storming a cinema complex in Viernheim, in Germany’s Hesse region. The man reportedly fired into the air as he entered the cinema and is said to have taken hostages, all of whom have escaped uninjured

    • Not the Chilcot Report

      It was an aggressive war on the basis of lies, for which people still die today, all over the world.

    • Colombia and Farc rebels sign historic ceasefire deal to end 50-year conflict

      Final peace deal will require approval in referendum but formal cessation of hostilities and Farc’s acceptance of disarmament are key steps toward resolution

    • Pakistan Mourns Sufi Singer Amjad Sabri After He Was Shot Dead in Karachi

      The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for the assassination

      Thousands of people in Pakistan mourned the death of one of the country’s most famous musicians, Amjad Sabri, on Thursday, a day after he was shot dead by armed assailants in broad daylight in the city of Karachi.

    • Amjad Sabri: Pakistanis mourn singer killed by Taliban

      Pakistan is mourning one of its most famous singers, Amjad Sabri, who was shot dead in Karachi by militants.

      Thousands paid their respects, throwing rose petals over an ambulance carrying his coffin. A faction of the Pakistan Taliban claimed Wednesday’s attack.

      Sabri performed Qawwali devotional music from the Sufi tradition, an Islamic practice opposed by extremists.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • German government agrees to ban fracking indefinitely

      Germany’s coalition government agreed to ban fracking for shale gas indefinitely on Tuesday, after years of fractious talks over the issue, but environmental groups said the ban did not go far enough and vowed to fight the deal.

      Test drilling will be allowed but only with the permission of the respective state government, officials said.

  • Finance

    • ‘Britons, vote in our name’: UK referendum dominates continental front pages

      Germany’s Bild newspaper promised on Thursday that Germans would not hog hotel sunloungers and would make key concessions to the England football team if the UK voted to stay in the European Union.

      “Dear Brits, if you remain in the EU … then we ourselves will recognise the Wembley goal,” Bild declared above a picture of Geoff Hurst’s controversial extra-time goal in the 1966 World Cup final, when England beat West Germany. The paper said Germany would go without its goalkeeper in the next penalty shootout between England and Germany.

    • I Will Vote Remain Because I Love My Mum

      After voting tomorrow I shall fly down to take part in an alternative online referendum results programme from the Ecuadorian Embassy with Julian Assange, to give you a chance to hear a discussion of the results without having to listen to yet more neo-liberal spokesmen spouting establishment propaganda.

      It is no secret I am an enthusiast for the EU. However as an ardent Scottish nationalist it has of course crossed my mind that it might be a plan to vote tactically for Brexit, to provoke a new independence referendum.

      I have decided against this for two reasons. First, there is no way the Establishment is going to allow Brexit to happen. And second, I love my mum, who is English and moved back from Inverness to Norfolk following the death of my father a decade ago. I wish England and the English nothing but well. An independent Scotland inside the EU would be disadvantaged by having its only land border with an ailing England outside the EU.

    • Farage declares ‘remain will edge it’ as polls close in historic vote

      The polls have closed in Britain’s referendum on EU membership, with a survey suggesting a bitterly close fight and the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, saying it “looks like remain will edge it”.

    • Intel Fighting EU’s $1.4B Fine Levied 7 Years Ago

      Today’s topics include Intel’s return to a European Union court to fight a $1.4 billion antitrust fine, the FAA’s finalized commercial drone rules, the addition of new business-oriented features to Drobox’s cloud storage service, and Docker’s launch of its containers-as-a-service management and orchestration software.

    • Pound rises – do markets believe Remain has won?

      Sterling hit a 2016 high today against the dollar and could be on track for one of its strongest weeks on the markets – in terms of increase in value – for 30 years.

    • FTSE 100 hits two-month high on Remain hopes

      The FTSE 100 hit a two-month high and the pound surged as investors bet on the UK voting to remain in the European Union.

      London’s blue-chip shares rose 1.2% to 6,338.1 points, with miners, banks and travel firms rising.

      Sterling almost hit $1.50 after Leave campaigner Nigel Farage said it looked as though Remain had “edged” the vote.

      Wall Street also jumped in late trading, with the Dow Jones and S&P 500 both closing 1.3% higher.

    • EU referendum: Pound hits lowest level since 1985

      The value of the pound has fallen dramatically as it emerged that the UK had voted to leave the EU.

      At one stage, it hit $1.3305, a fall of more than 10%, and a low not seen since 1985.

      The Bank of England said it was “monitoring developments closely” and would take “all necessary steps” to support monetary stability.

      Before the results started to come in, the pound had risen as high as $1.50, as traders bet on a Remain victory.

    • Going on holiday soon? You’re the first victim of the leave victory

      Many UK holidaymakers travelling abroad will pay more for foreign currency as the pound plunged to its lowest level since 1985 following the EU referendum.

      Sterling was down against every single major currency group.

    • Scotland’s Status Returns to the Center of Attention

      All 32 voting areas in Scotland voted to stay in the European Union, but they were outnumbered by an overwhelming “Leave” vote in England and Wales.

      That has created an immediate political dilemma for Scotland, which in a referendum in September 2014 voted against secession from the United Kingdom.

      Scotland, which has been legally in union with England and Wales since 1707, is considered the most pro-European part of the United Kingdom, and the decision by British voters to leave the 28-member European Union could prompt a second independence vote.

    • UK votes to leave the EU in historic referendum
    • Nicola Sturgeon: Second Scottish independence vote ‘highly likely’ after Brexit vote

      Nicola Sturgeon has said a second independence referendum is “highly likely” after Scotland’s voters overwhelmingly backed Remain.

      Scotland was out of step with England and Wales after all 32 of its local authorities voted to stay in the EU.

      Speaking this morning after the result was declared, the Scottish First Minister said it was “democratically unacceptable” that Scotland had been taken out of the union against its will.

    • Nicola Sturgeon says Scotland sees its future as part of the EU as Brexit confirmed

      Nicola Sturgeon has said the people of Scotland see their future as part of the European Union, after it became clear Britain had voted for Brexit in a historic referendum.

      Speaking after all 32 local authorities delivered a vote to Remain in Scotland, the First Minister welcomed her country’s “unequivocal” vote to stay in Europe. But despite the vote, the country still faces having to exit the European Union after the Leave campaign edged ahead across the UK.

    • LuxLeaks special committee’s first country visit: Belgium is breaching EU tax law

      This Tuesday a delegation of the European Parliament’s special committee on tax rulings and similar measures has completed its first country visit to a Member State with a problematic ruling practice. Visits to at least the UK, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland and Switzerland will follow. The programme included discussions with tax experts, the Belgium parliament and the commission responsible for tax rulings. On the lessons from this visit Green committee members Sven Giegold and Philippe Lamberts conclude:

    • David Cameron says he will stand down as Prime Minister – new PM by October

      The Prime Minister said he had been honoured to serve as Prime Minister for the past six years. He held nothing back in his campaign. He always believed Britain would be safer, stronger and better off inside the EU. He said it was only right for someone else to lead the country in this new direction.

    • Rest in peace UK

      I am mourning for the UK. I feel so much pain and pity for all my good friends over there. Stupidity has won again. Good bye UK, your long reign has found its end.

    • FTSE 100 sees £120bn wiped off its value in worst day of losses since financial crisis

      The FTSE 100 has plunged more than 8 per cent in its biggest opening slump since the financial crisis, wiping £120 billion off the value of the 100 biggest UK companies.

      Banks were particularly badly hit, with shares in a number of banks losing at least 20 per cent of their value on opening, including Lloyds, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutschebank.

    • Shares and pound plunge on Leave vote

      The FTSE’s slump was its biggest one-day fall since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008.

    • UK now poorer than France as pound hits 30-year low and FTSE 100 drops 8.7pc following British vote to leave EU

      The FTSE 100 fell as much as 8.7pc when the London market opened after the UK voted to leave the European Union, an unexpected outcome that prompted the resignation of prime minister David Cameron this morning.

      The blue chip index recovered slightly to a loss of 4.9pc, but the FTSE 250 – which is considered a closer barometer of the UK economy – fell by 12.3pc before paring losses back to 7.1pc.

    • Spanish minister calls for Gibraltar to be returned to Spain on back of Brexit vote

      Spain’s Foreign Minister José García-Margallo y Marfil has proposed a shared British-Spanish sovereignty over Gibraltar followed by the “restitution” to Spain, after the British territory voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU while the U.K. overall voted to leave.

      “Our formula … is British-Spanish co-sovereignty for a determined period of time, which after that time has elapsed, will head towards the restitution of Gibraltar to Spanish sovereignty,” García-Margallo told Spanish radio on Friday, AFP reports.

      Gibraltar, a former Spanish territory which was ceded to Britain in 1713, heavily relies on Spain for its economy, with over 12,000 people commuting across the border every day.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Tories Will Knit Back Together Quicker than Joe Ledley’s Leg

      The purpose of the Conservative Party is simply to be in power. The object of power for them is to make sure that nobody else can use the power of the state to counteract the power of the wealthy and curb their excesses.

      You will therefore be amazed by how, whatever the result today, the Tory cabinet will next week be smiling together in a show of unity. Because unity is needed for power. That they were calling each other liars, abusers of government funds, racists, unpatriotic or inciters to murder will be heartily brushed off as the rough and tumble of politics. Cameron will sleep soundly in his bed in Number 10.

    • WaPo Cites FAIR on C-SPAN’s Record of Bias

      The Washington Post‘s Callum Borchers (6/23/16) cited FAIR research in a story about complaints that C-SPAN continued to cover the Democratic sit-in on the House floor even after House Speaker Paul Ryan had the network’s cameras turned off.

      “This isn’t the first time C-SPAN has been accused of taking sides, of course,” Borchers wrote, noting that usually, “the charge is that it has a conservative bias.”

    • CMD Urges U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Prosecutors’ Appeal in John Doe II Corruption Case

      On Wednesday, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the Brennan Center for Justice, and Common Cause filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging the justices to grant a hearing and overturn a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that shut down a criminal investigation into potentially illegal campaign coordination between Governor Scott Walker’s campaign and groups that spent millions during the 2011-2012 recall elections.

    • Clinton’s private e-mail was blocked by spam filters—so State IT turned them off

      Documents recently obtained by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch show that in December 2010, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her staff were having difficulty communicating with State Department officials by e-mail because spam filters were blocking their messages. To fix the problem, State Department IT turned the filters off—potentially exposing State’s employees to phishing attacks and other malicious e-mails.

      The mail problems prompted Clinton Chief of Staff Huma Abedin to suggest to Clinton, “We should talk about putting you on State e-mail or releasing your e-mail address to the department so you are not going to spam.” Clinton replied, “Let’s get [a] separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal [e-mail] being accessible.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • 100 years ago in Spokane: Petition sought end of movie censorship ordinance

      The censorship ordinance was mainly about sexually suggestive movies and plays, but it also was intended to prohibit movies that incited racial hatred.

    • Information Warfare: China Demands Better Censorship

      In a rare move Chinese leaders recently criticized, in public, their own Propaganda Department for not doing its job. The Propaganda Department is the several hundred people who direct the vast censorship

    • Turkey blocks Google Cache to stop censorship circumvention, breaks its own internet

      It was first speculated that the Google domain might be simply overlooked among a long lists of URLs to be censored by the authority, just like the ‘accidental’ censorship of shortening service Bit.ly last year. But local sources reported that the ban was intended to block access to Google servers, which keep a cached copy of content previously banned in Turkey.

      Indeed, various Google services have been used in Turkey to circumvent political censorship. During the Gezi Protests of 2013, protesters tagged ‘8.8.8.8’ graffiti (Google’s Public DNS) on walls to broadcast ways to avoid DNS-filtering (a method for censoring internet content). Turkish authorities resorted to IP-blocking and even DNS-hijacking to prevent access to social media during the 2014 local elections. For Turkish citizens who cannot use VPN or the Tor anonymity network, which masks users’ locations and identities, both Google Cache and Google Translator were suggested options among lists of proxies since then.

    • Rather Than Launch A Massive DDoS Attack, This Time China Just Asks GitHub To Take Down Page It Doesn’t Like

      You may recall that a year ago, a massive DDoS attack was launched against GitHub from China. The attack itself was somewhat clever, in that it effectively turned the Great Firewall around, using Chinese search engine Baidu’s ad platform and analytics platform to basically load code that contributed to the attack. The target of the attack were two tools that helped people in China access material that was blocked in China by the Great Firewall. Of course, this attack was actually the second attempt by China to stop people from accessing such information on GitHub. The first attack involved just using the Great Firewall to block GitHub entirely (it needed to block the entire GitHub, rather than just specific pages, because GitHub is all HTTPS) — but that caused Chinese programmers who rely on GitHub to freak out and point out that they rely on GitHub to do their jobs.

    • Web content blocking squeezed into draft EU anti-terrorism law

      A vote in the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee early next week will set the stage for a debate over Web content blocking and terror attacks. It comes during a jittery period of concern around extremist activity online following the atrocity in Orlando and the murder of British politician Jo Cox.

    • West Allegheny student petition decries censorship of reading list

      In response to parents’ demands this year that some books be removed from the West Allegheny High School reading list, about 200 students have signed a petition asking the district not to use censorship in an attempt to shield teens from problems they may be encountering in their lives.

      “You’re trying to protect the children and I see that, but you’re really sheltering them and making them ignorant to issues that actually plague our society and are relevant right now,” student Renae Roscart,15, said of the parents who had sought the removal of some books.

    • Don’t Look! Erotic Khajuraho Drawings Show Hypocrisy of Censorship

      While Shiv Sena’s repeated attempts at beating, slapping and thrashing couples on Valentine’s Day started as a hot topic for outrage, it ended up as a Twitter joke.“It’s not part of Indian culture,” is what they often announce.

    • Twitter trolls are reporting Muslim girls to the police for posting ‘blasphemous’ messages online

      This weekend an account was spotted sending screenshots of ‘blasphemous’ tweets to the Dubai police and calling for action, after a 16-year-old girl rewrote a passage of the Quran to include a slang term for vaginas

    • SEX AND CENSORSHIP

      Although I believe censorship is a potential danger to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, I find myself wistful for the bad old days of the Motion Picture Production Code of the 1930s and 1940s.

      [....]

      There’s the smarmy sexualization of “family” sitcoms and the suggestive advertising using sex to sell.

    • Icasa to hold public hearing on SABC censorship
    • Public hearing looms over SABC censorship
    • Activists Say the SABC’s New Editorial Policy Is Shutting Them Out

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Court Rules the FBI Does Not Need a Warrant to Hack a Computer

      In one of the many ongoing legal cases surrounding a dark web child pornography site, a judge has written that the FBI did not require a warrant to hack a suspect’s computer.

      According to activists, the ruling could have serious implications for how law enforcement is able to conduct remote searches.

      “The Court finds that no Fourth Amendment violation occurred here because the Government did not need a warrant to capture Defendant’s IP address,” Henry Coke Morgan, Jr., a senior United States District Judge, wrote in an opinion and order on Tuesday. He adds that the government did not require a warrant to extract other information from the suspect’s computer either.

    • VPN Providers Protest Plans to Expand Government Hacking Powers

      Proposed legislative changes that will increase law enforcement’s ability to hack into computers are under attack by a broad coalition. Google, EFF, Demand Progress and FightForTheFuture are joined by TOR, Private Internet Access and other VPN services seeking to block changes to Rule 41.

    • In Wisconsin, a Backlash Against Using Data to Foretell Defendants’ Futures

      When Eric L. Loomis was sentenced for eluding the police in La Crosse, Wis., the judge told him he presented a “high risk” to the community and handed down a six-year prison term.

      The judge said he had arrived at his sentencing decision in part because of Mr. Loomis’s rating on the Compas assessment, a secret algorithm used in the Wisconsin justice system to calculate the likelihood that someone will commit another crime.

      Mr. Loomis has challenged the judge’s reliance on the Compas score, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which heard arguments on his appeal in April, could rule in the coming days or weeks. Mr. Loomis’s appeal centers on the criteria used by the Compas algorithm, which is proprietary and as a result is protected, and on the differences in its application for men and women.

    • EU to adopt new US data rules in July

      The European Commission is set to present a new draft of its data-exchange pact with the US, the Privacy Shield, in early July.

      EU justice commissioner Vera Jourova told EUobserver in a recent interview that the most contentious issues had been agreed by Washington and Brussels.

      These concerned access to data by US security services, bulk collection of people’s personal information and independent oversight.

    • Snoopers’ Charter: Government explains why it needs the power to hack into everyone’s devices

      GCHQ WILL have the power to hack into the devices of entire towns under the forthcoming Investigatory Powers Bill, according to a recently released Home Office briefing document.

      The ‘Operational Case for Bulk Powers’ is intended to explain why the security services need such wide-ranging and intrusive powers of surveillance and hacking granted under the so-called Snoopers’ Charter.

      The document uses a series of examples to make its case, citing terrorism, serious crime, terrorism, paedophiles, terrorism, state-based threats and, of course, terrorism.

    • GCHQ explains why it may want to hack every computing device in your town

      The Home Office has made the case for GCHQ’s new powers of bulk collection and hacking under the Investigatory Powers Bill, which will become law once it passes its third reading in the House of Lords, in a new document released this week.

      “The draft Investigatory Powers Bill… seeks to update the law to reflect technological change, ensuring that these powers – including those relating to sensitive capabilities available to the security and intelligence agencies – are set out transparently and consistently, with robust safeguards and world leading oversight,” claims the document.

    • Russia’s Problem (According To Russian Politicians): Not Enough Mass Surveillance

      When you look back at Techdirt’s coverage of Russia’s attempts to control its people and shut down online dissent, it’s unlikely you will be thinking to yourself: “What Russia really needs is more mass surveillance.”

    • Privacy Shield: Experts in the dark on planned EU-US data sharing pact

      National representatives charged with assessing the European Union’s controversial Privacy Shield proposal still haven’t seen the final text of the would-be Safe Harbour replacement, Ars has learned.

      The so-called Article 31 working group—which includes officials from the bloc’s 28 member states and the European Commission—held its last meeting on Monday. But despite anticipation, the commission didn’t deliver a new draft of the data-sharing deal it is negotiating with the US, and some delegations are getting frustrated.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • FBI, police visit activists’ homes in advance of Republican National Convention

      Law enforcement investigators this week began visiting the homes of local activists in an attempt to gather intelligence for possible planned demonstrations surrounding the upcoming Republican National Convention.

      Activists said they view the “door-knock” visits as intimidating. A spokeswoman for the local branch of the FBI acknowledged that “community outreach” is taking place as law enforcement officials try to make sure next month’s GOP convention is a “safe and secure” event.

      Jocelyn Rosnick, a leader with the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a left-leaning group planning legal support for RNC protesters, said over a dozen activists have reported visits by teams of federal and local law enforcement officials this week.

      Some of the activists are involved with groups planning RNC demonstrations, while some aren’t, she said. She also said that some of the people who were visited were among the 71 people who were arrested in May 2015 in the aftermath of protests that broke out following the acquittal of Michael Brelo, a then-Cleveland police officer who had been charged with voluntary manslaughter in connection with the 2013 shooting deaths of two Cleveland motorists following a police chase.

    • FBI and Police are Knocking on Activists’ Doors Ahead of Republican National Convention

      Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have been knocking on the doors of activists and community organizers in Cleveland, Ohio, asking about their plans for the Republican National Convention in July.

      As the city gears up to welcome an estimated 50,000 visitors, and an unknown number of protesters, some of the preparations and restrictions put in place by officials have angered civil rights activists. But the latest string of unannounced home visits by local and federal police mark a significant escalation in officials’ efforts to stifle protest, they say.

      “The purpose of these door knocks is simple: to intimidate the target and others in efforts to discourage people from engaging in lawful First Amendment activities,” Jocelyn Rosnick, a coordinator with the Ohio chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, wrote in a statement denouncing the home visits.

    • Teen Sues U.S. Over Cavity Drug Search for Which She was Billed $575

      Ashley Cervantes, a then 18-year-old American citizen, was stopped at the Mexico border and, for some unspecified reason, perhaps related to her being young and of Hispanic ethnicity, accused by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) of smuggling drugs.

    • The Campaign To Dox Twitter Users In Islamic Countries For ‘Blasphemy’ And Supporting LGBT Rights

      Nearly half a decade ago, we wondered publicly what a company like Twitter, a self-proclaimed advocate of free and open speech, would do if confronted by a government that is anything but. In that post, Mike discussed how Twitter had been used to rant against the government in Saudi Arabia, and wondered what would happen if Saudi Arabia decided to make such speech illegal. But what if it’s not direct government action but that of other users that threatens such speech? While we have seen some governments routinely punish internet speech they don’t like, we’re now seeing signs of non-government individuals getting into the racket as well, as a way to silence the kind of barely-progressive speech a company like Twitter would likely say it wants to protect.

    • #LibbyLeaks: Oakland Mayor Launches Investigation Against City and Police Whistleblowers [iophk: "Multiple separate scandals and they try to distract with this instead"]

      This week, the national spotlight is on Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and her embattled police department — and the headlines aren’t favorable.

      And now the Express has learned that Schaaf and City Administrator Sabrina Landreth have opened an investigation to identify internal whistleblowers and leaks, according to multiple city and police sources, who asked not to be identified because they fear retaliation.

      The investigation started after recent news reports exposed details regarding multiple police-misconduct cases, as well as efforts by city and police officials to keep the misconduct hidden from the public.

    • Interpol says it’s seeking public help to track down 123 suspected human traffickers

      Interpol said on Thursday (June 23) it is seeking public help to track down 123 suspected human traffickers wanted around the world.

      The largest international police organisation put out the public appeal from its base in Lyon, France, in a bid to bring the remaining fugitives to justice.

      “People smuggling is a global issue which is why international cooperation through operations such as Hydra are essential,” said Interpol’s director of Operational Support Michael O’Connell in a statement announcing the programme’s launch.

      The operation, known as Infra Hydra, involves 44 countries as well as the EU police agency Europol, and has already made 26 arrests and located 31 other suspects, Interpol said.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • North Carolina’s New Broadband Plan Forgets To Include ‘Don’t Let ISP Lobbyists Write Shitty State Telecom Law’

      For years we’ve noted how 19 states have effectively let companies like AT&T and Comcast write protectionist state broadband laws to protect the status quo. Such laws usually either block or hamstring frustrated communities looking to build their own broadband networks, or in some instances from striking public/private agreements with companies like Google Fiber. Last year the FCC finally started paying attention to such bans, stating it intends to use Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to preempt restrictions conflicting with its Congressional mandate to ensure even broadband deployment.

      The FCC’s action specifically targeted bans in both Tennessee and North Carolina, both states where incumbent telecom lobbyists quite literally control state legislatures. Both states’ dysfunction on this front is legendary, yet both chose to sue the FCC in court to, they claim, defend “states rights” from federal government “overreach” (defending state residents from shitty telecom law written by lobbyists isn’t much of a concern).

    • DTN: Vint Cerf And NASA Just Created An Internet For Whole Solar System

      Making the communication systems more reliable for its future missions, NASA and Google VP Vint Cerf has created a Solar System Internet service. Called DTN, or Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, this service is already incorporated in the software suite at the International Space Station.

    • Senate Report Cites Charter, Time Warner Cable Overcharges

      According to a copy of a staff report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Charter and Time Warner Cable (now a part of Charter) have failed to refund customers for overcharges, but both have taken steps to correct the issue.

      The report found that MVPDs vary greatly in how they handle billing overcharges, but that while “Time Warner Cable and Charter have procedures for identifying overcharges and removing them from customers’ bills prospectively, [n]either company, however, has automatically provided full retroactive refunds or credits for past overcharges.”

  • DRM/E-books

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • South Centre Steps Up Activity On IP, Medicines Access, Trade, Investment And More

      The Geneva-based organisation represents the interests of its developing country members.

    • Trademarks

      • Defending Our Brand

        We’ve forged relationships with millions of websites and users under the name Let’s Encrypt, furthering our mission to make encryption free, easy, and accessible to everyone. We’ve also worked hard to build our unique identity within the community and to make that identity a reliable indicator of quality. We take it very seriously when we see the potential for our users to be confused, or worse, the potential for a third party to damage the trust our users have placed in us by intentionally creating such confusion. By attempting to register trademarks for our name, Comodo is actively attempting to do just that.

    • Copyrights

      • MPAA Boss: Europe’s Geo Unblocking Plans Threaten Movie Industry

        MPAA Chairman and CEO Chris Dodd fears that Europe’s plans to limit geo-blocking will “cause great harm” to the movie industry. In a keynote address at the CineEurope convention, Dodd warned that broad access to movies and TV-shows will result in fewer films and higher prices for consumers.

      • Court Orders Usenet Providers to Expose Prolific Pirates

        Dutch Usenet providers Eweka and Usenetter have been ordered to hand over the personal details of two uploaders who shared over 2,000 pirated e-books. The case was initiated by local anti-piracy group BREIN, which plans to offer a settlement to the accused uploaders.

      • Jury finds Led Zeppelin did not steal intro to ‘Stairway to Heaven’

        Led Zeppelin did not steal a riff from an obscure 1960s instrumental tune to use for the introduction of its classic rock anthem “Stairway to Heaven,” a federal court jury decided Thursday.

        The verdict in Los Angeles settles a point that music fans have debated for decades but didn’t find its way to court until two years ago, when the trustee for the late Randy Craig Wolfe filed a copyright lawsuit.

      • Led Zeppelin Wins Copyright Case Over Stairway To Heaven

        Back in April, we talked about the fact that the lawsuit against Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page for copyright infringement over “Stairway to Heaven” was moving forward to a jury trail, and how ridiculous it was. As we noted, the song was written in 1970, and it’s a bit crazy to argue after all these decades that there’s infringement. But, more importantly, the similarities between Stairway and the Spirit song “Taurus” were just a few common notes that were predated by many artists, including Bach’s Bouree in E Minor. Still, as we’d seen with the Blurred Lines case, when copyright cases go to juries over song similarities, they often turn out wacky. The intricacies of copyright law are tossed out the window and often “hey, these sound similar” seems to win out.

      • Led Zeppelin Wins ‘Stairway to Heaven’ Jury Trial

        A jury rules in the band’s favor after hearing testimony and arguments that the iconic song was a copyright infringement of Spirit’s “Taurus.”

      • Good News: California Legislature Dumps Stupid Plan To Copyright All Government Works

        Back in April, we noted that California Assemblymember Mark Stone was pushing some legislation to basically push California governments to copyright and trademark everything they could. This was a bad kneejerk response to the admittedly ridiculous situation in Yosemite, where the concessions vendor had trademarked various park names and then tried to hold them ransom. Of course, the proper response is to make sure that kind of thing can’t be covered by trademark or copyright law, not push state government entities to lock up things under intellectual property laws.

      • Digitising public domain images creates a new copyright, rules German court

        A Berlin court has ruled that digitising paintings that are in the public domain creates new copyrights, even if the intent is to create a faithful image rather than produce an artistic interpretation.

        The case was brought by the Reiss Engelhorn Museum (REM) in Mannheim, Germany, against the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland—the local German chapter of the global Wikimedia movement—over 17 images of the museum’s public domain works of art, which have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

      • Terrible Ruling In Germany: Digitizing The Public Domain Creates New Copyright

        This is not a particularly new issue — it’s come up many times in the past. In the US, thankfully, we have a nice precedent in Bridgeman v. Corel that states clearly that exact photographic copies of public domain works are not protected by copyright, because they lack the originality necessary for a copyright. Of course, that hasn’t stopped some US Museums from looking to route around that ruling. Over in Europe, where there is no Bridgeman-like ruling, we tend to see a lot more of these kinds of attempts to relock down the public domain by museums. There have been similar attempts in the UK and in France, though as far as I can tell, neither case went to court.

06.23.16

Links 23/6/2016: Red Hat Results, Randa Stories

Posted in News Roundup at 8:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Lessons learned for building an open company with transparent collaboration

    In the first part of this two-part series, Building a business on a solid open source model, I described how an open source business needs to provide a solid ground for all stakeholders, users, contributors, employees, customers, and of course investors. Foundations, licenses, and trademarks can be helpful in building an open ecosystem. Open source communities need supporting organizations to work transparently, otherwise there are barriers to contribution. Code might be public, but code dumps (like Google tends to do with Android) don’t always facilitate collaboration. To encourage collaboration, you must go one step further and be proactive. Development in a place like GitHub or GitLab, and having open feature planning meetings and conferences help toward that goal. But still, open source project leaders can do more.

  • Why share / why collaborate? – Some useful sources outside Debian

    I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. … “

  • “But I’m a commercial developer / a government employee”

    Your employer may be willing to negotiate / grant you an opt-out clause to protect your FLOSS expertise / accept an additional non-exclusive licence to your FLOSS code / be prepared to sign an assignment…

  • How to share collaboratively

    Always remember in all of this: just because you understand your code and your working practices doesn’t mean that anyone else will.

  • twenty years of free software — part 3 myrepos

    myrepos is kind of just an elaborated foreach (@myrepos) loop, but its configuration and extension in a sort of hybrid between an .ini file and shell script is quite nice and plenty of other people have found it useful.

    I had to write myrepos when I switched from subversion to git, because git’s submodules are too limited to meet my needs, and I needed a tool to check out and update many repositories, not necessarily all using the same version control system.

  • OPNFV

    • Linux’s NFV crew: Operators keen to ditch clunky networks, be cool like Facebook

      Network operators have a jealous eye on the likes of Facebook and Google and want to ditch their clunky networks to compete for “cooler” consumer services, the head of the open-source network function virtualisation (NFV) project has said.

      Heather Kirksey is director of the collaborative Linux foundation’s OPNFV project – the open source software platform intended to promote the uptake of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV).

    • Nokia, Intel collaborate on open source hardware

      Just a week after Nokia (NYSE:NOK) announced an agreement to help China Mobile move to a more flexible cloud network infrastructure, Nokia said it is teaming up with Intel to make its carrier-grade AirFrame Data Center Solution hardware available for an Open Platform Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV) Lab.

    • OPNFV Summit: Key Takeaways

      The open source multi-VIM MANO, Cloudify, is giving a sneak preview of its Telecom Edition today at the OPNFV Summit in Berlin. Cloudify is an open source orchestrator used by a growing group of large telecoms and Tier 1 network operators that are pursuing network functions virtualization (NFV).

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Being open to open source and creating a new business category at VMWare

      In the age of developer-defined infrastructure, where developers have decision making power in application and cloud infrastructure technologies, open source has proven to be a powerful go-to-market and distribution method for both startups and enterprises. Developers are always looking for new technologies to improve their productivity.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Microsoft Edge is a system hog and cannot be called ‘power efficient’

    IT WAS ONE HELL of a Monday morning. The rain was hammering down with no end in sight, and the usual ‘wrong type of rain’ and ‘leaves on the line’ meant that trains from outlying areas into central London were all pretty much stationary.

    When I finally got to the office, I dashed to my desk, powered up my system and launched Microsoft Edge – the window to my Office 365-using world.

    I was met with a big, blank white window that wouldn’t shift, no matter how often I pressed Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

    It was the final straw after a year of repeated crashes, hangs, random tab locks followed by forced refreshes, and general slow motion performance that’s made anguished cries and keyboard thumps a normal occurrence for those around me.

    So after using Edge religiously since Windows 10′s launch as an attempt to ‘embed’ with the tech I write about, I decided this morning to stop using it entirely.

  • Opera repudiates Microsoft Edge battery-saving claims

    The browser-maker Opera has negated Microsoft’s much-publicised claim that its Windows 10-exclusive Edge browser provides significantly less battery drain than competitors Chrome and Opera – and its own tests put Edge firmly in second place for battery efficiency.

    In a post at the Opera blog today, Błażej Kaźmierczak reveals the result of the company’s own tests, which put Google Chrome in third place at two hours and fifty-four minutes, Edge in second at three hours twelve minutes, and Opera ahead of that by obtaining three hours and fifty-five minutes of battery life under identical tests.

  • Dell Sells Off Software to Double Down on Its Riskiest Business

    For Dell, combining software and hardware within a single company was supposed to be like chocolate and peanut butter. Instead, it’s turning out more like oil and water.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The media may have stopped talking about it, but the Flint water crisis is far from over

      “The national media [attention] has waned, but we are trying to keep the story alive,” Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha said, with a voice of sheer determination.

      After becoming the face of a national movement, Hanna-Attisha, the pediatrician who helped unmask the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, knows all too well — for herself and the residents of Flint — the disaster which almost destroyed the city is far from over. The series of unfortunate of events leading up to the calamity, the world knows all too well — the city stopped using Detroit’s water supply to use water from the Flint river as an economic measure in April 2014.

      High levels of lead permeated the pipes and infiltrated the water supply, while Flint locals complained incessantly about the water’s color, taste and odor, and reported several incidences of strange rashes and skin outbreaks. Yet, government officials assured residents of a majority black city, the water was not a “threat to public health” and “safe to drink.”

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Destroying Fallujah to ‘Save It’

      One of the concepts that emerged from the Vietnam War was that of destroying a village to save it. The idea was that by leveling a place where people once lived, the area would be denied to the Viet Cong. The people? Well, they’d just have to find somewhere else.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Here’s the Full Transcript of Our Interview With DNC Hacker ‘Guccifer 2.0′

      We spoke to the hacker who claimed to have broken into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, who goes by the name of “Guccifer 2.0,” in reference to the notorious hacker who leaked the George W. Bush paintings and recently claimed to have hacked Hillary Clinton’s email server.

      In the interest of transparency, and to let readers judge for themselves, we decided to publish the full chat log. We kept the parts in Romanian, adding the English translation, according to Google Translate.

    • Signs of thaw in Assange affair as he begins fifth year in embassy

      As Australia’s Julian Assange begins a fifth year of life in the Ecuador embassy in London, it looks like Sweden, the country that has accused him of rape, is finally beginning to come around.

      A report in the Guardian says Ecuador has received a formal request from Swedish authorities to interview Assange, a move that could bring the long-running saga to an end.

      Strangely, this is exactly what Ecuador has been asking for all along!

      Proposals for Assange to be extradited to Sweden for questioning were rejected because it was feared that he would be sent to the US from there.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Saudi energy minister just declared the oil glut over

      After two years of pain, the market has finally worked off the global glut of crude that slammed oil prices, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister said in a newspaper interview published Wednesday.

      “We are out of it. The oversupply has disappeared,” said Khalid Al-Falih, according to the Houston Chronicle. “We just have to carry the overhang of inventory for a while until the system works it out.”

    • Indonesian Foreign Ministry on Smoke Haze

      This story is from the Jakarta Post. I reproduce it with this brief comment.

      I find the reluctance of the Indonesian Foreign Ministry to make meaningful comment about the problem of transboundary haze very puzzling indeed. It leads me to wonder whether there is the will and capacity, at a national level, to tackle this problem.

  • Finance

    • We can only contemplate leaving the EU because its miracles have become banal

      Another day has brought another dismal poll for the Remain campaign. And yet, if Britain does vote to leave the EU on the 23rd, it will still most likely not be because a majority of British people wish to leave, but because those who wish to remain are too lukewarm about the issue to get out and vote.

      This, if it happens, will be tragic. For all its faults – which, though very real, are inherent to the grandeur of its virtues – the European Union is arguably the greatest thing human beings have ever achieved in the political sphere.

      To put the matter in perspective, imagine for a moment how the world would look if the international system worked like the EU.

    • EU Referedum polling day: Race ‘too close to call’ as four polls give different sides the lead as voting begins

      People are taking to Twitter to complain about flooded polling stations.

      The rain doesn’t seem to be putting people off, but many are being forced to return to their polling stations this evening.

      There are reports of flooded streets as storms swept through the South East this morning.

    • EU referendum: Why is there no exit poll?

      There will be no (public) exit poll following the EU referendum: our Chief Political Commentator explains why, and tells you what to look out for instead

    • Why isn’t there a European referendum exit poll?

      When Britain votes at general elections, minutes after voting ends at 10pm, the broadcasters reveal the results of their exit poll – a massive survey of around 150 seats in the country, paid for the BBC, Sky and ITV – which, mostly, gives us a fairly clear idea of how the country has voted.

    • Chinese internet firm buys majority stake in Finnish gamemaker Supercell

      The Chinese internet giant Tencent has finalised a deal to purchase a majority share in Finland’s biggest earning game company, Supercell. Tencent replaces the Japanese telecoms group SoftBank as the Finnish gamemaker’s largest owner.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The degenerate gambler: Trump runs his campaign like he ran his casinos — right into the ground

      Monday’s bombshell that Trump had finally fired his incompetent campaign manager Corey Lewandowski hit the news networks like a lightning bolt. It had been clear for months the man was in over his head but Trump was loyal to him apparently under the assumption that he’d ushered him through the primaries and therefore knew what he was doing. According to news reports it took the Trump heirs gathering Lewandowski and The Donald in a room together to confront the campaign manager with the campaign’s lack of organization.

    • R. Crumb v. D. Trump, 1989 [NSFW]
    • More young people voted for Bernie Sanders than Trump and Clinton combined — by a lot

      It’s hard to overemphasize how completely and utterly Sen. Bernie Sanders dominated the youth vote to this point in the 2016 presidential campaign. While Hillary Clinton dominated him among older voters, he dominated her right back among younger voters — even winning more than 80 percent of their votes in some states against no less than the eventual Democratic nominee.

      But this fact might say it better than any: In the 2016 campaign, Sanders won more votes among those under age 30 than the two presumptive major-party presidential nominees combined. And it wasn’t close.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Wearables at work are the new spy tool, UK workers say

      Despite 3m Britons buying a wearable device in 2015, we are not willing to use them at work, according to new research from PwC.

      In a survey of 2,000 workers across the UK, only 46pc of people said they would accept a free piece of wearable technology if their employers had access to the data recorded.

      This was despite the fact that two-thirds of respondents wanted their employer to take an active role in their health and well-being. The biggest barrier to adoption was trust, with 40pc saying they don’t trust their employer to use it for their benefit, and in fact believe it will actively be used against them.

    • Facebook Signs Deals With Media Companies, Celebrities for Facebook Live

      Facebook Inc. has inked contracts with nearly 140 media companies and celebrities to create videos for its nascent live-streaming service, as the social network positions itself to cash in on a lucrative advertising market it has yet to tap—and keep its 1.65 billion monthly users engaged.

    • Facebook Just Made A Pretty Awkward Change To Your Profile

      If you haven’t looked at your own Facebook profile recently, you might want to go check it out.

      The social network recently tweaked a setting that changes how your employment and education history is displayed, a spokeswoman for Facebook told The Huffington Post on Monday. While the change won’t make any private information public, it could make some previously tucked-away information very obvious to your friends — which might be a bit uncomfortable.

    • Supreme Court Gives Police More Leeway on Illegal Searches

      NBC reports that Justice Sonia Sotomayor let loose a scorching dissent in a case involving the Fourth Amendment and police conduct. The case concerns Edward Strieff, who was stopped while leaving a house a police officer was watching on suspicion of drug activity. When the officer discovered Strieff had an outstanding warrant for a minor traffic violation, he searched Strieff and found methamphetamine. The court had to decide whether the drugs found on Strieff could be used as evidence or whether such evidence was disqualified by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, saying the evidence was “admissible because the officer’s discovery of the arrest warrant attenuated the connection between the unlawful stop and the evidence seized incident to arrest.”

    • After Orlando, Senate rejects plan to allow FBI Web searches without court order

      The Senate on Wednesday rejected a Republican-led effort to allow the FBI to access a person’s Internet browsing history, email account data and other electronic communications without a court order in terrorism and spy cases.

      The measure from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) would have also extended the government’s authority to conduct surveillance over potential “lone wolf” attackers.

      McCain and Burr argued that the changes were necessary in the wake of recent terrorist attacks such as in Orlando, where a gunman claiming inspiration and loyalty to the Islamic State killed 49 people at a gay nightclub.

    • How ‘Deleted’ Yahoo Emails Led to a 20-Year Drug Trafficking Conviction

      In 2009, Russell Knaggs, from Yorkshire, England, orchestrated a plan to import five tonnes of cocaine from South America hidden in boxes of fruit. Somehow, he did this all from the cell of a UK prison, while serving a 16-year sentence for another drug crime.

      As part of the plan, a collaborator in Colombia would log into a Yahoo email account and write a message as a draft. Another accomplice in Europe would read the message, delete it, and then write his own. The point of this was to avoid creating any emails that could be found by law enforcement.

      Knaggs didn’t use the email account himself, but when Yahoo provided copies of the inbox contents to the authorities, he was convicted and sentenced to another 20 years in prison. The emails certainly aren’t the only pieces of evidence used to bust Knaggs (the plot was foiled after officers found a piece of paper with transfer routes and other details during a cell search), but it’s one that the defense is scrutinizing.

    • Invoking Orlando, Senate Republicans set up vote to expand FBI spying

      U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell set up a vote late on Monday to expand the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s authority to use a secretive surveillance order without a warrant to include email metadata and some browsing history information.

    • Don’t break crypto, go easy on the algorithms—global Internet commission

      Crypto backdoors, the overuse of opaque algorithms, turning companies into law enforcement agencies, and online attacks on critical infrastructure have all been attacked by the Global Commission on Internet Governance in a new report published on Wednesday.

      The body, which was set up in 2014 by UK-based Chatham House and the Canadian Centre for International Governance Innovation, has presented its 140-page-long One Internet report to provide “high-level, strategic advice and recommendations to policy makers, private industry, the technical community, and other stakeholders interested in maintaining a healthy Internet.”

      It comes out in favour of strict legal controls on the aggregation of personal metadata, net neutrality, open standards, and the mandatory public reporting of high-threshold data breaches. Along the way, it offers opinions on areas such as the sharing economy, blockchains, the Internet of Things, IPv6, and DNSSEC.

    • EFF Urges Citizens, Websites to Fight Rule Changes Expanding Government Powers to Break Into Users’ Computers

      San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Tor Project, and dozens of other organizations are calling today on citizens and website operators to take action to block a new rule pushed by the U.S. Justice Department that would greatly expand the government’s ability to hack users’ computers and interfere with anonymity on the web.

      EFF and over 40 partner organizations are holding a day of action for a new campaign—noglobalwarrants.org—to engage citizens about the dangers of Rule 41 and push U.S. lawmakers to oppose it. The process for updating these rules—which govern federal criminal court processes—was intended to deal exclusively with procedural issues. But this year a U.S. judicial committee approved changes in the rule that will expand judicial authority to grant warrants for government hacking.

    • Congress Seeks to Expand Warrantless Surveillance Under the Patriot Act

      How would you feel if the Federal Bureau of Investigation could get information about websites you visited or emails you sent – without ever getting permission from a judge? Would you begin to self-censor the websites you visited — maybe avoiding revealing sites? Or, avoid emailing your pastor, therapist, or lawyer? These scenarios may soon no longer be hypothetical.

    • Battle of the Secure Messaging Apps: How Signal Beats WhatsApp

      This spring, text messages got a lot more private. In April, the world’s most popular messaging service, WhatsApp, announced it would use end-to-end encryption by default for all users, making it virtually impossible for anyone to intercept private WhatsApp conversations, even if they work at Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, or at the world’s most powerful electronic spying agency, the NSA. Then in May, tech giant Google announced a brand new messaging app called Allo that also supports end-to-end encryption.

    • Senate Just Barely Rejects Plan To Expand FBI Surveillance Powers

      Just yesterday we wrote about how the Senate was, somewhat ridiculously, rapidly pushing forward plans on a vote for an amendment to the laws concerning what information the FBI can gather using National Security Letters (NSLs). Despite the fact that the big push for this bill began a few weeks ago, and the fact that it had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Orlando shooting, cynical Senators including John McCain and Mitch McConnell pointed to the shootings in Orlando as a reason that this expansion of FBI surveillance powers was needed. Of course, the reality is that it wasn’t needed, and the law is really there to paper over the fact that the FBI has already been widely abusing its NSL powers to get information it’s not allowed to request.

      After a vocal debate this morning, the measure (somewhat surprisingly) failed to pass, but by just two votes. It need 60 votes to move forward (it was a vote for “cloture” on debate, which requires 60 votes), and it only received 58. But McConnell already made it clear that the amendment will be reconsidered soon, which means he’s likely going to be pushing strongly to get those two remaining votes.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • CIA Psychologists Admit Role In ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program In Court Filing

      Two psychologists who helped the CIA develop and execute its now-defunct “enhanced interrogation” program partially admitted for the first time to roles in what is broadly acknowledged to have been torture.

      In a 30-page court filing posted Tuesday evening, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen responded to nearly 200 allegations and legal justifications put forth by the American Civil Liberties Union in a complaint filed in October. The psychologists broadly denied allegations that “they committed torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, non-consensual human experimentation and/or war crimes” — but admitted to a series of actions that can only be described as such.

      “Defendants admit that over a period of time, they administered to [Abu] Zubaydah walling, facial and abdominal slaps, facial holds, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding, and placed Zubaydah in cramped confinement,” the filing says.

      The American Psychological Association issued a lengthy report last year acknowledging members of the profession collaborated with the CIA and Pentagon on the torture program, and apologized. But until now, no psychologist has ever been called to account in court.

    • Anger as Swiss council plans non-pork school lunches

      Politicians with the conservative Swiss People’s Party believe school authorities in Basel have caved to religious minorities in their decision to take pork off the school lunch menu in the coming school year.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • OECD Ministerial On Internet: Trust, But Whom?

      Beware “digital protectionism.” That was one of the key messages of United States Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, speaking at the official opening of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Ministerial on the digital economy in Cancun, Mexico.

    • After Net Neutrality Win, Emboldened FCC Eyes New Reforms

      One week after a federal court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark net neutrality policy, emboldened FCC officials are moving to advance an ambitious set of reforms that are already generating static from the broadband industry and its political allies.

      The decade-long battle over net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible to consumers, is not over. Industry giant AT&T has said it plans to join an appeal of the DC Circuit’s decision to the Supreme Court, and net neutrality foes in Congress continue to pursue their relentless campaign aimed at knee-capping the FCC’s consumer protections.

    • Open Access Idaho Broadband Network Lets Customers Switch To A New ISP In Seconds

      In 2009, the FCC funded a Harvard study that concluded (pdf) that open access policies (letting multiple ISPs come in and compete over a central, core network) resulted in lower broadband prices and better service. Of course when the FCC released its flimsy, politically timid “National Broadband Plan” back in 2010, this realization (not to mention an honest accounting of the sector’s limited competition) was nowhere to be found. Since then, “open access” has become somewhat of a dirty word in telecom, and even companies like Google Fiber — which originally promised to adhere to the concept on its own network before quietly backpedaling — are eager to pretend the idea doesn’t exist.

  • DRM

    • Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid

      Another day, another rumor that Apple is going to ditch the headphone jack on the next iPhone in favor of sending out audio over Lightning. Or another phone beats Apple to the punch by ditching the headphone jack in favor of passing out audio over USB-C. What exciting times for phones! We’re so out of ideas that actively making them shittier and more user-hostile is the only innovation left.

      [...]

      1. Digital audio means DRM audio

      Oh look, I won this argument in one shot. For years the entertainment industry has decried what they call the “analog loophole” of headphone jacks, and now we’re making their dreams come true by closing it.

    • 74% of Netflix Subscribers Would Rather Cancel Their Subscription Than See Ads

      In its early days as a streaming service, Netflix wasn’t just the biggest and best company on the block – it was the only one. In those heady days, Netflix was able to charge low subscription rates and still provide a catalog that included just about everything.

      As we’ve seen, that’s been changing. With new competition from companies like Hulu and Amazon, Netflix has seen streaming deals get pricier and customers get antsier. For a few years now, Netflix’s catalog has been shrinking while its prices have been rising.

      So where’s a streaming company to find new profits in a tight market? According to some people, the answer is for Netflix to start showing ads, like competitor Hulu does. That would give the company new revenue streams without forcing them to raise prices.

      Of course, there’s a group of stakeholders that’s still left unaccounted for here: Netflix’s customers. We decided to ask them about the issue. And, in a survey of more than 1,200 people on Reddit, we got some pretty clear answers.

    • If you kill the headphone jack, you need to replace it with something better

      As the rumors that the next iPhone will drop the 3.5mm headphone jack have intensified, I’ve been keeping tabs on the specific argument that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber made yesterday: that removing the headphone jack from the iPhone is the modern-day equivalent of removing the floppy drive from the iMac in the late ’90s. It caused some pain at the time, but it was the way things were moving anyway and in the grand scheme of things it was a smart thing to do.

      The people on the “get rid of the headphone jack” side of the debate normally choose some version of this position as the justification that the jack is “old” and so getting rid of it represents “progress.” And the fact of the matter is that Apple has been pretty good at this kind of progress over the years, picking up new technologies like USB and SSDs and dropping aging ones like the DVD drive well before those technologies had gone (or ceased to be) mainstream.

      But the headphone jack is not the floppy drive. It’s not the 30-pin connector. It’s not the DVD drive. It’s not even USB Type-C. It’s not, in other words, directly comparable to all those other times when Apple has been “right” to remove or change something, both because of the ubiquity of the headphone jack and the quality of the supposed replacements.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Texas Trademark Spat Full Of Crap?

        We’ve seen plenty of strange, even laughable, trademark spats around here. What can get lost in the kind of ownership culture we’ve collectively created is that trademark is chiefly built around the concept of avoiding customer confusion. With that noble goal in mind, businesses are allowed to reserve the right to use specific marks that act as identifiers for their brands. One of the tests that’s commonly referenced to determine whether there is the potential for customer confusion is: would a moron in a hurry be confused by a given use between two competing companies?

    • Copyrights

      • Pirate Bay Co-Founder to Sue Record Labels For Defamation

        Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde is firing back at several major record labels, demanding compensation for damaging his name. Sunde is preparing a lawsuit against the music labels, who were recently awarded damages for his involvement with the notorious pirate site.

06.22.16

Links 22/6/2016: PulseAudio 9.0, GNOME 3.21.3 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Building a business on a solid open source model

    Since we announced Nextcloud, an ownCloud fork, many people have asked me how we plan to build a sustainable, healthy open source business. My short answer is that it requires a strong focus on maintaining a careful balance between the needs of all stakeholders: users, contributors, employees, customers, and—of course—investors. Building a solid open source business requires that management has confidence in the abilities of your company, stakeholders must be on board with the business model, and everyone must understand that balance is important for the ecosystem. Like a rising tide lifts all boats, a strong ecosystem benefits all stakeholders.

  • Why I must use Free Software – and why I tell others to do so

    My work colleagues know me well as a Free/Libre software zealot, constantly pointing out to them how people should behave, how FLOSS software trumps commercial software and how this is the only way forward. This for the last 20 odd years. It’s a strain to argue this repeatedly: at various times, I have been asked to set out more clearly why I use FLOSS, what the advantages are, why and how to contribute to FLOSS software.

  • BusyBox 1.25 Released

    This latest update to the widely-used BusyBox software features a new blkdiscard applet, new options for gunzip/gzip, new nsenter / unshare / ubirename applets, build system changes, fixes for unzip, updates to ntpd, Ash additions, and a wide variety of other changes.

  • Altair Adds Open-Source Licensing to PBS Pro

    One of the problems that continues to hinder HPC is that, by and large, there’s a greater demand for computing cycles than there are CPUs and GPUs available. With researchers and engineers lining up to have their calculations crunched, it’s critical that HPC schemes have effective job management software that can keep track of a queue or jobs and assign the appropriate hardware to each project.

  • ClusterHQ’s Mohit Bhatnagar Talks Flocker, Docker, and the Rise of Open Source

    Container technology remains very big news, and if you bring up the topic almost everyone immediately thinks of Docker. But, there are other tools that can compete with Docker, and tools that can extend it and make it more flexible. CoreOS’s Rkt, for example, is a command-line tool for running app containers. And, ClusterHQ has an open source project called Flocker that allows developers to run their databases inside Docker containers, leveraging persistent storage, and making data highly portable.

  • Events

    • openSUSE Conference 2016 Day 1

      The first day of this year’s openSUSE Conference went well and the keynote speaker team of SaltStack Chief Technical Officer and technical founder Thomas Hatch along with Senior SaltStack Engineer David Boucha and SUSE’s Joe Werner showed how powerful Salt is for IT automation.

      Boucha gave a live demo and Hatch talked about the evolution of Salt and even talked a little about Salt’s Thorium Reactor, which was added to Salt as an experimental feature in the 2016.3.0 release. Werner discussed how SUSE uses Salt with SUSE Manager.

    • Building a better LibrePlanet: What we learned from the conference surveys

      Our samples are usually about sixty to seventy respondents, and self-selecting — from their responses, we can say with confidence that LibrePlanet attendees feel we’re doing a decent job organizing the conference. The questions “How much did you enjoy the sessions you attended, compared to those at other conferences you have attended?” and “How likely is it that you will return to LibrePlanet next year?” received an average of about 3.5 out of 4 each of the last three years.

    • Do you GNU? Attend the GNU Hackers’ Meeting in France this summer!

      The GNU Hackers’ Meeting is a friendly, semi-formal forum to discuss technical, social, and organizational issues concerning free software and GNU. This is a great opportunity to meet GNU maintainers and active contributors.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

  • OPNFV

  • Healthcare

    • Dysfunction and Sabotage: Why Large Hospital EHR Costs So Much

      Years ago I read the cannon of the classic medical book “House of God” by Samuel Shem which reads: “…the House of God was sad and sick and cynical…like all our doings in the House…” At first, before I had worked in an actual hospital I thought the book itself was sick and cynical. After working in an actual hospital I re-read the book. I then found it hilarious for its uncomfortable truths, and did not think it was sick or cynical enough. Therein likes the crux of the matter with regard to very expensive large hospital EHR’s.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • ‘Steal My Tool’ showcases open source tools for journalists at IRE conference

      Robert Gebeloff, database projects editor at The New York Times, demonstrated how to use XML Grid to access and interpret a website’s data. Using these tools and techniques, Gebeloff showed how one can find which Trader Joe’s stores sell beer by simply scraping the site’s XML code. Gebeloff has published detailed instructions for web scraping without programming on his GitHub page.

    • Open Data

      • The current state of open data in the US government

        The S.2852 OPEN Government Data Act aims to require true open data access at the federal level. In this article I will discuss the importance of open data in government, the current state of open data in government, and what we need to do to implement true open data.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • VR Care is Frog’s open source VR headset for hospital patients

        VR is pretty good at distracting us from the outside world – take off the headset you’ve been wearing and you’ll see that it’s gone dark/everyone has left/you really need to shower.

      • 2048 DIY Open Source Game Console Hits Kickstarter (video)

        Anyone looking to learn more about coding and creating video games may be interested in the new DIY open source games console called 2048 which has been created by 2048.

        The name refers to the special screen that the game console is equipped with that is constructed from 2048 individual LED bulbs that are placed in a matrix form offering a 64 x 32 resolution.

        Learn more about what is possible using the open source games console from the developers at Creoqode. Who was taken to Kickstarter this week to raise the £20,000 they require to take the hardware into production. Early bird pledges are available from just $99 with delivery expected to take place during December 2016 with worldwide shipping available if required.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • Google Hacker Donates His $15,000 Bug Bounty Cash Award To Charity

      Google’s leading security engineer Tavis Ormandy recently won a bug bounty challenge run by security solutions firm Bromium and decided to donate the money to charity. Following his gesture, Bromium matched Ormandy’s donation and donated $15,000 to Amnesty International organization.

    • TOR Project And Security Experts Making A “Hardened” Version Of TOR To Defeat FBI

      The TOR Project is working closely with security researchers to implement a new technique to secure the TOR Browser against the FBI’s de-anonymization exploits. Called “Selfrando”, this technique will fight the FBI’s “Code Reuse” exploits and create a “hardened” version of TOR.

    • Mozilla Awards $385,000 to Open Source Projects as part of MOSS “Mission Partners” Program

      For many years people with visual impairments and the legally blind have paid a steep price to access the Web on Windows-based computers. The market-leading software for screen readers costs well over $1,000. The high price is a considerable obstacle to keeping the Web open and accessible to all. The NVDA Project has developed an open source screen reader that is free to download and to use, and which works well with Firefox. NVDA aligns with one of the Mozilla Manifesto’s principles: “The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.”

    • Mozilla MOSS ‘Mission Partners’ makes it rain $385,000 on open source project developers

      Open source is very important nowadays, especially from a privacy and security standpoint. Look, closed source ideology is not inherently bad — it is a good way to protect a company’s code. The problem, however, is that users are increasingly suspicious of software since Edward Snowden’s leaks. There is no telling what kind of back doors or other malicious things are hiding in the code.

    • Severe flaws in widely used archive library put many projects at risk

      n a world where any new software project is built in large part on existing third-party code, finding and patching vulnerabilities in popular open-source libraries is vital to creating reliable and secure applications.

      For example, three severe flaws in libarchive, recently found by researchers from Cisco Systems’ Talos group, could affect a large number of software products.

      Libarchive is an open-source library first created for FreeBSD, but has since been ported to all major operating systems. It provides real-time access to files compressed with a variety of algorithms, including tar, pax, cpio, ISO9660, zip, lha/lzh, rar, cab and 7-Zip.

  • Defence/Aggression

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Ecuador ‘fed up’ with Assange embassy ‘under siege’

      Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Guillaume Long says there is concern about the health of Julian Assange, who has now been in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy for four years.

      He told Zeinab Badawi: “We are concerned about his health. He doesn’t have access to good health care. We are very worried about this. After four years, there is a clear deterioration.”

      The Wikileaks founder sought refuge in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face accusations of sexual assault, which he denies.

    • Julian Assange Just Began His 5th Year Inside the Ecuadorian Embassy

      This past Sunday, June 19, Julian Assange began his fifth year inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum from the United States in 2012. The date was marked with simultaneous worldwide events—with 60 prominent supporters, including Noam Chomsky, Ai Wei Wei, Patti Smith, and Michael Moore, demanding Assange’s release. The theme of the day was “First They Came for Assange,” an allusion to Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem warning of the dangers of staying silent in the face of rising state repression.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • NSA rejects ‘inappropriate’ invitation to assist with design of lynx introduction programme

      Phil Stocker, NSA Chief Executive, says: “Our understanding is the Project Advisory Group will design the trial that will only go ahead if Lynx UK is successful in gaining a licence from Natural England and/or Scottish Natural Heritage. We feel it is inappropriate for NSA to provide guidance to Lynx UK ahead of that licence application, as we remain opposed to any pilot taking place. In addition, we are not prepared for someone from NSA to be part of the group when the terms of reference state members would not be there to represent the views of any particular organisation.”

    • The lynx effect: Plans to release wild animals in Britain abandoned

      But two more sites on either side of the border are still under consideration and one will ultimately be chosen to have lynx released to start breeding colonies.

      Alarmed farmers say it could lead to savage attacks on livestock and even children by the hungry beasts, which became extinct in Britain around 700 AD, almost 150 years before King Alfred the Great was born.

    • Bloodthirsty lynx to be released into UK for breeding for first time

      One of two sites will be chosen where the Eurasian lynx will be reintroduced.

      Alarmed farmers warn the decision could lead to savage attacks on livestock and even children by the beast.

      Now the Lynx UK Trust hopes to release the wild cat to somewhere in Aberdeenshire or Northumberland.

    • Lynx return ruled out in Cumbria and Norfolk

      Plans to reintroduce the lynx to the wild in Cumbria and Norfolk have been scrapped.

      The Lynx UK Trust said the animal, which has been extinct in Britain for 1,300 years, would help control deer populations and attract tourists.

      But it has now ruled out Ennerdale in the Lake District and Thetford Forest in Norfolk, as too small to support populations of the big cat.

  • Finance

    • Banks Warn Of Trading Issues Over EU Vote

      Banks and money transfer services are warning that a surge in market volatility surrounding Thursday’s EU referendum may impact electronic trading platforms.

      As holidaymakers flock to cash in on the strong pound, and buy their travel money ahead of the vote, a number of money transfer companies are suspending services.

      Azimo and rival website Transferwise, have both announced they will be suspending trading on Thursday morning.

    • Michael Gove compares experts warning against Brexit to Nazis who smeared Albert Einstein’s work as he threatens to quit David Cameron’s Cabinet

      Michael Gove has compared economic experts warning about Brexit to Nazis who smeared Albert Einstein’s scientific findings during the 1930s.

      Mr Gove, who chairs the Vote Leave campaign, also suggested that he may quit the Government if Britain votes to stay in the EU because David Cameron will not be able to meet his pledge to control migration.

    • Eddie Izzard: Comedian Gets Serious with ‘Remain’ Campaign

      English comedian Eddie Izzard is a passionate European who has been vigorously campaigning for young people to vote Remain in the Brexit referendum. Ahead of his last speech before the vote, he told Handelsblatt about his vision for a positive, unified European future.

    • A Brexit won’t stop cheap labour coming to Britain

      The Unite union is fighting all the way for a remain vote and for British workers to build their future in unity with workers in the rest of Europe. But I refuse to lecture or to patronise those working people who take a different view. After all, who can be surprised that in so many industrial areas, voting for the status quo is not a popular option?

    • Brexit: James Dyson is lone, pro-Leave voice among UK tech superstars

      British tech firms overwhelmingly support the UK remaining part of the European Union, even at the eleventh hour before Thursday’s referendum vote.

      In fact, the vacuum cleaner innovator Sir James Dyson is the only really big name among the country’s tech players to publicly come out and back Brexit—he believes that leaving the EU might help him recruit top engineering talent from outside Europe to come and work in the UK, and says “we will create more wealth and more jobs by being outside the EU.”

      Aside from him, the British tech sector appears to be very pro-European Union.

    • Why Mining Corporations Love Trade Deals

      From the salmon-spawning waters of Alaska to the cloud forests of Ecuador, communities are standing up to mining projects that threaten their health, environment, and livelihoods.

      But mining corporations are fighting back with a powerful tool buried in trade and investment agreements: the ability to go to private, unaccountable tribunals and sue governments that act to protect communities from mining.

      In these private tribunals, which sit outside of any domestic legal system, corporate lawyers – not judges – decide whether governments must pay corporations for halting destructive mining projects. To date, mining corporations have used these private tribunals to sue over 40 governments more than 100 times.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Hillary Clinton Criticizes Donald Trump for One of the Few Things He Is Right About

      Deficit hawks often raise the specter of hyperinflation to scare people who disagree with them. And that’s exactly what Hillary Clinton did on Tuesday.

      Speaking in Columbus, Clinton criticized Donald Trump for saying last month that the U.S. can never default on its debt obligations “because you print the money.”

      “We know what happened to countries that tried that in the past, like Germany in the ‘20s and Zimbabwe in the ‘90s,” Clinton said. “It drove inflation through the roof and crippled their economies.”

      But printing money — otherwise known as increasing the money supply – is a routine occurrence for governments that control their own currency. The Federal Reserve has increased its balance sheet by over $3 trillion since the financial crisis, explicitly to support the economy. (The Fed does this by buying stocks and bonds with electronic cash that didn’t exist before.)

      In fact, an increasingly influential school of economics, known as Modern Monetary Theory, argues that deficit spending, including through money printing, is critical to promote full employment.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • The New Censorship

      How did Google become the internet’s censor and master manipulator, blocking access to millions of websites?

    • Cleveland Bans Soapboxes and Sleeping Bags, Not Guns, Near Republican Convention

      Anyone venturing into a 3.3-square-mile “event zone” surrounding next month’s Republican National Convention will be prohibited from carrying tennis balls, tape, rope, bike locks, sleeping bags, or any object they could stand on to rise above the crowd and speak. They won’t be allowed to carry swords or water guns. But if they have a license, they’ll be permitted to openly carry real guns, including assault weapons.

      As Cleveland gears up to host one of the most controversial GOP conventions in decades, Ohio’s permissive gun policy isn’t the only red flag raised by prospective protesters and civil rights advocates. Many also warn that the regulations put in place by the city place “unacceptable restrictions on free speech” and risk escalating conflict, rather than diffusing it, by forcing rival groups of demonstrators to share tight quarters and schedules while keeping them out of sight and earshot of delegates and the media.

      The restrictions imposed on the large event zone drawn around Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena — known locally as “The Q”— have earned the city a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Ohio and widespread criticism across the spectrum of groups planning to show up at the convention to make their voices heard.

    • Egyptian and Lebanese film festivals censor ‘I Say Dust’ because of a same-sex kiss

      In making her short film “I Say Dust,” Darine Hotait wanted to explore Arab American identity from her perspective as a New York-based American Lebanese writer and director. It just so happened that her two lead characters would be women in their 20s who share a kiss. That kiss, however, has put “I Say Dust” at the center of a long-standing discussion about censorship after it was recently banned from two film festivals in the Middle East.

    • Sex Party forced to remove posters in ACT

      The Sex Party says it will reluctantly take down posters around Canberra deemed offensive by the ACT government.

      The party’s Senate candidate Steven Bailey says he will on Thursday remove signs reading “Screw the major parties – Vote for the Sex Party” and “Tax the Church – Vote for the Sex Party”.

      He said a city ranger on Monday gave the party 48 hours to remove the signs or face potential prosecution.

    • Election 2016: Sex Party hits out at ‘censorship’ after election signs taken down

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NSA Designates UTEP as a National Center of Academic Excellence (CAE) in Cyber Operations
    • Author Stephen Budiansky adds perspective to NSA’s covert activities

      Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used the CIA and NSA for personal projects

    • American Intelligence Agencies Lag Behind in Diversity

      For decades, intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA that have been tarred with accusations of sexism and racial profiling have worked hard to clean up their images and present a friendlier, more inclusive face to the world. Unfortunately, despite these efforts, similar scandals continue to hound the intelligence community, from the CIA’s hand in helping the NYPD monitor “ancestries of interest” to a culture within the NSA that condones violations of women’s privacy.

    • DOJ Insists That Rule 41 Change Is Not Important, Nothing To See Here, Move On Annoying Privacy Activist People

      We’ve been talking a lot about Rule 41 lately around here. As we’ve discussed, the DOJ had pushed for an update to the rule, basically granting the FBI much greater powers to hack into lots of computers, including those abroad (possibly creating diplomatic issues). We’ve been discussing the problems with the DOJ’s proposed change for years, and we haven’t been alone. Civil liberties groups and tech companies have both blasted the plans, but to no avail.

      Back in March, a judicial panel approved the DOJ’s proposed changes, and the Supreme Court gave its blessing a month later. The rule changes are set to go into effect on December 1st if they’re not stopped. Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul have introduced a bill to block them, while the EFF, Tor and friends have kicked off a big No Global Warrants campaign, encouraging Congress to block this change.

    • Firm pays $950,000 penalty for using Wi-Fi signals to secretly track phone users

      A mobile advertising company that tracked the locations of hundreds of millions of consumers without consent has agreed to pay $950,000 in civil penalties and implement a privacy program to settle charges that it violated federal law.

      The US Federal Trade Commission alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday that Singapore-based InMobi undermined phone users’ ability to make informed decisions about the collection of their location information. While InMobi claimed that its software collected geographical whereabouts only when end users provided opt-in consent, the software in fact used nearby Wi-Fi signals to infer locations when permission wasn’t given, FTC officials alleged. InMobi then archived the location information and used it to push targeted advertisements to individual phone users.

    • Senate Narrowly Rejects Controversial FBI Surveillance Expansion—For Now

      A controversial amendment that would expand the FBI’s surveillance power was narrowly defeated in the Senate Wednesday.

      The final tally was 58 to 38, two votes shy of the 60 needed for the amendment to move forward. The issue will likely surface again soon, however, as Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., immediately filed for a motion to reconsider the amendment.

    • Dashcam and bodycam undermine reasonable suspicion in two cases

      These two make one wonder how many times officers have just fabricated reasonable suspicion and courts have bought it:

      The dashcam video supports the defendant’s argument that he was stopped without reasonable suspicion of driving with lights off when they should have been on. The stop for following too close is also unsupported. The highway was nearly empty. Suppressed. United States v. Dominguez-Fernand, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 76368 (S.D.Ind. June 13, 2016).

    • Court Refuses To Uphold Evidence Seized During A Completely Bogus Traffic Stop

      Very rarely does anyone want to believe a defendant in a criminal prosecution. They have the most to lose, are often presumed guilty by all involved, and if they’d done nothing wrong, they wouldn’t be here defending themselves, right? None of that is how the system is supposed to work. But that’s how it often does.

      Law enforcement officers, on the other hand, are often treated as unimpeachably credible, even when their recollections of events are less than accurate. Sometimes they get called out for it. Most times they don’t. About the only way their dishonesty is called out if if there’s another set of eyes on the scene — like dashcams or body-worn cameras. (This, too, is far from a sure thing.)

      That’s what happened here. A bogus traffic stop that morphed into a drug bust began with zero traffic violations — even though the officer performing the stop claimed at least two violations had occurred. (via FourthAmendment.com)

      Victor Dominguez-Fernand was pulled over for allegedly driving with his headlights off and following too close to the vehicle ahead. Unfortunately for Deputy Nicholas Ernestes, his dashcam showed both claimed violations were bogus.

      First off, the supposed violation of “driving with headlights off” was only a presumed violation. Deputy Ernestes testified that he “believed” headlights were required because of the weather conditions (overcast and raining) but couldn’t actually assert that such a requirement exists.

    • GCHQ sets out ‘operational case’ for bulk collection

      A GCHQ document has put forward the ‘operational case’ for bulk collection.

      Authored by the UK’s signals intelligence agency, which is also the principal agent of bulk collection in the UK, the report sets out the manner in which “bulk powers provide vital intelligence that cannot be generated from any other source”.

      It goes on to draw out scenarios, some real, some hypothetical, in which bulk powers were or could be useful.

    • EFF Urges Senate Not to Expand FBI’s Controversial National Security Letter Authority

      The controversial National Security Letter (NSL) statute could be significantly expanded under two separate bills currently being debated by the Senate. Every year, the FBI issues thousands of NSLs to telephone and Internet companies, demanding records about their customers and gagging the companies from informing the public about these requests. NSLs are inherently dangerous to civil liberties because their use is rarely subject to judicial review. But NSLs are not magic, and they don’t require recipients to do whatever the FBI says. Above all, the type of information available to the FBI with an NSL is quite limited, reflecting the need to tightly control the extrajudicial nature of this controversial power.

    • Jewel v. NSA Moves Forward—Time For NSA To Answer Basic Questions About Mass Surveillance

      It’s time to lift the cloak of secrecy that has until now shielded the NSA from judicial scrutiny. EFF served the agency with information requests late last week in Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s signature case challenging government surveillance. Since we filed the case in 2008, leaks about government spying—much of which have been confirmed by intelligence agencies—have vindicated our claims that the U.S. government is and was illegally spying on millions of innocent Americans. Now, we are seeking answers to basic questions about the nuts and bolts of the government’s Internet and telephone mass surveillance programs.

      Not only does this mark the first opportunity to obtain evidence since the case was filed nearly eight years ago, but it’s also the first time any party has been allowed to gather facts about the programs’ inner workings from the NSA in a case involving the agency’s warrantless surveillance.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Customs Agents, Local Doctor Subject 18-Year-Old To Vaginal, Rectal Probing In Search Of Nonexistent Drugs

      The police obtained no drugs, but Eckert obtained a $1.6 million settlement.

      Perhaps that sort of payoff is in 18-year-old Ashley Cervantes’ future. Cervantes did nothing more than cross the border to eat breakfast in Nogales, Mexico. Upon her return, things went from bad to worse to nightmarish.

    • Guy In Australia Pleads Guilty To Criminal Trolling On Facebook, Faces 3 Years In Jail

      Let’s start off with this: there’s no legitimate way to defend Zane Alchin, a guy in Australia who appears to be an all around horrible person. He went on Facebook, and after seeing a friend of his post (and mock) a woman’s Tinder profile, proceeded to post a whole bunch of pretty horrible and misogynistic posts on Facebook, including some pretty horrifying statements about “raping feminists.” I won’t post any of his other comments, though they’re covered in some of the articles written about the case. Alchin, who now claims he was just drunk and trolling, and also insisted he wasn’t breaking any laws, has since discovered that apparently he was breaking a weird Australian law…

    • Sydney labourer Zane Alchin switches to guilty plea over Tinder shaming case

      A Sydney labourer, who unleashed a torrent of explicit abuse online after a screen shot of a woman’s Tinder profile was uploaded to Facebook, told police he was drunk and unaware that trolling was a crime, court documents show.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • As OECD Gathers, Call For New Internet Social Compact – With Some Open Questions

      The GCIG report is here. Information on the OECD Ministerial is here.

      Information Society (ISOC) background on Ministerial is available here.

      Insurance companies for example are asked in the report presented in Cancun today to “rise to the challenge of ensuring that best practices for data protection and security are appropriately rewarded.” Governments are requested “to ensure their taxation policies do not bias the market for internet services or related equipment.”

    • Study Finds That T-Mobile’s Binge On Is Exploitable, Unreliable, And Still Violates Net Neutrality

      For a while now we’ve warned how “zero rating” (letting some content bypass usage caps) is a creative way for ISPs to tap dance around net neutrality –potentially to public applause. Comcast, for example, exempts its creatively-named “Stream” streaming video service from caps, but claims this doesn’t violate net neutrality because the traffic never technically leaves Comcast’s network. Verizon exempts its own Go90 video service from caps as well, and to date doesn’t even bother justifying the move. Both AT&T and Verizon let companies pay for cap exemption.

      And while these programs all laugh in the face of neutrality, many users still tend to applaud the horrible precedent because they believe — despite paying an arm and a leg for wireless data — that they’re getting something for free.

      T-Mobile has been perhaps the most creative in exploiting this belief and implementing zero rating, now exempting some 90 video services from user usage caps and throttling these services to 1.5 Mbps (or 480p) unless a user opts out. But neutrality advocates have repeatedly noted this idea still violates net neutrality given that thousands of startups, educational orgs, and non profits still aren’t whitelisted — and may not even realize they’re being discriminated against.

    • Northeastern researchers find T-Mobile’s Binge On doesn’t live up to the hype

      Want to watch unlim­ited videos from Net­flix, YouTube, and other providers on your mobile device for free? Make us your internet ser­vice provider, says T-​​Mobile. Our Binge On ser­vice allows you to do just that.

      Not so fast, says Northeastern’s David Choffnes, assis­tant pro­fessor in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence. New research by Choffnes and his col­leagues shows that what T-​​Mobile promises is not what you, or con­tent providers, may actu­ally get.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • No Man’s Sky Settles With Sky TV So It Can Have ‘Sky’ In Its Name

        As you may or may not be aware, Sky TV is a European cable television network owned by Rupert Murdoch. Sky TV is also a company that has trademarked the word “sky” and enjoys bludgeoning anyone who uses the word “sky” in business into the ground. This has resulted in exceptionally silly disputes, such as Sky TV suing Skype, despite there being not a lick of competition between a messaging/calling system and television.

        This past week, gaming enthusiasts learned that the much anticipated open universe space exploration game No Man’s Sky had been battling with Sky TV over the inclusion of the word “sky” in its title. This case of trademark bullying can act as a wonderful barometer, because if you don’t think this is ridiculous, then you are ridiculous.

      • Cinemark Files Trademark Infringement Lawsuit Against Roblox Over User-Generated Content

        Today’s misguided IP infringement lawsuit comes from Cinemark USA, one of the largest theater chains in the United States. Its target is Roblox, a multiplayer online sandbox game where users can create their own “worlds” using blocks — putting it somewhere between Minecraft and Second Life.

        Cinemark is accusing Roblox and a few dozen of its users of trademark infringement, thanks to the latter’s creations. According to the lawsuit [PDF], various users have created versions of Cinemark theaters (complete with branding) and placed them in their own worlds, or uploaded for others to use in theirs.

    • Copyrights

      • MPAA Happily Gets Into Bed With Russian State Censor Agency… To Protect Copyright!

        Roskomnadzor is the Russian “telecommunications regulator” or “watchdog,” but it could just as easily be described as the Russian internet censor, because that appears to be a large part of its role in the country. In the past, we’ve written about Roskomnadzor blocking all of Wikipedia over a single reference to hashish (really) and also a plan to block all of CloudFlare because the company made it difficult for Russia’s internet censorship plans to work. Earlier this month, Roskomnadzor made news for blacklisting a Vice article, claiming that it would encourage shoplifting.

        So, who better to support such a censorship regime than… Hollywood! The MPAA has now proudly signed an agreement with Roskomnadzor to cooperate on protecting copyright online. The linked article is unfortunately horribly written. The title implies that the MPAA represents the government of the United States (while sometimes true in practice, that’s not how it’s supposed to work…) and then provides frightfully few details on what the agreement really is), beyond “protect copyright!”

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