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12.22.15

Links 22/12/2015: Linux 4.4 RC6, Solus 1.0 Imminent

Posted in News Roundup at 8:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Diversity in open source highlights from 2015

    The pool of people participating in open source communities still lacks diversity, but the good news is that many people, projects, and organizations are working to improve it. I’ve collected a few highlights from 2015 efforts to increase diversity in open source communities. Which 2015 diversity in open source stories would you add to the list? Let us know in the comments.

  • Inside the Robot Operating System, the robotics industry and the Open Source Robotics Foundation

    Eight years ago, the Robot Operating System (ROS) project began, and since then there have been huge advancements made to the robotics industry. Robots are teaching kids to code, becoming companions, have been given X-ray vision, and even started to fly.

    But adding these features aren’t easy, and that is where the Robot Operating System comes in, according to Brian Gerkey, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).

  • The Year of Crowdfunded Open Source Small Businesses

    2015 was crowded with events for Linux and open source. It was a year in which the runaway success of OpenStack continued, fuelling — among other things, rumors of a Canonical Software public offering. It was also the year of unsuccessful ventures into smartphones by Mozilla, Sailfish, and Ubuntu, and the first appearance of a Steam Machine for gamers.

  • Adafruit’s best open source wearables of 2015

    Wearable electronics have exploded in the past year. Countless small devices are now on the market for not only fitness tracking, but posture improvement, sunscreen reminders, muscle-sensing gesture control, and much more. As technology on the body becomes more pervasive than ever, having open source tools for developing wearable technology is more important than ever, so that we can create the future of fashion tech while maintaining data privacy of biometric sensor data.

  • The Keys to Success When Launching Your Own Open Source Concept

    Have you been thinking of launching an open source project or are you in the process of doing so? Doing it successfully and rallying community support can be more complicated than you think, but a little up-front footwork and howework can help things go smoothly. Beyond that, some planning can also keep you out of legal trouble. Issues pertaining to licensing, distribution, support options and even branding require thinking ahead if you want your project to flourish. In this post, you’ll find our newly updated collection of good, free resources to pay attention to if you’re doing an open source project.

  • Why Pinterest just open-sourced new tools for the Elixir programming language

    At Pinterest, that company with a popular app for pinning images and other content to boards, much of the source code is written in the longstanding Python programming language. But in the past year, a few of the company’s software engineers have called on a young language called Elixir.

    Pinterest’s notification system now uses Elixir to deliver 14,000 notifications per second. The notification system runs across 15 servers, whereas the old system, written in Java, ran on 30. The new code is about one-tenth of the size of the old code.

  • Puppet Labs Plugs in Kubernetes Orchestration Framework for Containers

    Rather than continuing to use low-level tools such as YAML, says Carl Caum, technical marketing manager for Puppet Labs, IT organizations can now make use of the declarative programming environment that Puppet Labs created to configure containers alongside the operating system and virtual machines that many of them already rely on Puppet to configure.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • An open vision: Strategic planning is transparent at Mozilla [Ed: but now they support the evil which is DRM to support a rotten business model (opposite of transparency)]

        This month marks a milestone for me. It’s been five years since I started working in—and learning from—an open organization.

        But it also marks another important milestone. My organization, the Mozilla Foundation, just finished drafting a strategic plan for what the next five years may hold.

        And we created that plan through open collaboration between our staff and community.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Collabora making modest profits on LibreOffice

      A little more than two years ago, the open source consulting company Collabora took over the job of commercialising LibreOffice, the free office suite that is produced by an army of developers.

      At that time, a number of LibreOffice developers moved from the Germany-based Linux company SUSE and became staff of Collabora.

    • LibreOffice Online is here!

      There are however a few comments I would like to make about this testing release. First, I’m very happy to see LibreOffice Online become a reality. By reality, I mean more than an announcement and more than a demo with chunks of code and configuration notes. Today, LibreOffice runs in the cloud. Which leads me to my second comment: the relevance of LibreOffice in the future is now pretty secure. Running LibreOffice in the browser needs you can access it without having to download the code and just by using the access gateway to everything these days: the browser.

  • Funding

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GnuCash 2.6.10 released

      The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.6.10, the tenth maintenance release in the 2.6-stable series. Please take the tour of all the new features.

    • The Fight For Freedom

      There’s a problem with the word ‘free’. Specifically, it can refer to something that costs no money, or something that isn’t held down by restrictions – in other words, something that has liberty. This difference is crucial when we talk about software, because free (as in cost) software doesn’t necessarily give you freedom. There are plenty of no-cost applications out there that spy on you, steal your data, and try to lock you in to specific file formats. And you certainly can’t get the source code to them.

    • GNU MediaGoblin 0.8.1 Open-Source Media Server Fixes Critical OAuth Security Flaw

      Jessica Tallon from the MediaGoblin project, open-source media server software designed for GNU/Linux operating systems, announced this past weekend the immediate availability of a patch for GNU MediaGoblin 0.8.

    • GnuCash 2.6.10 Free Accounting Software Squashes over 15 Bugs, Adds Improvements

      The developers behind the GnuCash Project were happy to announce this past weekend the immediate availability for download of the tenth maintenance release in the GnuCash 2.6 series, bringing all sorts of improvements, updated translations, and numerous bugfixes.

    • Stallman on happiness and perseverance

      It’s amazing to think that a broken printer lead to the creation of the Free Software movement which, many years later, would give me a professional career, an education, and incredible friends around the world.

    • Join with me to support the Software Freedom Conservancy
    • GPL enforcement is a social good

      Vendors who don’t release their code remove that freedom from their users, and the weapons users have to fight against that are limited. Most users hold no copyright over the software in the device and are unable to take direct action themselves. A vendor’s failure to comply dooms them to having to choose between buying a new device in 12 months or no longer receiving security updates. When yet more examples of vendor-supplied malware are discovered, it’s more difficult to produce new builds without them. The utility of the devices that the user purchased is curtailed significantly.

    • Donate to Conservancy!

      Conservancy needs 750 Supporters to continue its basic community services & 2,500 to avoid hibernating its enforcement efforts! The next 38 supporters who sign up by December 24th will count twice thanks to an anonymous match donor!
      552 have joined so far and match pledges reduced our 2,500 maximum need by 178 !

    • MediaGoblin 0.8.1: Security release

      We have had a security problem in our OAuth implementation reported to us privately and have taken steps to address it. The security problem affects all versions of GNU MediaGoblin since 0.5.0. I have created a patch for this and released a minor version 0.8.1 (see the release notes page). It’s strongly advised that everyone upgrade as soon as they can.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Commission begins overhaul of Joinup

      The European Commission has started working on the next version of Joinup, the collaboration platform for eGovernment professionals. Users are the main focus of the upgrade, which will make the platform easier to use. Access to and sharing of interoperability solutions will be streamlined, and the developers are making it more straightforward to contribute to the platform’s projects and communities. If all goes well, the new version could go live in June.

  • Licensing

    • Open Source Software: Usually Cash-free, but with Strings Attached [Ed: lawyers in a lawyers’ site spread FUD about FOSS and pretend it was all along just about cost]

      While everyone knows of the need to comply with contractual terms in software licenses (and elsewhere), the salient point in this context, is that under several recent cases, failure to do so with respect to a license for copyrighted material (which is usually applicable to software), allows the pursuit in United States District Court of claims for infringement damages under the Copyright Act and related items, such as attorney fees. This is in addition to traditional contract damages, which may be non-existent or difficult to prove. For example, if the evidence establishes (among other things) that the work infringed was a registered work in the U.S. Copyright Office and the infringement was willful, then the court may, in its discretion, award statutory damages of up to $150,000 (regardless of the retail cost of the underlying work).

  • Programming

    • Know Your Language: PHP Lurches On

      Presumably there are people that think the PHP language is awesome. An afternoon spent writing PHP code is like a fine meal and a backrub in one transcendent coding experience while JavaScript and client-side scripting can just go to hell.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • New data porting rules mustn’t overburden businesses with costs, says UK minister

      Baroness Neville-Rolfe said that the planned new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is likely to give consumers “more control over how their data is to be used” but she raised concern about the impact data portability rules could have on “new ideas, innovation and competition”.

      Various drafts of the GDPR have contained proposed new rules which would, if finalised, require businesses to ensure that they can hand over the personal data they possess on a consumer in a usable transferable format.

Leftovers

12.20.15

Links 20/12/2015: OpenMandriva Server Version, Alpine 3.3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • LEGO: The New Open Source Toy?

    Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of these open sourced projects involve LEGOs. When perusing through Github, developers will find a variety of projects based around LEGOs—for example, a project that allows you to create custom decals (or clothes) for LEGO minifigs (LEGO people). Or, a developer may stumble upon a project that enables him or her to create music, electronically, with a 32×32 inch LEGO plate and 2×2 inch LEGO bricks. The latter of the two involves a little more technology—a webcam, basic coding knowledge, and music software—but nonetheless, it is possible to achieve.

  • License Plate Tracking Has Gone Open-Source

    Computer vision-assisted license plate reading seems to be a favorite spectre of a certain sort of privacy worrier, at least anecdotally speaking. Something to do with its potential for tracking and profiling an activity that seems to make Americans in particular feel their most, uh, liberated (driving cars).

    The technology has had a steady uptake among law enforcement agencies, who of course think it’s wondertool for busting crimes, but now an open-source implementation is starting to make some waves in the developer world and beyond. This is OpenALPR, and, as Mike James notes at I-Programmer, it’s not a new thing but is getting some new attention in the wake of a recent code release. LPR is here for the masses and it’s incredibly easy to use.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Funding

    • FUUG grant for Obnam development: what happened then

      In September, The FUUG Foundation gave me a grant to buy some hardware for Obnam development. I used this money to buy a new desktop-ish machine, see below for details. It’s sat in a corner, and I use it as a server: it’s not normally connected to a monitor or keyboard. It runs Obnam benchmarks. Before this, I ran Obnam benchmarks and experiments on my laptop, or on BigV virtual servers donated by Bytemark.s

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Programming

    • Why Many Still Turn to Private Servers for Testing Environments

      With the evolution of the cloud, it may come as a surprise to some that there are so many businesses still using dedicated servers. In fact, according to Zephyr’s annual How The World Tests Report, nearly half of respondents host their test environments in their private servers, while 36 percent chose a mix of cloud and hardware solutions. The question, then, is what conditions do these organizations have and why are private servers so essential to their workflows?

Leftovers

  • New Zealand approves the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and other reasons to fear for humanity

    This is on the BBC so must be true: New Zealand has given approval to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to carry out marriage ceremonies in the country. Members of the church call themselves Pastafarians and believe that the world was created by an airborne spaghetti and meatballs-based being, although its own website notes that some followers consider it to be a satirical organization. The N.Z. registrar-general said his decision was based solely on whether the organization upholds or promotes religious beliefs, or philosophical or solely convictions, not whether the beliefs are all a big joke or not.

  • Security

    • BadWinmail Microsoft Outlook Bug Can Give Attackers Control Over PCs [iophk: "These kinds of bugs have been in Outlook as long as Outlook has been around. This is nothing new. What's needed are fines for people hooking Windows up to the Internet."]

      Just by looking at an email message in Outlook, attackers can now take control over your PC. The good news is that Microsoft has patched the issue, but unless you updated Outlook after December 8, you’re still vulnerable to this issue.

      Security researcher Haifei Li discovered this peculiar Outlook bug, which he named BadWinmail. According to a technical report he put together after the vulnerability’s discovery, the attack is extremely easy to carry out and does not require any complex interaction from the end user.

    • MacKeeper Leaks 13 Million Mac Owners’ Data, Leaves Passwords Open To Easy Cracking

      Researcher Chris Vickery said he uncovered four IP addresses that took him straight to a MongoDB database, containing a range of personal information, including names, email addresses, usernames, password hashes, phone numbers, IP addresses, system information, as well as software licenses and activation codes. All Vickery had to do was look for openly accessible MongoDB databases on the Shodan search tool.

    • Penetration Testing

      Penetration testing, also called pentesting, is an attack method which scans for broad vulnerabilities in networked computers. It is primarily used in professional settings in order to ascertain the status of security in a machine.

    • Exploit Logs You Into Linux Systems After Hitting Backspace 28 Times
    • Insane bug makes it incredibly easy to hack many Linux systems

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Spymasters: CIA documentary sheds little light on drones, 9/11 or torture

      There are a few ways to judge The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs, a new documentary which interviews all 12 living former heads of the CIA (and several other key personnel) and premieres on Showtime at 9pm on Saturday. You can view it as a piece of filmmaking, as an apologia for the tactics the agency has to employ to get its very difficult job done, or as a rewriting of history from the CIA’s point of view. On two out of three of these criteria, it sadly comes up short.

      As a film, The Spymasters is a bit of a failure. In aesthetic, tone and pacing it seems directly based on The Gatekeepers, a 2012 film that interviewed all the former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police. However, the former spooks in Spymasters aren’t nearly as candid as the Israelis. This new film is slow-moving and, at a solid two hours, long-winded. The first 15 minutes consist of throat-clearing platitudes, it is often hard to tell who is speaking, and interruptions from directors Gedeon and Jules Naudet frequently take the viewer out of the experience entirely.

    • Oh, the suffering of the CIA: In Showtime’s “The Spymasters,” America’s chief spooks bare their souls on the pain of the terror war

      Whom to waterboard? Which village to drone? A bizarre documentary explores the spy elite’s secret suffering

    • Weapon Used in November 13 Paris Attacks Came From CIA-linked Arms Dealer

      At least one of the guns used in the November 13 terror attacks in Paris was purchased by Century International Arms and then re-exported to Europe. One of the largest arms dealers in the United States, Century Arms has close ties to the CIA and has faced charges in America and Europe of involvement in illegal arms deals.

      The weapon, an M92 semiautomatic pistol, was produced at the Zastava arms factory in Kragujevac, Serbia. Last week, factory manager Milojko Brzakovic told AP he had checked its records on seven weapons that it manufactured that were used in the Paris attacks. It delivered several of the weapons inside Yugoslavia before that country dissolved amid capitalist restoration and civil war in the 1990s, but it delivered the pistol in May 2013 to Century Arms, based in Delray Beach, Florida.

    • Anonymous war with Isis could lead to spread of internet censorship, group warns

      Social media campaigns will “legitimize the spread of internet censorship and will lead to the increased censorship for everyone, including Anonymous,” the message reads. “Dealing with government agents et al will not only result in many more informers in Anonymous but will also damage its reputation as it will lead to a view that Anonymous is too close to US intelligence interests.”

    • There Have Been Zero Terror Attacks in the U.S. by People Radicalized by ISIS Through Social Media

      The term “radicalized” is a problematic one, namely because virtually no one who carries out sub-state political violence (which we’ll broadly refer to as terrorism) follows the same pattern. Some are hyper-religious while others have but a passing knowledge of the Bible or Quran. Some are battle-hardened fighters, while others carry out their “jihad” in a typical workplace violence mode. But in the wake of a terrorist attack, authorities and the press alike scramble to ask the question: When exactly did the attacker begin to show signs of violent ideology? In the case of Islamic-tinted violence, the question more specifically is: When did they first show support for either al Qaeda or ISIS ideology?

    • Why wasn’t San Bernardino prevented? The hard truth that no one wants to admit.

      Americans want to treat San Bernardino and the risk of future such attacks — and that risk is real — as purely a terrorism problem, because that feels like a problem with difficult but achievable and politically palatable solutions. We want to ignore the ways in which this is also a mass shooting problem, because American political and social factors have made addressing the broader mass shooting problem seem just about impossible.

    • Stephen Zunes: No Candidates Are Looking at Root Cause of ISIL, “This Monster We Created.”

      Juan González: GOP to Puerto Rico–”Drop Dead”; GOP Debate: Trump Defends Muslim Ban, Other Candidates Debate How to Restrict Rights & Go to Wa; Democracy Is Being Dismantled Before Our Eyes: Bob Herbert on Sheldon Adelson-Backed GOP Debate; Ben Carson: I am OK with Killing “Thousands of Innocent Children and Civilians”; Trump Calls for Closing Parts of Internet as Cruz & Rubio Debate NSA Powers; Stephen Zunes: No Candidates Are Looking at Root Cause of ISIL, “This Monster We Created.”

    • Our say: Why did arrested man have guns in his trunk?

      How could a man barred from possessing guns because of a 2009 conviction for illegal possession of a firearm have a 30-30 lever-action rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun in the trunk of his car?

  • Transparency Reporting

    • A Victory for Privacy and Transparency: HRW v. DEA

      In a victory for millions of people in the U.S. who have placed telephone calls to locations overseas, EFF and Human Rights Watch have confirmed that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s practice of collecting those records in bulk has stopped and that the only bulk database of those records has been destroyed.

      From the 1990s to 2013, the DEA secretly and illegally collected billions of records of Americans’ international calls to hundreds of countries around the world. In April 2015, we filed a lawsuit on behalf of our client, Human Rights Watch, challenging the constitutionality of the program and seeking to have the records purged from the government’s possession.

      Today, HRW has agreed to voluntarily dismiss that suit after receiving assurances from the government, provided under penalty of perjury, that the bulk collection has ceased and that the only database containing the billions of Americans’ call records collected by the DEA has been purged from the government’s possession.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Carbon emissions from Indonesian peat fires vary considerably based on fire type, research shows

      Revised carbon loss estimates for recurrent fires on tropical peatlands have been revised by a research team. The study also found that peatlands closer to canals have a higher probability of high frequency fires, which release harmful carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

    • Experts say efforts to stop Indonesian fires may not work for 2016

      Those fires have contributed to the smoke crisis choking Southeast Asia almost annually.

      But many experts believe fires in Indonesia are likely to start up again when the rainy season ends in March. They say not enough has been done yet to head off the risks.

      Slash-and-burn clearance of land – much of it to plant oil palm, and trees to make pulp and paper – is the main culprit fuelling the fires that smoulder deep underground in peat. They have pushed up pollution levels, disrupting daily life from Indonesia to Singapore and Malaysia.

      Who is responsible for starting the fires is unclear, although the finger is often pointed at small-scale growers of the palm which produces cheap, edible oil.

      Mansuetus Alsy Hanu, national coordinator for Indonesia’s Palm Oil Smallholder Union, said his members are often unfairly blamed, and better mapping of the land would show some fires break out on larger holdings.

      Still he admitted that financial pressure on small growers pushes them towards slash-and-burn clearance.

    • Efforts to stop Indonesian haze fires may not work for 2016

      South Sumatra’s governor, Alex Noerdin, is adamant there will be a “significant reduction” next year in fires on deforested and peat land in his province.

      Those fires have contributed to the haze crisis choking South East Asia almost annually.

      But many experts believe fires in Indonesia are likely to start up again when the rainy season ends in March. They say not enough has been done yet to head off the risks.

    • MORTON MARCUS: Global warming, NSA among mounting problems up in Santa Land

      Often at this season, I visit Elvin Elfenhausen, my inside guy at the North Pole. “How’s the Jolly Old Man?” I ask.

      “Not very jolly,” he sighs. “Nor would you be jolly if everything around you was turning from reliable snow and ice to slush and water.”

      “I forgot,” I say. “Global Warming?

      “Yes, but not just Global Warming,” Elvin says. “That supposedly slow disaster is happening with disturbing quickness. And it seems everything else is going to pot. Santa’s thinking of moving.

      “Santa moving his workshop from the North Pole?” I exclaim. Immediately, I wonder which of my friends in the economic development business I should call with this startling opportunity.”

      “Where’s he thinking of going?” I prod. “How many jobs? What incentives? Cash? Tax abatement? A frozen TIF district? Labor training support? Does he want a new building or would an existing structure, zoned manufacturing, suffice? Does he demand a sleigh launching and landing site?”

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Geo-blocking | Digital Single Market

      Geo-blocking and other geographically-based restrictions undermine online shopping and cross-border sales. The Digital Single Market strategy includes a commitment for an initiative to end unjustified geo-blocking by way of legislative proposals to change the e-Commerce framework or the Services Directive framework

    • Facebook and Google combine to beat off online hate speech in Germany [iophk: "Who decides what is "offensive"? Between censorship and zero-rating, FB is going to fully destroy the net."]

      GERMANY HAS managed to get the large internet companies to come together and agree to smash hate speech off the internet.

      People say that the internet is mostly pornography, but actually a huge chunk of it is hate speech and nasty talk of some kind. Taking it offline would be a challenge, but it is a challenge that companies like Google are ready to accept, according to Germany’s justice ministry and a number of reports.

    • Want To Know How Ridiculous The Omnibus Bill Is? It Has A Meaningless Porn Filter Clause Four Times

      Following Congress passing the Omnibus spending bill, it of course did not take long for President Obama to sign the bill, meaning that the fake cybersecurity bill/actual surveillance bill, is now law. Particularly ridiculous is that in his little speech about it, Obama talked about how he “wasn’t wild about everything in it” but that he was happy that it was a bill “without ideological provisions.” Except, you know, for the many ones that did get in there.

      But, what do you expect with a 2000+ page bill that Congress was only given a couple of days to look at before voting on. Zach Carter, over at Huffington Post has examples of a couple of ridiculous provisions in the omnibus, starting with a ban on giving any funding to ACORN, the organization that was the target of scorn from Republicans a few years back. So what’s so ridiculous about that? Following the pile on against ACORN years ago the organization shut down. It hasn’t existed in years. Preventing funding for it seems, you know, kinda pointless, as it doesn’t exist.

      [...]

      So Congress can’t seem to get much of anything done, but it does pass an omnibus bill that includes a weird meaningless porn filter requirement four times… and a damaging surveillance bill. And you wonder why people dislike and distrust Congress.

    • Indonesia’s Forgotten Genocide

      October marked 50 years since the Indonesian military launched one of the twentieth century’s worst mass murders. Yet the anniversary passed almost unnoticed. The massacre of some 500,000 members or sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) during 1965-1966 is the least talked-about genocide of the last century.

    • It is 50 years since the Indonesian massacre of 1965 but we cannot look away

      As 250 million Indonesians face up to the 50th anniversary of one of the most crushing episodes of our nation’s history – the massacre of up to 500,000 or more alleged Communists between 1965 and 1968 by the Suharto regime – the business of confronting the past has reached a new urgency. And it is an urgency that has only a week ago was sharpened by new disappointments.

      That new disappointment is our president Joko Widodo’s stance on “1965” – as the tragedy is commonly referred to. In a statement in front of the leaders of the Muhammadiyah, the country’s second largest Muslim organisation, he has refused to apologise to the victims of 1965. And so ended the campaign promises he made –hollow ones to start with, of giving priority to the country’s unresolved cases of human rights violations, including 1965 – that earned him the people’s votes.

    • Vitriol from ‘offended’ individuals a concern

      Our biggest concern is not Amos’ posts, which the authorities are already addressing, but the vitriol coming from “offended” individuals.

      Such vitriol has seemingly got a free pass in spite of its obscene, threatening, abusive or insulting nature – the very offences that Amos was previously convicted for.

    • Singaporean blogger Amos Yee in new police investigation over alleged anti-Islamic comments

      According to a statement released by the Singapore Police Force, 17-year-old blogger Amos Yee is again under police investigation, after he allegedly made offensive anti-Islamic comments on his personal blog.

      In a November 27 blog post, Yee wrote about former Singapore Nominated Member of Parliament Calvin Cheng and allegedly made anti-Islamic comments. He expressed similar sentiments in a Facebook post the next day.

    • Amos Yee to be interviewed by police for offensive remarks

      The police have said officers will interview teenage blogger Amos Yee “upon his return to Singapore”, in connection with investigations into offensive remarks made online about religion.

      Yee, 17, was to have shown up at Jurong Police Division on Monday (Dec 14) to assist with investigations, but he failed to do so.

      In a blog post last month, Yee had responded to remarks supposedly made by former Nominated Member of Parliament Calvin Cheng and made references to Islam.

      The police said in response to media queries that Yee is not prohibited from travelling overseas.

    • Amos Yee is top trending person on Google in Singapore this year, after Lee Kuan Yew [Ed: watch the Streisand Effect below]

      Amos Yee, a teenaged blogger detained for a video he posted about Lee Kuan Yew in March, was the second highest-trending person on Google in Singapore this year – after the late former prime minister.

      The haze was the top trending news story of 2015, with ‘PSI Singapore’ the top news search of the year, followed by the Southeast Asia Games. MERS was the most popular international news search.

      Reality TV show Bigg Boss was the top trending TV show in a list featuring four Korean dramas. The iPhone 6s was the most searched for gadget.

    • ‘PSI Singapore’, ‘Lee Kuan Yew’ the top Google searches in S’pore this year

      Other top searches included “SEA Games”, which were held in Singapore in June; “WhatsApp Web”, the web version of the chat app released this year; “iPhone 6s”; “QZ8501″, the AirAsia flight which crashed on route from Surabaya to Singapore; and “Amos Yee”, the controversial teenage blogger.

    • The highest Google searches in S’pore this yr

      Blogger Amos Yee, who drew consideration for his criticisms of the previous prime minister, was looked for as individuals stored tabs on the controversy on-line.

    • ‘PSI Singapore’ tops Google’s search phrases
    • What’s hot in 2015… according to Google
    • “PSI Singapore” was Singapore’s top trending search on Google in 2015

      Rounding up the rest of the list is teenage blogger Amos Yee, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers) virus and the Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501, which crashed in December 2014, killing 162.

    • ‘PSI Singapore’ tops Google’s search terms

      Blogger Amos Yee, who drew attention for his criticisms of the former Prime Minister, was looked up as people kept tabs on the controversy.

    • Haze was Singaporeans’ top Google search term for 2015

      While Mr Lee did not take top spot overall, he was the most trending person followed by controversial YouTuber and blogger Amos Yee and Mr Lee’s daughter, Dr Lee Wei Ling.

    • Art review: For Those Who Have Been Killed

      Somewhat different from this pair is the painting titled Wheelbarrow, which is oddly dated to “1990-2015”. It’s an incongruity that is revealed to be part of a tranche of old paintings of Leow’s, most of which lie rolled up in a custom-made coffin next to Wheelbarrow. The damage wrought by time seems to mirror the relentless march of the news cycle, which Leow tops off by painting an overlay of a quote from the nation’s current potty-mouth of the year, Amos Yee.

    • And on Saturday…

      Otherwise, we might have to call out – as surely as Amos Yee can’t stop himself trolling for attention – “Humbug!”

    • 8 free speech concerns the Community Action Network highlighted for the UPR

      In January 2016, Singapore’s human rights record will face international scrutiny at the United Nations (UN) for the second time.

    • Universities ‘are killing free speech’, says group of leading academics

      Universities are “killing free speech” by banning anything that causes offence, a group of leading academics have warned.

      Students are being denied the opportunity to debate opposing views due to political correctness and censorship, the group argued in a letter published in The Telegraph.

    • Politically correct universities ‘are killing free speech’
    • Universities must halt student censorship culture – academics

      Because universities increasingly see fee-paying students as customers, they do not dare to stand up to the “small but vocal minority” of student activists who want to ban everything from the Sun newspaper to the historian David Starkey.

      The letter says: “Few academics challenge censorship that emerges from students. It is important that more do, because a culture that restricts the free exchange of ideas encourages self-censorship and leaves people afraid to express their views in case they may be misinterpreted. This risks destroying the very fabric of democracy.

      “An open and democratic society requires people to have the courage to argue against ideas they disagree with or even find offensive. At the moment there is a real risk that students are not given opportunities to engage in such debate.

    • Academics Warn Politically Correct Universities ‘Are Killing Free Speech’ With Censorship
    • Will China’s Censorship Spread?

      On Monday, prominent human-rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang went on trial for writing seven social-media posts criticizing Chinese policies and government officials. Supportive online messages posted during the trial were swiftly taken down.

      At the same time, China’s Internet began to fill with images of Wuzhen, a scenic southern river town that is playing host to China’s biggest annual Internet conference this week. And on Wednesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping, in the presence of leaders of several Central Asian countries and a who’s who list from China’s biggest and richest online companies, laid out his vision for an Internet where governments like Beijing’s could regulate the Web how they see fit.

    • China tells the world to respect its censorship

      Chinese president Xi Jinping opened the World Internet Conference by telling world leaders to respect other nation’s cyber sovereignty. The leader went on to say that every country has the right to govern the web in accordance with local laws, and that China stands against “internet hegemony.” The move reinforces China’s right to suppress information on a whim, like when it shuttered Instagram during the Hong Kong democracy protests. By making it an issue of sovereignty, the country is effectively shouting “back off” to rivals who would dare criticize its heavy-handed attitude toward censorship.

    • ‘Freedom requires strict order’: China preps for second World Internet Conference

      China on Wednesday will kick off its World Internet Conference, a three-day gathering in the eastern city of Wuzhen. With Chinese leaders stressing all things Internet as a major economic development strategy, and with foreign tech firms salivating over the massive but tightly managed market, many are looking to the conference for signposts to the future.

    • Xi Jinping defends China’s right to ‘sovereign’ internet
    • The chill behind China’s vision of a ‘beautiful’ internet

      Wuzhen, I can only imagine, has been chosen as the venue for China’s World Internet Conference because it is beautiful.

      That is one of the recurring themes of the event: that the internet is a thing of beauty which should be shared and cherished by all mankind.

      And Wuzhen is a water town, a village held together by interconnecting canals, criss-crossed by elegant stone bridges.

      So that kind of works for the internet metaphor too. But the town, as it happens, is also unbearably cold at this time of year.

    • China lays out its vision of the internet: more control, more censorship

      President Xi Jinping has defended his government’s broad censorship of the internet, in a high-profile speech underscoring China’s increasingly emphatic attempts to justify its strict online control.

      Mr Xi said cyberspace was not a “place beyond the rule of law” and that countries must not interfere in the internal affairs of others, in remarks made to an international audience of world and business leaders at a technology conference in Wuzhen on Wednesday.

    • Hong Kong Newspaper’s Sale to Alibaba Fans Censorship Fears

      Chinese Internet giant Alibaba’s announcement this week that it’s buying Hong Kong’s premier English-language newspaper has set off concerns that the move will stifle the city-state’s free press.

      The e-commerce site on Monday said it had agreed to buy media assets of the SCMP Group Ltd., whose holdings include the South China Morning Post. Alibaba executives said the purchase was aimed at improving China’s image and countering what it calls the bias of Western news outlets.

    • Tiatr doesn’t need censorship, says Wagh
    • Govt shouldn’t censor tiatrs, but, tiatrists should have self-censorship: Wagh

      “Tiatrists are not mere artists but defenders of society and have a right as well as do enjoy the freedom of expression to speak out and criticise the government and other personalities,” remarked Kala Academy chairman Vishnu Surya Wagh on Monday.

    • ‘Censorship problem is not unique to India’

      The c-word is just another one of India’s tales of paradoxes, the way William Ma-zzarella, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago known for authoring Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity sees it as he revisits the way the censorship story has been unfolding in the country the recent times.

    • Censorship is about the opportunity to exert power: William Mazzarella

      William Mazzarella, a professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, has authored Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (2013) and co-edited Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (2009). Currently in Mumbai to talk about film censorship in India, Mazzarella on how censorship is used as a tool for publicity. Excerpts from an interview:

    • The theatre of censorship

      This past year, censorship has made big and recurring news in India. The Censor Board for Film Certification (CBFC) under Pahlaj Nihalani’s chairmanship has proved to be simultaneously a bane for filmmakers and a god-given-muse for Twitter humorists. The CBFC has gone where few previous iterations of the board have gone before. Whether it’s a list of banned words —including ‘Bombay’ and ‘masturbation’ — or cutting short James Bond’s kisses on screen. There has been a heightening of the old desi variety of crowd-sourced censorship.

      Our society seems to take offense easier and insist more volubly on our right to silence each other. And yet, while traditional channels of censorship have increased their scope and heightened their intensity, India is seeing a wide open space of cultural production online, which is somewhat free of the claustrophobic pressures of moral policing.

      The Godrej Cultural Lab this Friday is hosting a talk titled ‘Censoring India’ by William Mazzarella from the University of Chicago.

    • An uncensored talk

      Of course the government has and continues to try to regulate access to various internet sites, not least pornographic ones. At the same time, we all know that people find ways to access what they want to see. I think the interesting question is why and how censorship persists despite the fact that it obviously is unable to exert tight control — even the authorities themselves admit that. So the only answer has to be that censorship is in fact not only, or not even mainly, about control. Instead, as I was saying earlier, it’s about what can be gained from harnessing the controversy around a particular set of words or images and using that controversy to bolster authority. Of course that’s always a delicate and volatile game.

    • Encryption And Censorship In A Globalized World

      For example, an Iranian man was recently jailed when images were shared online of him posing with several women dressed in miniskirts and crop tops. Photographs of women in provocative Western attire are deemed immoral and illegal in the nation, even while such images are relatively commonplace on Western social media accounts. In fact, in just the last eight months more than 700 people have been arrested in the country for “economic, moral and social” crimes.

    • Filmmakers’ investigation shows how Angola’s regime attacks critics
    • Angola: Nicki Minaj concert causes controversy

      Given the swathes of corruption and human rights abuses in Angola, the rapper’s performance should not lend credibility to the dos Santos regime

    • Latin American journalism and advocacy groups recognized by Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards
    • How drug cartels impose censorship on Mexican newspapers

      In Monday’s Guardian, in reporting on the number of journalists around the world who have been killed so far this year, I noted that only four of the 55 victims came from Mexico.

      But that relatively low figure, plucked from the death toll compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists, conceals a terrible truth because it follows years of murders of media workers in that country.

      To put the situation in context, I turned to a special report published on Friday by the Washington Post, Censor or die: The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels.

    • Media Comment: When the media engages in self-censorship

      Balancing journalism’s twin goals of telling the public what it wants to know and what it needs to know is not only an ethical matter for journalists but a very real concern for the media consumers.

      [...]

      It is fair to ask whether two major newspapers, Yediot Aharonot and Israel Hayom, are suffering from problems that may lead to self-censorship.

      Our well-researched assumption from years of review is that the former is very anti-Likud and almost pathologically anti- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while the latter is at the other end of the spectrum, being consistently sympathetic to Netanyahu and his policies.

      The mainstream media has been lax, both the pro- and the anti-Netanyahu press, claims Yoav Yitzhak in a November 29 report at his News1 web site on whether Sara Netanyahu had “hidden away” gifts she and her husband received, as he has published, when visiting abroad rather than handing them over to the proper government clerks responsible for their storage.

    • How one Iranian TV show is breaking censorship boundaries

      In the 1980s, the main form of home entertainment in Iran consisted of two TV channels and two radio stations. For those who were tired of watching or hearing news about the ongoing war with Iraq and sanctions, there was only one source of entertainment: old movies from the time of former Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Despite the danger of being arrested and having to pay a fine or go to jail, people continued to watch videos by renting smuggled and banned VCRs. Media expert Dr. Fereydoun Ahmadvand told Al-Monitor, “One of the reasons videos became so popular among people and ultimately forced a retreat in the state’s position was the need for diversity and the desire to hear several voices and have cultural pluralism, which did not at all exist in Iran during the years of war.”

    • Iranian State-Run Newspaper Runs Unprecedented Anti-Censorship Editorial
    • Ian F. Svenonius’ ‘Censorship Now!!’ offers a smarter, more precise model of the D.C. punk hero’s shtick

      To remix an old saw for the Internet age: Familiarity breeds a particularly nasty, exhausted sort of apathy—the burnout of overexposure to a brand, whether it be Hulu’s fusillade of unchanging ads, Upworthy’s smug click bait, or an artist’s monomaniacal shtick. For a longtime devotee, the first few pages of Ian F. Svenonius’ “Censorship Now!!” carry plenty of that checked out disappointment. A longtime D.C. indie-punk fixture, Svenonius has spent two books (2006′s “The Psychic Soviet” and 2012′s “Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group”)—and 20 years as frontman for The Nation of Ulysses, the Make-Up, Weird War, and Chain and the Gang—mining a narrow melange of socio-musicological history, academic inquiry, and Marxist camp.

    • Censorship Now!! by Ian Svenonius Review

      Svenonius posits some rather radical steps concerning a remedy for censorship, takes a deep dive into the often unacknowledged cultural ramifications seeded during the earlier (and even earliest) days of the Internet and the corporate cooption of college rock that robbed it of its teeth, its vitality, its integrity. He also discusses the historical role of sugar in empire building, the potential corruptive powers (or misinterpretations) of backward-messages on vinyl records and, as we said, the 1988 film Heathers (concerning copycat crime sprees and the culpability of pop culture icons.) But there isn’t a shred of facetious snark or anecdotal wiseass-ery going on here. Each subject is thoroughly investigated and ruminated upon, scrutinizing some of the historical gunk that may have been disregarded from our more popular discourses and shrewdly polishing some ponderous interpretations to provide insight to the curious reader.

    • Lebanese Cartoonists Launch Indiegogo Campaign to Fight Censorship in Beirut

      The Lebanese nonprofit cartoon collective Samandal is in dire financial straits after the central government cracked down on them with censorship charges and fines.

    • Accused of Blasphemy, Lebanese Comic Book Combats Censorship
    • Argentines protest media law change, fear censorship

      Supporters of Argentina’s former president protest fearing new conservative leader Mauricio Macri will change media ownership laws. Natasha Howitt reports.

    • Argentina: Mass protest outside Buenos Aires congress over media censorship fears

      Hundreds of people have protested outside Argentinas congress amid fears of censorship and media monopoly. Protesters gathered in Buenos Aires on 17 December to demand the new president, Mauricio Macri, and his government reconsider proposed reforms that could lead to private organisations taking control of the countrys mass media.

      They say they are worried about censorship in Argentina if the anti-monopoly laws are loosened or repealed, and demanded that the president keeps the rules against market concentration.

      Martin Sabetella, director of the Federal Authority of Audiovisual Communication Services (AFSCA) watchdog – which is in charge of enforcing the legislation – said: We have come here to defend the audiovisual communications law, which is a tool to ensure freedom of expression, a plurality of voices, to guarantee a deep democracy that is enriched by all voices.

    • Republican hopefuls cut up on NSA surveillance, Trump needs to ‘shut down’ elements of web
    • Donald Trump doesn’t understand how the internet works

      The internet is a powerful tool for good as well as evil. So like almost every organization, ISIS has used it to organize and to spread its message. And Donald Trump wants to put a stop to that.

      “We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet, and we have to do something,” Trump said at a rally earlier this month. “We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them maybe in certain areas closing that internet up in some way.”

    • Stupidity and lies: Presidential candidates flunk the tech test

      When it comes to political theater these days, there’s no lack of boneheaded ideas backed by deliberately misleading statements (aka lying) and topped with a heaping helping of fearmongering.
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      Presidential candidates at this week’s debate were falling over each other in their rush to embrace bad policies, from dismantling the Internet to banning encryption and restarting NSA phone surveillance (not that it’s needed).

    • #Index100: Unveiling this year’s 100 global free speech heroes

      A graffiti artist who paints murals in war-torn Yemen, a jailed Bahraini academic and the Ethiopia’s Zone 9 bloggers are among those honoured in this year’s #Index100 list of global free expression heroes.

    • National Secular Society defends cinemas’ freedom not to screen religious adverts

      The NSS has defended cinema chains’ freedom to refuse religious or political advertising after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) accused them of “failing to uphold Britain’s long tradition of freedom of expression.”

      The EHRC has offered its legal expertise to the Church of England, should the Church seek to use the law to force cinemas to screen its advert featuring the Lord’s Prayer. The EHRC also said it would examine issues raised by Digital Cinema Media’s (DCM) decision not to screen the advert as part of its ongoing examination of the laws protecting freedom of religion and belief.

    • Lord’s Prayer ad ban ‘slippery slope towards censorship’ – Equality Commission

      The ban on an advert featuring the Lord’s Prayer from being shown in cinemas could be part of a “slippery slope towards increasing censorship”, and will be investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, it was announced on Friday.

    • The Music as Resistance playlist

      Music has long been used as a form of resistance, from civil rights movements to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine, focusing on taboos and the breaking down of social barriers, features an exclusive new short story by Ariel Dorfman about a military trumpeter who plays a defiant, rebellious song on his instrument.

    • Egypt lawyer challenges censorship law

      The prosecution and imprisonment of journalists by the Egyptian government has garnered widespread criticism from governments and rights groups worldwide. In August Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi [BBC profile] approved [JURIST report] a 54-article counter-terrorism law that has been met with significant controversy, as many believe it infringes on the freedom of the press. Many have said that the law defines terrorism too broadly and imposes harsh sentences and fines on violators. Human Rights Watch [advocacy website] (HRW) criticized [JURIST report] Egypt’s new counterterrorism law saying it infringes on freedom of the press. HRW opposes the fact that the new law gives prosecutors the power to detain suspects without a court order. Also in August Egyptian police arrested [JURIST report] three people under the law for their role in spreading propaganda related to the Islamic State on Facebook.

      [...]

      The prosecution and imprisonment of journalists by the Egyptian government has garnered widespread criticism from governments and rights groups worldwide. In August Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi [BBC profile] approved [JURIST report] a 54-article counter-terrorism law that has been met with significant controversy, as many believe it infringes on the freedom of the press. Many have said that the law defines terrorism too broadly and imposes harsh sentences and fines on violators.

    • Cecil Rhodes was a racist, but you can’t readily expunge him from history

      Quintessential racist and British supremacist though he was, Cecil Rhodes cannot simply be written out of Oxford’s history

    • [Old] Dell responds to accusations of censorship

      Dell says it is not censoring IdeaStorm, merely responding to IdeaStorm community requests to “merge” ideas.

      Commenting in response to our post Dell censors IdeaStorm Linux dissent, Dell spokesperson John Pope said that the company isn’t censoring dissent on IdeaStorm.

      “If ideas are submitted and they turn out to be the same, we have been asked by the IdeaStorm community to merge them — as well as any votes cast and comments logged — for simplicity,” said Dell spokesperson John Pope.

    • Mark Zuckerberg’s plea for internet freedom means nothing if he keeps kissing up to China

      Mark Zuckerberg is an extremely competent CEO when it comes to building an enduring internet company. But he’s less skilled when it comes to navigating the politics of the internet, as evidenced by his statement during Brazil’s unexpected crackdown on WhatsApp.

    • WhatsApp-ening? Brazil briefly censors Facebook-owned app for 48 hours
    • The awkward irony in Brazil blocking WhatsApp

      It wasn’t long ago that Brazil was trumpeting its bona fides on electronic surveillance, slamming the National Security Agency’s spying programs as a “grave violation of human rights and of civil liberties” in a 2013 speech to the United Nations.

      Now, though, Brazil is finding itself in an awkward position as it moved to block an immensely popular messaging app within its own borders for 48 hours. Prosecutors demanded that the service, WhatsApp, be shut off for its 100 million Brazilian customers after the company did not comply with a secret order for user data. (That ban was soon reversed by a higher court, but the damage was done.)

    • WhatsApp service has been restored in Brazil, but more Internet trouble is still on the way
    • Dutch Gallery Accused Of Censorship After Removing ‘Offensive’ Names Of Artworks

      AN art gallery has been criticised after removing words such as ‘negro’ and ‘Mohammedan’ from the descriptions of its artworks in case they cause offence.

      ‘Indian’ and ‘dwarf are two other words that have been altered at the the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – leading to accusations that it is pandering to political correctness.

      It has removed ‘offensive’ words from around 200 titles and descriptions of it works of art, replacing them with less racially charged terminology.

      Martine Gosselink, head of the history department at the Rijksmuseum and initiated the project, said: ‘The point is not to use names given by whites to others.

    • Why Facebook Isn’t Censoring Trump’s Hate Speech

      Facebook has had a super-clear policy on hate speech spelled out on the service since March 2015. What’s off limits? “Content that directly attacks people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender identity, serious disabilities, or diseases.”

    • Facebook Inc (FB) Supports Donald Trump Hate Speech

      Fast Company posted, simply, “I’m with Trump, it’s time for a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.’” The comment was flagged and removed for violating community guidelines.

    • Are Facebook’s censorship policies politically motivated?

      During a recent United Nations summit in New York, Mark Zuckerburg was put in the hot seat when German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, directly called him out about Facebook’s inaction over anti-immigration comments.

      Zuckerburg responded that his team “needed to do some work on the issue.”

      Censorship on Facebook is nothing new, but the social media site’s stance on global issues has been unpredictable and at times confusing. In this article we will take a more in depth look into Facebook’s reaction about censorship of anti-immigration content, and then investigate FB’s stance on a number of controversial topical issues in the past.

    • Wyoming ‘Data Censorship’ Law Under Fire In Federal Court

      Way back in March, I wrote about a freshly passed Wyoming law that criminalized “collecting resource data.” The law appeared designed to stop pesky journalists and activists from documenting abuses on ranches and poultry and dairy farms — a so-called ag-gag law. But the actual language of the law was exceptionally broad. In my earlier post, I wrote that “by my reading, you’ve technically violated this law and could be subject to a year’s imprisonment if you idly counted the dandelions in a Wyoming farmer’s front yard without asking the farmer first.” (I see now that your dandelion count would have to be reported to the government, or you’d have to intend to report it, to violate the law — but still.)

      And so I concluded my post with these (abridged) words: “Bad laws like this do accomplish one good thing: they keep public interest lawyers employed. Lawyers like those at the Center for Food Safety should be lining up already to see Wyoming’s law struck down.”

    • ‘NK girl band cancelled concert due to censorship’

      North Korea’s Moranbong Band abruptly cancelled its scheduled performances in Beijing in protest of China’s request not to sing propaganda songs praising its young leader, a lawmaker claimed Tuesday.

    • Turkey’s decades-old censorship law may be amended

      Article 298 of the Constitution, which stipulates heavy fines and bans on TV stations during every election period in a blatant display of censorship, may be amended, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered changes to the article used to justify bans by the Supreme Election Board (YSK) that oversees elections.

      The possible amendment was reported after the president met İlhan Yerlikaya, head of Turkey’s television and radio watchdog, the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK), earlier this week. Yerlikaya and Erdoğan discussed bans on private-run TV channels during the meeting.

    • Censors can try, but won’t stop digital speech

      If you were planning to hold a Internet conference for the world, where would you choose to hold it? Silicon Valley? Boston? London? Germany? Tokyo?

      Whatever locale you guessed, it is a pretty safe wager that China was not among the top 10 options.

      Yet, on Wednesday, no less a luminary that Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomed more than 2,000 guests to the coastal city of Wuzhen, China as they began participation in the something called the World Internet Conference.

      That’s right. China is hosting an Internet conference. Has the nation noted as one of world’s heaviest-handed cyber censors suddenly gone soft and decided to join the digital marketplace of ideas?

    • Facebook Content Police Censors Image from a German Museum

      The clash of cultures is inevitable once you move beyond your own borders. A lot of American companies had issues being present in China, for example – and that lead to bans of particular companies. Watching YouTube or being on Facebook (NYSE:FB) in China is impossible without a friendly VPN/Proxy server, because those companies refused to ‘play ball’ with the Chinese authorities. And yes, all the companies which were targeted would often criticize their policy and refused to abide to censorship. Yet, every once a while, a slight ‘what the he…’ happens when the censorship scissors of Facebook’s Political Correctness Police appears. This time, a victim was none other than Bundeskunsthalle – National Museum of Art in Germany.

    • Al-Jazeera blocks article slamming Saudi Arabian human rights record

      The Qatar-based news network, Al-Jazeera, has prevented an article slamming human rights in Saudi Arabia from being viewed outside the US.

      The article, titled “Saudi Arabia Uses Terrorism as an Excuse for Human Rights Abuses” and published on Al-Jazeera America’s website on 3 December, cites reports 50 people are intended to be executed for alleged terrorist crimes, injustices in the treatment of Saudi’s minority Shia population and criticises the country’s relationship with the US.

      The article is understood to still be available in the US, but when viewed in other countries is replaced with an error page.

      A tweet from Al-Jazeera America’s account with the article’s headline, pictured on a Bahraini website, appears to have been deleted, while the Saudi Arabian newspaper Okaz quotes Al-Jazeera’s director apologising for the article, The Intercept reports.

    • Al Jazeera Blocks Anti-Saudi Arabia Article

      THE CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS of Al Jazeera appears to have blocked an article critical of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record from viewers outside the United States. The news network, which is funded by the government of Qatar, told local press that it did not intend to offend Saudi Arabia or any other state ally, and would remove the piece.

      The op-ed, written by Georgetown University professor and lawyer Arjun Sethi and titled, “Saudi Arabia Uses Terrorism as an Excuse for Human Rights Abuses,” ran on the website of Al Jazeera America, the network’s U.S. outlet. It comments on reports of 50 people recently sentenced to death for alleged terrorist activity and criticizes the U.S. government’s silence on Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

    • It’s time for the arts world to look hard at its own racism

      We are condoning our forefathers’ bigotry if we fail to modify or rename portraits with offensive titles

    • South Korea’s art community expresses concerns about new museum director

      Bartomeu Marí, the new director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, attempted to ban a satirical sculpture from an exhibition during his previous role in Barcelona

    • Should we censor art and books to fit our times?

      The Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, says he would never remove offensive words from the title of an artwork on display in his gallery. His views contrast with those of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which has changed the titles of several of its paintings to take account of modern sensibilities. For example, Young Negro Girl, painted around 1900 by the Dutch artist Simon Maris, has been retitled Young Girl Holding a Fan. Serota says he would only do this if the artist gave permisison to do so – which means that for historic art he’d do nothing.

      We should tread with extreme caution before taking such a drastic step as renaming art, and there’s a clear danger of oversensitivity in making any decision. But for Serota to say “never” is wrong. There are many words and phrases which, while accepted in their day, are clearly insulting and derogatory in the modern context and distort or confuse our understanding of the art itself.

    • HRW: Drop dubious case against rights activist

      Malaysian authorities should immediately drop charges under the Film Censorship Act against rights activist Lena Hendry, Human Rights Watch and 11 Malaysian and international human rights organisations said on 11 December 2015 in letters to Malaysia’s prime minister and attorney general.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • The Hit List

      The Islamist war on secular bloggers in Bangladesh.

    • Drastic New Security Measures Put in Place for CES

      Attendees at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas January 5-9 will be subject to metal detector screening, pat downs and bag checks. Even laptop bags are being discouraged.

    • Ethiopia: Lethal Force Against Protesters

      Police and military forces have fired on demonstrations, killing at least 75 protesters and wounding many others, according to activists. Government officials have acknowledged only five deaths and said that an undisclosed number of security force members have also been killed. On December 15, the government announced that protesters had a “direct connection with forces that have taken missions from foreign terrorist groups” and that Ethiopia’s Anti-Terrorism Task Force will lead the response.

    • CIA torturers could still face justice: UN envoy

      Those responsible for the torture of suspected terrorists in the wake of the 11 September attacks cannot dodge justice forever, a top UN human rights official, Juan Mendez, told Middle East Eye.

      Mendez criticised US officials for not prosecuting intelligence agents for the widespread use of torture that was detailed in the US government’s own report – a damning probe that was released a year ago this week.

      “I’m certainly disappointed that the official policy of the US is to consider that bygones be bygones and to let torturers off the hook, but I wouldn’t say that this will never happen,” Mendez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, told MEE on Sunday.

    • Luncheon for Miss World Canada, Anastasia Lin, Examines Censorship, Free Speech

      She should be in China competing to wear the Miss World crown on Dec. 19. But the Chinese regime denied Anastasia Lin, Miss World Canada, entry into the country and declared her “persona non grata” because she speaks out about human rights in China.

    • Western democracy’s new maxim: surveillance and soft despotism

      September 21, 2014, was a day of global climate action. To testify to the scale of the protest in cities around the world, people at the Sydney rally were asked to smile for the drones flying above us.

      It was the first time I had been asked to smile at a drone. I felt uncomfortable. I was being watched, becoming an object of my own protest – a pixel, not an agent.

      What kind of society do our so-called “Western and networked democracies” count as normal if humans are constantly objectified, monitored and profiled?

    • Millionaire found not guilty of rape after claiming he tripped and fell on woman

      The Saudi property developer said he had already had sex with the young woman’s 24-year-old friend and it was possible his penis may have been poking out of his underwear when he tripped.

    • Donald Trump stands firm on proposed US travel ban for Muslims

      Republican front-runner Donald Trump has stood firm over his provocative call for banning Muslims from the United States as his party’s presidential candidates pushed their own plans for fighting Islamic State (IS) militants.

    • EFF Publishes “Pwning Tomorrow,” a Speculative Fiction Anthology

      As part of EFF’s 25th Anniversary celebrations, we are releasing “Pwning Tomorrow: Stories from the Electronic Frontier,” an anthology of speculative fiction from more than 20 authors, including Bruce Sterling, Lauren Beukes, Cory Doctorow, and Charlie Jane Anders. To get the ebook, you can make an optional contribution to support EFF’s work, or you can download it at no cost. We’re releasing the ebook under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license, which permits sharing among users.

    • EFF’s 2015 Holiday Wishlist

      For the last four years, EFF has greeted the holiday season by publishing a list of things we’d like to see happen in the coming year. Sometimes these are actions we’d like to see taken by companies, and sometimes our wishes are aimed at governments, but we also include actions everyday people can take to advance our digital civil liberties. This year has seen a few wishes come true. For example, our FOIA lawsuit against the NSA led them to disclose the (redacted) details of their Vulnerabilities Equities Process. We’ve also been pleased to see more journalists and news organizations using SecureDrop to securely accept documents from anonymous sources and the House Judiciary Committee is finally considering reform of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Let’s shut down the internet: Republicans vacate their mind bowels

      The presidential debate did not score highly on accuracy or sense.

    • Please Don’t Shut Down the Internet, Donald Trump

      What, exactly, did Trump mean? If you look at his different statements on the subject, it seems that he wants to knock out the infrastructure that provides Internet access in areas of Syria and Iraq that are controlled by ISIS. That’s one way to disrupt their recruitment, and the plan is technically feasible, at least in part. In theory, the United States could sever fibre-optic cables, destroy satellite dishes, and knock out cellular towers. It could also put pressure on telecommunications companies in the region. The headquarters of ISIS’s media operations, according to a defector who was quoted in the Washington Post, uses a Turkish wireless provider. Turkey is a NATO ally, and its government hasn’t recently shown any particular affection for free speech online. President Trump could call up its leaders and make a deal.

    • F.C.C. Asks Comcast, AT&T and T-Mobile About ‘Zero-Rating’ Services

      The Federal Communications Commission said on Thursday it was exploring whether new services from Comcast, T-Mobile USA and and AT&T violate net neutrality rules.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The fate of branding as we know it in a 3D-printing world

      We recall that the basic framework for 3D printing consists of a person who downloads a CAD file or the like, which digital file then instructs the 3D printing device to produce the desired product, using the proper materials. If there is a brand that is identified with the product, then the brand will appear on the product. The consumer may carry out the production process either within the confines of his home or business (think of a dental implant or airplane wing) or at a fulfillment center. In either situation, the ultimate manufacturer is the consumer (or the fulfillment center acting on the consumer’s instructions). The result is that 3D printing largely renders redundant the traditional product distribution function-—from manufacturer to distributor/importer to retailer to customer.

12.19.15

Links 19/12/2015: Manjaro Linux 15.12 RC 2, Jolla is Back

Posted in News Roundup at 1:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Openalpr – An Open Source Licence Plate Reader

    There is also an OpenALPR agent tat can run as a Linux daemon. In this mode it can monitor one or more MJPEG video streams and return JSON packaged data containing the licence number it found.

  • rsync.net: ZFS Replication to the cloud is finally here—and it’s fast

    In mid-August, the first commercially available ZFS cloud replication target became available at rsync.net. Who cares, right? As the service itself states, “If you’re not sure what this means, our product is Not For You.”

    Of course, this product is for someone—and to those would-be users, this really will matter. Fully appreciating the new rsync.net (spoiler alert: it’s pretty impressive!) means first having a grasp on basic data transfer technologies. And while ZFS replication techniques are burgeoning today, you must actually begin by examining the technology that ZFS is slowly supplanting.

  • Why OVH is betting on OpenZFS

    The annual OpenZFS Developer Summit took place on October 19-20 in San Francisco. Used in a relatively discrete manner by IT professionals until now, OpenZFS celebrates its 10 year anniversary as its adoption continues to grow. Witness how this open source technology has been used to store the twelve petabytes of dailies for the movie Gravity (1), or its integration into the latest release of Ubuntu as a native file system. This year, two representatives from the OVH storage team were sent to the Developer Summit to learn about new developments and to propose their contribution to the community, “Live migration with Zmotion”. Explanations and an overview are provided by François Lesage and Alexandre Lecuyer, OVH storage engineers.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • How Fast is Your Hadoop? Here’s How to Measure That

      Many organizations are also wrestling with how to quantify the performance they are actually getting from big data tools like Hadoop and Spark. On that front, there is good news. The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has announced two new additions to its growing arsenal of industry-standard benchmarks: TPC-DS 2.0 and TPCx-V. TPC-DS 2.0 is billed as “the first industry-standard benchmark for SQL-based Big Data systems, including Hadoop and Apache Spark-based systems, as well as relational database management systems (RDBMSs).” It could provide a standard for quantifying big data performance.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.0.4 for Slackware-current

      My christmas break has started! So there is finally time to finish some of the stuff that had been piling up. First thing to release is the new version of LibreOffice 5, because it is so fresh. Release 5.0.4 was announced yesterday on the Document Foundation blog. My virtual server I rent from HostUS gives me so much better speeds than my build server at home for RAM-hungry compilations like LibreOffice… I built my new packages in a third of the time it usually takes me. Plus, the server at home was free to work on Slackware Live Edition… more about that soon, in another post.

    • Collabora brings LibreOffice Online to ownCloud
    • Ministry of Defence Continues the process of migrating to LibreOffice [Ed: automated translation]

      Perugia, 17 December 2015 – the Defence Association and LibreItalia announce the conclusion of the first course for referees LibreOffice computer, run independently from the group of trainers within the organization of the defense (formed last November) and under the supervision of mentor volunteers Association LibreItalia.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • New Product in stock: PIC32-RetroBSD Open Source Hardware Board running Unix like RetroBSD OS

      RetroBSD is a port of 2.11BSD Unix intended for embedded systems with fixed memory mapping. The current target is Microchip PIC32 microcontroller with 128 kbytes of RAM and 512 kbytes of Flash. PIC32 processor has MIPS M4K architecture, executable data memory and flexible RAM partitioning between user and kernel modes. The project is open source and hosted at RetroBSD.org

    • Linux Predictions 2016, FreeNAS Logo Contest & More…

      FreeNAS Logo Contest: Okay, artists, get those colored pencils sharpened, those brushes cleaned and ready, because you have an assignment — that logo isn’t going to design itself. FreeNAS — “founded in 2005 on the guiding principle that network storage software should be available to the public at no cost and free of license restrictions” according to its site — has initiated a logo contest, urging the community to contribute artwork to become a part of FreeNAS history.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Free Software Foundation submits comments to U.S. Department of Education encouraging free licensing for all grant-funded materials

      The Department was seeking comments on proposed rules that would ensure that works created with competitive grant funds from the Department would be licensed to give the public and educational institutions the right to freely modify and distribute the works. The FSF’s comment lauded this goal, but suggested an important wording change in the regulation to ensure that “the license must grant public permission to ‘distribute modifications’ or equivalently ‘distribute adaptations.’” Earlier this month, the FSF also called on free software supporters to submit comments of their own, or add their signature to the FSF’s filing.

      “What the Department of Education is proposing is a great step for education and for computer user freedom. We submitted our comment, along with comments from our community, to ensure that the updated regulations create the greatest benefit: that all public grant-funded educational works carry the essential four freedoms,” said FSF’s executive director, John Sullivan.

    • GNU MediaGoblin: State of the Goblin: Stripe Open Source Retreat, and more!

      It’s been a few months since my last major update so I wanted to fill in what’s going on. As usual, a lot has been happening, and it’s been hard to cover it all as we go. There’s some particularly huge news in this update, including something about funding something oh hey this should help us get MediaGoblin 1.0 out the door, plus something about the standards work we’re doing, something something. So let’s dive in and resolve all those somethings, right?

    • Help put the Planet in LibrePlanet by sponsoring an attendee

      Each year, free software fans from across the world gather for the LibrePlanet conference. At this year’s LibrePlanet, our theme, “Fork the System”, will explore how free software creates the opportunity of a new path for its users, allows developers to fight the restrictions of a system dominated by proprietary software by creating free software replacements, and is the foundation of freedom, sharing, and change.

    • Bash logo

      I received a very generous offer to create a new logo and donate it for the project’s use. The benefactor is Justin Dorfman, and he has been very patient to wait for me to select from among a number of good alternatives (part of what made it so tough).

    • Server Software Matters

      Yesterday I had the pleasure of engaging in a conversation hosted by Bryan Lunduke on the topic of compromise in Free software. He has uploaded the audio and video recording of Richard Stallman, Stuart Langridge, Swapnil Bhartiya and myself tackling this topic.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The golden age of open source, predictions for 2016, and more news
    • Oakland biohackers beat funding goal for open source insulin protocol

      Wednesday evenings the hackers and biologists of Counter Culture Labs, a North Oakland “anarchist collective,” meet to work on a project aiming to create an open-source protocol for manufacturing a more accessible and affordable version of insulin, made by recombinant DNA, also known as genetic engineering.

      From day jobs at such powerhouse facilities as UC San Francisco, Amgen Inc., and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, they come to work on the project called Open Insulin. The project aims to accelerate development of a generic version of the lifesaving medicine while showing that citizen scientists and biohackers can contribute an alternative to methods now used by the for-profit pharmaceutical business model, says the group’s 35-year-old co-founder Anthony Di Franco of Berkeley.

Leftovers

  • Revealed: how Google enlisted members of US Congress it bankrolled to fight $6bn EU antitrust case [Ed: It is worth remembering that EU antitrust push is caused for the most part by hypocritical Microsoft lobbying with its satellites]

    Google enlisted members of the US congress, whose election campaigns it had funded, to pressure the European Union to drop a €6bn antitrust case which threatens to decimate the US tech firm’s business in Europe.

  • Security

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Revealed: Prince Charles has received confidential cabinet papers for decades

      Prince Charles has been receiving confidential cabinet papers for decades, giving him access to the inner workings of British government, according to a Whitehall manual released after a three-year freedom of information battle.

      The heir to the throne, who has previously been criticised for “meddling” in politics, is sent all cabinet memoranda, alongside the Queen and ministers in charge of departments, including secret proposals for new legislation and other discussion documents that have only been released to the public after 30 years.

  • Finance

    • TPP Ratification Process Grinding To A Halt As Canada Launches ‘Widespread Consultations’ On The Deal

      As we noted recently, the arrival of a new government in Canada has meant that the corporate sovereignty provisions in CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU, might be re-examined, even if they are unlikely to be dropped completely. The other major trade deal involving Canada, TPP, is much more complex, since there are 11 other nations to consider. Although that limits the Candian government’s scope for changing course, it appears that it is nonetheless taking a radically different approach compared to its predecessor.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Arun Kundnani on Islamophobia & the ‘War on Terror,’ Keane Bhatt on a Tale of Two Elections

      This week on CounterSpin: Alleged San Bernardino killers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik did not pledge allegiance to ISIS on social media, the FBI now says, but no matter: The California killings have already added fuel to an upsurge of Islamophobia in US media and politics that in some ways is worse than that seen in the wake of September 11, 2001. One new element is the murky idea of “radicalization.” We’ll talk about that with Arun Kundnani, adjunct professor at NYU and author of, most recently, The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror.

    • NY Times Public Editor: Flawed Stories Should Be “Red Alert” For Paper

      According to The New York Times’ public editor, the paper’s repeated publication of front-page, anonymously sourced stories that required major editor’s notes damages the paper’s credibility and should be a “red alert” for its editors.

    • How to feed and raise a Wikipedia robo-editor

      Wikipedia is to put artificial intelligence to the enormous task of keeping the free, editable online encyclopaedia up-to-date, spam-free and legal.

      The Objective Revision Evaluation Service uses text-processing AI algorithms to scan recent edits for signs that they may be spam, an effort at trolling, part of a revert war (where edits are made and reversed endlessly), or otherwise dubious. But humans are excellent at making sense of the nuance of the written word – can a computer do the same?

      Natural language processing is a branch of AI, focusing not on creating smart computers but on intelligent comprehension of text. Its aim is to help computers understand human language, and communicate as humans do.

    • Prosecutors Set to Appeal Scott Walker “John Doe” Case to U.S. Supreme Court

      Despite the best efforts of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his allies on the state Supreme Court, the John Doe is not dead.

      On Friday, three county prosecutors filed a motion to intervene in the case, the first step towards appealing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

      In July, the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a decision rewriting the state’s limits on money in politics and ending the “John Doe” investigation into Walker’s campaign coordinating with dark money groups. Yet some justices faced serious conflicts-of-interest in the case, since the same groups that coordinated with Walker’s campaign were among the majority’s biggest financial supporters, spending $10 million to elect the court’s majority.

      Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, the justices likely should not have heard the case at all. The Special Prosecutor leading the probe, Francis Schmitz, asked two justices to recuse but they refused to do so.

  • Privacy

    • European Union lays down first cybersecurity rules

      The European Parliament has made headway into the development of cybersecurity rules its member states should follow. Under the first set of regulations it has laid down, critical service companies in all 28 member states will have to make sure they’re using a system robust enough to fend off cyberattacks. By “critical service companies,” we mean those that fall under any of these six categories: energy, transport, banking, financial market, health and water supply. Each member state will have to list businesses that can be identified as critical service companies under a category. Any company that makes the cut will have to be able to quickly report security breaches to authorities.

    • Tor Has a New Leader, Heads Toward its Next Frontier

      There continue to be many people around the globe who want to be able to use the web and messaging systems anonymously, despite the fact that some people want to end Internet anonymity altogether. Typically, the anonymous crowd turns to common tools that can keep their tracks private, and one of the most common tools of all is Tor, an open source tool used all around the world.

    • Juniper warns of spying code in firewalls

      Juniper, a major manufacturer of networking equipment, said on Thursday it found spying code planted in certain models of its firewalls, an alarming discovery that echoes of state-sponsored tampering.

      The affected products are those running ScreenOS, one of Juniper’s operating systems that runs on a range of appliances that act as firewalls and enable VPNs. ScreenOS versions 6.2.0r15 through 6.2.0r18 and 6.3.0r12 through 6.3.0r20 are vulnerable, according to an advisory.

    • Secret Code Found in Juniper’s Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

      Encryption backdoors have been a hot topic in the last few years—and the controversial issue got even hotter after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, when it dominated media headlines. It even came up during this week’s Republican presidential candidate debate. But despite all the attention focused on backdoors lately, no one noticed that someone had quietly installed backdoors three years ago in a core piece of networking equipment used to protect corporate and government systems around the world.

      On Thursday, tech giant Juniper Networks revealed in a startling announcement that it had found “unauthorized” code embedded in an operating system running on some of its firewalls.

      The code, which appears to have been in multiple versions of the company’s ScreenOS software going back to at least August 2012, would have allowed attackers to take complete control of Juniper NetScreen firewalls running the affected software. It also would allow attackers, if they had ample resources and skills, to separately decrypt encrypted traffic running through the Virtual Private Network, or VPN, on the firewalls.

    • Trying to prevent browser fingerprinting? The odds are against you

      With recent revelations about browser fingerprinting, the race is on to find ways and means that will help reduce your browser’s fingerprint, and with it, make it difficult for it (and you) to be tracked.

      After trying Panopticlick yesterday, a tool released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help users determine if their browser is safe against tracking and fingerprinting, I set out to find out how to make my browsers less unique to trackers.

      For the very paranoid, the results are not good.

    • Congress snuck a surveillance bill into the federal budget last night

      After more than a year of stalemate, Congress has used an unconventional procedural measure to bring a controversial cybersurveillance bill to the floor. Late last night, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) announced a 2,000-page omnibus budget bill, a last-minute compromise necessary to prevent a government shutdown. But while the bulk of the bill concerns taxes and spending, it contains a surprise 1,729 pages in: the full text of the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, which passed the Senate in October.

    • Telegram gains 1 million users in a day following WhatsApp ban in Brazil

      WhatsApp has been blocked for 48 hours in Brazil following a court order by a judge in the country. It has been alleged that the messaging service has been providing “pirate” services, undermining the role of the country’s telecommunications companies, and should be regulated. The so-called blockade goes into effect at midnight tonight.

  • Civil Rights

    • Ten Triumphs of 2015

      We saw off a sneaky attempt to introduce Snoopers’ Charter into law. Four members of the House of Lords tried to insert the text of the Snoopers’ Charter into the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill, just when that Bill was at its final stages. With only a few days notice, ORG responded, galvanising supporters to call Lords and explain why this was unacceptable. The Lords saw sense and the amendments were dropped.

    • Fox Co-Host Suggests Killing Detainees To Close Gitmo

12.18.15

Links 18/12/2015: Linux in Blockchain and Red Hat’s Good Results

Posted in News Roundup at 11:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Embrace Open Source Software, For the Good of Nerdmanity

    Software analysts at Deutsche Bank AG -5.56% recently sent around a list of 2016 predictions, and one caught my eye: “Open source keeps eating the world.” Open source is more-or-less free software that developers share with each other for the good of nerdmanity.

  • Top 5 open source frameworks every application developer should know

    Given the insane variety of superb open source frameworks available, I picked our top 5 open source frameworks of 2015 not from a single ranked order, but from all levels of the stack. (For front-ends, I focused on the web and, still more narrowly, true client-side frameworks—simply because browsers and mobile devices are growing increasingly capable, and because SPAs [single page applications] and the like avoid sending data over the wire unnecessarily.)

  • 3 open source genealogy tools for mapping your family tree

    Genealogy, the study of family histories, is a popular pastime for millions of people worldwide. Individuals seeking to learn more about their pedigree or simply discover more about their family’s past have built vibrant communities of like-minded (and possibly related) individuals to help each other play historical detective and track down the missing links in their chain of ancestry.

    Fortunately, to assist in this historical sleuthing and help to organize all of the important names, dates, and documents which paint the picture of their kinship, amateur and professional genealogists alike have access to a slew of software tools. Providing a number of different features, and running on a variety of platforms, family tree researchers can choose between many options to meet their needs, and many of these choices are open source and usable on a Linux operating system.

  • Yahoo open-sources Anthelion web crawler for parsing structured data on HTML pages

    Yahoo today announced that it has released the source code for its Anthelion web crawler designed for parsing structured data from HTML pages under an open source license.

    Web crawling is at the very core of Yahoo, even though it has many other applications, including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Messenger, Flickr, and Tumblr. For Yahoo to share code in an area as competitive as web search is significant.

  • Yahoo open-sources Data Sketches algorithms for blazing fast counting and sorting

    Yahoo is announcing today that it has open-sourced algorithms for doing very quick and efficient computations on streams of data. The Java-based Data Sketches algorithms are now available for download on GitHub under an Apache License.

  • Internet access and privacy with FreedomBox

    Recently, I learned about FreedomBox, a personal server that allows you to use the Internet privately or in locations that have bad or no Internet connection. I was visiting Swecha, a non-profit in the Indian city of Hyderabad that is working to bring about social change with the use of free and open source software, as part of the Free Software Movement of India. The FreedomBox is a revolution in itself and a big part of their initiative.

    According to the open source operating system Debian wiki page, FreedomBox is a free software stack that is able to host applications like file sharing, shared calendaring, instant messaging, secure voice conference calling, blogs, and wikis. And, it can be installed on one of the supported hardware devices, installed on a standard Debian machine, or deployed on a virtual machine. FreedomBox has the ability to store data and provides secure instant messaging and voice conference calling that works on low bandwidth.

  • Publisher’s picks: 29 open source books for 2015
  • Why working openly works (even when it’s hard)

    When I talk about working openly, I mean that doing things “the open source way” is more than using an open source license (although clearly you must have one of those, too). Working openly means being public about your process, from start to finish, including all the messy bits in between.

  • BetConstruct’s Spring to be open source

    Spring offers a single gaming management environment that supports multiple products, with a range of management functions covering player management, accounts, payment systems, back-office users, permissions, currencies, languages, main reports and business performance.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chromium 47 available for testing

        Chromium users of both architectures (32 e 64 bit), release 47.0.2526.80 is available for testing now. There are no major updates, you will probably notice the bookmark folders now are black instead of yellow. This can make them unreadable if you are using a dark theme. Developers are aware of that, if you want to follow the discussion just look at this ticket.

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Users Can Now Watch Netflix HTML5 Video on Windows

        Netflix announced today that their HTML5 video player now supports Firefox on Windows Vista and later using Adobe’s new Primetime CDM (Content Decryption Module). This means Netflix fans can watch their favorite shows on Firefox without installing NPAPI plugins.

      • Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening!

        WebAssembly is a new binary format for compilation to the web. It is in the process of being designed and implemented as we speak, in collaboration among the major browser vendors. Things are moving quickly! In this post we’ll show some of our recent progress with a deep dive into the toolchain side of WebAssembly.

      • Work Continues On WebAssembly For Low-Level, In-Browser Computing

        Work continues on the WebAssembly project that’s the joint effort by Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple to allow C/C++ (and potentially other languages) to target a virtual ISA that would be executed within the web-browser.

        WebAssembly is a virtual ISA designed around allowing portable code, compatibility across different browsers, a small download footprint, and other traits for effective client-side browser scripting. Much of WebAssembly’s development continues to happen on its LLVM back-end.

      • Mozilla rolls out Firefox version 43 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack N and O Looking for a Name

      OpenStack release names are tied by context to the location of the design summit preceding the release. The next design summit is set to be held in Austin, Texas.

    • ​Firewalling the OpenStack cloud

      Securing the cloud is not easy. Now, Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack business, and Palo Alto Networks, an important network security company, have joined forces to add firewalls via virtual network function (VNF) to Mirantis OpenStack. The partners claim this combination will protect “applications from cyber threats while taking advantage of the agility, cost savings, and innovation of the OpenStack cloud ecosystem.”

    • £5,400 worth of PostgreSQL training to be won

      The UK Met Office approved PostgreSQL as its preferred RDBMS, following an evaluation of alternatives. The decision was influenced by 2ndQuadrant training. Data Services Portfolio Technical Lead James Tomkins commented: “With the training we had from 2ndQuadrant we could feel the weight of expertise that came with Gianni [Dr Gianni Ciolli, tutor] and it was obvious he really knew his subject inside-out. It was an enormous confidence-building exercise and has been consistent with all of our interactions with 2ndQuadrant.”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • An open source tool for every classroom need

      Students would often come to school with an assortment of file formats from software that was bundled with computers they or their parents had purchased in local stores. Supporting differing file formats was difficult, and by distributing OpenOffice (and later, LibreOffice) to students and teaching them how to save files in a format that they could share with their teachers was a boon.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • Plotting Out the BSD Year

      What’s good to know is that BSD will be well-represented at both of these events. At SCALE 14x — which is the first-of-the-year FOSS event worldwide from Jan. 21-24, 2016, in Pasadena, Calif. — the FreeBSD Foundation (along with FreeBSD in its own booth, of course) will be there, as well as pfSense. What’s more, there’s a BSD certification exam being offered, as it has been for the last several years at SCALE. More on this in a later post.

    • LLVM Begins Looking At PKU Memory Protection Keys Support

      This week mainline LLVM received support for the PKU feature flag as prep work towards supporting the new RDPKRU and WRPKRU instructions for Intel’s forthcoming memory protection keys capabilities.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Guix starts fundraising campaign with support from the FSF
    • FSF announces fundraising support for GNU Guix, a new approach to GNU/Linux

      The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that we would begin accepting donations as part of our support for GNU Guix, a dependable and customizable package manager, along with GuixSD, GNU’s advanced free GNU/Linux distribution. Donations will primarily go to increasing the project’s build farm capacity so it can manage the growing number of packages and users.

    • VCS friendly, patchable, document line wrapping

      If you do enough work in any sort of free software environment, you get used to doing lots of writing of documentation or all sorts of other things in some plaintext system which exports to some non-plaintext system. One way or another you have to decide: are you going to wrap your lines with newlines? And of course the answer should be “yes” because lines that trail all the way off the edge of your terminal is a sin against the plaintext gods, who are deceptively mighty, and whose wrath is to be feared (and blessings to be embraced). So okay, of course one line per paragraph is off the table. So what do you do?

    • TheSetup ChangeLog

      Of course, my setup has changed since 2012. Although the vast majority is still the same, there is a growing list of modifications and additions. To address this, I’ve been keeping a changelog on my wiki where I detail every major change and addition I’ve made to the setup that I described in the original interview.

    • Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: December 18th

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Node.js Version Chaos Management

      I’m just starting out in the world of development, and many of the projects I’m interested in exploring are written in Node.js. If you’re an old hand at such things, you already know that which version of Node you use on a particular application is vitally important. (This is actually one of the reasons Docker is so amazingly amazing when it comes to deploying Node apps, but I digress.)

  • Standards/Consortia

    • NIFO refines interoperability data collection

      The National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO) community is making available on the Joinup platform an updated series of European countries factsheets and analytical models. The updates track interoperability initiatives in 2015, and refine scoring. They also describe more precisely the implementation and monitoring of the National Interoperability Frameworks (NIFs).

Leftovers

  • Don’t blame Marissa Mayer: Nobody was going to save Yahoo [Ed: remember what happened]

    If I asked you to name the most-popular websites in the world, you might mention Google, Facebook and Amazon. In another part of the world, candidates might include Tencent, China’s social networking phenomenon; and Baidu, its incumbent search engine.

  • One hedge fund’s plan to fix Yahoo: Fire 9,000 – and Marissa Mayer too [Ed: sounds familiar]

    An activist shareholder is calling for Yahoo to radically change its strategy, fire CEO Marissa Mayer and even revert to its old logo.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • World’s Small Farmers Fighting Back as WTO Pushes Corporate Agenda

      The World Trade Organization (WTO) kicked off its 10th ministerial conference in Kenya on Tuesday to develop a new free trade agreement, as grassroots activists rallied worldwide against measures they say would undermine the rights of small-scale farmers in developing countries.

    • Flint Kids Have So Much Lead in Their Blood That the Mayor Declared a State of Emergency. Thanks GOP.

      Children in Flint, Michigan, have such high levels of lead in their blood that Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency on Monday, calling the situation a “manmade disaster.” The origins of the escalating situation in Flint go back to 2011, when Republican Gov. Rick Snyder appointed an emergency financial manager to balance Flint’s budget—largely by cutting costs on basic public services. Here’s what you need to know:

    • Media Take Diet Advice From Coke-Funded Academics

      Readers of USA Today, the LA Times and Atlantic Monthly might expect that prominent university professors quoted as independent experts on obesity would relay objective information based on the best science. They would be wrong.

      Over the past few months, through excellent investigative work, journalists Anahad O’Connor and Candice Choi unmasked a scheme that should look familiar to anyone following health and environmental news: corporations paying front groups and scientists to spin the media and public in order to protect their products.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • John McAfee: We have created a cyberwar doomsday machine that Isis can turn against us

      That we stand today on the brink of some form of war does not seem to be debatable. America has enemies – people that would do us harm and even destroy our way of life. Who these enemies are is more fertile ground for debate. The world is simply too complicated, and the American public too uninformed by our government, to say with certainty who our real enemies are and who they are ultimately working for.

      What we can do in an effort to be prepared is to look at all of the possible sources of attack – all of the other nations and groups that have interests in conflict with our own. When we do this a startling pattern emerges. Every significant threat against the Unites States has demonstrated some measure of tech savvy.

    • Trump doesn’t want ISIS “using our Internet”

      A week after saying the US should disrupt the Islamic terrorist group ISIS’ online recruiting by “closing that Internet up in some way,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was given a chance to clarify what he meant at last night’s GOP debate.

    • Why Donald Trump Can’t Actually Close ‘Parts of the Internet’

      During Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, frontrunner Donald Trump doubled down on his call for “closing off parts of the Internet” in order to stymie terrorist groups’ online recruitment efforts. “I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody,” Trump said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or ISIS. “I sure as hell don’t want to let people that want to kill us and kill our nation use our Internet.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Indonesia forest clearing fires questioned under Paris climate agreement

      The Paris climate agreement could see big changes in Indonesia, where a developing economy depends on practices like open-cut coal mining and using fires to clear forests for farming.

      Changing those industries could drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions but many Indonesians have more pressing concerns.

    • Indonesia: Fires Cause Massive Pollution

      Indonesia is currently undergoing one of the worst environmental disasters of the 21st century. Fires rage across the length of Indonesia as a result of companies looking to profit from the land. The smoke has reduced visibility to 30 meters in some cities while there are reports of children who have choked to death. There have been over 10,000 cases of respiratory infection and counting.

    • Fracking under national parks backed by MPs

      MPs have voted to allow fracking for shale gas 1,200m below national parks and other protected sites.

      The new regulations – which permit drilling from outside the protected areas – were approved by 298 to 261.

      Opposition parties and campaigners criticised the lack of a Commons debate – and accused ministers of a U-turn as they previously pledged an outright ban on fracking in national parks.

    • College Football Brought to You by Koch Industries

      Through Koch Industries, Charles and David Koch, are funding a dozen college football games during the 2015-2016 season. This funding will allow them to have an increased presence at twelve major games this year. Koch-branded video equipment as well as Koch-themed giveaways will be regular occurrences at these college football games. However, as Nick Surgey writes, the Koch brothers’ history of buying influence and manipulating course content on college campuses provides an important context for understanding their newfound interest in college football.

    • Botanist says squatters in Kalimantan could be smoke culprits

      The Malaysian botanist had then just been made the director at the newly established Centre for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia.

      At the time, the entire south of Kalimantan was blanketed in smoke and the airports had to be closed.

      The fires were low, producing more smoke than heat, so the roads were still usable.

      He found squatter homes all along the road, each about 100m apart. Every house was occupied.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Report Claims That Big Political Funder Sheldon Adelson Is The ‘Anonymous’ Owner Of Las Vegas Newspaper

      Earlier this week, we wrote about the truly bizarre situation in which the Las Vegas Review Journal — the largest newspaper in Nevada — had been purchased for $140 million… and no one knew who the owner was. For fairly obvious reasons, this started to make a lot of people uncomfortable — including the reporters for the NVRJ. Suspicion quickly focused on big time political funders, with some noting that Nevada is an early primary state, and may play a key role in the presidential election. The Koch brothers, who are big time funders of candidates flat out denied it, leading to more intense scrutiny on the other key guess: Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a key funder of Mitt Romney in the last election.

    • Koch Self-Interest in Criminal Justice Reform, Exposed

      Charles and David Koch have received positive press for backing a bipartisan effort to reform American criminal justice laws, which have helped make the U.S. the world’s biggest jailer and whose burdens have fallen disproportionately on people of color.

      But, as the Kochs ride the wave of momentum toward criminal justice reform, it is becoming increasingly clear that part of their agenda would actually make it harder to prosecute corporate violations of environmental and financial laws that protect the public from corporate wrongdoing. The changes would make it harder to hold executives and their employees responsible for violating U.S. laws and would protect their financial interests, at the public’s expense.

      Over at least the past five years, the Kochs and Koch-backed groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have been pushing to increase the “intent” standard for criminal violations, particularly for so-called “white collar” crime and executive suite criminals.

    • Glenn Beck: If GOP Nominates Donald Trump, It Will Bring “An End To The Republican Party”

      He didn’t even know what are the missile silos and the strategic air command with missiles on the planes and our nuclear submarines. He didn’t even know what that meant. He couldn’t answer that question. It was bizarre. He is also a giant progressive. So I can’t vote for progressive. I can’t vote for Hillary, and I can’t vote for him.

    • Carly Fiorina is a liar: And everyone should finally just say it — loudly

      Carly Fiorina is unique among all the candidates in the Republican presidential field for her visceral, aggressive hatred for anything resembling truth. Other candidates lie, of course, but they at least go to the trouble of dressing up their lies with weasel words and other forms of qualifying language that allow them to squirm their way out of fact checks. Fiorina doesn’t care about any of that. She makes firm, declarative statements that are unquestionably inaccurate, and when confronted with inarguable facts that prove her wrong, she insists against all evidence that she is correct and bristles at the very notion that anyone might challenger her. She does not care. She does not pretend to care. As far as Fiorina’s concerned, the fact that she said it is what makes it true.

  • Censorship

    • West Papua: Mining in an occupation forgotten by the world

      Now more than ever, say activists, media access to West Papua is crucial in order to bring global attention to a planned smelter, and to give the world a true understanding of the human rights situation in the region – and Freeport’s role in it. Nithin Coca reports.

    • Raising West Papua’s Flag on 1 December

      It is over half a century since the West Papuan Morning Star flag was raised with pomp and ceremony on 1 December 1961 in the capital Hollandia (now Jayapura). The flag and accompanying national anthem had been chosen by Papuans in a democratic process and accepted by the colonial Dutch as part of their programme for granting independence. The flag was then flown alongside the Dutch flag on official buildings. A halcyon time? No, Indonesia ramped up its claim to the territory with military incursions and an attempted torpedo boat assault.

    • Facebook, Google, Twitter agree to delete hate speech in 24 hours: Germany

      Germany said on Tuesday that Facebook, Google and Twitter have agreed to delete hate speech from their websites within 24 hours, a new step in the fight against rising online racism following the refugee crisis.

      The government has been trying to get social platforms to crack down on the rise in anti-foreigner comments in German on the web as the country struggles to cope with an influx of more than 1 million refugees this year.

      The new agreement makes it easier for users and anti-racism groups to report hate speech to specialist teams at the three companies, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said.

    • Germany makes Facebook, Google, and Twitter remove hate speech within 24 hours

      The German government has struck a deal with Facebook, Google, and Twitter will supposedly make it easier to report and remove hate speech from the Internet. The big Web companies will now have 24 hours to remove instances of hate speech after they have been first reported.

      “When the limits of free speech are trespassed, when it is about criminal expressions, sedition, incitement to carry out criminal offences that threaten people, such content has to be deleted from the net,” said German Justice Minister Heiko Maas. “And we agree that as a rule this should be possible within 24 hours.”

      The agreement also changes how the complaints are processed. By the new workflow, they will be assessed by “specialist teams” at the companies, which will look at them from the standpoint of German law “and no longer just the terms of use of each network,” Maas said.

    • Disney Grapples With Light-Side/Dark-Side, Retracts Toy DMCA, Resubmits It, Is Probably Our Father, Aaaah!

      It’s a struggle that Disney ought to know quite well, having taken over the Star Wars franchise. The struggle between good and evil; the light side of the force… and the dark side. And it looks like we’re all getting a front row seat to the internal strife of Disney via the ongoing silliness surrounding the image of a Star Wars toy accidentally released to the public by a retailer.

    • Trump Calls For Partial Shutdown Of The Internet, Doesn’t Understand What He’s Saying

      I have to admit that I find Donald Trump’s presidential campaign fascinating. Or, rather, I find its survival to this point fascinating. What amazes me about it is that the Trump campaign exhibited a strong commitment to not actually putting forward any detailed policy prescriptions, except for a few general policy ideas that mostly conflict with the party whose nomination he’s seeking. And those policy ideas he does express have generally been either despicable, impossible to implement, or both. Deporting six million Latin Americans? Yeah, that just isn’t going to happen. Putting a hold, however temporary, on legal immigration by using a religious test to keep Muslims out of the country? That violates the very founding document an American President would be tasked with upholding. Also, it’s disgusting.

  • Privacy

    • S.754 Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015
    • As Predicted, Congress Turned CISA Into A Clear Surveillance Bill… And Put It Into The ‘Must Pass’ Gov’t Funding Bill

      Yesterday we warned that Congress was quietly looking to do two horrible things: (1) strip all pretense from the “cybersecurity” information sharing bills and turn them into full-on surveillance bills and (2) then shove it into the “must pass” omnibus bill which is supposed to be about funding the government and nothing more. And… it looks like our warning was almost entirely accurate, as the bill has been released and within its over 2000 pages, it includes CISA and has been stripped of many of the key privacy protections (if you want to find it, it’s buried on page 1728), while expanding how the information can be shared and used. In part, due to concerns raised yesterday, a few of the absolutely worst ideas didn’t make it into the final bill, but it’s still bad (and clearly worse than what had previously been voted on, which was already bad!).

    • Teenagers simply can’t imagine a world without social media – that’s why we need to ban it

      This week, the European Union put forward proposals recommending a legal ban on under 16s joining social networking sites without parental permission. Naturally, this was reported in some quarters as another excuse to whip up anti-European sentiment. However, as the government’s mental health tsar for schools, my initial reaction to the news was positive.

      Of course, I paused to ponder how on earth such a law would be enforced. After all, we live in a world where the average 10 year old has far more technological expertise than their parents (as a recent experiment in which a teenager was handed the “Fort Knox of laptops”, with every conceivable parental block in place and proceeded to access online pornography within 30 seconds proved). Putting aside the practical considerations, however, I believe the general sentiment of the proposal to be sound.

    • Montana Newspaper Decides To Just Delete Old Comments After People Get Upset About Plans To Reveal Their Names

      A few weeks ago, we wrote about a plan by the Montana Standard newspaper to change its commenting policy, publishing the “real names” of any commenters. While we generally think that’s a silly policy for a variety of reasons, the real problem was that it was retroactively applying it to all old comments, despite clearly telling earlier commenters that their names would not be revealed (and potentially violate the newspaper’s own privacy policy). In its defense, the newspaper insisted that (1) anyone who wanted otherwise could contact the paper and have their comments deleted and (2) that while it might have liked to have only applied the policy to new comments after January 1, its content management system wouldn’t allow that. Of course, while that seems like something that, perhaps, should be fixed by the newspaper, I can understand that it might not have the resources to do so.

    • Big Brother is born. And we find out 15 years too late to stop him

      PRESTON, which collects about four million intercepted phone calls a year, has also recently been used to plant malware on iPhones, according to disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The phones were then targetted for MI5 “implants” (malware), authorised by a ministerial warrant.

    • Microsoft extends China link with government version of Windows 10 [Ed: dumb move into a trap]

      MICROSOFT’S JAMMY SOD DEPARTMENT has managed to pull off something of a coup with the announcement that it is to form a joint venture to bring Windows 10 to the Chinese public sector.

    • Congressman Who Supports Undermining Encryption Says We Need CISA (Which Undermines Privacy) To ‘Protect Privacy’

      Nearly everything Schiff says here is complete hogwash. This bill is far from “the most protective of privacy of any cyber bill” that has advanced. Other versions clearly had more privacy protections (mainly the one advanced by the House Judiciary Committee). And, this latest one clearly strips out privacy provisions and makes it that much more difficult to protect our privacy.

      And the fearmongering about “these innumerable hacks” and how “our privacy is being violated every day” is totally meaningless, because CISA does nothing to stop these hacks. We’ve asked many times before how would CISA have stopped a single hack and no one ever answers. We’ve looked hard and cannot find a single online security expert who thinks that CISA would be useful in preventing online hacks and attacks. Because it wouldn’t. There is nothing in there geared towards stopping attacks.

      You know what would help in protecting our privacy and limiting the damage from hacks? Stronger encryption. I wonder what Rep. Adam Schiff thinks about that?

    • Why The New CISA Is So Bad For Privacy

      We warned earlier this week that Congress was going to make the cybersecurity bill CISA much worse on privacy, and then shove it into the “must pass” omnibus spending bill, and that’s exactly what happened. The 2000+ page bill was only released early yesterday morning and the vote on it is tomorrow, meaning people have been scrambling to figure out what exactly is actually in there. The intelligence community has been using that confusion to push the bill, highlighting a couple of the predictions that didn’t make it into the bill to argue that people against CISA are overstating the problems of the bill. That’s pretty low, even for the intelligence community.

    • Is your browser safe against tracking? Use Panopticlick to find out

      Worried about privacy, about the websites you visit tracking you, whether you accept their cookies or not?

      Panopticlick to the rescue!

      Panopticlick is a tool released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that makes it easy to tell if your browser settings are putting up enough resistance against online tracking.

    • Stingrays: A Secret Catalogue of Government Gear for Spying on Your Cellphone

      THE INTERCEPT HAS OBTAINED a secret, internal U.S. government catalogue of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies. The document, thick with previously undisclosed information, also offers rare insight into the spying capabilities of federal law enforcement and local police inside the United States.

  • Civil Rights

    • The Punishment Should Fit the Crime: Matthew Keys and the CFAA

      One of the basic tenets of a civilized society is that the punishment should be proportionate with the crime. What essentially amounts to vandalism should not result in even the remote possibility of a 25-year jail sentence. But that very possibility is on the table in the government’s case against journalist Matthew Keys, whose sentencing hearing is about one month off. The case is an illustration of prosecutorial discretion run amok—and once again shows why reform of the federal anti-hacking statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), is long overdue.

    • Facebook Messenger Lets You Book an Uber [Ed: Two malicious companies join forces]

      Taking another page from its counterparts in Asia, Facebook will add a feature for booking a ride through its messaging application. Users of Facebook Messenger in the U.S. will be able to summon an Uber car with a few taps starting on Wednesday.

    • Professor suspended after saying Christians, Muslims have same God

      Wheaton College has suspended a political science professor who said her fellow Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

      The prominent Christian college’s decision, which sparked protest on campus on Wednesday, came days after Larycia Hawkins, a tenured professor, received attention in Christian media outlets after announcing she would wear a traditional headscarf known as a hijab through the Christian Advent season. Wearing the hijab is part of her personal effort to show solidarity with Muslims, who have faced backlash in the aftermath of recent mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif. and Paris.

    • Family of teenage Saudi protester sentenced to death appeal for his life

      The family of a teenage protester who faces beheading in Saudi Arabia have come forward in public for the first time to plead for his life.

      The father of Abdullah al-Zaher, 19, called on the world to help before it is too late and his son is executed in the kingdom along with a reported 51 other people.

      “Please help me save my son from the imminent threat of death. He doesn’t deserve to die just because he participated in a protest rally,” Hassan al-Zaher told the Guardian.

    • The Controversial “Rule” Police Rely on to Shoot and Kill Supsects

      Last month, the attorney representing the Chicago police officer who shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald offered an explanation for his client’s actions: “There is this 21-foot rule,” the attorney, Dan Herbert, told CBS News. “It talks about how an individual is a significant threat to a police officer when they’re in that 21-foot boundary.”

      Chicago police officials said the black teen held a four-inch folding knife on the night of the shooting last October, and that he waved it aggressively at Jason Van Dyke and other officers, ignoring orders to drop the weapon. But the video, released in late November on court orders, showed McDonald was wielding a knife but was shot with 16 bullets as he was facing away from the officers and then fell to the ground.

    • How Old Should Kids Be Before They’re Allowed to Play in the Front Yard on Their Own?

      I don’t know how this has changed over time, but these figures sure seem strange. I played on my own in front of my house when I was five,1 but today’s parents think you need to be 10—and a substantial fraction think you need to be over 12 to play in front of the house unsupervised.

    • Our Proud and Fascist Heritage

      Yesterday’s revelation that Prince Charles sees Cabinet Office memoranda denied to most ministers did not spark as much public outrage as might be expected. Part of that is because of the view that, by and large, Charles is a fairly decent old stick with some surprisingly progressive opinions.

      The problem is, of course, that with a monarchy you have no choice what you get. The defence deployed yesterday across all media was that this is a longstanding practice, in place for many decades. What they did not tell you is that it was instituted at the insistence of the Prince of Wales who was the future Edward VIII, and at the very least sympathetic to fascism. Strange how the media omitted that bit, don’t you think?

    • Is the SNP Campaigning for Independence?

      Let me put it this way. It is definitely a possibility that the coming real domination of both MPs and MSPs will never happen again. If the SNP do not even try to use that dominance to deliver Independence, then what is the point of the SNP?

      Oh sorry, I forgot. They manage the institutions better, and are an effective opposition at Westminster. That apparently is the point. But not what I joined for.

    • Wash. Post Editorial Board Slams GOP’s Embrace Of “Bigotry, Hatred and Magical Thinking”

      The Washington Post editorial board criticized the Republican Party for pushing “fear-mongering and raw xenophobia” into the mainstream during the GOP presidential debates.

    • Laura Ingraham Applauds Her Show For Helping To Block Comprehensive Immigration Reform
    • ‘It’s Just One in a Long Series of Attacks on Planned Parenthood’

      Janine Jackson: It’s a crime story, a culture war story, a debate about what gets called terrorism and about presidential candidates’ ability to rise or sink to an occasion. But for all the worthy stories being aired, the killing of three people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic by a man angry about “baby parts” hasn’t quite become a story about women and our right to decide whether to have a child.

      With Colorado only the latest in a long, long history of attacks, how do we move the conversation off the dime of whether reproductive justice advocates have a right to be upset toward what must be done to secure an atmosphere in which women can actually exercise their full human and legal rights? Jodi Jacobson is editor-in-chief at RH Reality Check. She joins us now by phone from Maryland. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jodi Jacobson.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Tech Companies Urge Lawmakers To Stop Trying To Kill Net Neutrality With Sneaky Budget Bill Riders

      Since the FCC passed net neutrality rules last February, ISP allies in Congress have been working tirelessly to either gut the rules, or shame and defund the FCC so it can’t enforce them. This has included an endless number of House “fact-finding” hearings that usually involve using discredited ISP data to claim the rules are demolishing the Internet. Of course the opposite appears to be true; network investment (at least in competitive areas) continues undaunted, and the rules have actually helped stop a lot of the anti-competitive shenanigans that were occurring on the streaming video front.

    • EU’s Own Survey On Internet Regulations Broken; Please Urge Them Not To Break The Internet Too

      Last week, we wrote about an important survey put online by the EU Commission, asking for feedback on its plans to regulate certain key aspects of the internet. We noted that the survey itself was cumbersome and confusing, and because of that, via the Copia Institute, we set up our own guide to filling out the survey called Don’t Wreck The Net. We were a little mocking of the survey, as it does seem a bit silly that the people in charge of potentially putting all sorts of regulations on the internet… have a poorly designed and confusing survey (including the fact that depending on how you answer certain questions, the survey will appear quite different for you than it might for others). However, to some extent, we get it: government bureaucracies have some limitations on what technologies they can make use of.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Looking back over this GreeKat’s shoulder… Part IV: “JE SUIS… un opportuniste” – the public order as a trade mark barrier

        Twice within 2015, INPI, the French TM Office, was forced to tackle controversial trade mark registration cases. Both cases were linked to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris. In January, INPI rejected some 50 trade mark applications for “Je suis Charlie” that were filed within a few days after the attack at the Charlie Hebdo offices. The attempt to capitalize on the tragic events was shocking for many. Moreover, leaving aside moral aspects [can they be left aside?!], how would one enforce such a trade mark registration? This could have been a one-off attempt (despite those 50 applications…), but, only last month, just after Paris suffered from another terrorist attack, “Je suis Paris” and “Pray for Paris” marks were also filed with INPI.

    • Copyrights

      • Rightscorp wins landmark ruling, Cox hit with $25M verdict in copyright case

        The verdict comes at the close of a two-week trial, which took place after US District Judge Liam O’Grady issued an opinion (PDF) slamming Cox’s behavior, saying that the ISP isn’t protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act “safe harbor” because the company did not “reasonably implement” a policy to terminate repeat infringers.

        Today’s verdict is a huge victory for BMG and its copyright enforcer, Rightscorp. The Rightscorp business model is based on sending massive numbers of copyright notices via email and asking for $20 or $30 per song “settlements” from users believed to have pirated songs. While Rightscorp wasn’t a named plaintiff in the suit, BMG’s case was based on evidence produced by Rightscorp, which says it found the IP addresses of the worst Cox infringers.

      • Popcorn Time Fork Goes Dark After MPAA Hounds Developers

        The MPAA has not yet given up its fight against Popcorn Time. The movie industry group is reportedly going after a group of developers who launched a “Community Edition” of the popular application. While the new fork has yet to throw in the towel, they’ve taken down their website and GitHub repository for the time being.

      • UK police busts karaoke “gang” for sharing songs that aren’t commercially available

        The City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) claims to have “dismantled a gang suspected of uploading and distributing tens of thousands of karaoke tracks online.” However, it turns out that this “gang” is actually three blokes, aged 60, 53, and 50: one man from Barnstaple, Devon and two men living in Bury, Lancashire.

        PIPCU’s press release says: “hundreds of albums have had their copyright uploaded by the men, leading to thousands and thousands of tracks being accessed illegally and depriving legitimate music companies of a significant amount of money.” That sounds dramatic, but once again the reality is rather different.

      • KickassTorrents “DIY” Karaoke ‘Gang’ Busted By UK Police

        Three men from the UK have been raided by City of London Police after uploading thousands of karaoke tracks online. Although described by police as a criminal “gang”, the men in their 50s and 60s claim they only created their own karaoke tracks when alternatives weren’t commercially available.

      • Pirating Subscribers Could Cost Cox Over $200 Million

        Internet provider Cox Communications is facing more than $200 million in potential damages, if a jury holds it responsible for the copyright infringements of its subscribers. According to music publisher BMG there is no doubt that Cox is responsible. After a week of trial hearings the company has asked the court to confirm this, arguing that the ISP failed to rebut its allegations.

12.16.15

Links 16/12/2015: Linux Foundation Expansion, Mesa 11.1

Posted in News Roundup at 3:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • “Open-Source Windows” ReactOS 0.4 Steps Closer With A Release Candidate

    ReactOS, the open-source operating system aiming for binary compatibility with Windows programs and drivers, is finally closer to its next big release: v0.4.

    ReactOS 0.4 has been talked about for more than a year and it’s been a while since the last big update, but now it looks like ReactOS 0.4 is on finals with the first release candidate having been pushed out hours ago. If you are anxious for ReactOS 0.4, you can download RC1 right away via SourceForge.

  • Another gaze into the crystal ball..this time, open source

    Open source.

    2015 was a fairly important year for open source technology. There was no doubting that Linux had made major inroads into enterprise computing. Android and Chrome OS continued their dominance, and plenty of other open source projects were gaining serious ground.

  • 9 Open Source Internet of Things Platforms
  • 16 Open Source Hardware Tools for the Internet of Things

    A survey of the open source hardware tools that are enabling the flexible, integrated design that so naturally fits with the Internet of Things.

  • 9 Open Source Operating Systems for the Internet of Things
  • 6 Open Source Middleware Tools for the Internet of Things

    Middleware tends to be the unsung hero of technical infrastructure. Middleware doesn’t prompt great debates, like Windows vs. Apple vs. Linux OS debates of years past, and there are no TV ads for middleware. Yet middleware – the software that sits between the OS and applications – is an essential element, especially for the Internet of Things. Among other tasks, middleware often provides messaging services so different apps can connect with one another. It also helps ease the work involved with the development of apps that get services from other apps. So the six open source middleware tools on the following pages may not stir a lot of argument, but they are highly important in enabling the vast, far-flung world of the Internet of Things.

  • 5 Advantages of Using Open Source Software

    Open source software (OSS) i accessible under a software authorization that enables individuals to access the source code and customize it according to their needs, thus providing the capability to tailor the software for different jobs. The program license keeps the right of the individual to modify and customize it in any way they desire.

  • The Golden Age Of Open Source Has Arrived

    Finally — the golden age of open source has arrived.

    Companies 20 years ago built monopolies on licensed software; today, free and open–source code fertilizes economic growth. The way to win at tech is no longer to own code, but to serve customers — and service has open source at its roots.

    Like cloud storage and hardware components, coding languages hold little value by themselves anymore. The services around the code are what differentiate commodity companies from those with market value in the billions. Tesla released all of its patents to the public in 2014, jump-starting a new ecosystem of electric vehicles without threatening its own dominance.

    Facebook’s entire data-center architecture is available via Open Compute, and its Apache Cassandra, released into the wild, has become a cornerstone of many an enterprise database. And that didn’t stop the social giant from reporting $12.46 billion in revenue last year.

  • Nine Reasons for Using Open Source Software

    For years, I’ve wondered why anyone still bothers with proprietary software. Around the turn of the millennium, they might not have found an open source alternative, but today, that situation is rare enough that it comes as a surprise.

    Force of habit is a likely explanation, but often users simply don’t know what they don’t know. In fact, thanks to obsolete rumors, sometimes what users believe about open source is the exact opposite of the truth.

  • BitPay Releases New Version Of Open Source Bitcoin Wallet

    BitPay, a global bitcoin payment service provider, on Tuesday rolled out version 1.6.1 of its open source bitcoin wallet Copay.

  • Cloud Foundry launches code certification effort, IBM, HPE, Pivotal on board

    The Cloud Foundry Foundation on Wednesday launched a certification program. The certification is the first aimed at ensuring portability across platform-as-a-service offerings across multiple vendors and clouds. The Cloud Foundry Foundation is collectively owned by 55 member companies.

  • Using Blender to prepare for orthopedic surgeries

    The planning of orthopedic surgeries is a difficult process. In a lot of ways, it’s like working while wearing a blindfold; a surgeon can’t see the bone that needs to be worked on until during the actual surgery, when time is most critical. Even with X-rays and CT scans, the raw data can be difficult to interpret correctly. Fortunately, open source software can (and does!) help reduce the guesswork.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Open source cloud tools offer risk, reward with AWS

      Logging AWS resources can be cumbersome, but is necessary to ensure nothing goes awry. Open source tools help aggregate and visualize AWS resource data.

    • OpenStack Security and Monitoring Solutions Spread Out

      There is news rolling in on the OpenStack front, especially for organizations interested in cloud monitoring and security. Mirantis and Palo Alto Networks, a company focused on security, have announced a joint partnership and the availability of Palo Alto Networks next-generation security as a virtual network function (VNF) within the Mirantis OpenStack distribution.

  • Databases

    • Google Revamps Cloud SQL Service with New Pricing, Higher Performance
    • Changes Coming For PostgreSQL 9.5

      The PostgreSQL 9.5 release change-log was recently updated in Git to reflect all of the latest changes for this next version of this database server due out in 2016.

      The changes in Git yesterday now provide an up-to-date look at the PostgreSQL 9.5 additions. Some of the PostgreSQL 9.5 features worth mentioning include row-level security control, addition of Block Range Indexes (BRIN), “substantial” performance improvements for sorting, “substantial” performance improvements for multi-CPU machines, and much more.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • ownCloud and Collabora Announce LibreOffice Online for ownCloud Server

      Today, December 15, ownCloud, Inc. and Collabora have just announced a partnership to bring a new tool for LibreOffice and ownCloud users, based on the LibreOffice Online project and the robust, open-source ownCloud Server self-hosting cloud storage solution.

    • Collabora + ownCloud Release CODE For LibreOffice Online

      CODE is a distribution of LibreOffice Online and OwnCloud Server, providing an easy way to let developers/enthusiasts run untested feature additions and updates. CODE is basically for research and development with new features and the pairing of ownCloud and LibreOffice Online. In 2016, the two companies plan to provide a commercial solution based on Collabora CloudSuite and ownCloud Server.

    • Collabora Online Developer Edition (CODE)

      Today we release an easy way to get stuck into playing with LibreOffice online alongside ownCloud – please do checkout the CODE page and have a play. The purpose of my blog here is to credit the people involved in the development so far: currently all of the core work is by Collabora – that’s something we hope that making it easier to get involved will improve.

    • LibreOffice user interface changes

      In our class, I asked students to do their own usability test as a final project, from capturing the Personas, documenting the use Scenarios, defining the Scenario Tasks, and moderating a usability test on their favorite open source software project. To get them ready for the final project, I had students moderate a “mini-project.” I selected the topic for the mini-project, based on what open source software everyone claimed some level of familiarity with.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • ARMv8.1 Support Added To GCC Compiler

      While the LLVM Clang compiler has been working on ARMv8.1 support since earlier this year, the developers focusing on GCC have been working on it still but the first bits have been committed to trunk this morning.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Law schools lag behind on open source law

      Many organizations use at least some open source code within their programs. So it is surprising that recent graduates who work with companies using open source software are usually ill prepared (or not prepared at all) to deal with open source legal issues. However, it is not the attorneys’ fault.

      Open source legal training is not easy to find, and if available it is not cheap. In the Bay Area, some law schools support an “open movement” policy. For example, some of them create and promote their own commons, meaning that the journals’ articles are uploaded and distributed for free online. The schools’ open access policies allow attorneys to stay up-­to-­date on their education, without the stress of paying for a subscription. (See SCU commons and UC Hastings.)

    • Why I’m not using your open source project

      There’s a peculiar mix of altruism and egotism that goes into releasing an open source project. On the one hand, you might be solving a problem that others are struggling with, and sharing your solution will save them a lot of time. On the other, the near-fantastic rock star status of those who have created successful open source projects (think John Resig, Ryan Dahl, and Linus Torvalds) drives people to overshare in the hopes of also achieving such status. This has resulted in a glut of open source projects being released into the wild and their creators venturing out on marketing campaigns to attract users.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • 5 favorite 3D printing projects of 2015
      • FAQ: OpenRISC
      • Hands-on with Simblee, connecting things to the cloud through smartphones

        Arduino-compatible chip lets makers embed cloud-connected mobile apps right in their devices.

        Earlier this year, Ars Technica got a demonstration of a technology that seeks to change how we interact with embedded computing technology—tying together Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communications, Arduino-style microcontroller technology, and mobile Internet connectivity. The chip at the core of the technology, called Simblee, allows device developers to build and deploy their own mobile applications without having to write iOS or Android code or having to publish their applications through an app store. Eight months have passed, and Simblee Corporation’s eponymous chip is now shipping to pre-order customers and is for sale through electronics distributors.

  • Programming

    • The next generation of continuous integration

      This new approach to CI has been implemented at scale in the OpenStack project to manage the CI of all the different sub-projects. To give you an idea of the scale, every day OpenStack handles 1,000 proposed patch sets, 7,500 posted comments and votes on Gerrit, 16,000 test environments spawned, and 250 changes merged (source).

    • GCC 5.3 Optimization Level Tests From -O0 To -Ofast

      Here are some fresh tests of Fedora 23 with the GCC 5.3.1 compiler when running a series of benchmarks after the binaries were compiled each time with an assortment of optimization levels.

    • prpl Foundation Launches prpl.works to Mobilize Open Source Developers

      The prpl Foundation today revealed prpl.works, an online community by and for open source developers and users. Active for just a few weeks, the community has already reached over 40,000 developers from around the world.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Everything You Know About Latency Is Wrong

      Okay, maybe not everything you know about latency is wrong. But now that I have your attention, we can talk about why the tools and methodologies you use to measure and reason about latency are likely horribly flawed. In fact, they’re not just flawed, they’re probably lying to your face.

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Watch: Seth Meyers Explains Why Fox’s Coverage Of The Paris Climate Agreement Was A Joke
    • Indonesia to name firms linked to forest fires

      Indonesia is set to name the companies responsible for illegal fires that led to this year’s transboundary haze crisis. The firms, which mainly run plantations on concession land in Sumatra and Kalimantan, will also have their business licences suspended while a decision is made on whether to initiate legal proceedings against them for breaching environmental laws.

    • Falling Oil And Gasoline Prices Bring Back Memories Of Right-Wing Media Hypocrisy

      With global crude oil prices at their lowest point in seven years, and gasoline prices approaching their lowest point of President Obama’s term of office, Media Matters remembers Fox News’ hypocritical coverage of the relationship between presidential policy initiatives and fuel and energy markets.

    • Indonesia forest fires cost twice as much as tsunami clean-up, says World Bank

      Indonesia’s economy took a $16bn hit this year from forest fires that cloaked south-east Asia in haze, more than double the sum spent on rebuilding Aceh after the 2004 tsunami, according to the World Bank.

      The fires and resulting haze are an annual occurrence caused by slash-and-burn land clearance. But the blazes in 2015 were the worst for some years, causing air quality to worsen dramatically and many to fall ill across the region.

      In a quarterly update on the Indonesian economy, the World Bank said the fires had devastated 2.6 million hectares (6.4m acres) of forest and farmland across the archipelago from June to October.

    • Fires cost Indonesia US$16b, twice the tsunami bill: World Bank

      Indonesia’s economy took a US$16-billion hit this year from forest fires that cloaked Southeast Asia in haze, more than double the sum spent on rebuilding Aceh after the 2004 tsunami, the World Bank said Tuesday (Dec 15).

      The fires and resulting haze are an annual occurrence caused by slash-and-burn land clearance. But the blazes in 2015 were the worst for some years, causing air quality to worsen dramatically and many to fall ill across the region.

      In a quarterly update on the Indonesian economy, the World Bank said the fires had devastated 2.6 million hectares (6.4 million acres) of forest and farmland across the archipelago from June to October.

      The cost to Southeast Asia’s biggest economy is estimated at 221 trillion rupiah (US$16.1 billion), equivalent to 1.9 per cent of predicted GDP this year, it said.

      In contrast, it cost US$7 billion to rebuild Indonesia’s westernmost province of Aceh after it was engulfed 11 years ago by a quake-triggered tsunami, with the loss of tens of thousands of lives, the bank said.

      “The economic impact of the fires has been immense,” said World Bank Indonesia country director Rodrigo Chaves.

    • CNN Debate Ignores Climate Change, Does Not Ask GOP Candidates About Historic Paris Agreement

      Three days before CNN hosted the fifth Republican presidential debate, leaders from every country in the world struck a historic climate change agreement in Paris to reduce fossil fuel emissions and face up to one of the greatest threats facing our country and our planet. The Paris agreement was a front page story in newspapers throughout the U.S. and around the globe. So considering that the Pentagon says climate change “could impact national security” and experts have identified a relationship between global warming and the rise of ISIS, the issue clearly belonged in the December 15 CNN debate, which co-moderator Wolf Blitzer described as a “discussion about the security of this nation.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • What Gets Asked at Debates–and Who Gets Asked It?

      The 536 questions asked in the first four Republican debates, four Republican undercard debates and two Democratic debates were divided into six categories: economic, social, international, immigration, environment and non-policy questions. If the same question was asked to multiple candidates, it was counted each time, but clarifying and follow-up questions to the same candidate were not counted.

      FAIR also studied the percentage of questions each candidate was asked. While moderators clearly took candidates’ positions in opinion polls into account when distributing questions, some seemed to get asked more—or less—based on media assumptions about who was and was not a serious contender.

    • Fox’s Sean Hannity To Sen. Rand Paul: “I’m Not So Sure If I Agree With All The Geneva Conventions”
    • Adding to CNN’s Sizeable Dossier of Misreporting on the TWA Flight 800 Crash

      With stunning regularity, CNN’s reporters and producers have, for the last twenty years, egregiously misreported on the evidence and eyewitness accounts pertaining to TWA Flight 800. More recent crashes, this time Metrojet’s demise, are regularly seized upon to craft news packages in which the TWA Flight 800 crash is mentioned at length. These mentions consist of repeating the same “official source” false narrative that CNN and other major news outlets have been promulgating for years, even though the public is now well aware that at least half a dozen key members of the official Flight 800 crash investigation have presented evidence showing that the official probable cause of the crash is untenable and that the physical evidence indicates that explosive ordnance caused Flight 800’s demise.

    • CNN’s John Avlon: “Broad Strokes” Of Marco Rubio’s ISIS “Plan Are Not That Different From Barack Obama”

  • Censorship

    • Senate Passes Bill Banning Non-Disparagement Clauses

      Despite it being transparently obvious that non-disparagement clauses hidden in fine print serve the singular purpose of deterring complaints about bad products and services, companies still deploy them with little fear of retribution. To date, only one state has actually banned the use of non-disparagement clauses: California.

      The issue appears to have finally reached the critical mass needed to propel it onto the national legislative radar. Back in May, multiple representatives started pushing for a federal ban on these clauses, prompted in part by the high-profile KlearGear debacle, in which a couple had their credit rating ruined by the online retailer in its pursuit of a BS $3,500 fee tied to its (nonexistent at the time of the negative review) non-disparagement clause.

  • Privacy

    • EFF confirms that the DEA has deleted its phone call database

      Earlier this year, it was revealed that the NSA’s massive surveillance program had a precursor: the Drug Enforcement Administration’s USTO, which monitored almost every international call American citizens made since the 1990′s. Now, the EFF has confirmed that the program was killed in 2013, and that most of the data it collected had already been purged. The non-profit was able to dig deeper into the situation, since it filed a case against the DEA earlier this year on behalf of Human Rights Watch, and a federal judge has recently ordered the agency to answer all of HRW’s questions about the program.

    • Carly Fiorina says government needs a way to ‘work around’ encryption

      Carly Fiorina wants the government to be able to “work around” encryption to aid intelligence agencies and law enforcement in thier investigations, she told Breitbart News on Monday.

      The Republican presidential candidate and former HP CEO shifted the focus of her campaign to national security two days before the last Republican debate of 2015.

      “One of the places we need help is to deal with all of these encrypted communications,” she said. “You can’t outlaw encryption. Encryption protects American consumers from identity theft, and all the rest of it. But we have to be able to work around it where necessary to give our investigators the information they need. I’d ask the private sector’s help in that.”

    • Congress Drops All Pretense: Quietly Turns CISA Into A Full On Surveillance Bill

      Remember CISA? The “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act”? It’s getting much, much worse, with Congress and the administration looking to ram it through — in the process, dropping any pretense that it’s not a surveillance bill.

    • Teens face social media ban in EU data protection shake-up

      New data protection rules being discussed on Tuesday mean that teenagers below the age of 16 will have to get permission from parents to access social media websites and apps.

    • Change is coming: are you prepared?

      Specific to the UK, the UK Data Protection Act requires every data controller, from the largest enterprise to a sole trader, to register with the Information Commissioner’s Office (unless exempted). It ensures that organisations are not collecting or using data unduly, and that the data that is collected is protected and used only in a manner that complies with the articles within the Act.

    • NSA Propagandist John Schindler Suggests Boston Marathon Terrorist Attack Not “Major Jihadist Attack”

      NSA propagandist John Schindler has used the San Bernardino attack as an opportunity to blame Edward Snowden for the spy world’s diminished effectiveness, again.

      Perhaps the most interesting detail in his column is his claim that 80% of thwarted attacks come from an NSA SIGINT hit.

    • Fact-Checking the Debate on Encryption

      As politicians and counter-terrorism officials search for lessons from the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, senior officials have called for limits on technology that sends encrypted messages.

      It’s a debate that has repeatedly recurred for more than a decade.In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration directed technology companies to store copies of their encryption keys with the government. That would have given the government a “backdoor” to allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies easy access to encrypted communications. That idea was dropped after sharp criticism from technologists and civil liberties advocates.

      More recently, intelligence officials in Europe and the United States have asserted that encryption hampers their ability to detect plots and trace perpetrators. But many have questioned whether it would be practical or wise to allow governments widespread power to read encrypted messages.

    • Twitter Users Hit By ‘State-Sponsored’ Hackers

      It’s the type of message no Twitter user wants to receive: their account has been targeted by “state-sponsored actors” attempting to swipe their email address and phone number.

      But that’s exactly the news that an array of Twitter users, many who do privacy- and security-related jobs, began to get on Friday. Among those targeting: programmers working on Tor, a browser that helps users maintain anonymity online. While Twitter hasn’t revealed how many users were targeted, one public list includes 35 accounts belonging to security researchers, privacy activists, and developers.

    • Christie’s PAC Scoops Up Voter Data Across New Hampshire

      For months, a political action committee supporting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been scooping up data about New Hampshire voters who show up at other Republican candidates’ campaign events across the Granite State.

      While voters have been willingly turning over these data — their names, email addresses, zip codes and candidate preferences — it’s unclear whether they realized the information was benefiting Christie.

      The America Leads effort springs from a simple campaign reality: When people want to see political candidates in person, they usually need to show up early. “And then while they’re waiting, they’re on their mobile phones,” said Kurt Luidhardt, who runs digital operations for the America Leads PAC. “And a lot of them are on Facebook, looking at what their friends and other folks are saying on Facebook.”

    • Europe Finally Agrees Tough New Data Protection Rules

      Late yesterday European institutions finally agreed the text of new data protection rules (GDPR), more than three years after new regulation was proposed.
      The 28 Member States of the European Union will have two years to transpose the provisions of the GDPR into their national laws, with the regulation set to come into force from 2018.

  • Civil Rights

    • Saudi Arabia announces 34-state military alliance to fight terrorism

      Saudi Arabia has announced the formation of a 34-state Islamic military coalition to combat terrorism, according to a statement published on the state news agency, SPA.

      “The countries here mentioned have decided on the formation of a military alliance led by Saudi Arabia to fight terrorism, with a joint operations centre based in Riyadh to coordinate and support military operations,” said the statement, which was released on Tuesday.

    • All LA schools shut down over message sent from 8chan’s e-mail host, cock.li

      The “credible” threat that caused the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to close all schools on Tuesday was sent from cock.li, the “meme” e-mail host that also provides e-mail services for 8chan, the 4chan splinter site.

      School officials in New York and Los Angeles reportedly both received threats from madbomber@cock.li but only LAUSD took it seriously. All 640,000 LAUSD students were unable to attend classes on Tuesday.

      Vincent Canfield, the founder of cock.li, posted a copy of the subpoena he received from a New York detective on his own website and included audio recordings of polite but brief conversations with two officials from the New York Police Department (NYPD) Intelligence Bureau.

    • Jack Straw Responds to Alex Salmond with Blatant Lie

      It has been a source of astonishment to me that journalists are prepared to continue to publish Straw’s denials of involvement in torture, when there is indisputable documentary proof that he is lying. I offered these documents to the Guardian years ago, but was not surprised when that Blairite rag refused to publish.

      I was however surprised by this. When Straw criticised Salmond on Monday, I immediately offered these documents to the National as proof that Straw was lying. The National too refused to publish. Firstly they said that they had to consult their lawyers about whether the government would sue them. Then they said they could not work out how to condense the information into a short article (which begs the question why it had to be short). They then said they were too busy.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Add Verizon To The Growing List Of Companies Tap Dancing Around Net Neutrality With Zero Rating

      That’s a lot of sponsoring. More simply, the technology lets you pay Verizon to get a leg up over your competitors, who may not be able to afford to pay Verizon for the same privilege. It’s an idea that’s been highly criticized for the fact that it puts smaller companies (and especially independents and nonprofits) at a distinct and immediate market disadvantage. And while some implementations of zero rating may seem better than others (like T-Mobile’s Binge On, which exempts all video from usage caps), the precedent of giving an ISP this kind of authority remains troubling to those intimate with the telecom industry’s long, long history of anti-competitive behavior.

  • DRM

    • Light Bulb DRM: Philips Locks Purchasers Out Of Third-Party Bulbs With Firmware Update

      The world of connected devices is upon us and things have never been better. Criminals can access your email account by breaking into your fridge. Your child’s toys and your television record your conversations and send them to manufacturers’ servers, where criminals are (again) able to access them. Your home thermostat goes HAL 9000 and attempts to set your house on fire. And, now, your light bulbs won’t do the one thing you expect them to do: produce light.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

12.15.15

Links 15/12/2015: CentOS Linux 7 1511, Enlightenment DR 0.20.1

Posted in News Roundup at 8:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Core Developer Jeff Garzik on the Similarities Between Bitcoin and Linux

    Before making any contributions to Bitcoin, Bloq Co-Founder and Bitcoin Core Developer Jeff Garzik was a longtime Linux developer who started working on the operating system in the early nineties — before the creation of Red Hat. As someone who was involved in the early development of both Linux and Bitcoin, Garzik has a unique perspective on the common themes found in the two respective development communities.

  • Person of Year, Podcasts, and Polls

    Today in Linux news, several reviews lead the pack today. Jesse Smith and Das U-Blogger Prashanth reviewed Chakra 2015.11, Swapnil Bhartiya tested newly released Mint 17.3, and a couple of quick openSUSE reports were posted. Elsewhere, Donald Stewart posted an update on Mageia Cauldron and Antonio Rojas said Arch is dropping KDE 4. A couple of interesting polls warrant a mention as well and more in tonight’s Linux news recap.

  • So you want a lean mean Linux machine?

    No matter what people say, efficiently utilising the resources of your computer is very important. Sure disk space is cheap they say, but one thing they never tell you is that no matter how big your hard disk is, a way will be found to fill it up. Especially for older machines, as operating systems are getting bigger and bigger, requiring more memory and disk space than ever before.

  • Desktop

    • Qubes OS will ship pre-installed on Purism’s security-focused Librem 13 laptop

      Qubes OS, the security-focused operating system that Edward Snowden said in November he was “really excited” about, announced this week that laptop maker Purism will ship their privacy-focused Librem 13 notebook with Qubes pre-installed.

    • Here a Chromebook, there a Chromebook, everywhere a Chromebook

      I used to carry ThinkPads, starting with the IBM models and then Lenovo’s versions, with me everywhere. They were, and still are, great laptops. Then I started using Chromebooks. I still have a couple of ThinkPads, but they never leave my office. Why? Because a Chromebook can do anything I want, typically deliver battery life that can see me through a whole day of work at a coffee shop, and are immune to almost all of Windows’ security woes. I’m not the only one who loves them.

    • Chromebookify Your Laptop Now!

      A few years ago there was a project designed to boot generic laptops so they functioned as Chromebooks. It was a cool project, but unfortunately, the compatibility wasn’t great, and it wasn’t reliable to use on a daily basis. Although Chromebooks are old news these days, it still would be quite useful to transform aging laptop computers into Chromebooks. Because they have such low system requirements, older laptops running the ChromeOS can become quite useful again.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • 7 Linux Podcasts You Need to Listen To

      If you’re a die-hard Linux user, or a command-line newbie, you’re going to find something worth listening to in this list of seven download-worthy Linux podcasts.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Eduardo Mayorga Téllez

      Eduardo Mayorga Téllez, a Teens in Training scholarship recipient, is 17 and lives in Nicaragua. He plans to become a Linux kernel developer and use his knowledge of device drivers to help Linux support the most hardware possible. He says he often hears classmates and colleagues argue that Linux is not suitable for them because they cannot make the most of their hardware. Eduardo says he will change that.

    • Newest Linux Foundation Video Highlights Open Source In Space

      Linux in space is the subject of the Linux Foundation’s latest “World without Linux” video, which highlights how open source software helps power the world we live in — or, in this case, the things orbiting around it.

    • Dell and Red Hat Deliver Easier Firmware Updates for Linux Users

      Dell — the first big company to sell Linux computers — is catering to open source fans again by announcing plans to make user-friendly firmware upgrades possible on Linux.

      In a blog post, Richard Hughes, who works for Red Hat (RHT) and contributes to the GNOME project, writes that Red Hat and Dell have been collaborating on a system that will allow users of Dell hardware to update firmware from Linux. If that doesn’t seem significant to you, it’s probably because you either do not use Linux or have not spent enough of your life geeking out to know what firmware is.

    • Linux Kernel 4.3.3 Is Now the Most Advanced Stable Version Available

      The latest iteration of the stable Linux kernel, 4.3.3, has been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman, making this the latest and best version available right now.

      The 4.3 branch of the Linux kernel is a really popular one and it’s been adopted by many distros. From the looks of it, the maintainers will continue to provide support for it, but it’s not clear for how long. There is already a 4.1.15 version that has been declared long-term, so it’s difficult to say if another branch will be tagged LTS as well, after such a short time.

    • Microsoft offers its first-ever Linux certification on Azure
    • Microsoft offers MCSA qualification for IT workers using Linux on Azure
    • Microsoft wants you to train using its rival, Linux operating system
    • New Certification Announced for Linux on Azure Cloud
    • Technology Sector Trend Analysis Report: Microsoft (MSFT), Sunedison (SUNE), Cisco Systems (CSCO), Corning (GLW)

      Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) on December 9, 2015 announced the creation of a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) Linux on Azure certification. Created in conjunction with the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, this certification represents one more important step in broadening the technology integration between Microsoft and the open source community.

    • Files Are Hard

      I haven’t used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even though my gmail account not only handles more email than I ever had on desktop clients, but also allows simultaneous access from multiple locations across the globe? Distributed systems have an unfair advantage, in that they can be robust against total disk failure in a way that desktop clients can’t, but none of the file corruption issues I’ve had have been from total disk failure. Why has my experience with desktop applications been so bad?

    • It’s okay, break your kernel

      The reality is much simpler: the kernel is a software project. There is nothing particularly special about being a kernel developer. Jumping into any code base is going to involve a learning curve. You don’t need to be the best programmer ever to make modifications. The core kernel is completely self-contained in one project which means fewer dependencies than a lot of userspace projects. (yes, there are modules out of tree but the most important parts are in a single project). The self-contained nature means that it’s easy to switch back to a stable kernel from an unstable one which makes testing easier.

    • The Nexus 4 & 7 Will Be Closer To Handling An Upstream Linux Kernel

      Rob Clark submitted his MSM-Next DRM driver changes today in preparation for the Linux 4.5 kernel cycle.

      He was quick to note that with this MSM DRM driver update from the Freedreno project there is now DSI support for Qualcomm’s MSM8960 and APQ8064 hardware. He explains the impact as, “should be helpful for getting an upstream kernel working on nexus7/nexus4/etc.” DSI is short for the Display Serial Interface and is a MIPI specification for communicating between the host and display device.

    • Exynos DRM In Linux 4.5 To Support Runtime Power Management
    • AppStream 0.9 Brings Many Changes, Breaks API/ABI

      Version 0.9 of AppStream is now available. As a refresher, AppStream is a FreeDesktop.org specification backed by multiple major Linux distributions as a cross-distribution effort of standardizing Linux component metadata.

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • 7-Way Linux Laptop Comparison From Sandy Bridge To Broadwell

        For those curious about how Intel’s laptop/ultrabook CPUs have evolved over the past few generations and whether it’s worthwhile upgrading from one generation to the next, here’s a fresh Linux laptop comparison with seven different laptops being tested on Ubuntu 15.10 x86_64 and comparing these laptops from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell on a variety of workloads while also doing some performance-per-Watt measurements.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Enlightenment DR 0.20.1 Release

      This bugfix release improves on the 0.20.0 release and resolves a number of issues.

    • Enlightenment 0.20.1 Released With Fixes

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME: Shortcuts love

        Keyboard shortcuts can be a powerful feature, particularly for actions that are repeated often and are consistently available. In GNOME 2, shortcuts could be learned through menu bars, but we moved away from these with GNOME 3. There were a number of reasons why we did this, and it was a good thing, but it did leave users without an easy way to learn keyboard shortcuts. This is something that we’ve wanted to address for some time, and are now finally resolving.

      • Evolution Email and Calendar Client Updated for GNOME 3.20 with Over 40 Changes

        The GNOME 3.19.3 desktop environment is under heavy development these days, and many of its core components and applications are being updated by the hour.

      • GNOME Maps 3.20 Is Going to Be a Really Big Update

        GNOME Maps is one of the many components of the GNOME stack, and it looks like the upcoming 3.20 version will get some pretty cool features.

        Not all the packages get big improvements when they move from one version to another. In fact, for many packages in the GNOME stack, not a lot happens. GNOME Maps is not one of those apps, and it’s becoming more useful with each new release.

      • GNOME Maps App Now Lets Users Edit Locations in OpenStreetMap
      • Video Series

        I’m nearly a month down on a branch for Builder 3.20. It’s goal is to radically simplify the process of creating plugins, and prepare for external plugins. We really wanted to create a solid plugin story before doing that and things are progressing nicely.

  • Distributions

    • Best distro of 2015 poll

      Let’s do it again. Last year, in a first-of-its-kind Dedoimedo best distro vote poll, I asked you about your favorite operating system, and you responded in kind. With exactly 1,900 votes, you opined on the state of the Linux. It’s that time of the year once more.

      I am going to post an article reflecting my own view on how this year of distro testing went, but I would also very much like to hear from you. Like in 2014, I used the THP on Distrowatch and selected the top ten entries for the poll. But there’s also a free field for you to add any other distro you like, as well as comments. It ought to be interesting, and hopefully not too quiet. After me.

    • Reviews

      • Review: Chakra 2015.11 “Fermi”

        Not only has it been a while since I’ve done a Linux distribution review on this blog, but it has been an especially long time (over 2.5 years, in fact) since I’ve looked at Chakra. I figured that now that KDE 5 (technically incorrect terminology, I know, but please bear with me, as I’m using this for the sake of brevity) is being used in Chakra, it may be time to see how a distribution I’ve rather liked in the past has evolved. In case you don’t remember, Chakra was originally based on Arch Linux, but a few years ago, it branched off into its own independent distribution with its own repositories, though certain tools (like the package manager Pacman) are based on things found in Arch Linux. It focuses exclusively on KDE, and it uses a semi-rolling release model in which core system packages are updated less frequently in order to maintain stability, while front-end applications seen by users most often are updated more frequently to provide a competitive desktop experience.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Some news of what’s boiling in the Cauldron

        For those of you who are most familiar with Mageia and its development, you are starting to know the drill: Cauldron is the place where we break stuff by upgrading everything that we tried to keep stable during the previous release cycle, and then we work on making it stable again. We are now in this stabilization phase and we were aiming internally for a first development snapshot of Mageia 6 as a set of ISO images, but there are still a number of factors that make it difficult right now.

    • Arch Family

      • Dropping Plasma 4

        Since the KDE 4 desktop has been unmaintained for several months and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to support two versions of Plasma, we are removing it from our repositories. Plasma 5.5 has just been released and should be stable enough to replace it.

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • OpenSUSE LEAP: A Great Free Linux Server Distribution

        So what exactly is LEAP? What’s it for? The easiest way to approach something like OpenSUSE LEAP is to think of it like a beefed-up, more stable Fedora-type thing. The main goal of this Linux distribution is to create an enterprise grade distribution designed for workstations and servers free of charge.

      • I accidentally openSUSE

        I am sorry for this silly article. But it is important. Just as important as my other failures over the years. They teach as much as image-rich guides and prosaic, finely worded reviews, albeit with much less beauty and style. The moral of the story is, as you may have guessed already, DON’T DO IT. Wait for openSUSE to gets its due major and minor version increment and come around with Plasma 5 natively and a suave, integrated Gecko or Chameleon theme, as it just recently did.

        At this point, thinking in retrospect, I probably should have used BTRFS, and this might have given me the necessary snapshot to go back in time and undo the damage. Maybe. Furthermore, I am disappointed with the SUSE team. They should protect their system a little more robustly from aesthetic escapades. All I did was install a bunch of packages and let the system remove some of the conflicting dependencies with the previously installed desktop environment. Not something we should let happen in 2015. Food for thought. As for Plasma on openSUSE, I owe you that one. Leap 42.1. Very soon. Take care.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Ordering mount points in Jessie (systemd < 220)

        In the previous post I had mentioned that I didn’t figure out how to add dependency on mount points so as to achieve correct ordering of mount points. After a lot of search today I finally figured it out thanks to the bug report and the patch which adds x-systemd.requires and other option to systemd.

      • Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2015
      • Reproducible builds: week 33 in Stretch cycle

        Exchanges have started with F-Droid developers to better understand what would be required to test F-Droid applications. (h01ger)

      • Derivatives

        • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” Gets Linux Kernel 4.1.13 LTS in Second Test Build

          Today, December 14, the Parsix GNU/Linux developers announced the release and immediate availability for download of the second TEST build of their upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” computer operating system.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Touch to Get FM Support for Aquaris e4.5 and E5 HD First

            A couple of developers have started to work on bringing FM support to the Ubuntu phones, and they already made some progress, but it’s more complicated than it sounds.

          • OnePlus One Ubuntu Touch Developer Is Helping Other Projects Do the Same

            The community is working on a OnePlus One Ubuntu Touch port, and the developer who’s doing the heavy lifting is also trying to help other people port the OS to their devices.

          • Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition Project Seems to Be Still Alive

            The Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition is the elephant in the room, and it looks like people don’t want to talk about it. It’s been pulled from sales, and it’s virtually invisible on social media, but all hope is not yet lost.

          • Mycroft Is Now an Official Ubuntu IoT Partner

            Mycroft is a home automation Linux-based device that promises to change the way we interact with our homes. The guys who are making this hardware decided to show us how it’s made.

          • Ubuntu Bugs That Won’t Go Away

            I grew up on a farm and ranch up until I was fourteen. It’s a tough life, best suited for tough people who can beat their environment into submission and produce the results needed to thrive. Should I ever have displayed the poor judgement to complain about something within earshot of my dad, I would get the same advice every time.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon Review

              Linux Mint is among the most popular GNU/Linux-based operating systems. Although DistroWatch is not a metric of popularity, Linux Mint has claimed the #1 ranking on the website, which means it’s the most sought after distro on the site.

            • Monthly News – November 2015

              Our apologies for posting these news so late. Since the website and forums went down, we’ve been hit by two new server issues. Two of our repository servers lost their hard drives. That’s a total of 3 servers going down in just a few weeks. This time around we had full backups though and we were able to minimize downtime (no downtime at all on the Mint and LMDE2 repositories, a few hours yesterday on the LMDE 1 repositories). We’re eager to resume work on Linux Mint but at the moment most of our focus is still on server administration, on recovery, on configuration but also on making sure we’re stronger and issues like these have less of an impact on us going forward.

            • Linux Mint 17.3 OEM images available

              Reminder: OEM images are for computer vendors and manufacturers. They allow Linux Mint to be “pre-installed” on a machine which is then used by another person than the one who performed the installation. After an OEM installation, the computer is set in such a way that the next reboot features a small setup screen where the new user/customer has the ability to choose his/her username, password, keyboard layout and locale.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Manchester City will be happy with draw but London clubs get rough ride

    For the three English clubs left in the Champions League there must be a sense of deja vu about the draw for the last 16 but not a great deal of satisfaction. Arsenal’s supporters could be forgiven for thinking the worst after drawing Barcelona, with the prospect of going out at this stage for the sixth year in a row. Manchester City, for the second season in succession, will not be allowed to take fans to a Champions League tie because of the racism of others and the bad news for travellers on the Paris Métro is that Chelsea are on their way back to the French capital.

  • Yahoo told: cut 9,000 of your 10,700 staff

    Yahoo is facing shareholder pressure to pursue other alternatives besides a complex spin-off of its internet operations while chief executive Marissa Mayer struggles to revive the company’s revenue growth.

  • Las Vegas Review-Journal Now Owned By… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    The last time we wrote about the Las Vegas Review-Journal — the largest newspaper in Nevada — it was owned by Stephens Media and was making headlines for using the LVRJ as a copyright troll, pretending to sell its copyrights to a company called Righthaven. That scam fell apart when it was discovered that Righthaven didn’t really own the copyrights it was suing over. Since then, the LVRJ has changed hands a couple times. Stephens Media sold the paper to New Media Investment Group earlier this year. And then, last week, it was announced that “New Media Investment Group” had sold the newspaper to News + Media Capital Group LLC, for $140 million. News + Media Capital Group LLC is a brand new Delaware-based company, and no one has the slightest clue who they are, including all the folks working for the LVRJ.

  • Practical guide for avoiding burnout and living a happier life

    As open source fans, we tend to spend a lot of time curled up in front of our computers. Many of us we work in front of computers during the day, and some of us even work on or with open source projects, too. If you are anything like me, spending an entire day in front of a screen and then spending most of the evening there, too, is not uncommon. Today is a good example: I started work at 8:00AM, and at 8:21PM I am starting to write this article…

  • Microsoft apologizes for riling OneDrive users, restores some free storage space on request

    Microsoft on Friday apologized for how it conveyed last month’s decision to slash OneDrive storage allotments, and restored the 15GB of free cloud storage space to current users who asked for it. But it did not back down from its determination to eliminate the unlimited allowance.

    “We are all genuinely sorry for the frustration this decision has caused and for the way it was communicated,” wrote Douglas Pearce, a group program manager for OneDrive, in a message that shut down a massive plea on Microsoft’s own website for the restoration of the allotments.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • United Nations agency gives EU a tobacco warning

      The United Nations public health agency in charge of tobacco control has warned EU policymakers to keep their distance from industry as they consider reforms to fight cigarette smuggling.

      The head of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control secretariat, Vera Da Costa e Silva, wrote senior European Commission officials earlier this month, saying the EU’s close working relationship with tobacco companies to fight cigarette smuggling may violate Europe’s international commitments.

    • ‘On the Back of a Cigarette Packet’ – Standardised Packaging Legislation and the Tobacco Industry’s Fundamental Right to (Intellectual) Property

      Standardised packaging (also known as plain packaging) legislation has recently been adopted in some states as a tobacco control measure. Under such laws, tobacco products must be sold in drab coloured packaging without branding other than a written indication of the name under which the product is sold. Its aim is to reduce the attraction of tobacco products, particularly to young smokers, and to prevent advertising imagery from interfering with prominent mandatory textual and visual health warnings. In March 2015, the Standardised Packaging of Tobacco Products Regulations 2015 received Parliamentary approval in the United Kingdom. The tobacco industry vigorously opposed their introduction. Amongst other objections, it claimed that the restrictions on branding introduced under the Regulations violate its fundamental right of property under Art 1 of the First Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights and Art. 17 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union because they deprive it of its ability to use marks, designs and inventions protected by intellectual property law. In this article, this argument is tested by reference to the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU. It is demonstrated that the absolutist view of property rights promoted by the Industry is very different from that prevailing in European fundamental rights law and that, as a result, the Industry’s suggestion that the Regulations violate A1P1 and Art. 17 is seriously misleading.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Peter Dale Scott and David Talbot

      David Talbot’s latest book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, examines the post-WWII U.S. intelligence sector and the power it wields, by following the career of Wall Street lawyer, diplomat and spymaster Allen Dulles. Talbot discussed his new book with fellow author Peter Dale Scott, in a public event at the Mechanics’ Institute Library in San Francisco on December 2, 2015. Talbot says he believes CIA assassins were responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy.

    • U.S. Visa Process Missed San Bernardino Wife’s Zealotry on Social Media

      Had the authorities found the posts years ago, they might have kept her out of the country. But immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks, and there is a debate inside the Department of Homeland Security over whether it is even appropriate to do so.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Pumped beyond limits, many U.S. aquifers in decline

      Just before 3 a.m., Jay Garetson’s phone buzzed on the bedside table. He picked it up and read the text: “Low Pressure Alert.”

      He felt a jolt of stress and his chest tightened. He dreaded what that automated message probably meant: With the water table dropping, another well on his family’s farm was starting to suck air.

      The Garetson family has been farming in the plains of southwestern Kansas for four generations, since 1902. Now they face a hard reality. The groundwater they depend on is disappearing. Their fields could wither. Their farm might not survive for the next generation.

    • Rampant Indonesian fires causing havoc in Papua

      Greenpeace says the impact of rampant forest and peatland fires in Indonesia’s Papua region is having a devastating effect on West Papuan society.

      Fires from land clearance on drained peatland have caused rampant fires across the republic including in Papua, catapulting Indonesia to being one of the world’s largest emitter’s of greenhouse gasses.

      Greenpeace’s Indonesia forest campaigner Yuyun Indradi says the fires have belched carbon haze across the region which is a health hazard for many communities.

    • How Indonesian Fires Are Affecting Global Climate

      Raging fires in Indonesia’s forests and peat lands since July this year are precipitating a climate and public-health catastrophe with repercussions across local, regional and global levels, experts told IndiaSpend.

      Acrid smoke and haze have enveloped Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, and have reached Thailand, choking people, reducing visibility and spiking respiratory illnesses, according to Susan Minnemeyer, Mapping and Data Manager for Washington-based World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Global Forest Watch Fires initiative.

    • North Carolina citizenry defeat pernicious Big Solar plan to suck up the Sun

      The citizens of Woodland, N.C. have spoken loud and clear: They don’t want none of them highfalutin solar panels in their good town. They scare off the kids. “All the young people are going to move out,” warned Bobby Mann, a local resident concerned about the future of his burg. Worse, Mann said, the solar panels would suck up all the energy from the Sun.

      Another resident—a retired science teacher, no less—expressed concern that a proposed solar farm would block photosynthesis, and prevent nearby plants from growing. Jane Mann then went on to add that there seemed to have been a lot of cancer deaths in the area, and that no one could tell her solar panels didn’t cause cancer. “I want information,” Mann said. “Enough is enough.”

      These comments were reported not in The Onion, but rather by the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald. They came during a Woodland Town Council meeting in which Strata Solar Company sought to rezone an area northeast of the town, off of US Highway 258, to build a solar farm. The council not only rejected the proposal, it went a step further, voting for a complete moratorium on solar farms.

    • [Satire] Koch Brothers Get Each Other Same Election For Christmas

      Chuckling and shaking their heads as they described their annual family gift exchange to reporters, Koch Industries executives Charles and David Koch confirmed Wednesday they had unwittingly gotten each other the same election for Christmas this year.

      The two brothers and energy industry magnates, who for decades have gathered to share a holiday meal and open presents next to the Christmas tree in Charles’ Wichita home, admitted they were a bit embarrassed to learn they had each given the other U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin’s congressional seat, but said they ultimately shrugged off the coincidence.

  • Finance

    • Poorest areas have low student debt, highest defaults

      The study comes as student loan debt continues to grow nationwide. Outstanding student loan balances increased by $13 billion to $1.2 trillion as of Sept. 30. That’s more overall debt than consumers owe on credit cards or auto loans. Nearly 12% of the money owed on student loans is 90 days or more delinquent in the third quarter of 2015.

      In the federal loan portfolio, which makes up $896 billion of the $1.2-trillion overall student loan debt, 20% of all borrowers, owing 13% of the debt, are in default, or more than 90 days late on a payment.

    • Prof. Wolff on The David Pakman Show: “Will Automation End “Full Employment?”

      Professor Wolff joins David Pakman to discuss the the future of employment in the context of automation and technological unemployment.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • NRA Uses The San Bernardino Mass Shooting To Compare Liberals To Terrorists

      A commentary video from the National Rifle Association labeled those who called for more than thoughts and prayers following the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California the “Godless Left” and claimed that they “march hand-in-hand” with terrorists “toward the possible, purposeful destruction of us all.”

  • Censorship

    • UK ISPs Unleash 85+ New Blocks on ‘Pirate’ Domains

      Internet service providers in the UK have begun blocking around 85 new ‘pirate’ domains following demands from rightsholders. All six major ISPs will implement the ban which targets, among other things, various clones, proxies and mirrors associated with The Pirate Bay plus major torrent and MP3 download sites.

  • Privacy

    • Twitter Says Possible State Sponsored Hack

      There is no indication what “government” Twitter suspects is connected with the hack, but online news sources are speculating the usual suspects, China and North Korea. PCWorld reports that many of the account holders receiving the Twitter notices are “privacy advocates and security researchers, some of whom tweet under pseudonyms.” Reuters is also reporting that Google and Facebook have also started warning users of possible state-sponsored attacks, but offers no details.

    • Let’s encrypt — because we really ought to

      Last week, Let’s Encrypt came out of beta. Let’s Encrypt is a collaborative effort that provides free SSL/TLS certificates for use by anyone with a valid Internet domain. It’s also a trusted certificate authority, and it’s currently issuing 90-day certificates free of charge. The upside is free SSL/TLS certificates. The downside is that 90-day expiration, though there are methods to renew the certificates automatically as the expiration approaches.

      Further, the tools provided by Let’s Encrypt make it pretty much effortless to implement. The Let’s Encrypt Python tool available at GitHub runs on a Web server, requests a valid certificate, and even does the Apache configuration for you, all with a pretty ncurses UI. Basically, you run this on a host with a bunch of non-SSL domains, and when it’s done, they’re all secured with free valid certificates.

    • A Victory for Privacy and Transparency: HRW v. DEA

      In a victory for millions of people in the U.S. who have placed telephone calls to locations overseas, EFF and Human Rights Watch have confirmed that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s practice of collecting those records in bulk has stopped and that the only bulk database of those records has been destroyed.

  • Civil Rights

    • Blair and Straw face questions over complicity in Shaker Aamer’s treatment

      In his first interview since returning home to London in October after being detained without charge for 14 years in the US military facility in Cuba, British resident Aamer suggested the former prime minister and the former foreign secretary were aware that he was being tortured.

      “The not unreasonable allegation that Shaker Aamer makes is that both the [then] prime minister Tony Blair and … Jack Straw must have known not just about his illegal abduction, but also about his torture at the hands of the US authorities,” Salmond told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show.

      The SNP foreign affairs spokesman and former Scottish first minister said that “as with so many other things”, Blair and Straw had a great deal to answer for. “They have to be asked the straight question of how could they possibly not have known about the fate that had befallen a British citizen,” he said.

      “Governments have many responsibilities, but the primary responsibility of all governments is to keep their own citizens safe from harm, and governments aren’t meant to collaborate on the illegal abduction and the torture of one of their own citizens. So both the then prime minister and home secretary have to face up and tell us exactly what they knew and when they knew it.”

    • Teenagers under 16 face being banned from social media and email under EU laws

      Teenagers under the age of 16 could be banned from Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and email if they don’t have parental permission, under last-minute changes to EU laws.

      The European Union is on the verge of pushing through new regulations that would raise the age of consent for websites to use personal data from 13 to 16.

      Officials quitely amended proposed data protection laws last week to increase the age and put the EU out of step with rules in other parts of the world.

    • Publicity hound, coward, liar: Whistleblowers are inevitably demonized by their enemies — Edward Snowden is no exception

      The most powerful gun in the damage-control arsenal isn’t truth. It is demonization—a vicious assault on the character of the whistleblower in order to destroy credibility and distract from the message. The damage controller’s bag of tricks is as old as Machiavelli.

      Find anything that borders on illegal behavior in the whistleblower’s past, such as court convictions, messy divorces, arrest reports, domestic violence complaints, a history of alcohol, child support issues, or drug abuse. Attack the whistleblower’s motive by alleging that he or she was driven by malice, revenge, deceit, greed, or hunger for publicity. Dig up colleagues, neighbors, and fellow workers who are willing to say, true or untrue, that the whistleblower is vindictive, sneaky, dishonest, prone to exaggerate, not a team player, disruptive in the workplace. Allege that the whistleblower is incompetent at his or her job, cannot be trusted with responsibility, or lacks leadership skills. Accuse the whistleblower of being a thief who stole proprietary documents, illegally revealed company secrets, broke a confidentiality agreement. Label the whistleblower mentally unstable.

      Edward Snowden—“the world’s most wanted man by the world’s most powerful government”—wasn’t surprised that his enemies tried to assassinate his character. He expected as much. As he told Greenwald and the Guardian, “I know the government will demonize me. They’ll say I violated the Espionage Act. That I committed grave crimes. That I aided America’s enemies. That I endangered national security. I’m sure they’ll grab every incident they can find from my past and probably will exaggerate or even fabricate some to demonize me as much as possible. . . . What keeps a person passive and compliant is fear of repercussions. . . . I decided a while ago that I can live with whatever they do to me. The only thing I can’t live with is knowing that I did nothing.”

    • Another Trustworthy Confidential Informant Allegedly Tied To Multiple Bogus Drug Arrests

      The only thing as trustworthy as a cop’s testimony are statements made by confidential informants. These are used to secure warrants and, occasionally, as supporting evidence in prosecutions. Never mind the fact that confidential informants are often career criminals who carry with them the innate desire to stay out of jail.

    • Supreme Court Again Makes It Clear: Companies Can Erode Your Legal Rights Via Mouse Print

      For years, AT&T worked tirelessly to erode its customers’ legal rights, using mouse print in its terms of service preventing consumers from participating in lawsuits against the company. Instead, customers were forced into binding arbitration, where arbitrators employed by the company unsurprisingly rule in their employer’s favor a huge percentage of the time. Initially, the lower courts derided this greasy behavior for what it was: an attempt by AT&T to eliminate customer legal rights and save a buck. And with AT&T’s massive history of fraud, you can imagine AT&T was looking to save quite a bit.

    • New U.S. FAA rule requires drone owners to register by Feb 19

      The Federal Aviation Administration, responding to heightened concerns about rogue drone flights near airports, unveiled a pre-Christmas rule on Monday requiring drone hobbyists as young as 13 years old to register their unmanned aircraft.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Grumpy Cat Sues Coffee Maker For Copyright Infringement

        Grumpy Cat is not happy. Her owners have filed a lawsuit at a California federal court, accusing a coffee maker of exploiting the cat’s copyrights and trademarks without permission. In addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, Grumpy Cat’s owners also want control of the coffee maker’s grumpycat.com domain name.

12.14.15

Links 14/12/2015: KDE Frameworks 5.17.0, ‘Referendum’ on GPL Enforcement

Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Hints For Successfully Managing an Open Source Project

    Today I want to change things a bit: instead of covering a technical subject, I want to share with you what it means to run an open source project

    For more than two years, my friend David Rousset and I have led Babylon.js. We started the project after hearing that IE11 would support WebGL and we wanted to make it easier for people to build 3D scenes and games. For the following two years I spent all of my spare time making Babylon.js a simple and powerful 3D engine for web developers.

  • Western Digital Labs and ownCloud
  • Person of The Year 2015 in the Linux/OpenSource Community: Open Voting

    Year 2015 ends. Taking time to honor those peoples who work in Linux and Open Source community and don’t have deserved popularity. Maybe you use everyday several products from these peoples – this is your personal chance to say “thank you”.

  • Why William Hill is betting on open source rather than traditional IT vendors for digital transformation

    William Hill is moving away from traditional IT vendor relationships as it seeks to modernise its business, choosing to build applications internally using open source technologies pioneered by internet giants such as Google and Facebook.

  • Staking a career on open source software’s success

    I have enjoyed reading the stories others have shared about how they got started with open source software, so I thought I’d add mine. It is different in that I came to open source purely for business reasons. While I later embraced the open source way for reasons such as personal freedom and community, my initial exposure to it came from trying to find the best solution to a business problem.

  • Events

    • Extension: FOSDEM 2016 Desktops DevRoom Call for Talks

      The FOSDEM Organization has graciously given devroom organizers a little extension. We are therefore extending our own deadline for the Desktops DevRoom: the new deadline is December 14th. There will be no further extensions.

    • TADHack Paris – 12-13 December 2015

      I’m currently in Paris for TADHack, an opportunity to collaborate on a range of telephony APIs and services. People can also win prizes by doing something innovative with the platforms promoted by the sponsors.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • Google tries to spread the SQL cloud love

      Google has unveiled the next gen of its Cloud SQL service, a hosted version of the MySQL database.

      The second generation Beta Cloud SQL is more than seven times faster than the first generation of Cloud SQL. And it scales to 10TB of data, 15,000 IOPS and 104GB of RAM per instance.

      The first generation of Cloud SQL was launched in October 2011 .

  • Education

    • Dear parents: Let your kids use open source software

      A 16-year-old boy recently asked the r/Linux community for advice. When his parents discovered that he’d reloaded his laptop with Linux, they were horrified—after all, this “free” software must certainly be riddled with viruses and/or hackers. It didn’t help matters any that he’d “ruined” an expensive gift, and was no longer using some of the expensive software that had been purchased with it. He tried to talk to them about it, but it was tough—he was the teenager; they were the adults.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Facebook’s custom AI hardware will be open-source, ready for Skynet

      While most artificial intelligence is powered by software, as the software gets more sophisticated, it relies on more powerful and sophisticated hardware to execute its needs. The social network will reportedly submit all the relevant design materials to the Open Compute Project, an organization that manages the sharing of datacenter infrastructure designs. “They’ve designed quite an elegant solution that can fully power and cool that number of GPUs and deliver maximum performance”.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • A referendum on GPL enforcement

      One of the key provisions of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is that derivative products must also be released under the GPL. A great many companies rigorously follow the terms of the license, while others avoid GPL-licensed software altogether because they are unwilling to follow those terms. Some companies, though, seem to feel that the terms of the GPL do not apply to them, presenting the copyright holder with two alternatives: find a way to get those companies to change their behavior, or allow the terms of the license to be flouted. In recent times, little effort has gone into the first option; depending on the results of an ongoing fundraising campaign, that effort may drop to nearly zero. We would appear to be at a decision point with regard to how (and whether) we would like to see GPL enforcement done within our community.

    • For the love of bits, stop using gzip!

      So, who *does* use xz? kernel.org. Also, the linux kernel itself optionally supports xz compression of initrd images. Vendors just need to pay attention and turn the flags on. Anyone else want to be part of the elite field of people who use xz? Please?

  • Openness/Sharing

    • ROS, the Robot Operating System, Is Growing Faster Than Ever, Celebrates 8 Years

      Eight years ago, Morgan Quigley, Eric Berger, and Andrew Ng published a paper that was not about ROS. It was about STAIR, the STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, which used a library called Switchyard to pass messages between software modules to perform complex manipulation tasks like stapler grasping. Switchyard was a purpose-built framework that was designed to be modular and robot-independent, and it was such a good idea that in 2009, “ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System” was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Japan. As of this month, the paper introducing ROS has been cited 2,020 times, an increase of more than 50 percent over last year.

    • The Cryptocurrency Open Source API Marketplace for Developers

      The API economy is the reality we live in and it’s an enormous one that, once the Internet of Things kicks into full gear, will feature an infinite number of API calls a day. But as we globalize, the world and the products—in this case APIs—we sell in it become more complicated and often more expensive as we factor in all the friction of exchange rates and credit card micropayments. It’s in everybody’s interest to smooth over that friction so developers can access our APIs or application programming interfaces more easily.

    • Open Hardware

      • OSWatch, an open source watch

        If you are a soldering ninja with a flair for working with tiny parts and modules, check out the Open Source Watch a.k.a. OSWatch built by [Jonathan Cook]. His goals when starting out the project were to make it Arduino compatible, have enough memory for future applications, last a full day on one charge, use BLE as Central or Peripheral and be small in size. With some ingenuity, 3d printing and hacker skills, he was able to accomplish all of that.

  • Programming

    • Git 2.6.3 A Lot Of New Features And Fixes
    • Django awarded MOSS Grant

      We’ve been awarded $150,000 to help fund the development of Channels, the initiative to rewrite the core of Django to support (among other things) WebSockets and background tasks, and to integrate key parts of the Django REST Framework request/response code into Django, such as content negotiation. Together, these projects will help considerably improve Django’s role of backing rich web experiences as well as native applications.

    • Go vs Node vs Rust vs Swift

      Some days ago ago Apple released Swift as open source language with instructions for Ubuntu Linux 15.10. So I decided to do a couple of simple benchmarks just to test some basic general purpose things like cpu, functions, read/write and not sequential access to arrays, concurrent parallel execution where possibile.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Auto-Generating Clickbait With Recurrent Neural Networks

    “F.D.R.’s War Plans!” reads a headline from a 1941 Chicago Daily Tribune. Had this article been written today, it might rather have said “21 War Plans F.D.R. Does Not Want You To Know About. Number 6 may shock you!”. Modern writers have become very good at squeezing out the maximum clickability out of every headline. But this sort of writing seems formulaic and unoriginal. What if we could automate the writing of these, thus freeing up clickbait writers to do useful work?

  • Twitter Aims to Show Advertising to Much Wider Audience

    Twitter has long argued that its reach and influence extends far beyond the 320 million people who log into its social media service at least once a month. Tweets are embedded on thousands of other websites and apps, emailed, displayed on television and published in newspapers.

  • Microsoft is in an apologetic mood right now — what next? ‘Sorry for Windows 10′?

    Sorry may be the hardest word, but it seems to be tripping off Microsoft’s tongue quite freely at the moment. Maybe it’s the holiday season making the company look at itself, but we’ve had two apologies in recent days — first, a semi-apology for stealing OneDrive storage from people, and now it’s sorry about the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Meat industry ignores FDA, health experts, buys more antibiotics

      Despite recent efforts by health experts, doctors, and the Food and Drug Administration to pull the meat industry away from its heavy use of antimicrobials, livestock producers seem to have dug in their heels.

      From 2009 to 2014, the amount of antimicrobials sold and distributed for use in livestock increased by 22 percent, according to an FDA report released Thursday. Of the antimicrobials sold in 2014, 62 percent were related to drugs used in human health, also called medically important. From 2009 to 2014, sale and distribution of medically important antimicrobials used on farms also jumped—an increase of 23 percent.

      That brings the 2014 total of antimicrobials sold for US livestock to 15,358,210 kilograms, including 9,475,989 kilograms of medically important drugs, according to the report.

  • Security

    • The Joy of Getting Hacked

      Two weeks ago, the server I host all my personal projects on was hacked by some guy in Ukraine.

    • Microsoft Edge has inherited many of Internet Explorer’s security holes

      We’re all anxiously awaiting the day that Windows 10′s new Edge browser becomes usable. That hasn’t happened yet, but it will some day next year. Microsoft Edge should represent a huge improvement in browser security, particularly when compared with the ancient, creaking, and leaky Internet Explorer. Recent events, though, have me wondering if Edge really represents that big of a step forward.

    • DEF CON 23 – Runa Sandvik, Michael Auger – Hacking a Linux-Powered Rifle

      TrackingPoint is an Austin startup known for making precision-guided firearms. These firearms ship with a tightly integrated system coupling a rifle, an ARM-powered scope running a modified version of Linux, and a linked trigger mechanism. The scope can follow targets, calculate ballistics and drastically increase its user’s first shot accuracy. The scope can also record video and audio, as well as stream video to other devices using its own wireless network and mobile applications.

    • Supporting secure DNS in glibc
    • TLS in the kernel

      An RFC patch from Dave Watson at Facebook proposes moving the bulk of Transport Layer Security (TLS) processing into the kernel. There are a number of advantages he sees for doing so, but most of the commenters on the patch set seem a bit skeptical about the idea. TLS is, of course, the encryption layer that protects HTTPS and other internet protocols.

    • Let’s Encrypt Stats
    • December ’15 security fixes for Adobe Flash

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • How Indonesian fires are affecting global climate

      Raging fires in Indonesia’s forests and peat lands since July this year are precipitating a climate and public-health catastrophe with repercussions across local, regional and global levels, experts told IndiaSpend.

      Acrid smoke and haze have enveloped Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, and have reached Thailand, choking people, reducing visibility and spiking respiratory illnesses, according to Susan Minnemeyer, Mapping and Data Manager for Washington-based World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Global Forest Watch Fires initiative.

    • Peat fires travel underground – the Indonesian disaster

      When I landed in Palangkaraya, the capital of the Indonesian province of central Borneo, in early September the smoke was already fairly thick. I was surprised they hadn’t cancelled the flight on seeing the ground suddenly come into view what seemed like a few seconds before landing.

      The smoky smell and thick warm air was something I recognised from 2011, the last El Niño year to hit the region (causing an extended dry season). There was definitely something of a “here we go again” sentiment from the locals I knew there too. My friend Yuyus texted: “selamat datang di kota asap” when I told him I’d arrived – welcome to smoke town. Within the next two days, all flights to and from the town had been grounded.

    • Fires Caused These Massive Plumes of Carbon Monoxide to Appear Over Indonesia

      Tens of thousands of wildfires ravaged Indonesia in September and October. A sizable portion of these blazes was smoldering subterranean peat fires, which sent toxic gas and particulate matter into the atmosphere. This new map shows the extensive spread of one particularly nasty gas: carbon monoxide.

      Wildfires in Indonesia are particularly troublesome. Unlike “conventional” forest fires, these fires smolder under the surface, making it extremely difficult to extinguish; it usually takes a good downpour during the rainy season to put them out. Making matters worse, these peat-fueled fires release far more smoke and air pollution than most other types of wildfires.

    • California in overdraft

      Two decades ago, the rolling hills of Paso Robles were mostly covered with golden grass and oak trees. Now the hills and valleys are blanketed with more than 32,000 acres of grapevines.

      Surging demand for wine has brought an explosion of vineyards, and along with it heavy pumping of groundwater. With the water table dropping, many people have had to cope as their taps have sputtered and their wells have gone dry.

    • Meteorologist Dr. Marshall Shepherd Explains How Historic Climate Agreement Will Have Positive Cascading Effects For Decades

  • Finance

    • Bill with passport and third-party tax collection provisions passes Congress

      The act creates a new Sec. 7345 that requires the secretary of State to deny, revoke, or limit the passport of any person who the IRS certifies has a seriously delinquent tax debt. “Seriously delinquent tax debt” is defined as an outstanding tax debt in excess of $50,000 (adjusted for inflation) for which a notice of lien or a levy has been filed, unless the individual is making timely payments under an agreement with the IRS or collection is suspended because a Collection Due Process hearing or innocent spouse relief has been requested or is pending. This provision is effective upon enactment.

    • Desperately seeking Satoshi Nakamoto

      In 2008, someone calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto posted a paper describing the workings of what would become the world’s most important digital cryptocurrency, bitcoin. Two months later, he posted the code for the first version of the software that would allow people to create and exchange the currency.

      The paper was revolutionary because it brought together ideas that people had been working on in the area of digital currencies. It solved the problem of exchanging money in a safe and secure way, without having to trust third parties or even the other person in the deal.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • What I told the kid who wanted to join the NSA
    • ‘I want to join the NSA. What do you think of that?’

      In September, I spent a day at the United States military academy at West Point, an elite, 213-year-old academic institution. I’d been invited to lecture by the Army Cyber Institute, a new academic department that focuses on cybersecurity and policies related to the military implications of attacking and defending electronic infrastructure.

      It’s not my usual speaking gig. I grew up as an organiser in the anti-nuclear-weapons movement; my experience of the military mostly revolves around protesting outside bases, not being invited inside them. West Point was the first military audience I’d ever addressed, yet I’d heard that they have used my young-adult novel Little Brother, which concerns net-savvy kids in San Francisco who form an underground movement to resist Homeland Security incursions on civil liberties following a terrorist attack.

      West Point is an American oddity: a leafy, ancient (by US standards) campus on a lazy river with academic standards to match any Big Ten or Ivy League university, but with a student body that is far more likely to come from racial minorities and poor people than any of America’s notoriously high-ticket educational institutions. I’ve done teaching stints at American universities where annual tuition ran to $50,000, and the contrasts between the student body at those schools and West Point could be the subject of a dissertation on American history, sociology, race relations or economics.

    • AP FACT CHECK: GOP hopefuls overstating on NSA phone records

      In the wake of the California shootings, Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham are complaining that U.S. intelligence agencies have lost their authority to collect phone records on Americans under a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program. They want the government to bring that program back.

    • Rubio Doubles Down on Repealing NSA Restrictions

      Florida Sen. Marco Rubio amped his criticism Friday of the Obama administration’s support for restrictions to a major National Security Agency surveillance program, and joined with fellow Republicans to call for increasing the agency’s powers in the wake of recent deadly shootings in Paris and California inspired by the Islamic State.

    • Cruz Defends Dictators, NSA Limits in Security Speech

      Taking on critics in his own party, Republican presidential contender Ted Cruz on Thursday defended Middle East dictators as useful allies against Islamic extremists during a Washington address decrying political correctness and stricter gun laws as an impediment to national security.

    • Ted Cruz rejects demands to revive NSA surveillance after San Bernardino

      Ted Cruz has launched a stinging attack on fellow Republicans who have demanded the return of mass telephone surveillance in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

    • Libertarian hero: ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, government funds, the NSA and the DHS

      It’s more than a little odd seeing the world hail their libertarian hero, mourn that he was “arrested for inventing Bitcoin”* (as is being claimed on Twitter), and find that he ate government money like a horse.

    • ‘Probable’ Bitcoin Creator Is A Garrulous Government Security Contractor And Is In Legal Trouble

      As the old adage has it, never meet your heroes. If Craig Steven Wright, an Australian serial entrepreneur, really is the creator of Bitcoin, then lovers of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency are going to be a little disappointed: Satoshi Nakamoto is not the man you thought he was.

      Reporters from Wired and Gizmodo have unmasked someone who has been a long-time purveyor of business cliches, someone who claims to be one of the most certified security professionals on the planet, and, rather than working against government, appears to have done plenty of work for the establishment. He even claimed to have relationships with employees at the NSA. As both publications admit, however, it could all be one elaborate ruse.

    • This Is What The NSA Told Their Employees About Digital Currencies, In 1995

      If news goes unnoticed for years, is it still new news, especially if the present brings new perspectives to light? While researching another article I came across an internal NSA document that was written in 1995 and declassified in 2008, not long before the invention of Bitcoin. The document, which is publicly available on the NSA website, is a weekly internal newsletter for NSA employees called Communicator and in it, they discuss the early iterations of digital currencies that were make headway at the time, specifically David Chaum’s Digicash.

    • James Clapper has found another reason why he lied about NSA spying

      Director of National Intelligence James Clapper now has a fifth reason for why he lied to the US Congress over the NSA’s spying program: he just plain forgot it existed.

      Speaking during a panel discussion last week, Clapper’s general counsel Robert Litt said that Clapper had not had time to prepare an answer to the question posed to him by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) about storing data on Americans.

    • Terrorist attacks don’t warrant return to mass NSA spying, McCaul says

      The terrorist attacks in California and Paris should not spur Congress to reinstate the mass surveillance of Americans’ phone records, House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul said Wednesday.

      But McCaul, R-Texas, said phone companies may need to keep customer data longer to help federal agents investigate terrorists such as the couple that carried out the mass shooting last week in San Bernardino. Federal agents have complained that a new law reining in the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone data limited how many years of phone records they could analyze in the San Bernardino case.

    • Researchers Found Windows’ Malware Similar To The One Used by NSA

      NSA’s one of the known snooping tactics is installing a malware into hard drive’s firmware which makes the deletion of the malware nearly impossible even the malware can avoid formatting of the hard drive.

      Nemesis is a malware that can be used for similar purposes as it can avoid clean-up software and can even avoid reinstalling of windows altogether by hiding behind boot records, according to FireEye.

    • Inside the NSA’s hunt for hackers

      When America’s premier federal security recruiters go fishing for new technical talent, they have plenty of lures to dangle. There’s the patriotic mission; the promise of a government salary; the thrill of working under the hood on the country’s classified cyber mechanics.

      And then there’s the pile of free purple and orange pens.

      At a recent job fair in this city’s cavernous convention center, the National Security Agency set up an eight-foot-long folding table and covered it with a black cloth and assorted pieces of schwag, trying to rope in coders and tech experts. “Push the limits of innovation,” read one of its posters. Brochures touted a mission producing results “that you might see on the nightly news,” like disrupting a terrorist attack, catching international drug traffickers or preventing a crippling cyberattack.

    • Original NSA Whistleblower Russ Tice: NSA Targeted Barack Obama

      Tice stated that the NSA is lying that they are only collecting the meta-data of USA citizens, and that the entire contents of every single form of communication in the United States is illegally and unconstitutionally spied upon and recorded by the NSA.

      Tice made the shocking allegations that the NSA is specifically targeting Congressmen, Supreme Court Justices, and that the NSA has targeted and wire-tapped President Obama while he was campaigning prior to being elected!

    • Join Us as We Dive with Trevor Paglen 70 Feet Underwater and See NSA-Tapped Cables

      I’m flopping in my fins toward my first scuba dive in the ocean, accompanying artist Trevor Paglen on a mission to the ocean floor. We’re heading 70 feet down off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The captain asks me how I’m feeling.

      “Scared,” I say with a shrug, as if to say, How else would I feel?

      “Remember,” he tells me, “Jacques Cousteau did not die from diving. He died an old man.”

      When I hit the water, though, the anxiety is gone, and I am going slowly into the deep, hand over hand along a yellow rope.

    • How the NYPD is using social media to put Harlem teens behind bars

      Asheem and Jelani, were born exactly one year apart to the day, in the warm Junes of 1991 and ‘92. “I always felt there was something special about that,” says their mother Alethia. “A little bit of magic.” The two grew up together in their mother’s small apartment on the corner of 129th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in New York’s Harlem neighborhood.

      As young children, the brothers were good friends with kids from all over Harlem. But as they matured into adolescent young men, a set of once-invisible rivalries began to surface. The True Money Gang from the Johnson Houses was at war with the Air It Out crew from the Taft Houses. Crews from Grant and Manhattanville projects exchanged gunfire in the streets. As he grew up, Jelani looked forward to leaving the neighborhood for school, “So I didn’t have to look behind my back every two seconds to see if someone about to bash me in the head,” he says.

    • Facebook offices in Hamburg vandalised

      Vandals have damaged the entrance to a building in Hamburg that houses the offices of social network Facebook, smashing glass, throwing paint and spraying “Facebook dislike” on a wall, according to police in the northern German city.

      Police said in a statement on Sunday that the overnight attack was carried out by a group of 15-20 people wearing black clothes and hoods. An investigation has been launched. Facebook was not immediately available to comment.

    • Privacy hawks turn to White House in encryption fight

      Privacy advocates are leaning on the White House to counter lawmakers’ renewed efforts to pass encryption-piercing legislation in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.

      Despite a lack of direct evidence the technology played a role in either incident, lawmakers continue to use both deadly plots to promote a bill that would force companies to decrypt data upon request.

      The tactic has left technologists and privacy advocates frustrated, even outraged.

      In a meeting with privacy and civil liberties groups on Thursday, the Obama administration said it was preparing to issue an updated stance on encryption policy in the coming weeks, giving the pro-encryption community hope it might have a new ally in its fight.

    • FBI director renews push for back doors, urging vendors to change business models

      The FBI still wants backdoors into encrypted communications, it just doesn’t want to call them backdoors and it doesn’t want to dictate what they should look like.

      FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he’d been in talks with unspecified tech leaders about his need to crack encrypted communications in order to track down terrorists and that these leaders understood the need.

    • Congresswoman Asks Feds Why They Pressured a Library to Disable Its Tor Node

      A Congresswoman from California is questioning Department of Homeland Security officials who put pressure on a local public library to take down the relay node it had set up for the anonymity network Tor.

      You may recall back in September, when the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire briefly disabled its Tor relay after meeting with local police, who had received a tip from agents with Homeland Security’s investigations branch warning that the network can be used by criminals. Relay nodes act as the middle points of the Tor network, whose layers of encryption allow activists, journalists, human rights workers, and average citizens (and, yes, criminals) to access the Internet anonymously. The more nodes, the faster the network becomes.

      The fearmongering backfired spectacularly: the Lebanon library unanimously voted to restore its Tor relay and announced plans to convert it into a Tor exit node, one of the essential gateways which provides the last “hop” allowing Tor users to anonymously connect to Internet sites and services. More than a dozen other libraries around the U.S. also piled on, declaring their intention to run Tor nodes of their own in defiance.

      Now Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren is asking just what the hell compelled the DHS to intervene.

    • The Secrets of an Abandoned Microwave Tower in Kansas

      A mysterious AT&T relic reveals connections between telecommunications infrastructure and the Cold War.

    • Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley investors to open AI research center

      In an interview following the launch of OpenAI, Musk explained how his new nonprofit was designed to help.

    • Cyber bill’s final language likely to anger privacy advocates

      Digital rights advocates are in an uproar as the final text of a major cybersecurity bill appears to lack some of the privacy community’s favored clauses.

      In the last few weeks, House and Senate negotiators have been working unofficially to reach a compromise between multiple versions of a cyber bill that would encourage businesses to share more data on hacking threats with the government.

    • Obama calls on tech giants to fight ISIS

      President could be referring to encryption debate

    • Government can’t find big needle in small haystack

      Since Edward Snowden revealed the federal government’s unlawful and unconstitutional use of federal statutes to justify spying on all in America all the time, including the members of Congress who unwittingly wrote and passed the statutes, I have been arguing that the Fourth Amendment prohibits all domestic spying, except that which has been authorized by a search warrant issued by a judge. The same amendment also requires that warrants be issued only based on a serious level of individualized suspicion backed up by evidence — called probable cause — and the warrants must specifically identify the place and person to be spied upon.

    • AP’s Ted Bridis Fact Checks His Own Bogus Claims, Now Being Repeated By Others, Admitting They’re False

      Earlier this week, we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous Associated Press story by reporter Ted Bridis, claiming that law enforcement investigating the San Bernardino shootings are being somehow held back because of the close of the NSA’s Section 215 phone records program. There were all sorts of problems with that story, so it’s great to see the Associated Press ask one of its enterprising young reporters — a guy who goes by the name Ted Bridis — to do a “fact check” piece on Republican Presidential candidates who are now repeating the very claims that Bridis himself made earlier in the week.

    • What the NSA Should Have Been
    • Edward Snowden to speak at CU via video chat

      Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist will moderate the February 16 event from the Macky Auditorium. Attendees will be able to ask Snowden questions, but details about that process have not been released.

    • Jesse Ventura: NSA Violates the Constitution

      The FBI has used a secretive authority to compel Internet and telecommunications firms to hand over customer data including an individual’s complete web browsing history and records of all online purchases, a court filing shows.

      The NSA is violating the Fourth Amendment: Reasonable search and seizure. They’re providing none. They have no reasonable warrant to do this.

    • The Online Habits That Trigger NSA Spying

      TOR is an encryption network developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in the 1990s. The military’s hope was to enable government workers to search the web without exposing their locations and identities. The system today is widely available, runs on open-source code, and is popular among privacy advocates as a more secure alternative to open Internet surfing, particularly in countries with repressive regimes. It works by encrypting the user’s address and routing the traffic through servers that are located around the world (so-called “onion routing.”) How does the NSA access it? Through a computer system called XKeyscore, one of the various agency surveillance tools that NSA leaker Edward Snowden disclosed last summer.

    • * Obama Speech Translated * AP’s NSA “Propaganda”

      Wheeler writes widely about the legal aspects of the “war on terror” and its effects on civil liberties. She blogs at emptywheel.net. She just wrote the piece “6 Responses to Why the AP’s Call Record Article Is So Stupid,” about the NSA’s monitoring of San Bernardino shooting suspect Tashfeen Malik which states: “The AP engaged in willful propaganda yesterday, in what appears to be a planned cutout role for the Marco Rubio campaign. Rubio’s campaign immediately pointed to the article to make claims they know — or should, given that Rubio is on the Senate Intelligence Committee — to be false, relying on the AP article. That’s the A1 cutout method Dick Cheney used to make false claims about aluminum tubes to catastrophic effect back in 2002.

    • Edward Snowden Would Rather Play Fallout 4 Than Correct AP Journalists

      The takeaway from the AP story is that investigators lost out on the NSA’s phone record dragnet when one of the NSA’s bulk collection programs expired, which would have allowed them to access five years of phone records on shooters Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. Now, the AP story implies, they’re stuck obtaining records directly from phone companies under the USA Freedom Act.

    • Paul: ‘If Rubio Were Doing His Job’ He’d Know NSA Program Was Active Last 6 Months

      Host Chuck Todd said, “Senator, respond to something Marco Rubio said. He said the following a week ago, ‘We were still able to see the phone records of a potential terrorist cause, we held them, now you have to hope the phone company still has them, you have to argue with their chief counsel by the time you get access to it and find out who they’ve been talking to before it’s too late.’ You were on the forefront of trying to change this law. Any second thoughts?”

    • Senator Rand Paul: NSA program failed to prevent terror

      Kentucky Senator Rand Paul says the US National Security Agency’s program of collecting US citizens’ phone metadata has failed to thwart terrorist attacks or help detain criminals as had been claimed by the United States authorities.

    • Paul: ‘Authoritarians’ like Christie want to reinstate data collection
    • Paul: Christie is an ‘authoritarian’
    • Paul slams ‘authoritarian’ Christie over bulk data collection
    • Christie to Congress: Attach Restoration of NSA Program to Spending Bill
    • Rand Paul on NSA Data Collection: Is There Any Limit To What “Authoritarians” Like Chris Christie Will Give Up?
    • Rand Paul: NSA phone-snooping program didn’t prevent any attacks
    • Paul’s Libertarian Support Siphoned Off by Cruz
    • 3 GOP presidential-candidate stooges
    • Christie hits Obama, Congress over NSA surveillance
    • NSA bulk collection of phone records ended, or did it?

      Nov. 29 was the deadline for the end of NSA bulk collection of telephone records as established by the USA Freedom Act six months ago. This ended the Patriot Act, revealed by Edward Snowden, to have been the authority used to collect the bulk phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans, a certain big government invasion of privacy, which incensed civil libertarians. Libertarians and Constitutionalists, on Fourth Amendment concerns, led by Sen. Rand Paul brought the demise of the hated Patriot Act. This ends government surveillance of its citizens. Or does it?

      The USA Freedom Act called for a six-month transition period allowing NSA to continue bulk collection as before, but at its end NSA must only access targeted data from telephone providers with judicial approval. Unfortunately for Constitutionalists it, like its predecessor the Patriot Act, nullifies the 4th Amendment requirement of “probable cause” and thus is as unconstitutional as the law it replaced.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Pirate Bay Founder: ‘I Have Given Up’

        “The internet is shit today. It’s broken. It was probably always broken, but it’s worse than ever.”

      • UK to Lengthen Copyright on Works of Artistic Craftsmanship

        The United Kingdom is holding a consultation as to when a provision of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 should take effect. Copyright in works of artistic craftsmanship—utilitarian objects (even if mass-produced) which are deemed artistic—shall be extended. Currently, the copyright lasts for 25 years after an item is first offered for sale; the new term will be for the life of the creator, then another 70 years. This means that some works which are now in the public domain will become copyrighted. Publishers of derivative works of such items, for example a book or film in which a work of artistic craftsmanship was photographed, will be obliged to obtain permissions, except for uses which fall under fair dealing.

      • Pirate Gets a Million YouTube Views, Everybody Benefits

        A pirate ordered to get 200,000 YouTube views or risk getting sued by companies including Microsoft has smashed his target. Against the odds Jakub F’s anti-piracy video now has more than a million views. Could it be that everyone involved – from corporations to pirates – have benefited from this exercise?

12.12.15

Links 12/12/2015: Mozilla Funds for FOSS, Rust 1.5

Posted in News Roundup at 10:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Time has come for an ‘honorable retreat’ from Tokyo 2020 over Fukushima

    Let me begin this message by offering you my sincerest condolences. Condolences for what? For the death of the belief that a trouble-free 2020 Tokyo Olympics would serve to showcase Japan’s economic revival.

    Up to this point, the exact opposite has been the case, due to the scrapping of plans for a very expensive new National Stadium, the scuttling of the Olympic logo amid charges of plagiarism and newspaper headlines alleging, for example, that “Japan’s Olympics fiascoes point to outmoded, opaque decision-making.” Even more recently, Japan sports minister Hakubun Shimomura offered to resign over the Olympic stadium row.

    Among these developments, the charge alleging “outmoded, opaque decision-making” is perhaps the most troubling of all, because it suggests that both of the major setbacks the 2020 Olympics has encountered are systemic in nature, not merely one-off phenomena. If correct, this indicates that similar setbacks are likely to occur in the future. But how many setbacks can the 2020 Olympics endure?Let me begin this message by offering you my sincerest condolences. Condolences for what? For the death of the belief that a trouble-free 2020 Tokyo Olympics would serve to showcase Japan’s economic revival.

    Up to this point, the exact opposite has been the case, due to the scrapping of plans for a very expensive new National Stadium, the scuttling of the Olympic logo amid charges of plagiarism and newspaper headlines alleging, for example, that “Japan’s Olympics fiascoes point to outmoded, opaque decision-making.” Even more recently, Japan sports minister Hakubun Shimomura offered to resign over the Olympic stadium row.

    Among these developments, the charge alleging “outmoded, opaque decision-making” is perhaps the most troubling of all, because it suggests that both of the major setbacks the 2020 Olympics has encountered are systemic in nature, not merely one-off phenomena. If correct, this indicates that similar setbacks are likely to occur in the future. But how many setbacks can the 2020 Olympics endure?

  • Typo in case-sensitive variable name cooked Google’s cloud

    Google has admitted that incorrectly typing the name of a case-sensitive variable cooked its cloud.

    Users of the Alphabet subsidiary’s Google Container Engine customers “could not create external load balancers for their services for a duration of 21 hours and 38 min” on December 8th and 9th.

  • On the unreasonable reality of “junior” developer interviews

    Let’s not torture our junior developers by forcing them to do the programming equivalent of making high school students studying the Catcher in the Rye and the Scarlet Letter. Let’s talk to them like humans who are writing software. Let’s find out whether or not they’re open to learning, good at communicating, and people we’d like to work with every day.

  • Cyberbullying: Chubb offers UK ‘troll’ insurance against digital threats

    Cyberbullying has been a long-standing problem in the online community. Wrapped under the guise of anonymity, some individuals will launch hate campaigns against others rather than confront them in the physical realm, whether it be Facebook messaging and posts, tweets or campaigns designed to smear their reputation.

  • Hardware

    • Virtually there: the hard reality of the Gear VR

      But when the holidays are over, what will happen to the Gear VR? Is the headset a novelty or, as many of its developers and fans suggest, the start of a new medium? Once you’ve given everyone you know five minutes of virtual reality, is there much left to do? I’m not sure there is yet — and I’m not sure when that will change.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • GMO Toxins Endanger Human Health

      GMOs’ toxins put your health at risk, according to plant biologist Jonathan Latham. As Latham reports, many genetically modified plants are engineered to contain their own insecticides. These GMOs, which include maize, cotton and soybeans, are called Bt plants. Bt plants get their name because they incorporate a transgene that makes a protein-based toxin (usually called the Cry toxin) from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. (The term “cry toxin” comes from the crystal proteins that form the toxin.) Many Bt crops are “stacked,” meaning they contain a multiplicity of these Cry toxins. Bacillus thuringiensis is all but indistinguishable from the well known anthrax bacterium

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Petraeus Recommends Using Al Qaeda Fighters to Defeat ISIS

      The United States’ relationship with Al Qaeda could be closer than corporate media might lead you to believe. In August 2015 retired CIA chief David Petraeus openly called for recruiting so-called moderate members of Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra to fight ISIS in Syria. Despite corporate media reiterating the message that Al Qaeda is an enemy terrorist group, the CIA and US military leadership continue to discuss using Al Qaeda as a tool for their own military objectives. As Shane Harris and Nancy A. Youssef report, Petraeus called for recruiting members of the Nusra Front, which opposes the Syrian government, to help the US combat ISIS.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Indonesia’s forest fires: everything you need to know

      As satellite data of the fire hotspots shows, forest fires have affected the length and breadth of Indonesia. Among the worst hit areas are southern Kalimantan (Borneo) and western Sumatra. The fires have been raging since July, with efforts to extinguish them hampered by seasonal dry conditions exacerbated by the El Nino effect. As well as Indonesia, the acrid haze from the fires is engulfing neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore and has reached as far as southern Thailand.

    • VIDEO: Here’s Why Fox News Is Wrong To Dismiss The Link Between Climate Change And Terrorism

      Fox News pundits have spent much of the past year mocking and dismissing comments by President Obama, Democratic presidential candidates and others who have described the connection that climate change has to terrorism and the rise of the jihadist group ISIS. But as world leaders strive for an ambitious agreement at the conclusion of the United Nations climate change conference in Paris — the site of horrific terrorist attacks by ISIS in November — it’s more important than ever that Americans and people around the world recognize the relationship between global warming and global security.

    • Fires in Indonesia: Perspective from the Ground

      I live in the Ketapang district of West Kalimantan. We had some serious fires here, but it wasn’t as bad as in Central Kalimantan, which was basically the epicenter of the disaster. Breathing the smoke wasn’t pleasant, and I didn’t dare open a window or a door in my house because it would just permeate everything.

      The smoke also seriously disrupted some of my travel plans. There were no flights into or out of my town for at least a month, so we had to rely on boats or long-distance travel by car.

      The smoke also disrupted my work. I do lot in the community and in schools, but September and October were quiet months for us because the schools were not in session. It was too dangerous for students. Adults were not available to participate in our conservation activities and meetings because they either had to stay in the field and guard their crops from fire, or didn’t want to be outside more then necessary.

    • 6 locations where groundwater is vanishing

      Groundwater is disappearing beneath cornfields in Kansas, rice paddies in India, asparagus farms in Peru and orange groves in Morocco. These are stories about people on four continents confronting questions of how to safeguard their aquifers for the future – and in some cases, how to cope as the water runs out.

  • Finance

    • Exposing One of the Largest Accounting Scandals in American History

      New Networks Institute just released two reports in a new series, “Fixing Telecommunications”. It is based on mostly public, but unexamined information that exposes one of the largest financial accounting scandals in American history. It impacts all wireline and wireless phone, broadband, Internet and even cable TV/video services, and it continues today with impunity.

      Verizon, AT&T, CenturyLink, and other large telephone companies have been able to manipulate their financial accounting to make the local phone networks and services look unprofitable and have used this ‘fact’ in many public policy and regulatory decisions that benefited the incumbent telecommunications utilities.

      But the core of this scandal, which we dubbed the “FCC’s Big Freeze”, is so bizarre that no one would believe it if it was detailed in some thriller about financial chicanery. I’ll get to this in a moment.

    • Satoshi’s PGP Keys Are Probably Backdated and Point to a Hoax

      On Tuesday, both Wired and Gizmodo dropped a big bombshell: According to “leaked” (Wired) or “hacked” (Gizmodo) documents, the real Satoshi Nakamoto is…. Craig Steven Wright.

      Uh, who? one might ask. It’s a good question. Until now, Wright hasn’t pinged very many people’s radars as a potential Satoshi Nakamoto. On the other hand, Wright is indeed considered an expert on Bitcoin—in fact, he appeared on a panel with other possible-Satoshi Nick Szabo this year at the Bitcoin Investor Conference.

      Both Wired and Gizmodo outline Wright’s qualifications and accomplishments in detail, aside from pointing to emails and other documents that seem to nail Wright as once-and-future Bitcoin king Satoshi Nakamoto.

    • CETA’s Festering Wound: Corporate Sovereignty

      Remember CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU? Even though the text was “celebrated” back in October 2014, it is still not ready to be presented for possible ratification. As Techdirt has been covering, it’s pretty clear that the problem area is the corporate sovereignty chapter, because of concerns about the huge power it grants to Canadian (and US) corporations. First there were hints that Angela Merkel wanted the so-called “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) mechanism changed. Then France said the same — twice. Most recently, the EU commissioner responsible for trade and trade agreements, Cecilia Malmström, indicated that it wouldn’t be possible re-open the corporate sovereignty chapter, or to move away from “classic” ISDS to the re-branded version known as the Investment Court System (ICS), which the European Commission is pushing in an attempt to head off growing opposition to the whole idea.

    • ‘A Woman’s Ability to Pay Her Bills Should Not Be Dependent on the Whims of Customers’

      Janine Jackson: “The truth of the matter is this is a big deal,” says Simon King, the general manager of The Modern, a high-end restaurant attached to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. He is referring to the decision by Danny Meyer, owner of The Modern and many other restaurants, to phase out what the New York Times called “the time-honored American practice” of tipping.

    • On-demand workers unite online to fight Uber and the gig economy

      IT WAS a strike, but not as we know it. At midnight on 1 December, about 100 workers in New York City logged out of the Uber app on their phones in protest over a pay cut at UberRUSH, a delivery service run by the ride-sharing giant. One post on the Facebook page they created to rally the strike and list their demands read: “All we are asking is that Uber treats us fairly.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • BBC Bias

      I am involved quite extensively in the making of what I believe to be a valuable independent documentary. It is based on George Ponsonby’s excellent book London Calling, and has the working title How the BBC Stole the Referendum. We have already done a few hours filming of my contribution.

    • Jon Stewart And Stephen Colbert Mock Media For Its Trump Coverage On The Late Show

      On the December 10 edition of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert reunited to lament the media’s extensive coverage of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Colbert told Stewart that “the media won’t pay attention to anything … unless you are Donald Trump” and that if he wanted the media to pay attention to serious issues, he would have to “Trump it up.” Stewart appeared on the show to urge Congress to pass the Zadroga Act, which provides health care funding and compensation for the first responders to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Recently the media has been called out for its “wall-to-wall” Trump coverage, especially of his unconstitutional plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

    • After San Bernardino, Some Reporters ‘Poke Around’–While Others Follow the Money

      Some would say Columbia Journalism Review put it mildly, referring to the events of December 4 as an “unbecoming media frenzy in San Bernardino.” That was the sight of dozens of TV crew members from MSNBC and CNN trampling through the home of alleged killers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, rifling through whatever they came across, holding it up for the camera and guessing about its meaning.

      Sample commentary from MSNBC‘s Kerry Sanders: “Come over here, you can see the baby’s toys. We have really quite a number of toys.” Sanders proceeded to show millions of viewers various photographs, we don’t know of whom, and for good measure, the driver’s license of Farook’s mother, including identifying information like her address.

  • Censorship

    • Citizens triumph in Nigerian digital rights battle

      This week the will of Nigerian citizens triumphed over a threat to the free and open Web. The recently proposed “Bill for an Act to Prohibit Frivolous Petitions and Other Matters Connected there-with”, popularly known as the “Social Media Bill”, sought to restrict free expression by making it illegal to start any type of petition without swearing an affidavit that the content is true in a court of law.

    • YouTube blocks Japanese contributors’ content for refusing to use its paid version

      Not everyone was sold. ESPN has pulled all of its content from YouTube due to what a YouTube spokesperson called “rights and legal issues.” At least EPSN got to choose. YouTube has said that companies that do not sign off on YouTube RED will find their videos unavailable to viewers. And it’s keeping that promise, blocking a huge swath of Japanese artists from U.S. fans.

    • Lucasfilm Uses DMCA to Kill Star Wars Toy Picture

      Star Wars: The Force Awakens has gone into an early and bizarre anti-piracy overdrive. Earlier this week a fansite posted an image of a ‘Rey’ action figure legally bought in Walmart but it was taken down by Facebook and Twitter following a DMCA notice. Meanwhile, webhosts are facing threats of legal action.

    • Couple takes pics of Star Wars figure they bought, gets DMCA notice from Lucasfilm

      or the last decade, Marjorie Carvalho and her husband have produced Star Wars Action News, a podcast dedicated to Star Wars collectibles of all sorts. Predictably, they’ve had a lot to talk about, as waves of action figures and other collectibles have been launched in the run-up to the much-anticipated release of Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens next week.

      On Tuesday, a Star Wars Action News staffer saw something he shouldn’t have—and bought it. A 3 3/4″ action figure of “Rey,” a female character from The Force Awakens, was on display in a Walmart in Iowa, apparently earlier than it should have been. The staff member bought it for $6.94 plus tax, no questions asked. The following day, he posted pictures of the Rey figure on Star Wars Action News’ Facebook page.

    • Disney drops—then doubles down on—DMCA claim over Star Wars figure pic

      A Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent by the Walt Disney Company earlier this week seems to have truly awakened The Force, and now the company can’t seem to decide if it wants to be on the light side or the dark side.

      Marjorie and Arnie Carvalho run Star Wars Action News, a podcast about Star Wars collectibles. Earlier this week, SW Action News staffer Justin Kozisek purchased an action figure of “Rey” in an Iowa Walmart. The figure, which hasn’t been seen elsewhere, was presumably put on the shelves by accident ahead of its official release date. An image of the figure was posted on the SW Action News Facebook page—and promptly subjected to a wave of DMCA takedown demands by Lucasfilm. Many of those who had spread the image on social media were also subject to copyright claims.

    • Search Engines Need Regulating to Reduce Piracy, Russia Says

      Russian telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor says it will create a working group to look into the regulation of search engine results. The move is part of a package of initiatives designed to make pirated content harder to find. Also on the table are discussions on how to make anti-piracy techniques less prone to circumvention.

    • Resistance to Wyoming’s Unconstitutional Data Trespass Law

      In March 2015, Wyoming legislators passed a law that makes it illegal to report environmental hazards to the general public or to state officials. Senate Bill 12, “Trespassing to Collect Data,” makes it illegal to “collect resource data” from any “open land,” meaning any land outside of a city or town, whether the land is federal, state, or privately owned. As Justin Pidot and Deirdre Fulton reported, the controversial law protects the interests of private land owners by making it illegal for people to take photographs, sample soils, test water, or to take any kind of environmental data from any private, public or federal land outside of city limits.

  • Privacy

    • The Investigatory Powers Bill: PR myth list

      In the weeks since the Investigatory Powers Bill was officially released, we’ve seen a lot of Government PR. They are trying their best to assure us that we have nothing to be worried about, but we’re not convinced.

    • WaPo’s Excellent Explainer On Encryption Debunks WaPo’s Stupid Editorial In Favor Of Encryption Backdoors

      Washington Post reporter Andrea Peterson has put together a really excellent explainer piece on what you should know about encryption. Considering the source, it’s a good “general knowledge” explainer piece for people who really aren’t that aware of encryption or technically savvy. That’s important and useful, given how important this debate is and how many participants in it don’t seem to understand the first thing about encryption.

    • Driver Leaves Scene Of Accident, Gets Turned In By Her Car

      It’s no secret today’s vehicles collect tons of data. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be a secret. It certainly isn’t well-known, despite even some of the latest comers to the tech scene — legislators — having questioned automakers about their handling of driver data.

      More than one insurance company will offer you a discount if you allow them to track your driving habits. Employers have been known to utilize “black boxes” in company vehicles. These days, the tech is rarely even optional, although these “event data recorders” generally only report back to the manufacturers themselves. Consumer-oriented products like OnStar combine vehicle data with GPS location to contact law enforcement/medical personnel if something unexpected happens. Drivers can trigger this voluntarily to seek assistance when stranded on the road because of engine trouble, flat tires, etc.

    • FBI admits it uses stingrays, zero-day exploits

      The FBI’s secrecy surrounding stingrays has been well documented. And the controversy over the use of zero-days by governments has also generated its share of headlines. Both issues are controversial, in part because they have the potential to harm vast numbers of people who aren’t suspected of committing any crime. That’s because stingrays generally intercept all cell phone communications in a given area, not just those of a drug or kidnapping suspect. Paying large sums of money to buy zero-days, meanwhile, creates powerful incentives for governments to keep the underlying vulnerabilities secret. FBI officials have long attempted to distance themselves from such topics. Today, they inched slightly closer.

    • On the CCA (in)security of MTProto

      Telegram is a popular messaging app which supports end-to-end encrypted communication. In Spring 2015 we performed an audit of Telegram’s source code. This short paper summarizes our findings.

      Our main discovery is that the symmetric encryption scheme used in Telegram — known as MTProto — is not IND-CCA secure, since it is possible to turn any ciphertext into a different ciphertext that decrypts to the same message.

      We stress that this is a theoretical attack on the definition of security and we do not see any way of turning the attack into a full plaintext-recovery attack. At the same time, we see no reason why one should use a less secure encryption scheme when more secure (and at least as efficient) solutions exist.

      The take-home message (once again) is that well-studied, provably secure encryption schemes that achieve strong definitions of security (e.g., authenticated-encryption) are to be preferred to home-brewed encryption schemes.

    • FBI Admits To Using Zero Day Exploits To Hack Into Computers

      It’s been widely suspected for ages that both the NSA and the FBI made use of so-called “zero-day” exploits to hack into computers. Leaks from a few years ago (which may or may not have come from Snowden) exposed just how massive the NSA’s exploit operation was, and there have been plenty of stories of security companies selling exploits to the NSA, who would use them, rather than reveal them and get them patched — thereby putting the public at risk. Last year, the President told the NSA to get better at revealing these zero day exploits to companies to patch, rather than hoarding them for their own use. Just about a month ago, the NSA proudly announced that it now discloses vulnerabilities 90% of the time — but conveniently left out how long it uses them before disclosing them.

    • Lofgren questions DHS policy towards TOR Relays

      Today, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) released a letter expressing her concern with news reports indicating an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent enlisted local law enforcement to pressure a New Hampshire public library into disabling its Tor relay.

      The letter, addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, notes that the Tor network is used by journalists, activists, dissidents, intelligence sources, and other privacy concerned individuals to keep their web browsing private, and the network receives significant funding through government grants.

    • Comey Calls on Tech Companies Offering End-to-End Encryption to Reconsider “Their Business Model”

      FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday called for tech companies currently offering end-to-end encryption to reconsider their business model, and instead adopt encryption techniques that allow them to intercept and turn over communications to law enforcement when necessary.

      End-to-end encryption, which is the state of the art in providing secure communications on the internet, has become increasingly common and desirable in the wake of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance by the government.

    • Obama to clarify his stance on encryption by the holidays

      The Obama administration plans to clarify its stance on strong encryption before Washington shuts down for the holidays.

      Administration officials met Thursday with the civil-society groups behind a petition urging the White House to back strong, end-to-end encryption over the objections of some law-enforcement and intelligence professionals.

    • Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users

      Documents reveal donor-funded US startup embedded in Republican’s campaign paid UK university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters

      Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals, the Guardian can reveal.

      A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz’s campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey.

    • Facebook for Work is almost upon us

      HUNGRY DATA HIPPO Facebook has promised to launch the work version of its time-wasting solution very soon.

      The firm reckons that the time blight will hit worker desktops in the next few months and will not be used for things like crushing candy or, presumably, assessing the global cat situation.

      Reuters is first with the news, hot from Julien Codorniou, director of global platform partnerships at Facebook, who explained that the system is very much like the consumer version, except it is designed to make users more productive. This means no crap apps or gimmicky gewgaws but a lot of the other crap that you might have come to expect.

    • Tor Hires a New Leader to Help It Combat the War on Privacy

      The Tor Project is entering a crucial phase in its nearly 10-year existence. In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, it has assumed a higher profile in the world of privacy and security than ever before. But it’s also come under increased attack by governments out to demonize it, and by law enforcement and intelligence agencies out to crack it and unmask its anonymous users.

    • FBI on Encryption: ‘It’s A Business Model Question’

      Now that encryption has been elevated to a default technology on mobile devices, the government has heightened its “Going Dark” rhetoric, again on Wednesday insisting during a Senate Judicial Committee hearing that Silicon Valley figure out how to deliver plain-text communication between criminal and terror suspects to law enforcement.

    • Government, Can You Hear Me Now? Cell-site Simulators Aren’t Secret Anymore

      Digital analyzer. IMSI catcher. Stingray. Triggerfish. Dirt box. Cell-site simulator. The list of aliases used by the devices that masquerade as a cell phone tower, trick your phone into connecting with them, and suck up your data, seems to grow every day. But no matter what name cell-site simulators go by, whether they are in the hands of the government or malicious thieves, there’s no question that they’re a serious threat to privacy.

  • Civil Rights

    • NYT Rewrites Scalia to Make Him Sound Less Racist

      This is not a person talking about a subset of blacks with a particular kind of educational background; taking his words at face value, this is a person asserting that African-Americans as a whole belong in “lesser schools” that are not “too fast for them.” (Or that “there are those who contend” that that is the case, if you want to give Scalia credit for that circumlocution.)

      The fact that a Supreme Court justice justifies eliminating affirmative action on the basis of openly racist views ought to be big news. By sugarcoating what Scalia actually said, the New York Times disguises that news–making the ethnic cleansing of America’s top schools a more palatable possibility. Perhaps that shouldn’t make me gasp.

    • Global Refugee Crisis Reaches 60 Million

      According to the United Nations’ High Commission on Refugees Global Trends Report: World at War, published in June 2015, sixty million people worldwide are now refugees due to conflict in their home nations. One in every 122 people is considered a refugee, internally displaced, or an asylum seeker. Those individuals come from almost every continent. Parts of Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa all have massive numbers of people who are trying to flee. Millions of people are on the move or hiding in the fringes of society to keep from being persecuted and harmed.

    • Glenn Beck Compares Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban To Hitler
    • Is Donald Trump a 2016 Manchurian candidate?

      The Republican presidential hopeful’s views are getting more and more extreme. Perhaps, as Salman Rushdie suggested, there’s more going on than meets the eye

    • Court Says Constitutional Violations By Law Enforcement Are Perfectly Fine As Long As They Happen Quickly

      As long as the stop isn’t extended for too long (a wholly arbitrary length decided on a case-by-case basis during suppression hearings/civil rights lawsuits), cops are pretty much free to stop and search any driver for any reason. And even if they’re completely wrong every step of the way, there’s a good chance the “good faith exception” will excuse their misdeeds. (For everything else, there’s qualified immunity.)

    • Bassel Khartabil: fears for man who brought open internet to the Arab world

      Syria never had a hackerspace until Bassel Khartabil – known online as Bassel Safadi – started Aiki Lab in Damascus in 2010. The Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer used it as a base from which to advance the free software and free culture movements in his country. Because of Khartabil’s work, people gained new tools to express themselves and communicate.

      Writing to the vice president of the European commission in 2013, MEPs Charles Tannock and Ana Gomes summed up Khartabil’s contributions as “opening up the internet in Syria – a country with a notorious record of online censorship” and “vastly extending online access and knowledge to the Syrian people”. Among his awards included the 2013 Index on Censorship Digital Freedom Award for using technology to promote an open and free internet.

    • Massive Sexting Case Shockingly Results In No Criminal Charges

      Given what we’ve seen in other (and much smaller) sexting cases — where sex offender laws have been twisted to cover consensual interactions between adolescents — the district attorney’s decision to put control of the situation back in parents’ hands is a surprise. It will no doubt be the exception that proves the rule.

      The instinctual reaction to bring law enforcement into the equation is understandable and, admittedly, there are aspects of sexting that may require this sort of scrutiny. The problem is that prosecutors often feel compelled to find something to charge sexting participants with, if only to justify the expenditure of law enforcement resources. This leads to preposterous (and potentially life-damaging) outcomes like teens being charged with exploiting themselves by taking photos of their own bodies and sharing them with others.

    • Twitter Told a Bunch of Users They May Be Targets of a ‘State Sponsored Attack’

      The attack is currently being investigated by Twitter. In their notice to users, Twitter said that the attack only impacted usernames, IP address, email addresses, and phone numbers if a phone number was associated with the account. Twitter did not say which state was implicated—it could have been China, Russia, or even the US.

      I spoke to a number of Twitter users who received the notice. A couple are engaged in activism and are connected to the Tor Project in some capacity. A few are located in Canada, and vaguely associated with the security community at large. However, I could not determine any common factors between all recipients. They all received the notice around the same time, between 5:15 and 5:16 PM EST.

    • Jamie Kalven on the Laquan McDonald Cover-Up

      This week on CounterSpin: There are calls for the resignation of Chicago Mayor (and former Obama chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel—stemming from the city’s 13-month cover-up of video that belied the official story of the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. That video, along with an autopsy that also showed police’s initial story to be false, eventually came to light through the work of journalists—but not mainstream journalists; it was independent reporters, including our guest, who stepped in to force the police department and the city to acknowledge not only what happened on the night of October 20, 2014—when officer Jason Van Dyke put 16 bullets into the body of a boy who posed him no harm—but what happened after, as institutional forces came together to keep the truth from the public.

    • Salvadoran Women Imprisoned for Miscarriages

      In El Salvador an unexpected pregnancy loss has been declared unconstitutional and criminal. The law that has been in place since 1998 prohibits abortions in the country regardless of the situation. The penal code does no take into account if the mother’s life or the baby’s life is in danger; it is all abortion. The purpose of this law is to give the embryonic human a right to life. If any expectant mother happens to break this law regardless of the situation, she can be sentenced to 2-8 years in prison, and the medical professionals assisting the women can serve 6-12 years in prison. In some more severe cases, a woman can be charged with aggravated homicide if it is believed that the fetus could have been able to reach life successfully.

    • Ingraham: “I’d Go Farther” Than Trump’s Plan To Ban Muslims From Entering The US And “Do A Pause On All Immigration”
    • New York Teens Often Isolated in Adult Prisons

      New York and North Carolina are the only two states in the US that prosecute sixteen and seventeen year old teenagers in the justice system as adults. This is a crucial issue because in other states these teens are sent to juvenile facilities where they are held in more appropriate environments, given their ages. Young teens in adult prisons are often forced into solitary confinement, which can be severely, psychologically and physically damaging.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • “The more bits you use, the more you pay”: Comcast CEO justifies data caps

      While Comcast doesn’t actually cut people off the Internet when they hit their 300GB-per-month data limits, customers do get charged an additional $10 for each 50GB used. Customers can also pay an extra $30 or $35 per month for unlimited data, depending on where they live. Comcast, the nation’s largest home Internet provider, has implemented the data caps in many cities but hasn’t rolled them out to its entire territory yet. “We’re just trialling ways to have a balanced relationship,” Roberts said. “You can watch hundreds of shows and movies and other things before you hit these levels, many devices, but I don’t think it’s illogical or something people should be paranoid about… it’s not that different than other industries.”

    • Comcast CEO Defends Caps: Claims Broadband’s Like Gasoline

      Comcast CEO Brian Roberts was forced to defend the company’s expansion of usage caps this week at an industry conference. As most of you know, Comcast has been imposing usage caps of 300 GB on the company’s customers. Users then have the option of either paying $10 per every 50 GB consumed, or paying $30 to $35 to enjoy the same unlimited service many of these users literally enjoyed only just yesterday.

  • DRM

    • Ecuador Likely To Legalize DRM Circumvention In The Exercise Of Fair Use Rights — Something TPP Will Block

      Eighteen months ago, Mike wrote about the DMCA being abused to censor stories in an Ecuadorian newspaper that someone in the government there apparently didn’t want out in the open. But Boing Boing points us to a post by Andrés Delgado from a few weeks back which offers hope that some good things could be happening in Ecuador in the field of copyright.

    • Thirteen Year Legacy: Last.fm Downfall?

      Last.fm is a web service for users to track and share their music tastes with friends in an easy, simple way. A single play of a song is known as a “Scrobble”. Listening to music and recording the listen with Last.fm is known as “Scrobbling”. This is a service that has existed since 2002, originally under the name of Audioscrobbler. In 2015, Last.fm rolled out their new website beta, originally optional, but later forced upon all users.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • UK Throws A Copyright Crumb: Confirms That Digitized Copies Of Public Domain Images Are In The Public Domain

        A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about a German museum suing Wikimedia over photos of public domain objects that were in its collection. We mentioned there was a related situation in the UK, where the National Portrait Gallery in London had threatened a Wikimedia developer for using photos of objects that were clearly in the public domain. Mike pointed out that in the US, the Bridgeman v. Corel case established that photographs of public domain images do not carry any copyright, since they do not add any new expression. In a rare bit of good news, noted by Communia, the UK Intelllectual Property Office has just announced officially that it takes the same view…

      • Canadian Govt Eyes VPN Pirates, Netflix Thieves and ISP Blocking

        New Government documents have shed some light on the future agenda points for online copyright enforcement. In a briefing for minister Mélanie Joly, officials from the Department of Canadian Heritage mention VPN pirates and website blocking as emerging issues and pressures.

      • On the Fringe: David Elston, Pirate Party UK

        Pirate Party UK is our first brave volunteer as we explore the fringe movements campaigning against the dominance of the Westminster parties in British politics.

        Speaking to the deputy leader David Elston, newly elected as part of a leadership change following the general election, we delve into what the Pirates stand for, why authenticity is a new force in campaigning, and what effect Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is having on smaller parties.

      • ‘Happy Birthday’ Copyright Case Reaches a Settlement

        After more than two years of litigation, “Happy Birthday to You” — often called the most popular song in the world, but one that has long been under copyright — is one step closer to joining the public domain.

      • Parties celebrate as ‘Happy Birthday’ copyright dispute settled

        A copyright lawsuit centring on the song “Happy Birthday to You” has been settled out of court.

        Music publisher Warner/Chappell and a group of documentary makers, who had been disputing ownership of the song for more than two years, settled the dispute yesterday, December 9.

        Details of the settlement have not been disclosed.

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