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12.26.16

Links 26/12/2016: Darktable 2.2.0, HandBrake 1.0.0, Linux 4.10 RC

Posted in News Roundup at 10:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • FreeDOS 1.2

    The official announcement is on our website at www.freedos.org—but since I announced the FreeDOS 1.2 RC1 and RC2 here, I figured I’d make a brief mention on this blog too.

    We’re very excited for the new FreeDOS 1.2 distribution! We’ve added lots of new features that you should find useful and interesting.

    Thanks to everyone in the FreeDOS Project for their work towards this new release! There are too many of you to recognize individually, but you have all helped enormously. Thank you!

  • FreeDOS 1.2 Released With New Installer & More Commands
  • Top 10 open source projects of 2016

    We continue to be impressed with the wonderful open source projects that emerge, grow, change, and evolve every year. Picking 10 to include in our annual list of top projects is no small feat, and certainly no list this short can include every deserving project.

    To choose our 10, we looked back at popular open source projects our writers covered in 2016, and collected suggestions from our Community Moderators. After a round of nominations and voting by our moderators, our editorial team narrowed down the final list.

  • Krampus adopts one free software tool for each month in 2017

    Curious how Krampus is doing this year? Well, as the recently hired manager of Krampus’s open source programs office, I’m excited to tell you that we have an ambitious plan to adopt one free software tool during each month of the coming year.

    Our story might be useful for other non-software-focused businesses (Krampus, Inc. doesn’t currently produce any software) who are also are curious about open source alternatives and want to follow a similar path. To get you in the spirit, I’ve included all the links that made us feel like 12 months of free and open source software adoption is possible.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Public Services/Government

    • Low Code, Not Open Source, is Key to Federal IT Agility [Ed: Anti-FOSS, using buzzwords]

      The federal government is striving to increase the agility of the IT systems that underpin mission-attainment and service-delivery. Taking a cue from the private sector, federal agencies are seeking faster time-to-delivery for new capabilities and a rapid response in the face of changing conditions. To that end, U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott recently announced a new government website, Code.gov, promoting a shared-services approach to open-source software under the new Federal Source Code Policy.

      Unfortunately for the feds, open source is not the answer to the agility challenge. The reason why is right there in the name of the site and the policy: code.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open-Source Parametric CAD in Your Browser

      If you’re looking for a parametric open-source CAD program that can run in your browser, this is it. It’s far enough along that you can use it for real-world (albeit simple) modeling. CAD does, however, still require a certain type of spatial thinking and reasoning. So, if you’re new to the 3D modeling world, it might be worth tinkering with a more learning-oriented tool like BlocksCAD.

    • How “open source” seed producers from the US to India are changing global food production

      Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space. For nearly 20 years, Morton’s work was limited only by his imagination and by how many different kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on. But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more and more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding. The patents weren’t just for different types of lettuce, but specific traits such as resistance to a disease, a particular shade of red or green, or curliness of the leaf. Such patents have increased in the years since, and are encroaching on a growing range of crops, from corn to carrots — a trend that has plant breeders, environmentalists and food security experts concerned about the future of the food production.

  • Programming/Development

    • Ruby 2.4.0 Released

      We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 2.4.0.

      Ruby 2.4.0 is the first stable release of the Ruby 2.4 series.

    • Ruby 2.4 Programming Language Has Performance Updates & More

      The Ruby project has continued in its annual tradition of releasing a new version of their programming language on Christmas, a tradition held up now for the past number of years.

    • DocKnot 1.01

      This is the second release of my new documentation generation system for my packages. It’s still probably not of much interest to anyone other than me, particularly since the metadata format is still rapidly evolving so I’ve not documented it yet. But the templates are getting fleshed out and it’s generating more and more of my package documentation, which will make releases much easier.

    • krb5-strength 3.1

      krb5-strength provides password strength checking plugins and programs for MIT Kerberos and Heimdal, and a password history implementation for Heimdal. This is the first new upstream release since I left Stanford, since I don’t personally use the package any more. But it’s easy enough to maintain, and it was overdue for merging some contributed patches.

    • rra-c-util 6.2

      This is my general collection of utility functions, standard tests, and portability code, mostly for C but also including a fair bit of Perl these days.

    • anytime 0.2.0: Feature, fixes and tests!
    • C TAP Harness 4.1

Leftovers

  • Defence/Aggression

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Josh Earnest: Obama Hasn’t Gotten Enough Credit for Being ‘Most Transparent’ President

      Earnest said this is one of the biggest “beefs” he has with journalists, claiming that “President Obama has been the most transparent president in American history.” And he wishes Obama got more credit for it.

    • NYT’s James Risen: Obama WH Has Been ‘The Most Anti-Press Administration’ Since Nixon

      You may remember the years-long legal battle journalist James Risen underwent in which the government was pressuring him to identify his confidential sources in a leak case. The case was finally resolved two years ago, but Risen has been on record saying the Obama White House has been “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.”

      He told Stelter today that not only does he still believe that, but he believes this White House to be the most secretive and “the most anti-press administration since the Nixon administration.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Polar Bears’ Path to Decline Runs Through Alaskan Village

      Come fall, polar bears are everywhere around this Arctic village, dozing on sand spits, roughhousing in the shallows, padding down the beach with cubs in tow and attracting hundreds of tourists who travel long distances to see them.

      At night, the bears steal into town, making it dangerous to walk outside without a firearm or bear spray. They leave only reluctantly, chased off by the polar bear patrol with firecracker shells and spotlights.

      On the surface, these bears might not seem like members of a species facing possible extinction.

    • Major flooding in UK now likely every year, warns lead climate adviser

      Major flooding in the UK is now likely to happen every year but ministers still have no coherent long-term plan to deal with it, the government’s leading adviser on the impacts of climate change has warned.

      Boxing Day in 2015 saw severe floods sweep Lancashire and Yorkshire, just weeks after Storm Desmond swamped Cumbria and parts of Scotland and Wales. The flooding, which caused billions of pounds of damage, led to the government publishing a review in September which anticipates 20-30% more extreme rainfall than before.

      But Prof John Krebs, who leads the work on adapting to global warming for the government’s official advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), told the Guardian: “We are still a long way from where we need to be, in that there is still not a coherent long-term view.”

  • Finance

    • Election Losses Don’t Stop Corporate Efforts to Block Voter-Approved Minimum Wage Hikes

      Voters spoke very clearly on November 8 when they elected to raise the minimum wage in Arizona and Maine, along with Colorado and Washington State.

      But those wins, the democratic process, and the express will of the people are being defied and denied in Arizona and Maine, where corporate lobbyists and their legislative allies are working to block, delay, even rewrite the laws approved on Election Day.

      These efforts to flout voter-approved laws are part of ongoing conservative and corporate-backed strategies to keep wages low.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • ALEC’s Little Brother, ACCE, Has Big Plans for 2017

      I recently returned from the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 2016 States and Nation Policy Summit, in Washington, DC. As a Mayor, I was most interested in the corresponding meeting of the American City County Exchange (ACCE), an offshoot spawned by ALEC in 2014 to spread ALEC’s ideas about “limited government, free markets, and federalism” down to the most local levels of government.

      I had attended the 2014 ACCE conference and was eager to see how the group had evolved in its formative years. What plans were its leaders developing in response to the surprising ascension of Donald Trump to President-elect, and the consolidation of republican power in the Congress and in statehouses nationwide?

      The short story is the group is working hard to expand its membership and stable of corporate sponsors, but in the meantime a handful of people are cranking out cookie-cutter “model” ordinances with little informed discussion.

    • Trump Urged to Put Nation Before Family Profits

      With just four weeks left until inauguration, President Elect Donald Trump has yet to deliver on his promise to tell the American people how he is going to handle his corporate empire in order to avoid crippling conflicts of interest.

      With investments and developments in at least 20 countries around the globe, not to mention the United States and Washington, DC, Trump brings an unprecedented array of conflicts to the White House, along with an equally unprecedented risk of bribery, foreign influence, and corruption.

    • Happy Holidays from the Video Asshats at Your State Department

      So what better use of taxpayer money and time than for your State Department to make idiotic holiday videos?

      Acting like an asshat is something of a State tradition year-round, but these annual videos seek to memorialize it. The very broad theory is that these things “humanize” American foreign policy in a way drones do not, and because they get lots of “clicks,” prove those foreigners really do love us after all. Of course, lots of people slow down for gory car wrecks, too.

    • Is Donald Trump a traitor? His path to the White House suggests a pattern of profound disloyalty

      During the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Donald Trump urged a foreign power, Russia, to interfere in the American election in order to undermine his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Russia complied. The American intelligence community, including the CIA and FBI, has reached a “strong consensus” that the Russians interfered with the presidential election in order to help Donald Trump win.

      It has also been reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed this espionage operation. So serious was Russian interference in the American presidential election that the Obama administration warned Putin that it was tantamount to “armed conflict.”

      Republican leaders in Congress were briefed on Russia’s interference in the presidential election and how it was targeted at elevating Trump and hurting Clinton. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans chose to block any public discussion of these findings. In what could be construed as a quid pro quo, McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, has been selected by President-elect Trump for a Cabinet position in his administration.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Congressional Committees Say Backdooring Encryption Is A Bad Idea

      Two bipartisan Congressional committees are the latest to express their opposition to government-mandated encryption backdoors. The House Judiciary Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee have arrived at the same conclusion as the experts FBI director James Comey insists on ignoring: encryption backdoors are a net loss for everyone, no matter what gains might be experienced by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

    • Revealed: British councils used Ripa to secretly spy on public

      Councils were given permission to carry out more than 55,000 days of covert surveillance over five years, including spying on people walking dogs, feeding pigeons and fly-tipping, the Guardian can reveal.

      A mass freedom of information request has found 186 local authorities – two-thirds of the 283 that responded – used the government’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to gather evidence via secret listening devices, cameras and private detectives.

      Among the detailed examples provided were Midlothian council using the powers to monitor dog barking and Allerdale borough council gathering evidence about who was guilty of feeding pigeons.

      Wolverhampton used covert surveillance to check on the sale of dangerous toys and car clocking; Slough to aid an investigation into an illegal puppy farm; and Westminster to crack down on the selling of fireworks to children.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • In Pictures: ‘Treated like animals’, Hong Kong’s ‘Snowden refugees’ dream of better life

      The story of how impoverished refugees helped Snowden evade authorities in 2013 only emerged in September, propelling them into the media spotlight.

      Former National Security Agency contractor Snowden hid out in Hong Kong where he initiated one of the largest data leaks in US history, fuelling a firestorm over mass surveillance.

      After leaving his initial hotel bolthole, he went underground, fed and looked after by some of the city’s 11,000 marginalised refugees.

      [...]

      She also says her case worker recommended she have an abortion when she was three months’ pregnant with Danath.

      ISSHK told AFP it “completely denies” that allegation, and has rejected assertions by the refugees and their lawyer Robert Tibbo that it has breached its obligation to provide them sufficient humanitarian assistance.

      But Supun feels refugees in Hong Kong are treated “like animals”.

    • Progressive causes see ‘unprecedented’ upswing in donations after US election

      One man wrote a check for $10,000 to an organization that helps women get elected to office, saying he was “embarrassed” that Donald Trump won the presidential election.

      Someone else walked into the office of an organization advocating for immigrant rights and handed over a bag of cash he had just collected from members of his local community civics group.

    • Tea-maker at Cumhuriyet daily headquarters jailed for ‘insulting’ Erdogan

      Şenol Buran, a tea-maker working at the Cumhuriyet daily’s İstanbul headquarters, has been arrested by a Turkish court for allegedly insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Cumhuriyet daily reported.

      According to the daily, Buran was late to work on Dec. 24 after authorities closed roads and stopped public transport to deny access to the Şişli district, where President Erdoğan was to attend a meeting.

      “When I finally arrived at the building [of Cumhuriyet], the security chief asked me why was late. I explained the situation and he told me that the police closed the roads because of the president. He also told me that I would serve him a glass of tea if he pays us a visit,” Buran said.

    • Does Whistleblowing Pay? New Study Says Yes!

      New research by Jaron H. Wilde, an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Iowa’s, Tippie College of Business, “demonstrates for the first time that financial shenanigans at companies decrease markedly in the years after truth tellers come forward with information about wrongdoing in their operations.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

12.24.16

Links 24/12/2016: Christmas Tux 2016, LLVM 3.9.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 12:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Benefits of Open Source Game Development

    Technology innovations have impacted every single industry sector in a tremendous way. Right from healthcare and education, to entertainment and gaming, there is no sector that has remained untouched by the influence of technology. The express evolution of technology means a win-win for both – users and the game developer are at a distinct advantage. The end users gain a much better gaming experience, while game programmers can apply these new technologies to create highly stimulating and enthralling games.

  • Encrypted messengers: Why Riot (and not Signal) is the future

    As a response to the Snowden revelations, the number of messaging apps that promise security against surveillance has rapidly multiplied. There seems to be an emerging consensus – ranging from Edward Snowden to the New York Times – that Signal is the best choice for those nervous about the privacy of their messages.

    Indeed, Signal has a number of advantages that set it apart from many competitors: The encryption algorithm that it uses is well-reviewed and most experts in the field think that it can indeed protect against dragnet surveillance. It also allows experts to inspect the source code of the entire app for back doors which makes it more trustworthy than competitors such as WhatsApp. Finally, OpenWhisperSystems – the company that produces Signal – is known to log only minimal information about its users. As a result, when law enforcement agencies demand information about message “metadata” (who messages when with whom), they cannot supply them with much useful information.

  • Intro to the Godot game engine

  • Events

    • Open Source Foundation Pakistan Holds Open Source Summit 2016

      Open Source Foundation Pakistan Holds Open Source Summit 2016. The 4th Annual Open Source Summit was held at Bahria University Islamabad Campus Yesterday. Mr. Asim Shahryar Hussain, MD PSEB, was the Chief Guest at the event.

    • PSEB for Open Source Technologies in 10 years

      Managing Director Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) Asim Shehryar Hussain Thursday said the board aimed at migrating government sector organization from licensed softwares to Open Source Technologies in next 10 years.

    • LibrePlanet 2017 keynote announcement: Author and tech activist Cory Doctorow

      Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of many books, most recently In Real Life, a graphic novel; Information Doesn’t Want to be Free, a book about earning a living in the Internet age; and Homeland, the award-winning, best-selling sequel to the 2008 young adult novel Little Brother.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Update on Multi-Process Firefox

        About four months ago, we launched multi-process Firefox to a small group of Firefox 48 users. Shortly after the carefully measured roll-out, we increased to approximately 50% of our user base. That included almost every Firefox user not using extensions. Those users have been enjoying the 400% increase in responsiveness and a 700% improvement when web pages are loading.

        With Firefox 49 we deployed multi-process Firefox to users with a select set of well tested extensions. Our measurements and user feedback were all positive and so with Firefox 50 we deployed multi-process Firefox to users with a broader set of extensions, those whose authors have marked them as multi-process compatible.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • OpenStack Spreads Out as a Public Cloud Solution

      While most people know that the hugely popular OpenStack cloud platform is used in many hybrid cloud deployments, lots of people still think of it as primarily for private clouds. That’s not necessarily the right mindset, notes a new report from Forrester Research this week.

      Especially in Europe, OpenStack is gaining traction as a public cloud solution notes Forrester’s report OpenStack’s Global Traction Expands For Its Newton Release.

      OpenStack is the most widely deployed open source cloud computing software. The December 2016 report focuses on Newton, the latest release of OpenStack software, and the plan for the 14th release of the software, codenamed Ocata and expected in February 2017. The report also details important next steps for infrastructure and operations leaders investing in the OpenStack platform.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.2.4, Mint Upgrading, Weather Forecast

      The Document Foundation is celebrating today with their release of LibreOffice 5.2.4. The announcement also teased upcoming LibreOffice 5.3 that will feature the new MUFFIN interface. Elsewhere, there seems to be some disagreement as to whether Mint’s heart is in their upgrades and Jonathan Corbet published his latest Linux Forecast. A couple of sites have gathered some fun activities for the long boring holiday season and, in case you missed it, Fedora 23 reached its end of life Tuesday.

    • Let’s celebrate with LibreOffice 5.2.4

      The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.2.4 “still”, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family. Based on the upcoming announcement of LibreOffice 5.3, all users can start to update to LibreOffice 5.2.4 from LibreOffice 5.1.6 or previous versions.

    • LibreOffice updating its user interface

      I saw a recent blog post from LibreOffice about an upcoming change to their user interface. They call it the MUFFIN, a new “tasty” user interface concept. You can also find more details at the Design blog, discussing how they are evolving past the restrictions of the toolbar. The new MUFFIN will appear in LibreOffice 5.3.

    • Nine free and open source Microsoft Excel alternatives business-users should consider in 2016

      Spreadsheets are a staple for both small and large businesses, data analysts and marketers among others, most opting for the convenience and familiar interface of Microsoft Excel. But there are many options out there from Google, Apache, Libre and more offering free and open source alternatives.

    • Kickstarter open sources its mobile apps, OpenOffice for small business, and more news

      In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Kickstarter making the code for its iOS and Android apps open source, UNICEF and Malawi announcing the first humanitarian drone testing corridor in Africa, and more.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • LLVM 3.9.1 Released

      For those nervous about using LLVM Git/SVN of the current 4.0 development code but looking to have the latest fixes atop the stable LLVM 3.9 series, the LLVM 3.9.1 point release is now available.

    • LLVM 3.9.1 Release

      LLVM 3.9.1 is now available! Download it now, or read the release notes.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Dutch govt data centre sets open source standard

      The Dutch government’s data centre in Groningen (ODC-Noord) is setting a standard for government-hosted cloud services. Its combination of OpenStack (managing virtualised machines) and CEPH (handling storage) is attracting more and more central government services. The open source solutions are proving enormously scalable, while keeping costs low.

    • EC study: open source an important enabler for public sector collaboration

      Open source software provides an easy and affordable way to improve existing public services. According to the EC report ‘Analysis of the Value of New Generation of eGovernment Services and How Can the Public Sector Become an Agent of Innovation through ICT’, it allows a single developer to incrementally build human services based on publicly available source code.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Two more cities join Madrid eParticipation project

      This month, the two Spanish cities of Toledo and Chiloeches joined the Madrid open source software project for citizen participation. The Consul platform was originally created by the City of Madrid last year when it launched its participation portal. At the same time, the software was made available for re-use on GitHub. Since then, the number of participants in the further development of this software package has grown to about thirty Spanish cities.

    • Open Data

      • New Slovenian open data portal built on CKAN

        The Slovenian Ministry of Public Administration has launched a new National Open Data Portal (OPSI). The portal has been built on CKAN, the most popular open source software platform for storing and publishing open data.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Meet the Open Source Design Collective

        We love to spend time with collectives to learn why they do what they do, what their goals are and what they need to achieve them. We wanted to share one of these stories today: Open Source Design.

        [...]

        Free and open source software (FOSS) preserves privacy of its users and ensures they — rather than web oligopolies — are in control of their data. For free and open source software to be successful and reach adoption levels of proprietary apps, we believe good design and a seamless UX is essential.

        So, we bring together people currently working on design in open source projects as well as encourage new designers to join the movement and find projects which need their help.

        Members of our collective include people working on Mozilla, Wikimedia, Nextcloud, GNOME, OpenFarm, XWiki, Drupal, Transparency Toolkit, OpenStreetMap, Trustroots and more!

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Do Try this at Home: Growing Bacterial Paper with Open-source Bioart

        The work of Diane Trouillet uses living organisms to create open-source bioart that everyone can try to replicate at home.

        Diane Trouillet, a self-proclaimed artist-researcher from Toulouse, is moving the French art community. Back in 2013, the bioartist invented a bacterial paper that she is now exploring as an artistic medium.

      • Convert that Cheap Laser Engraver to 100% Open-Source Toolchain

        LaserWeb is open-source laser cutter and engraver software, and [JordsWoodShop] made a video tutorial (embedded below) on how to convert a cheap laser engraver to use it. The laser engraver used in the video is one of those economical acrylic-and-extruded-rail setups with a solid state laser emitter available from a variety of Chinese sellers (protective eyewear and any sort of ventilation or shielding conspicuously not included) but LaserWeb can work with just about any hardware, larger CO2 lasers included.

  • Programming/Development

    • Python 3.6 Released With Async Generators/Comprehensions

      New to Python 3.6.0 on the syntax side is support for formatted string literals, a syntax for variable annotations, asynchronous generators, and asynchronous comprehensions are among the changes.

    • Python 3.6 is packed with goodness

      Debuting a little more than a year ago, Python 3.5 hinted at how the language could become faster and more powerful without sacrificing the convenience and ease of use that characterize Python — without forcing everyone to toss out existing Python code and start over.

      Python 3.6 picks up where many of those improvements left off and nudges them into new realms. Python 3.5 added syntax used by static type checking tools to ensure software quality; Python 3.6 expands on that idea, which could eventually lead to high-speed statically compiled Python programs. Python 3.5 gave us options to write asynchronous functions; Python 3.6 bolsters them. But the biggest changes in Python 3.6 lie under the hood, and they open up possibilities that didn’t exist before.

    • Python 3.6.0 released
    • Tips on Developing Python Projects for PyPI

      I wrote two recent articles on Python packaging: Distributing Python Packages Part I: Creating a Python Package and Distributing Python Packages Part II: Submitting to PyPI. I was able to get a couple of my programs packaged and submitted.

Leftovers

  • Step Inside China’s Hellish, Illicit Steel Factories

    Kevin Frayer’s photographs of illegal Chinese steel factories look like postcards from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Thick smoke spews out of tall stacks, steam rises from vast pits, and molten steel flows across the ground like lava. All around, men toil without even basic protective gear. “It was like stepping back in time,” says Frayer, who spent four days at two steel factories in Inner Mongolia in early November. “The way of working seemed unchanged and unaffected by technology.”

  • Hardware

    • New MacBook Pros Fail to Earn Consumer Reports Recommendation

      Apple launched a new series of MacBook Pro laptops this fall, and Consumer Reports’ labs have just finished evaluating them. The laptops did very well in measures of display quality and performance, but in terms of battery life, we found that the models varied dramatically from one trial to another.

      As a result, these laptops are the first MacBooks not to receive recommended ratings from Consumer Reports.

      Complaints about MacBook Pro batteries have been popping up online since the laptops first went on sale in November. Apple says that these computers should operate for up to 10 hours between charges, but some consumers in Apple’s support forums reported that they were only able to use their laptops for three to four hours before the battery ran down.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • [Older] Why Doctors Still Worry About Measles

      My grandmothers had measles. Your grandmothers had measles. In medicine, it is taken for granted that all people born before 1957 had measles, whether they remember it or not.

      Grandmothers invariably were invoked on questions of measles back when I was doing my residency in the 1980s in Boston. When there was a child in the emergency room with a truly striking and scary rash, a senior attending physician would stride in, look at the child, and announce something like, “Your grandmother could diagnose measles from across the room!”

      Nowadays, pediatricians worry that we’ve lost our collective memory and therefore some of our healthy fear of the disease and its serious complications — at least until an exposure happens and people start to panic.

    • Snyder: I’m not concerned about being charged over Flint water crisis

      Gov. Rick Snyder said Wednesday he has “no reason to be concerned” that Attorney General Bill Schuette will bring criminal charges against him in connection with the Flint drinking water crisis, and most of the $3.5 million he is spending on outside criminal legal defense fees is to pay for work on turning over documents to investigators.

      In an interview with the Free Press at his Capitol office, Snyder said he “can’t speak for the attorney general,” but asked if he is getting concerned that Schuette might decide to bring criminal charges against him, Snyder said: “I have no reason to be concerned.”

    • Gov. Snyder adds $1.5 million to contract for his Flint water criminal defense

      Gov. Rick Snyder has approved adding $1.5 million to a contract for legal services with a law firm that’s defending him against possible criminal charges tied to the Flint water crisis.

      The State Administrative Board received notice of the action at its meeting Tuesday, Dec. 20, the same day Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette filed new criminal charges against two former Flint emergency managers appointed by Snyder and two former city officials.

      The governor’s emergency managers were running Flint before and during a water emergency that unfolded after a change in the city’s source water.

      Lead leached into the city’s drinking water after the state Department of Environmental Quality allowed the use of the river without requiring treatment to make it less corrosive to lead and lead solder in home plumbing and transmission lines.

    • Vaccine Found 100 Percent Effective at Preventing Ebola Infection

      In medical news, a new study finds an experimental vaccine was 100 percent effective in protecting West Africans against the Ebola virus during an outbreak in 2014-15, raising the prospect that the future spread of the deadly disease could be halted. The finding was reported Thursday in the British medical journal The Lancet. An assistant director-general of the World Health Organization said the study compared about 6,000 residents of Guinea who received the vaccine with a similar-sized group who hadn’t.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Julian Assange: “Donald? It’s a change anyway”

      When they appeared on the scene for the first time in 2006, few noticed them. And when four years later they hit worldwide media headlines with their publication of over 700,000 secret US government documents, many assumed that Julian Assange and his organisation, WikiLeaks, would be annihilated very shortly.

      Since 2010 Assange has lived first under house arrest and then confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been granted asylum by Ecuador. The country’s officials judged his concerns of being extradited to Sweden and then to the US to be put on trial for the WikiLeaks’ revelations well-grounded.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Shanghai water supply hit by 100-tonne wave of garbage

      Medical waste, broken bottles and household trash are some of the items found in more than 100 tonnes of garbage salvaged near a drinking water reservoir in Shanghai.

      The suspected culprits are two ships that have been dumping waste upstream in the Yangtze river. It has then flowed downstream to the reservoir on Shanghai’s Chongming island which is also home to 700,000 people.

      The reservoir at the mouth of the river is one of the four main sources of drinking water for the country’s largest city, according to local media.

      China has struggled with air, soil and water pollution for years during its economic boom, with officials often protecting industry and silencing citizens that complain. China’s cities are often blanketed in toxic smog, while earlier this year more than 80% of water wells used by farms, factories and rural households was found to be unsafe for drinking because of pollution.

    • Sorry, Trump, You Can’t Bring Back Coal When Solar Costs Half as Much

      Bloomberg released a new report this week with some startling findings about solar energy. To wit:

      * Solar energy can now be generated for about half the cost of coal. Coal had been the cheapest energy source, but it has now been overtaken by solar. That means it is crazy to build new coal plants– you’d be costing yourself money.

    • Climate scientist wins major court battle just in time for Trump administration

      In a legal first, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that a climate science researcher can proceed with defamation claims against writers who made false allegations about his scientific work.

      The ruling by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, found that a “reasonable jury” could find that two writers defamed Michael Mann — known for the famous “hockey stick” graph showing that modern climate change is unprecedented in human history — by making false claims about his work, and comparing him to a notorious child molester.

      The court found that two writers for the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, may have defamed Mann by comparing him to Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted of molesting dozens of children in 2012.

    • Policy like EPA’s Clean Power Plan would mean higher crop yields

      After the Supreme Court ruling clarifying that the EPA had an obligation to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency developed the Clean Power Plan to target greenhouse gases. That’s not the only pollutant that is reduced by cutting emissions and moving away from coal for power generation, though. Limiting the rest of the stuff that comes out the smokestack has health an economic benefits, as well—“co-benefits” in the policy lingo.

      One type of pollution on that list is the compounds that react to produce ozone in the lower atmosphere. While ozone up in the stratosphere shields us from skin-burning UV radiation, ozone at the surface is a lung irritant. It harms plants, as well, reducing the uptake of CO2 that fuels growth.

    • China’s smoggiest city closes schools amid public anger

      China’s smoggiest city closed schools Wednesday as much of the country suffered its sixth day under an oppressive haze, sparking public anger about the slow response to the threat to children’s health.

      Since Friday a choking miasma has covered a large swathe of northeastern China, leaving more than 460 million gasping for breath.

      Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, was one of more than 20 cities which went on red alert Friday evening, triggering an emergency plan to reduce pollution by shutting polluting factories and taking cars off the road, among other measures.

      Nowhere has been hit as hard as Shijiazhuang, which has seen a huge rise in pollution.

    • Arctic temperatures soar to 30 C above normal

      On Thursday, the temperature there was almost 30 C warmer than average, and it continued into Friday morning. Ocean buoys recorded temperatures near the North Pole of 0 C or warmer. That’s right: It’s warmer in the Arctic than it is in Thunder Bay, Ont.

      This isn’t an isolated event. Arctic temperatures have been unusually warm for the past few months, though perhaps not quite as dramatically different as we’re seeing now.

    • North Pole hits melting point in time for Christmas, so Santa can just swim to you now

      Today is an extremely unusual December day at the North Pole, with temperatures getting very close to the melting point of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0 degrees Celsius.

      For perspective, the temperature at the North Pole is about 40 degrees Fahrenheit above average for the date.

      Data from a buoy located about 80 miles south of the dark, windswept pole hit 32 degrees on Thursday morning as storm systems dragged unusually mild air into the high Arctic. Aiding the warm spell is the fact that these winds passed over Arctic waters that would normally be covered with sea ice but are open ocean this year after a severe sea ice melt season and record-slow winter freeze-up.

      The bizarre Arctic heat wave, which will be brief, lasting only two days, is similar to another warmup that occurred in December 2015, and there is scientific evidence showing that these extreme events are becoming more frequent and extreme in the Arctic as sea ice melts and air temperatures increase.

    • UK hits clean energy milestone: 50% of electricity from low carbon sources

      Half of the UK’s electricity came from wind turbines, solar panels, wood burning and nuclear reactors between July and September, in a milestone first.

      Official figures published on Thursday show low carbon power, which has been supported by the government to meet climate change targets, accounted for 50% of electricity generation in the UK in the third quarter, up from 45.3% the year before.

      The rise was largely driven by new windfarms and solar farms being connected to the grid, and several major coal power stations closing.

  • Finance

    • Ireland’s love affair with Apple triggers hate at home

      The Irish government’s unwavering protection of Apple has infuriated the very people who stand to gain the most.

      The residents of Cork are souring on the tech giant — the city’s biggest employer — and fanning the flames of Euroskepticism.

      The European Commission slapped Apple with a €13 billion penalty for allegedly accepting a sweetheart tax deal from Ireland earlier this year. Cork residents resent Dublin’s unwavering defense of the tech giant, most recently its support of the company’s appeal Monday that claimed the EU Commission overstepped its powers. Instead of banking an amount roughly the size of the country’s annual health budget, Irish leaders recoiled at the order and defended its four-decade-long relationship with Apple.

    • Why Supervision Committees Spell Danger for Corrupt Officials

      In four years, China’s anti-corruption campaign has made huge inroads despite doubts about its sustainability. It is now time for the country to enforce a unified mechanism with universal coverage to curtail corruption and abuses of power.

      Last month, the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which runs the party’s daily operations, issued a directive to the provinces of Zhejiang in the east and Shanxi in the north, as well as to the Beijing Municipality, asking each to build a supervisory body overseen by their local legislative systems. This was an unprecedented measure, as it implied that real power was to be ensconced in an extra-party institution.

    • Source: Trump weighing tariffs as high as 10%

      Trump transition team tell sources that they are talking about the possibility of imposing tariffs through executive action. Jim Acosta reports.

    • Thirty things you didn’t know about the EU referendum

      This has been a bumper autumn for political publishing. I’ve recently finished five of the main books on the EU referendum campaign and, although some of the key revelations have already been serialised in newspapers, there is plenty of material in them worth reporting that hasn’t yet been flagged up anywhere. So, as a Christmas service for anyone who has not read enough about the EU referendum already this year, here are 30 things about it that you might not know.

    • Silver Lake Said to Join $1.2 Billion Round in Key Alibaba Arm

      Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s on-demand services unit is close to securing $1.2 billion of funding for expansion after getting backing from first-time investors including Silver Lake Management and China’s sovereign wealth fund, people familiar with the matter said.

      The latest round for Koubei, which deals in local services such as food delivery, will surpass a $1 billion target with backing from China Investment Corp., according to the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private. The round also includes Yunfeng Capital, a fund backed by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, and values the two-year-old startup at about $8 billion, they said.

    • Minimum wage going up in 21 states, including Florida

      Come the new year, millions of the lowest-wage workers across the country will get a raise.

      Some of those raises will be very minor — a cost of living adjustment amounting to an extra nickel or dime an hour. But in several places the jump will be between $1 and $2 an hour.

    • School cleaners who went on strike over pay sacked before Christmas

      Three long-serving primary school cleaners, who went on strike over claims their wages and conditions were cut when a private company took over the contract, have been sacked days before Christmas.

      The women – Lesley Leake, Marice Hall and Karen McGee – sparked a debate over outsourcing when they went on strike for 14 weeks after their school in West Yorkshire was turned into an academy earlier this year.

      Known as the “Kinsley cleaners”, the women said they had their wages cut from £7.85 an hour to the minimum wage of £7.20 once the contract switched from Wakefield council to C&D Cleaning in April.

    • Trump advisor Icahn says it’s ‘crazy’ to think he couldn’t serve while owning stocks

      Carl Icahn told CNBC on Thursday it’s “crazy” to say he should sell his holdings to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest while serving as an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump.

      Trump on Wednesday named the billionaire activist investor, a frequent critic of some Obama administration rules and a major fossil fuel investor, a special advisor on regulation. Critics say Icahn could use the role to craft regulatory policies that would help his companies and benefit him personally.

    • The Surprising Danger of Being Good at Your Job

      Science confirms what high performers have known for years: It’s not easy being so competent.

      A study from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business suggests that people with high self-control — the kind of people who remember birthdays, choose the salad instead of the fries, take on extra projects at work, and resolve conflicts easily — might actually pay a price for those virtues.

      “People always talk about how having high self-control is a good thing,” says researcher Christy Zhou Koval, a Ph.D. candidate and first author on the study, which was published in this month’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And in many ways, it is a good thing: “Go-getters get what they go after,” she points out. “They’re better at goal pursuits. They make very good relationship partners.”

    • The #Brexit mask begins to slip: they’re still after our rights

      We welcomed the Prime Minister’s pledge at Conservative Party Conference (repeated by Ministers) that workers would keep their current rights – and gain new rights – after Brexit. It’s not enough, but it’s a start (we want it guaranteed, not just pledged, and we want to make sure British workers don’t fall behind those across Europe.) And it’s clearly not a done deal, as REIDsteel boss Simon Boyd showed this week by writing to every single MP urging them to use Brexit to scrap a whole swathe of protections for working people, including working time, holiday pay and health and safety.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Trump Grill Could Be the Worst Restaurant in America

      Halfway through a recent late lunch at the Trump Grill—the clubby steakhouse in the lobby of Trump Tower that has recently become famous through the incessant media coverage of its namesake landlord, and the many dignitaries traipsing through its marbled hall to kiss his ring—I sensed the initial symptoms of a Trump overdose. Thanks to an unprecedented influx of diners, we were sitting at a wobbly overflow table outside the restaurant, in the middle of a crush of tourists, some of whom were proposing to their partners, or waiting to buy Trump-branded merchandise, or sprinting to the bathroom.

      As my companions and I contemplated the most painless way to eat our flaccid, gray Szechuan dumplings with their flaccid, gray innards, as a campy version of “Jingle Bells” jackhammered in the background, a giant gold box tied with red ribbon toppled onto us. Trump, it seemed, was already fighting against the War on Christmas.

    • Beyond fake news: an investigation into the murky world of fake campaigns

      So far, so normal. There are plenty of rights groups, big and small, which have worked on the issue of migrant workers in Qatar in the context of the World Cup. The fact that we hadn’t previously heard of this organization was not that surprising.

    • Donald Trump’s Pick for Health Secretary Traded Medical Stocks While in House

      President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Health and Human Services Department traded more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies over the past four years while sponsoring and advocating legislation that potentially could affect those companies’ stocks.

    • Out of options

      It was a chilly afternoon in April 2013 when Roy Roberts, a former GM executive now charged with righting the struggling Detroit Public Schools, appeared in the auditorium of Oakman Elementary/Orthopedic, a school on the city’s northwest side. Roberts had arrived with an entourage of district officials and he didn’t waste any time with small talk. “We’ll be closing Northwestern,” he announced.

      About a dozen parents were there, among them Aliya Moore, the president of the parents’ organization. Moore’s older daughter, Chrishawana, was in fifth grade and her final year at the school, where she’d been since kindergarten. Her youngest, Tylyia, just a toddler at the time, had become a fixture on the campus, often seen coloring in the back of one of the kindergarten classrooms. Moore wasn’t sure what to make of the robocall she’d received the night before summoning her to the meeting, but she knew she had to be there.

    • 5 Reasons Fake News Killed Facts In 2016

      Hi. I’m Cracked editor David Bell. Before I wrote columns, I was a full-time researcher for the site. During that time, I wrote scores of articles calling out the terrible instances of fake news occurring weekly online. The series strove to be bipartisan, from exposing fake racism against Obama to misguided outrage about Obama to generally batshit stories reported anyone from Gawker to Breitbart. It’s not hard to remain objective when your brain is a flood of deadline stress mixed with throbbing Odin rage toward the mainstream media. In the thick of it all, I hoped my humble contribution would be joined by an internet-wide embracing of reason.

    • Fake News Is Not the Real Media Threat We’re Facing

      From all the recent hand-wringing about “fake news,” you would think that the hand-wringers had never stood in a supermarket checkout line, surrounded by 72-point headlines about alien abductions and miracle cures. Fake news has been around as long as real news, as any historian of early modern Europe can tell you (Renaissance readers gobbled up stories about women giving birth to rabbits, and men from Africa with faces in their chests). Social media has certainly transformed how fake news circulates, speeding up its circulation and extending its reach and impact. The temptation to blame many of our current ills on it—and by extension, on Mark Zuckerberg—is understandable. But the hand-wringing has in fact distracted attention from a much more important problem involving the American media. That problem is not fake news but the continuing delegitimization of real news by American conservatives. This delegitimization has been taking place for a long time (as The Nation’s Eric Alterman has meticulously reported, and as even some conservative media figures have admitted), but during the past year it has taken a frightening new turn. If the mainstream American news media are to have any hope of avoiding potentially catastrophic results—both for themselves and for American democracy—they need to change how they report on American politics, and on the ideological apparatchiks they continue to describe, misleadingly, as “journalists.”

    • Iron Grip of Theresa May Said to Cut Her Off From Key Colleagues

      U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May is increasingly isolated as her demands to control all areas of policy alienate key colleagues, according to more than a dozen officials who worry tensions will undermine planning for Brexit.

      Speaking anonymously because the subject is delicate, many of the government figures said an early period of goodwill toward May had given way to division and resentment, leading to policy mistakes that had to be hastily corrected. Much of that stems from the influence wielded by her joint chiefs-of-staff, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, the people said.

    • Michael Flynn had role in firm co-led by man who tried to sell material to the KGB

      President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for national security adviser partnered in recent months with a technology company co-led by a businessman who pleaded guilty to trying to sell stolen scientific material in the 1980s to the KGB, the former Soviet intelligence service.

      Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn joined the advisory board of Brainwave Science in February, company documents show. The Massachusetts firm develops controversial “brain fingerprinting” technology designed to assess whether people under interrogation are being truthful by measuring their brain waves. The firm offers training in how to use the technology, in partnership with Flynn’s consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, according to Brainwave’s website.

    • The Democratic Game Plan for Making Trump Miserable — and Regaining Power

      Now that the 2016 election has formally ended, and there’s no denying Donald Trump the presidency, Democrats can finally and fully focus on their strategy for opposing him. I say “opposing him,” because everything Trump has done since November 8 shows beyond a reasonable doubt that there’s not going to be some shockingly moderate Trump administration as open to Democratic as to Republican policies and priorities. Becoming a “loyal opposition” is not an option, and if Democratic leaders actually went in that direction (beyond a few formulaic expressions of willingness to cooperate with Trump if he turns out to be someone other than himself), the Democratic rank and file would probably find themselves new leaders.

      There is not much question that most congressional Democrats will be taking as a template Mitch McConnell’s declaration of scorched-earth opposition to all Barack Obama’s policies and initiatives in early 2009. Partly it’s a matter of payback, but the more important motive is that it worked: Democrats lost their control over Congress at the very first opportunity, in the 2010 midterms; even before that, major elements of Obama’s agenda — including climate-change legislation — were derailed. But there are some major differences between the situation of Democrats today and that of Republicans in 2009 and 2010 that should be reflected in the party’s strategy.

    • Don’t be fooled by these dishonest attacks on the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’

      Nearly half the population in Britain and America oppose the current attack on decent values. That’s not marginal, it’s mainstream – and strong

    • Trump’s unpopularity threatens to hobble his presidency

      President-elect Donald Trump will descend on Washington next month, buoyed by his upset victory and Republican control of Congress to implement his agenda.

      But he’s facing a major obstacle: Trump will enter the White House as the least-popular incoming president in the modern era of public-opinion polling.

    • Korean protests in Santa suits occupy Seoul’s streets, demanding removal of impeached president Park

      Everybody knows that North Korea is a failed state basket-case full of starving people and multigenerational concentration camps, but South Korea is hardly the model of good governance: from the long-serving leader who stole $200M and gave it to his kids (who now live happily in America off his nest-egg) to those long-ago days of 1988 when the government kidnapped homeless people and developmentally delayed people and put them into forced labor camps — some of which still operate today.

      More recently, South Korean President Park Geun-hye has been revealed to be a stooge of a Rasputin-like cult leader, leading to her impeachment (of course, they didn’t impeach her when she passed an incredibly invasive surveillance bill despite a brave filibuster.

    • Why the Green Party Continues to Demand Presidential Recounts

      Presidential recounts are not about changing election results. At least, that is not their primary purpose. At their core, recounts are about ensuring confidence in the integrity of the voting system.

      It is unfortunate, if not all that surprising, that the two largest corporate-controlled political parties have chosen to stand in the way of these grassroots-demanded recounts—in the case of Republicans, actively blocking them in the courts; in the case of Democrats, capitulating in their refusal to push for them. In an election marked by so many irregularities, public distrust, and outright evidence of hacking, Americans deserve to know now more than ever that the election was accurate and secure.

      That is the ultimate goal of this and every recount: to restore confidence in our elections and trust in our democracy.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • A modest proposal for Facebook News Feed

      Over the past year, there has been much hue and cry about Facebook’s fake news problem. The company deferred dealing with it first by saying that a better machine-learning model will fix the problem and then by saying it will rely on third-party fact checkers to flag “disputed” stories when they are shared. Both of these ideas are OK, but they are missing one crucial ingredient. That ingredient, as Charlton Heston screams in Soylent Green, is people.

      Economist Brad DeLong has been saying for a while that robots may take over many jobs, but there are some things robots cannot do alone. Humans will always be needed to make decisions that require a nuanced understanding of how culture works, especially in political and social debates where context is everything. An algorithm might be able to learn some of the signs of fake news—certain hashtags perhaps, or a viral reach that starts with shares happening at bot-like speed. But a human is always going to be needed at some point to determine whether those signs point to fake news or real news that’s blowing up organically because it’s actually important. And these humans need to be well-trained in media analysis themselves, able to spot hoaxes and lies better than an average reader.

    • Mark Zuckerberg appears to finally admit Facebook is a media company

      Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, appears to have finally conceded that the social network is a media company, just not a “traditional media company”.

      In a video chat with Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg said: “Facebook is a new kind of platform. It’s not a traditional technology company. It’s not a traditional media company. You know, we build technology and we feel responsible for how it’s used.

      “We don’t write the news that people read on the platform. But at the same time we also know that we do a lot more than just distribute news, and we’re an important part of the public discourse.”

    • Superstar reporter warns ‘fake news’ panic is censorship trap

      And if you want to find out what is “fake news,” ask perhaps the top investigative reporter in journalism.

      Sharyl Attkisson spotted the fake news trend long before it became a recent catchphrase.

      And she doesn’t portray it, as do many in the mainstream media, as some right-wing conspiracy. In fact, Attkisson told WND she often sees the mainstream media as prime culprits when they push suspect stories.

      So, what is really behind the mainstream media’s war on fake news?

    • Cyberbullying in India is a form of censorship: Mishi Choudhary, Executive Director of SFLC

      Cyberbullying and online harassment is a major global problem. The lack of a physical presence only means that people are more mentally exposed in the digital realm. A majority of children in India encounter online harassment in one form or another, but their parents are oblivious of the fact. Facebook recently launched a portal to tackle cyberbullying, and allow parents to let their children navigate the social network safely. We discussed online harassment with Mishi Choudhary, the Executive Director of Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), a Delhi-based not-for-profit legal services organization. SFLC.IN brings together students, lawyers, technologists and policy analysts to defend freedom in the digital realm.

    • Leading Jewish Scholar Prosecuted in France for Alleged anti-Muslim Remarks

      One of the world’s leading historians on the Jewish communities in Arab countries is being prosecuted in France for alleged hate speech against Muslims.

      The Morocco-born French-Jewish scholar Georges Bensoussan, 64, is due to appear next month before a Paris criminal court over a complaint filed against him for incitement to racial hatred by the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, the group recently announced on its website.

      The complaint, which leading French scholars dismissed as attempt at “intimidation” in a statement Friday, was over remarks about anti-Semitism by Muslims that Bensoussan, author of a definitive 2012 work entitled “Jews in Arab Lands,” made last year during an interview aired by the France Culture radio station, the Collective said.

    • Adam Saleh: YouTube star ‘wasn’t speaking Arabic on phone when kicked off Delta flight’, passenger claims

      A passenger on the Delta Airlines flight from which YouTube star Adam Saleh was ejected on Wednesday has come forward to claim the prankster was not on the phone to his mother when he was removed.

      In fact, the supposed passenger said in a Reddit post, Mr Saleh had goaded a friend into shouting in Arabic across the plane and filmed fellow passengers’ reactions, before being told to be quiet. The claim tallies with a statement released by the airline.

    • US Government Targets Pirate Bay and Other ‘Piracy Havens’

      The US Government has listed some of the largest piracy websites and other copyright-infringing venues. The USTR calls on foreign countries to take action against popular piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay, which has important “symbolic value,” according to the authorities. In addition, stream-ripping is mentioned as an emerging threat.

    • BipCoin to Provide “Censorship-Proof DNS,” Succeed Where NameCoin Failed

      Journalists, artists, and the purveyors of other potentially controversial material have reason to be wary that their content may be taken down and censored, even more so as some of the top United States journalists warn that Donald Trump’s administration could have a chilling effect on journalistic freedom.

      Online domains that are registered with DNS (Domain Name System) are registered under centralized control and are ultimately able to be taken down, meaning that a website can be essentially censored at whim by a sufficiently controlling government. NameCoin set out to solve this vulnerability by creating a distributed domain name registration system, unable to be taken down through centralized control. However, due to various developmental flaws, NameCoin never reached more than a historical and novelty significance.

    • Kerala High Court brings procedural fairness to film censorship

      Film censorship in India has always been subject to, and defined by the whims and caprices of those appointed as the tsars of dictating the terms for movie and documentary viewership. There was no mandatory legal requirement to give a fair and proper hearing to film-makers before arriving at a final decision. Similarly, there have been cases galore – like the Supreme Court’s ruling in the KA Abbas case- that a film must be seen as a whole before deciding upon censoring it. Moreover, there have been many instances where the censors have been sitting over decisions, resulting in mounting losses for directors and producers alike. Doughty directors had to knock on the doors of the courts to get their films released, and were often compelled to insert excisions as the censors demanded.

    • Censorship in the House a lack of good faith
    • Putin on Culture Censorship: Impossible to Ban Anything in Modern World
    • Town council video request was not an attempt at censorship, says town councillor

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Tor at the Heart: OnionShare

      In August 2013, David Miranda was detained for nine hours and searched at Heathrow Airport in London while he was trying to board a plane back home to Rio de Janeiro. Working on a journalism assignment for the Guardian, he was carrying an encrypted USB stick that contained classified government documents. When I first learned about this story, I knew there must be safer ways to move sensitive documents across the world than physically carrying them, one that didn’t involve putting individual people at risk from border agents and draconian “terrorism” laws that are used to stifle award-winning journalism.

    • Obama moves to split cyberwarfare command from the NSA

      With weeks to go in his tenure, President Obama on Friday moved to end the controversial “dual-hat” arrangement under which the National Security Agency and the nation’s cyberwarfare command are headed by the same military officer.

      It is unclear whether President-elect Donald Trump will support such a move. A transition official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the next administration’s plans, said only that “cybersecurity has been and will be a central focus of the transition effort.”

      Pressure had grown on Obama to make such a move on the grounds that the two jobs are too large for one person to handle, that the two organizations have fundamentally different missions and that U.S. Cyber Command, or Cybercom, needed its own leader to become a full-fledged fighting force.

    • The Year Encryption Won

      Between the revelations of mega-hacks of Yahoo and others, Russia’s meddling in the US electoral system, and the recent spike in ransomware, it’s easy to look at 2016 as a bleak year for security. It wasn’t all so, though. In fact, the last 12 months have seen significant strides in one of the most important aspects of personal security of all: encryption.

      End-to-end encryption, which ensures that the only people who can see your communications are you and the person on the receiving end, certainly isn’t new. But in 2016, encryption went mainstream, reaching billions of people all over the world. Even more significantly, it overcame its most aggressive legal challenge yet, in a prolonged standoff between Apple and the FBI. And just this week, a Congressional committee affirmed the importance of encryption, giving hope that future laws around the topic will include at least a modicum of sanity.

    • Silicon Valley’s Trump rebellion now has EFF calling for more encryption

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation is keenly worried that President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress will step up surveillance activities and pass laws to curtail electronic rights.

      As a result, the EFF is advising the tech sector to use end-to-end encryption for every transaction by default, and to scrub logs. “You cannot be made to surrender data you do not have,” the EFF said.

    • I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent….

      So what have you downloaded lately?

      If you’re using BitTorrent without a VPN, proxy or seedbox, there’s a good chance that the rest of the world can see without asking.

      Several companies have made it their job to monitor and report files that are shared through torrent sites. This is also how tens of thousands of people end up getting warnings in their mailboxes from copyright holders, or worse.

    • This low-cost device may be the world’s best hope against account takeovers

      The past five years have witnessed a seemingly unending series of high-profile account take-overs. A growing consensus has emerged among security practitioners: even long, randomly generated passwords aren’t sufficient for locking down e-mail and other types of online assets. According to the consensus, these assets need to be augmented with a second factor of authentication.

      Now, a two-year study of more than 50,000 Google employees concludes that cryptographically based Security Keys beat out smartphones and most other forms of two-factor verification.

      The Security Keys are based on Universal Second Factor, an open standard that’s easy for end users to use and straightforward for engineers to stitch into hardware and websites. When plugged into a standard USB port, the keys provide a “cryptographic assertion” that’s just about impossible for attackers to guess or phish. Accounts can require that cryptographic key in addition to a normal user password when users log in. Google, Dropbox, GitHub, and other sites have already implemented the standard into their platforms.

    • US begins asking visitors for social media details

      The US government has started asking visitors from countries that have a visa waiver arrangement with it to provide details of their social media accounts when applying for the waiver.

      A report on the website Politico said the practice, which iTWire reported about in June, had begun on Tuesday this week.

      Australia is among the 38 countries that have a visa waiver agreement with the US; prospective visitors have to visit the electronic system for travel authorisation (ESTA) website and apply for a waiver before they travel.

    • U.S. government begins asking foreign travelers about social media

      The U.S. government quietly began requesting that select foreign visitors provide their Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts upon arriving in the country, a move designed to spot potential terrorist threats that drew months of opposition from tech giants and privacy hawks alike.

      Since Tuesday, foreign travelers arriving in the United States on the visa waiver program have been presented with an “optional” request to “enter information associated with your online presence,” a government official confirmed Thursday. The prompt includes a drop-down menu that lists platforms including Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, as well as a space for users to input their account names on those sites.

    • Camera Makers Aren’t in a Hurry to Add Encryption

      Cameras are missing one feature that may help journalists in sticky situations: encryption. Last week, over 150 documentary filmmakers and photojournalists signed an open letter to major camera manufacturers such as Nikon and Sony urging the companies to adopt encryption into their products.

      But the manufacturers aren’t exactly jumping at the chance. Out of five companies contacted by Motherboard, only two, Nikon and Olympus, responded, and neither said they would be pursuing any changes.

    • Snowden disputes Congressional report on NSA leaks

      In a 33-page report, Congress calls former NSA contractor Edward Snowden a liar and says his leaks mostly put US military at risk. Snowden disagrees.

    • House Oversight Committee Calls For Stingray Device Legislation

      The Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has issued its recommendations on the use of cell site simulators (a.k.a. “Stingrays,” presumably to Harris Corporation’s trademark erosion dismay) by law enforcement. Its recommendations are… that something needs to be done, preferably soon-ish.

    • Top US Surveillance Lawyer Argues That New Technology Makes The 4th Amendment Outdated

      Reuters has an interesting piece looking at how many experts are concerned that mass surveillance efforts by the federal government are making a mockery of the 4th Amendment. The focus of the article is on the scan of all Yahoo email that was revealed back in October, but it certainly touches on other programs as well.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • A TITANIC trade mark dispute

        It has been nearly 20 years since Titanic hit cinemas worldwide and slightly more than 100 since the eponymous ocean liner hit an iceberg.
        Despite these somewhat mixed associations, many businesses have sought to use the Titanic name for products and services ranging from spas to property developments.

      • Butterball Sues Australian Wine Company Over Its ‘Butterball’ Chardonnay

        It just won’t stop when it comes to trademark disputes involving the alcohol industry. Such disputes between wine, beer, and liquor companies are legion. In such a crowded industry, it needs to be hammered home that the purpose of trademark law is not so that big companies can bully smaller companies, but rather so that customers are protected from imitation products and from being confused as to who they are buying from.

12.23.16

Links 23/12/2016: New Alpine, Rust 1.14

Posted in News Roundup at 12:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How to build powerful and productive online communities

    These accidental communities offered tremendous value to their participants with skills development, networking, and relationships. They also offered significant financial value. The Smithsonian valued Wikipedia at tens of billions of dollars and the Linux Foundation deduced that a typical Linux distribution would cost around $11 billion to recreate using traditional commercial methods.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Now We All Agree: There are no safe backdoors when it comes to encryption

        There are many recent examples of the threats to Internet security. We’ve talked about how protecting cybersecurity is a shared responsibility and we see increased need for governments, tech companies and users to work together on topics like encryption, security vulnerabilities and surveillance.

        The most well known example is the Apple vs FBI case from earlier this year. In this case, law enforcement officials said they were unable to access encrypted data on an iPhone during an investigation. The FBI wanted to require Apple to create flawed versions of their software to access encrypted data on an iPhone of a known criminal.

        Mozilla argued in statements and filings that requiring tech companies to create encryption backdoors for law enforcement to decrypt data would 1) weaken security for individuals and the Internet overall, defeating the purpose of creating such technology in the first place and 2) set a dangerous precedent in the US and globally for governments to require tech companies to make flawed versions of software that would be vulnerable to criminals (not just government hacking).

      • Rust 1.14 Released With Experimental WebAssembly Support
      • Announcing Rust 1.14

        The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.14.0. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

        As always, you can install Rust 1.14.0 from the appropriate page on our website, and check out the detailed release notes for 1.14.0 on GitHub. 1230 patches were landed in this release.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Guix and GuixSD 0.12.0 released

      We are pleased to announce the new release of GNU Guix and GuixSD, version 0.12.0!

      The release comes with USB installation images to install the standalone GuixSD, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries.

    • GNU Guix/GuixSD 0.12 Released
    • GNU Compiler Collection 6.3 Fixes 79 Bugs as GCC 7 Is Nearing End of Development

      Red Hat’s Jakub Jelinek was proud to announce the release and immediate availability of the third stabilization update to the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 6 series for GNU/Linux distributions.

      GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 6.3 is here four months after the release of the previous maintenance update, namely GCC 6.2, and promises to address many of the bugs and annoyances reported by users since then. According to the developers, it looks like more than 79 recorder bugs have been fixed in this new version.

  • Public Services/Government

    • France’s free software sector grows by 15%

      Sales by France’s ICT companies specialising in free and open source software and related services have grown by 15% on average in the period October 2015 – October 2016, reports the Conseil National du Logiciel Libre (CNLL), France’s trade group advocating free software, representing over three hundred ICT firms. “Our sector is growing, and has many start-ups, and small and medium-sizes enterprises”, CNLL said in a statement.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Thursday’s security updates
    • Lithuania said found Russian spyware on its government computers

      The Baltic state of Lithuania, on the frontline of growing tensions between the West and Russia, says the Kremlin is responsible for cyber attacks that have hit government computers over the last two years.

      The head of cyber security told Reuters three cases of Russian spyware on its government computers had been discovered since 2015, and there had been 20 attempts to infect them this year.

      “The spyware we found was operating for at least half a year before it was detected – similar to how it was in the USA,” Rimtautas Cerniauskas, head of the Lithuanian Cyber Security Centre said.

    • Dear CIO: Linux Mint Encourages Users to Keep System Up-to-Date

      Swapnil Bhartiya gets it wrong.

      Let me start by pointing out that Bhartiya is not only a capable open source writer, he’s also a friend. Another also: he knows better. That’s why the article he just wrote for CIO completely confounds me. Methinks he jumped the gun and didn’t think it through before he hit the keyboard.

      The article ran with the headline Linux Mint, please stop discouraging users from upgrading. In it, he jumps on Mint’s lead developer Clement Lefebvre’s warning against unnecessary upgrades to Linux Mint.

    • Infosec in Review: Security Professionals Look Back at 2016

      2016 was an exciting year in information security. There were mega-breaches, tons of new malware strains, inventive phishing attacks, and laws dealing with digital security and privacy. Each of these instances brought the security community to where we are now: on the cusp of 2017.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Donald Trump: US must greatly expand nuclear capabilities

      Donald Trump has called for the US to “greatly strengthen and expand” its nuclear capabilities.

      The president-elect, who takes office next month, said the US must take such action “until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes”.

      His spokesman later said that he was referring to the need to prevent nuclear proliferation.

      Mr Trump spoke hours after President Vladimir Putin said Russia needs to bolster its military nuclear potential.

      The US has 7,100 nuclear weapons and Russia has 7,300, according to the US nonpartisan Arms Control Association.

    • Donald Trump Unleashes The Hounds Of War

      See what happens when you put a mad man in charge? Much of my lifetime was spent trying to put nuclear weapons back in the box so they would never be used. Now Trump wants to fire up the arms-race again, just to make USA “Great” again. What a short-sighted, wrong-headed, dangerous old fool is the president-elect.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • ‘You couldn’t hear, you couldn’t sit’: Activists asked to leave Enbridge meeting Tuesday night (W/ VIDEO)

      A community meeting hosted by energy company Enbridge quickly dissolved Tuesday after a Bemidji police officer asked environmental activist Winona LaDuke to leave.

      The meeting, held at the DoubleTree hotel in Bemidji, was meant to give community members and landowners information about the proposed replacement of Line 3, an Enbridge oil pipeline that runs from Alberta, Canada, through northern Minnesota to Superior, Wis.

    • Yes, the Arctic’s freakishly warm winter is due to humans’ climate influence

      For the Arctic, like the globe as a whole, 2016 has been exceptionally warm. For much of the year, Arctic temperatures have been much higher than normal, and sea ice concentrations have been at record low levels.

      The Arctic’s seasonal cycle means that the lowest sea ice concentrations occur in September each year. But while September 2012 had less ice than September 2016, this year the ice coverage has not increased as expected as we moved into the northern winter. As a result, since late October, Arctic sea ice extent has been at record low levels for the time of year.

    • Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions rising, Government figures show

      The latest report card from the Environment Department shows emissions rose by 0.8 per cent for the year until June.

      The Government said the results support its climate policies.

      “These figures show that Australia’s emissions per capita and emissions per unit of GDP are now at their lowest level in 27 years,” Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg said.

      “It demonstrates that we are able to meet our climate targets without a carbon tax which Bill Shorten and the Labor Party want to bring back.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • How Russia surpassed Germany to become the racist ideal for Trump-loving white supremacists

      Richard Spencer, the current face (and haircut) of US’s alt-right, believes Russia is the “sole white power in the world.” David Duke, meanwhile, believes Russia holds the “key to white survival.” And as Matthew Heimbach, head of the white nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party, recently said, Russian president Vladimir Putin is the “leader of the free world”—one who has helped morph Russia into an “axis for nationalists.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • China Seeks Comment on Seven Draft Cybersecurity and Data Privacy National Standards

      China’s National Information Security Standardization Technical Committee (“NISSTC”), a standard-setting committee jointly supervised by the Standardization Administration of China (“SAC”) and the Cyberspace Administration of China (“CAC”), released seven draft national standards related to cybersecurity and data privacy for public comment on December 21, 2016. The public comment period runs until February 2, 2017.

    • Encrypted messaging app Signal uses Google to bypass censorship

      Developers of the popular Signal secure messaging app have started to use Google’s domain as a front to hide traffic to their service and to sidestep blocking attempts.

      Bypassing online censorship in countries where internet access is controlled by the government can be very hard for users. It typically requires the use of virtual private networking (VPN) services or complex solutions like Tor, which can be banned too.

      Open Whisper Systems, the company that develops Signal — a free, open-source app — faced this problem recently when access to its service started being censored in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Some users reported that VPNs, Apple’s FaceTime and other voice-over-IP apps were also being blocked.

    • Surveillance has gone too far. The jig is up

      Just as we’d resigned ourselves to the fact that the best 2016 was going to offer by the way of cheer was a new Star Wars film, and the prospect of a few mince pies and a tonne of mulled wine, Europe’s top court has given us a very welcome early Christmas present.

      For anybody with an interest in protecting democracy, privacy, freedom of expression, a free press and the safety and cybersecurity of everybody in the UK, Wednesday’s EU court of justice judgment is cause for celebration.

      In a landmark ruling – its first major post-referendum judgment involving the UK – the court ruled that our government is breaking the law by collecting all our internet and phone call records, then opening them up freely to hundreds of organisations and agencies.

      This was a challenge brought by Labour deputy leader Tom Watson (and initially Brexit minister David Davis), and represented by Liberty, to the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (Dripa) – a temporary “emergency” law covering state surveillance, rushed on to the statute books in a matter of days in 2014.

    • Generalised data retention: a blow to mass surveillance!

      The European Court of Justice published a very important decision last 21 December, condemning the principle of generalised data retention by operators, including when mandated by Member States implementing this principle on issues linked to security or fight against crime. Data retention must be the exception and not the rule and can only be used with strong safeguards due to the very serious violation that such retention constitutes for privacy. La Quadrature du Net welcomes this very positive decision and is asking French government to acknowledge European decisions by cancelling all legislation linked to the exploitation or conservation of internet users data.

      The decision of 21 December follows a very important ECJ decision: Digital Rights Ireland. In April 2014, the ECJ invalidated the 2006 European Directive forcing Member States to organise the collection and the general retention of all connection data of European internet users. Already, the ECJ considered that this systematic retention of connection data undermined too much the right to privacy: even when not taking into account the future use of this data, the mere fact of keeping it was already a systematic breach into citizens’ lives.

    • HTTPS Deployment Growing by Leaps and Bounds: 2016 in Review

      This was a great year for adoption of HTTPS encryption for secure connections to websites.

      HTTPS is an essential technology for security and privacy on the Web, and we’ve long been asking sites to turn it on to protect their users from spying (and from censorship and tampering with site content). This year, lots of factors came together to make it happen, including ongoing news about surveillance, advances in Web server capacity, nudges from industry, government, and Web browsers, and the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority.

      By some measures, more than half of page loads in Firefox and in Chrome are now secured with HTTPS—the first time this has ever happened in the Web’s history. That’s right: for the first time ever, most pages viewed on the Web were encrypted! (As another year-in-review post will discuss, browsers are also experimenting with and rolling out stronger encryption technologies to better protect those connections.)

    • In Declassified Edward Snowden Report, Committee Walks Back Claims About ‘Intentional Lying’

      The House Intelligence Committee in September issued a three-page document alerting the public that information from its two-year investigation of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden had turned up evidence that Snowden was a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” who exhibited a “pattern of intentional lying.”

      The executive summary of the committee’s report on Snowden was released one day after large advocacy groups launched a campaign asking President Barack Obama for a pardon, arguing Snowden’s leaks about mass surveillance were in the public interest.

      The committee’s message was clear: a pardon would be undeserved, as Snowden arguably harmed national security and did so while falsely portraying himself as a whistleblower, when in fact he was a habitual liar and a disgruntled employee.

    • US government starts asking foreign travelers to disclose their social media accounts

      The US Customs and Border Protection has started demanding that foreign travelers hand over Facebook, Twitter, and other social media account information upon entering the country, according to a report from Politico. The new policy follows a proposal laid out back in June and applies only to those travelers who enter the US temporarily without a visa through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, process. The goal, the government says, is to “identify potential threats,” a spokesperson tells Politico.

    • Google Employee Sues Company Over “Internal Spying Program”

      A man who worked at Google as a product manager in its Nest division is now suing the company over what he and his lawyer describe as an internal “spying program.”

      The former employee says that internal policies and confidentiality agreements encourage Google employees to report colleagues who they suspect of leaking information to the media.

      According to tech news site The Information, who first reported on the lawsuit, Google has set up a special website where employees can report each other.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Philippines journalist killed after criticising officials over illegal drug lab

      A Philippine provincial newspaper publisher has been shot dead after writing a column alleging official negligence over a recently discovered methamphetamine laboratory, in the first killing of a journalist during the country’s war on drugs.

      The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) condemned Monday’s murder of Larry Que, publisher of a news site on the island of Catanduanes, and said it “challenged” President Rodrigo Duterte to find the perpetrators and utilise a special task force he set up to protect media.

    • Missouri dooms countless children to the school-to-prison pipeline

      In a move that will likely doom countless children to the school-to-prison pipeline, Missouri will soon charge students who get into fights with felonies.

      A state statute that goes into effect on Jan. 1 will no longer treat fights in schools or buses as a minor offense, regardless of a young person’s age or grade. Instead, School Resource Officers (SROs) and local law enforcement will now intervene by arresting and charging them with assault in the third degree — a Class E felony. That type of assault can result in four years of prison time, fines, or probation. Attempts or threats to cause harm will be treated as a Class A misdemeanor, which can lead to a year of prison time. If law enforcement or school officials consider the assaulted person a “special victim,” a student can be charged with a Class D felony that comes with a maximum prison term of seven years.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Publishing Lobbyists Suck Up To Trump With Lies About Copyright, Ask Him To Kill DMCA Safe Harbors

        With the Donald Trump administration fully taking shape, lobbyists for basically every industry (yes, including tech and internet companies) are groveling before the President with whatever their pet projects are. The latest to put together a letter is the Association of American Publishers, via its top lobbyist Allan Adler. You may recall Adler from a few years ago, in which he explained why his organization opposed a copyright treaty for the blind, noting that his members were upset about the idea of ever including user rights in international treaties, and only wanted to see international agreements that focused on stronger copyright protections. So, you get a sense of where he’s coming from.

12.22.16

Links 22/12/2016: VirtualBox 5.1.12, Qt 5.8.0 RC, IPFire 2.19

Posted in News Roundup at 7:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

    • ALSA 1.1.3 Released For Linux Sound

      Version 1.1.3 of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) was released today.

    • A Holiday Gift From Conexant: an ALSA Driver For Recent Cherry Trail SOC Based Devices

      Late on Monday Simon Ho of Conexant announced the release of a driver for the company’s driver for CX2072X codec to the ALSA-devel mailing list. I have to add a tip of the proverbial hat to Pierre Bossart who shared the information in kernel.bugzilla.org where I found it. According to Mr. Bossart we can expect “a follow-up machine driver soon from Intel.” The machines where sound has been a problem have Intel SST sound on the SOC which uses the Conexant codec. On those systems the “sound card” is simply not detected.

    • Suzuki Joins Automotive Grade Linux to Expand Technology Development through Open Source Collaboration

      Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project developing a Linux-based, open platform for the connected car, today announced that Suzuki is joining The Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux as a Platinum member.

      “Adopting an open source approach to software development is a key part of our technology strategy and will help us to keep pace with the rapid advances happening across the auto industry,” said Hisanori Takashiba, Executive General Manager of Research & Development at Suzuki Motor Corporation. “Joining Automotive Grade Linux expands our R&D capabilities and enables us to collaborate with hundreds of developers across the industry on new automotive technologies.”

    • Graphics Stack

      • RADV Radeon Vulkan Code Enables More Driver Features

        The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa has seen some activity last night to enable more fine-grained features.

        RADV now enables shaderImageGatherExtended. The image gather extended functionality for shaders is described via the Vulkan registry as “indicates whether the extended set of image gather instructions are available in shader code. If this feature is not enabled, the OpImage*Gather instructions do not support the Offset and ConstOffsets operands. This also indicates whether shader modules can declare the ImageGatherExtended capability.”

      • Haswell OpenGL 4.0 / FP64 Support In Mesa Might Finally Be Close To Merging

        It appears that ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 for Intel Haswell graphics hardware might finally be merged soon into Mesa and thereby exposing OpenGL 4.0 support.

        While Broadwell and newer Intel hardware has OpenGL 4.5 support in Mesa, the Haswell support is left behind as while it can reach OpenGL ~4.1, it’s currently at OpenGL 3.3. The blocking extension from Haswell having OpenGL 4.0 is the big ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 extension, but the code has been sitting around for a while.

    • Benchmarks

      • Blender & Darktable OpenCL Benchmarks On 13 NVIDIA GPUs

        For those into Blender modeling or Darktable for your RAW photography workflow, hopefully you find these latest OpenCL benchmarks interesting. The NVIDIA 375.26 Linux driver was used for benchmarking. The cards tested based upon what I had available included the GTX 680, GTX 760, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080. The tests in this article are just on the NVIDIA side with having no new AMDGPU-PRO release available for testing since my last 16.50 comparison and the open-source stack still leaving a lot to be desired and not yet trying out the brand new ROCm release, but I plan to work on benchmarks of that over Christmas if the stack holds up.

      • Linux Workstation/Server Distribution Benchmarks For Winter 2016

        The latest for your enjoyment of our year-end comparison articles and benchmarks is a fresh comparison of various workstation/enterprise/server oriented Linux distributions when looking at relevant workloads. Testing for this distribution comparison being done from a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E system while a desktop-focused Linux desktop comparison for winter 2016 will be posted still before year’s end.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Best GNOME Distro, Linux All-in-One, PIXEL for PCs

        Today was another busy day in Linux news with the top story being the release of Red Hat’s third quarter 2017 financial report. Third quarter revenue missed analysts’ expectations and cut full year forecast along with the resignation of CFO all added up to a rough night for Red Hat stock. Elsewhere, Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the release of PIXEL for PC and Mac and The Document Foundation introduced MUFFIN, a “tasty new user interface” for LibreOffice. Blogger Dedoimedo chose the best GNOME distro of the year and Andy Weir covered Acer’s new all-in-one PC that’s available with Linux.

      • GTK 3.89.2 Released With Vulkan Renderer, Continued GDK/GSK Changes

        Matthias Clasen shifted focus today from working on the new recipes program to putting out a new development release in the road to GTK4.

        GTK+ 3.89.4 is the new GTK4 development snapshot released today. This the experimental Vulkan renderer implementation that co-exists alongside the OpenGL back-end. Related, the GDK and GSK (Scene Kit) rendering code continues to be refactored. Some changes to handling include now only drawing the top-level windows and always re-drawing the whole window. GTK has also been working towards EGL X11 support — as an alternative to the GLX X11 code — while the EGL Wayland support is obviously already there.

      • Best Gnome distro of 2016

        Ever since Gnome 3 came to life, I struggled with how it was realized and what it did, a far cry (but not Far Cry, hi hi) from its predecessor. It was functionally inferior to its rival, and it is the chief reason why MATE and Cinnamon came to life. Then, over the years, it slowly evolved, and now, at last, the combination of its core elements and a thick layer of necessary extensions allows for a decent compromise. Throughout 2016, I tested more Gnome releases than ever before, I was quite pleased with the results, and now we will select the best candidate for this year.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Asus, T-Mobile have CES surprises in store for Android users

          As the end of December approaches, visions of sugar plums are dancing in Android fans’ heads as they await the big event. Not Christmas—we’re talking about CES 2017. While there are more rumors than you can shake a stocking at, several companies have already begun to promote their upcoming announcements.

        • 2016 and Android: 5 Things That Still Stand Out

          2016 was, to be honest, not exactly the best year in recent memory. From the nastiest presidential election we may ever see (until the next one in four years) to the early deaths of some of the great entertainers and people of this world, there was a lot to be sad about. But even in tech or Android specifically, we saw Samsung go through the Note 7 recall, carriers go extra shady on this “unlimited” idea, and even Google kill the Nexus line. What a year.

          And now with that depressing glob of snot on your mind, let’s talk about five (or six) things that are still standing out from 2016 as we head into 2017. Because even if 2016 sucked, a lot of stuff did happen!

        • Our Favorite Android Smartphone of 2016

          While we are still bringing in votes for the DL Reader’s Choice for Phone of the Year (POTY), we are ready to present you with our choice(s). In 2016, we saw a plethora of great smartphones from a number of makers, which made for a very exciting and busy year.

          Because there was such a high number of fantastic phones, it was actually quite the struggle to choose a single one as our favorite. As you will see, we have a couple runner ups this year, only because we didn’t want to have a three-way tie for favorite.

        • LG announces five new phones you probably won’t care about

          Ahead of CES, LG has announced four new phones in the K series — the K10, K8, K4, and K3 — that will make their debut at the trade show. LG will also showcase the Stylus 3, which offers an “improved writing experience” that mimics the “feel and feedback of an actual pen.”

Free Software/Open Source

  • 5 open source gift ideas for non-techies

    It’s getting down to the wire here for the holidays. You know, that time when we all realize that we’ve completely neglected to get gifts for people. While reading through our very excellent gift guide, a thought occurred to me: Those unfortunate souls with lives devoid of technological wonder… they need presents, too. So what do we get them? What do we present to these people whose interests diverge so greatly from our own? I’m glad you asked. I made a list.

  • What is Odoo Open Source ERP?

    Odoo’s open source application offerings range beyond ERP to include such features as CRM, website building, eCommerce and BI.

    Belgium-based Odoo made a name for itself under its previous name of OpenERP, an open source ERP application that quickly gained traction, especially in Europe. Over the past few years, however, the company has expanded into many more areas of the enterprise application landscape.

  • Swift Is Old, Why Should I Use it?

    A central concept to Swift is the Binary Large OBject (BLOB). Instead of block storage, data is divided into some number of binary streams. Any file, of any format, can be reduced to a series of ones and zeros, sometimes referred to as serialization. Start at the first bit of a file and count ones and zeros until you have a block, a megabyte or even five gigabytes. This becomes an object. The next number of bits becomes an object until there is no more file to divide into objects. These objects can be stored locally or sent to a Swift proxy server. The proxy server will send the object to a series of storage servicers where memcached will accept the object, at memory speeds. Definitely an advantage in the days before inexpensive solid state drives.

  • Ticketmaster Chooses Kubernetes to Stay Ahead of Competition

    If you’ve ever gone to an event that required a ticket, chances are you’ve done business with Ticketmaster. The ubiquitous ticket company has been around for 40 years and is the undisputed market leader in its field.

    To stay on top, the company is trying to ensure its best product creators can focus on products, not infrastructure. The company has begun to roll out a massive public cloud strategy that uses Kubernetes, an open source platform for the deployment and management of application containers, to keep everything running smoothly, and sent two of its top technologists to deliver a keynote at the 2016 CloudNativeCon in Seattle explaining their methodology.

  • Events

    • LibrePlanet 2017 will return to MIT thanks to SIPB, March 25-26, 2017

      This is the fourth year the FSF will partner with MIT’s Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) to bring this two-day celebration of free software and software freedom to Cambridge, MA. Registration for LibrePlanet is now open, and admission is gratis for FSF members and students.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox takes the next step towards rolling out multi-process to everyone

        With Firefox 50, Mozilla has rolled out the first major piece of its new multi-process architecture. Firefox 50 is also Firefox’s current stable release.

        Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari all have a multiple process design that separates their rendering engine—the part of the browser that reads and interprets HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—from the browser frame. They do this for stability reasons (if the rendering process crashes, it doesn’t kill the entire browser) and security reasons (the rendering process can be run in a low-privilege sandbox, so exploitable flaws in the rendering engine are harder to take advantage of).

  • SaaS/Back End

    • 3 highly effective strategies for managing test data

      Over the last year, I’ve researched, written, and spoken coast-to-coast on strategies for managing test data, and the common patterns you can use to resolve these issues. The set of solutions surrounding test data are what I call “data strategies for testing.” Here are three patterns for managing your own test data more effectively. If after reading you want to dig in more deeply, drop in on my presentations on these patterns during my upcoming presentation at the upcoming Automation Guild conference.

    • Tuning OpenStack Hardware for the Enterprise

      As a cloud management framework OpenStack thus far been limited to the province of telecommunications carriers and providers of Web-scale services that have plenty of engineering talent to throw at managing one of the most ambitious open source projects there is. In contrast, adoption of OpenStack in enterprise IT environments has been much more limited.

      But that may change as more advanced networking technologies that are optimized for processor-intensive virtualization come to market. Some of the technologies we have covered here include single root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV) and Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). Another technology includes using field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) in Network Interface Cards, to make them smarter about how to offload virtualized loads.

    • Q&A: Hortonworks CTO unfolds the big data road map

      Hortonworks has built its business on big data and Hadoop, but the Hortonworks Data Platform provides analytics and features support for a range of technologies beyond Hadoop, including MapReduce, Pig, Hive, and Spark. Hortonworks DataFlow, meanwhile, offers streaming analytics and uses technologies like Apache Nifi and Kafka.

      InfoWorld Executive Editor Doug Dineley and Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Hortonworks CTO Scott Gnau about how the company sees the data business shaking out, the Spark vs. Hadoop face-off, and Hortonworks’ release strategy and efforts to build out the DataFlow platform for data in motion.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Public Services/Government

    • EC reports examine value of open government, help inspire for implementation

      This month, the European Commission published two reports, the first providing inspiration for the implementation of open government services, the second providing insight on the social value of these services, with advice on how to foster their use and increase their impact. The reports are part of the ‘eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020′, which aims to modernise public administration, achieve the Digital Single Market, and engage more with citizens and businesses to deliver high quality services. The reports are targeted at European policy makers.

Leftovers

  • Norwegians are about to lose their FM radio and they’re not happy about it

    In just a matter of weeks, Norway will tune out FM radio for good and become the world’s first country to switch over to digital-only transmissions.
    Norway’s government has decided that the nation’s FM airwaves will fall silent from January 11, 2017, starting in Nordland and gradually moving south.

    After nearly a century of the analogue system, which revolutionised music listening with high-fidelity stereo sound compared to mono AM transmissions, the changeover to Digital Audio Broadcasting’s advanced version (DAB+) will render the country’s almost eight million radio sets obsolete.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Lead Contaminated Drinking Water Is Much More Prevalent Than You Think

      In 2001, Washington, DC changed the chemical used to treat the city’s water from chlorine to chloramine. The switch was supposed to limit byproducts in the water that arise during the disinfection process. It turned out, however, that chloramine also has the particularly powerful trait of corroding lead pipes, which allows the toxic metal to show up in faucets and drinking water.

      Authorities from the water utility knew of the astronomical lead levels in 2001 but, for fear of repercussion, kept mum. It carried on for 3 more years, and as many as 42,000 children in the womb, or less than 2 years old, were exposed to extreme levels of lead, which can cause serious cognitive, and behavioral problems in children, as well as hearing, and weight loss, and fatigue. The DC water crisis from 2001 to 2004 is still considered by experts to be the worst such calamity in modern American history.

  • Security

    • Most ATMs in India Are Easy Targets for Hackers & Malware Attacks

      Hacking is a hotly debated subject across the country right now, and it’s fair to say that the ATM next door is also in danger. It has been reported that over 70 percent of the 2 lakh money-dispensing ATM machines in our country are running on Microsoft’s outdated Windows XP operating system, leaving it vulnerable to cyber attacks.

      Support for Windows XP was discontinued by Microsoft in 2014 which means that since then the company hasn’t rolled out any security updates for this Windows version.

      While it doesn’t make sense for banks to continue using outdated software, security experts feel that the practice stems from legacy behaviour, when physical attacks were a bigger threat than software hacks.

    • 20 Questions Security Pros Should Ask Themselves Before Moving To The Cloud

      A template for working collaboratively with the business in today’s rapidly changing technology environment.

      Everywhere I go lately, the cloud seems to be on the agenda as a topic of conversation. Not surprisingly, along with all the focus, attention, and money the cloud is receiving, comes the hype and noise we’ve come to expect in just about every security market these days. Given this, along with how new the cloud is to most of us in the security world, how can security professionals make sense of the situation? I would argue that that depends largely on what type of situation we’re referring to, exactly. And therein lies the twist.

      Rather than approach this piece as “20 questions security professionals should ask cloud providers,” I’d like to take a slightly different angle. It’s a perspective I think will be more useful to security professionals grappling with issues and challenges introduced by the cloud on a daily basis. For a variety of reasons, organizations are moving both infrastructure and applications to the cloud at a rapid rate – far more rapidly than anyone would have forecast even two or three years ago.

    • Report: $3-5M in Ad Fraud Daily from ‘Methbot’

      New research suggests that an elaborate cybercrime ring is responsible for stealing between $3 million and $5 million worth of revenue from online publishers and video advertising networks each day. Experts say the scam relies on a vast network of cloaked Internet addresses, rented data centers, phony Web sites and fake users made to look like real people watching short ad segments online.

      Online advertising fraud is a $7 billion a year problem, according to AdWeek. Much of this fraud comes from hacked computers and servers that are infected with malicious software which forces the computers to participate in ad fraud. Malware-based ad fraud networks are cheap to acquire and to run, but they’re also notoriously unstable and unreliable because they are constantly being discovered and cleaned up by anti-malware companies.

    • Linux Backdoor Gives Hackers Full Control Over Vulnerable Devices [Ed: Microsoft booster Bogdan Popa says “Linux Backdoor”; that’s a lie. It’s Microsoft that has them.]

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Keeping Cheerful in a Difficult World

      It has been a difficult couple of days at the end of a difficult year. Individual lone wolf terrorism is impossible to stop completely. Fortunately, although it commands the headlines when it occurs, it is quite incredibly rare. Terrorism remains almost the least likely of freak deaths you could suffer, and everywhere in Europe is thousands of times less likely than the comparatively mundane event of dying in an ordinary traffic accident. Yet the perception of the terrorism risk is entirely wrong – for precisely the same reason that recent surveys show that people massively overestimate the number of Muslims in the population. Relentless media propaganda takes its toll.

    • US Military Returns Land to Japan, but Okinawa Isn’t Celebrating

      When US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and top American military brass join Japanese officials for a much-anticipated land return ceremony on December 22 (Japan time), they will mark the largest handover of property by the United States in a generation. Okinawa, once the independent Ryukyu kingdom, has been part of Japan since the 1870s and after World War II was administered by the US military until 1972 when the islands reverted to Japanese control. But the US never really left and still has roughly half of its 50,000 troops and its greatest concentration of military bases on just 0.6 percent of Japanese territory.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • 39 Chernobyl children to spend Christmas in Ireland

      A group of 39 children with special needs will fly into Dublin from Chernobyl this afternoon before heading to homes all around the country for the best Christmas holiday of their lives.

      The very special visit follows an historic move by the UN this month, to designate an ‘International Chernobyl Disaster Remembrance Day’ for the future.

      Adi Roche from Chernobyl Children International (pictured) says it’s heart-warming that thirty years on – the survivors of the world’s worst nuclear disaster are not being forgotten: “I tried it one more time, last April at the General Assembly, not sure whether it would fall on deaf ears or not,

    • Judge rules school children can pursue climate change lawsuit against Washington State

      Eight Seattle children should have “their day in court” to argue that Washington State and others aren’t protecting them from climate change, a judge ruled.

      King County Superior Court Judge Hollis Hill allowed the young petitioners to move ahead in their case against the state, writing that “it is time for these youth to have the opportunity to address their concerns in a court of law, concerns raised under statute and under the state and federal constitutions.”

      The petitioners, between 12 and 16 years old, had asked the judge last month to find the state Department of Ecology in contempt for failing to adequately protect them and future generations from global warming.

    • Storm Barbara set to batter UK and cause Christmas chaos

      Storm Barbara is set to bring strong winds and Christmas chaos to Britain, according to forecasters.

      Gusts of up to 90mph are predicted to hit the UK, with the worst of destruction expected between Friday evening and Christmas Eve morning.

      Scotland appears likely to suffer the most, while pockets of Northern Ireland, north Wales and north England could also feel the full force.

      Forecasters warned the potential for structural damage and disruption to some transport services means the storm’s impact could be felt long after the winds have subsided.

    • Fog in the south east threatens Christmas travel

      Fog across the south east has disrupted flights at Heathrow, Gatwick and City airports, British Airways says.

      The delays in London come as people travelling for Christmas were warned to expect disruption across the UK as Storm Barbara approaches.

      The Met Office said the worst of the weather was expected on Friday and Saturday, with gusts of up to 90mph forecast in parts of Scotland.

    • Storm Barbara AND Storm Conor to wreak havoc on Christmas Day in double mega storm

      Strong gales of up to 100mph are expected to smash into Britain with the arrival of the freak storm – with many predicting travel cancellations.

      And during Christmas it”s beginning to look likely that another storm will strike in the aftermath of Storm Barbara.

  • Finance

    • U.K. Companies Plan 2017 Price Hikes as Pound Drop Lifts Costs

      If you’ve ever gone to an event that required a ticket, chances are you’ve done business with Ticketmaster. The ubiquitous ticket company has been around for 40 years and is the undisputed market leader in its field.

      To stay on top, the company is trying to ensure its best product creators can focus on products, not infrastructure. The company has begun to roll out a massive public cloud strategy that uses Kubernetes, an open source platform for the deployment and management of application containers, to keep everything running smoothly, and sent two of its top technologists to deliver a keynote at the 2016 CloudNativeCon in Seattle explaining their methodology.

    • Google avoided US$3.6b in taxes in 2015: report

      Last year, Google, along with Microsoft and Apple, came under attack during an Australian Senate hearing into tax avoidance.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • A Spy Coup in America?

      As Official Washington’s latest “group think” solidifies into certainty – that Russia used hacked Democratic emails to help elect Donald Trump – something entirely different may be afoot: a months-long effort by elements of the U.S. intelligence community to determine who becomes the next president.

      I was told by a well-placed intelligence source some months ago that senior leaders of the Obama administration’s intelligence agencies – from the CIA to the FBI – were deeply concerned about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump ascending to the presidency. And, it’s true that intelligence officials often come to see themselves as the stewards of America’s fundamental interests, sometimes needing to protect the country from dangerous passions of the public or from inept or corrupt political leaders.

    • Emanuel releases private emails, ending court fight

      After fighting in court to keep his private email accounts completely concealed from public view, Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday released a trove of messages from throughout his nearly six years in office and announced a new city ban on using private email to conduct official business.

      The records released by his administration showed Emanuel has frequently used a private Gmail account and another personal, unofficial email address — mayor_re@rahmemail.com — to communicate with top aides, business leaders, political supporters, national media figures and others who wanted to discuss city government with him.

    • Unsealed Clinton Email Warrant Asks Court To Maintain Secrecy Of Investigation James Comey Publicly Announced To Congress

      The FBI’s search warrant for Anthony Weiner’s laptop was unsealed and released yesterday. This isn’t the warrant the FBI originally used to seize and search the laptop. That one was looking for evidence related to allegations Weiner sexted an underage girl.

      This warrant is the second search warrant for the same laptop, related to the discovery of emails to and from Hillary Clinton on it. This discovery during an unrelated search prompted Comey to write a letter to Congress informing it that he was going to be diving back into the Clinton email investigation.

      The second dive into emails stored on the laptop by former Clinton aide (and estranged spouse of Anthony Weiner) Huma Abedin resulted in the discovery of nothing the FBI hadn’t already seen. Comey apologized for getting everyone hot and bothered by his shouting of “CLASSIFIED!” in a crowded electoral season, but believed his actions were justified because he feared this information would likely leak anyway.

    • Celebrity isn’t just harmless fun – it’s the smiling face of the corporate machine

      Now that a reality TV star is preparing to become president of the United States, can we agree that celebrity culture is more than just harmless fun – that it might, in fact, be an essential component of the systems that govern our lives?

      The rise of celebrity culture did not happen by itself. It has long been cultivated by advertisers, marketers and the media. And it has a function. The more distant and impersonal corporations become, the more they rely on other people’s faces to connect them to their customers.

      Corporation means body; capital means head. But corporate capital has neither head nor body. It is hard for people to attach themselves to a homogenised franchise owned by a hedge fund whose corporate identity consists of a filing cabinet in Panama City. So the machine needs a mask. It must wear the face of someone we see as often as we see our next-door neighbours. It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living: her role is to exist in our minds. By playing our virtual neighbour, she induces a click of recognition on behalf of whatever grey monolith sits behind her this week.

      [...]

      The celebrities you see most often are the most lucrative products, extruded through a willing media by a marketing industry whose power no one seeks to check. This is why actors and models now receive such disproportionate attention, capturing much of the space once occupied by people with their own ideas: their expertise lies in channelling other people’s visions.

    • U.S. government loses to Russia’s disinformation campaign: advisers

      The U.S. government spent more than a decade preparing responses to malicious hacking by a foreign power but had no clear strategy when Russia launched a disinformation campaign over the internet during the U.S. election campaign, current and former White House cyber security advisers said.

      Far more effort has gone into plotting offensive hacking and preparing defenses against the less probable but more dramatic damage from electronic assaults on the power grid, financial system or direct manipulation of voting machines.

      Over the last several years, U.S. intelligence agencies tracked Russia’s use of coordinated hacking and disinformation in Ukraine and elsewhere, the advisers and intelligence experts said, but there was little sustained, high-level government conversation about the risk of the propaganda coming to the United States.

    • 2016: The Year the Media Broke

      Rupert Murdoch’s bid for a full takeover of Sky TV demonstrates graphically that the extreme concentration of media ownership has not yet run its course. It also yet again underlines the extent to which the Leveson Inquiry was barking entirely up the wrong tree. There is no question to which the correct answer is increased government control over free speech. Any inquiry into the media should look first and foremost at its highly concentrated ownership and how to instil more pluralism. It is probably now too late to expect that a vibrant, diverse traditional media is achievable. We can however be cheered by the continuing decline of the political influence of the mainstream media, as illustrated by its “Fake News” panic.

      Even five years ago, if the mainstream media carried a meme that was fundamentally untrue, the chances of persuading public opinion of its untruth were almost minimal. Similarly if they wished to ignore an inconvenient truth, it would be very hard indeed to get it out to a significant number.

      Four years ago, when the official version of the Adam Werritty affair was front page news for days, causing the resignation of the Defence Secretary, I discovered that in fact the real scandal ran much deeper. Werritty – who had an official pass but no official position – had held at least eight meetings with Matthew Gould, now Cabinet Office anti-WikiLeaks supremo. Gould had at the time of some of the meetings been ambassador to Israel, at the time of others Private Secretary to two different Foreign Secretaries, David Miliband and William Hague. On at least one occasion it was acknowledged by the FCO that Mossad were also present. For the three meetings which occurred while Gould was Private Secretary, I requested the diary entries under the Freedom of Information Act. The meetings were held on 8 Sept 2009, 27 Sept 2010 and 6 Feb 2011. The FCO sent me, in reply to my Freedom of Information request, the diary entries for those three days with only the dates – the rest was 100% redacted, in the interests of national security.

    • Vox’s Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest, Explained

      One of Vox’s major investors—second only to Comcast—is General Atlantic. The New York–based private equity firm invested $46.5 million in Vox Media in December 2014, roughly six months after the flagship website Vox.com launched. As part of the deal, General Atlantic VP Zachary Kaplan got a seat on Vox Media’s corporate board (as is common in large investment rounds). General Atlantic also invests in several technology and media companies Vox Media covers, without Vox disclosing this fact.

      [...]

      General Atlantic was also one of three lead investors in a $1.5 billion fundraising round for AirBnb in December 2015. While Vox has been critical of AirBnb’s high-profile problems with racist users, the New Money vertical was quick to defend the San Fransisco room-sharing giant after New York state passed restrictive legislation—again, without any disclosure of General Atlantic’s investment: “New York’s Crackdown on ‘Commercial’ Airbnb Listings Is Misguided” (11/18/16).

      When asked for comment on their disclosure policy, Vox managing editor Lauren Williams wrote back, “That’s something we’ve been thinking about, and we plan to post one in the new year.” A follow-up email asking whether Vox covering companies owned by its major investors was a potential problem has had no response so far.

      [...]

      While Vox coverage of its corporate parents, siblings and cousins isn’t uniformly positive, all too often it is. Even in stories that aren’t more or less verbatim PR copy, disclosures ought to be mandatory—especially when it’s as direct as covering Comcast and NBC corporate. For startups, major investors are tantamount to ownership in every sense of the word, and since traditional media companies disclose ownership, there’s no reason why this same standard wouldn’t apply to venture capital and private equity-backed New Media outfits.

      Complexity is no excuse for not disclosing obvious conflicts, nor does it justify running a major media site for two-and-a-half years without a public, clearly worded code of ethics. Vox Media has raised over $300 million and has a staff reportedly of over 400 people. With all those resources, perhaps they can take a week off and hash out a coherent ethics guide that reflects the economic realities of PE- and corporate-backed “disruptive” media.

    • Sources Tell Me… Fake News, Kuwait and the Trump DC Hotel

      It is fully normalized now in American mainstream journalism to build an entire story, often an explosive story, around a single, anonymous source, typically described no further than “a senior U.S. official,” or just “a source.”

      For a writer, this makes life pretty easy. They can simply make up the entire story sitting in their bedroom, inflate a taxi driver’s gossip into a “source,” or just believe an intern they tried to pick up at happy hour who says she saw an email written by her supervisor saying their manager heard something something. The story goes viral, often with an alarming headline, and is irrefutable in an Internety way, demanding critics prove a negative: how can you say it didn’t happen?!?!?

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Thailand’s military-appointed Assembly unanimously passes an internet law combining the world’s worst laws

      On Dec 15, an amendment to Thailand’s 2007 Computer Crime Act passed its National Legislative Assembly — a body appointed by the country’s military after the 2014 coup — unanimously, and in 180 days, the country will have a new internet law that represents a grab bag of the worst provisions of the worst internet laws in the world, bits of the UK’s Snooper’s Charter, America’s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the dregs of many other failed laws.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Twitter is ‘toast’ and the stock is not even worth $10: Analyst

      Twitter is “toast” as a company and the stock is not even worth $10, according to a research note published Tuesday, following the departure of another top executive at the social media service.

      The microblogging platform’s chief technology officer, Adam Messinger, tweeted that he would leave the company and “take some time off”, while Josh McFarland, vice president of product at Twitter, also said he was exiting the company. Both executives announced their departure on Tuesday.

      Meanwhile, last month, Adam Bain stepped down as chief operating officer last month to be replaced by chief financial officer Anthony Noto, who has yet to be replaced. Twitter has also lost leaders from business development, media and commerce, media partnerships, human resources, and engineering this year.

    • European Officials Accuse Facebook of Misleading Them on WhatsApp Deal

      European competition officials filed charges on Tuesday against Facebook, accusing the social media giant of making misleading statements to receive regulatory approval for its $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp, the internet messaging service.

      The accusation, which could lead to a fine of up to 1 percent of Facebook’s yearly revenue, meaning a penalty of about $200 million, comes amid growing tension with Europe’s policy makers over how the company is able to dominate much of the region’s digital world.

    • In Major Privacy Victory, Top EU Court Rules Against Mass Surveillance

      The European court’s panel of 15 judges acknowledged in their ruling that “modern investigative techniques” were necessary to combat organized crime and terrorism, but said that this cannot justify “the general and indiscriminate retention of all traffic and location data.” Instead, the judges stated, it is acceptable for governments to engage in the “targeted retention” of data in cases involving serious crime, permitting that persons affected by any surveillance are notified after investigations are completed, and that access to the data is overseen by a judicial authority or an independent administrative authority.

      The case was originally brought in December 2014 by two British members of parliament, who challenged the legality of the U.K. government’s Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act, which forced telecommunications companies to store records on their customers’ communication for 12 months. That law has since been replaced by the Investigatory Powers Act, which was recently approved by the British parliament and is expected soon to come into force.

      Though the U.K. voted to leave the European Union earlier this year, Wednesday’s decision remains — at least in the short term — highly significant, and will prove to be a severe headache for British government officials. The ruling will now be forwarded to the U.K.’s Court of Appeal, where judges there will consider how to apply it in the context of national law. It may result in the government being forced to make changes to controversial sections of the Investigatory Powers Act, which enable police and spy agencies to access vast amounts of data on people’s internet browsing, instant messages, emails, phone calls, and social media conversations.

    • Complete Victory: EU Supreme Court Rules Blanket Logging Requirements Blanketly Unconstitutional

      The EU Supreme Court (European Court of Justice) has ruled that no European country may have laws that require any communications provider to perform blanket indiscriminate logging of user activity, stating in harsh terms that such measures violate the very fundamentals of a democratic society. This finally brings the hated Data Retention to an end, even if much too late. It also kills significant parts of the UK Snooper’s Charter.

      This morning, Luxembourg time, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) presented its damning verdict. In a challenge brought by plaintiffs in Ireland and Sweden, it was argued that forcing telecommunications providers – ISPs and telecom companies alike – to log all activity of their users, in case law enforcement may need it later, was simply incompatible with the most fundamental privacy rights laid out in the European Charter of Human Rights. The court agreed wholesale.

    • Parliament must change the Investigatory Powers Act in response to CJEU ruling

      The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has issued a judgment that could force the Government to change the Investigatory Powers Act – just weeks after the surveillance law received royal assent.

    • Yahoo email scan shows U.S. spy push to recast constitutional privacy

      Yahoo Inc’s secret scanning of customer emails at the behest of a U.S. spy agency is part of a growing push by officials to loosen constitutional protections Americans have against arbitrary governmental searches, according to legal documents and people briefed on closed court hearings.

      The order on Yahoo from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) last year resulted from the government’s drive to change decades of interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment right of people to be secure against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” intelligence officials and others familiar with the strategy told Reuters.

    • Europe’s highest court declares UK ‘snooper charter’ illegal

      Britain’s controversial ‘snooper’s charter’ has been delivered a blow from the EU with its highest court ruling that the government’s “indiscriminate retention” of emails is illegal.

      The ruling could trigger challenges against the UK’s new Investigatory Powers Act, passed into law in November, which allows for the sweeping collection and storage of people’s emails, text messages and internet data.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Anonymous’ Barrett Brown Is Free—and Ready to Pick New Fights

      When Barrett Brown was arrested in his home by FBI agents in 2012—a moment captured by chance in a public videochat streamed to his fans and haters alike—the hacker group Anonymous was an online force to be reckoned with. Just nine months earlier the group had hacked the private intelligence firm Stratfor and dumped five million of its emails, the crime to which Brown would later be tied and sentenced to five years in prison.

      Today, just a few weeks after Brown walked out of Texas’s Three Rivers Federal Correctional Institute, Anonymous has shrunk to a thin imitation of the hacker army it once was. But with or without the hacktivist group that he championed, Brown can’t imagine a better time to resume his work as a journalist and radical information agitator. “When things deteriorate, when the system destroys itself as it’s doing right now and does so in such an obvious and disgusting way, my ideas seem less crazy,” he says.

    • VIDEO: “Relatively Free” Barrett Brown out of prison and already hard at work

      Alex Winter and production company Field of Vision have released a short documentary on Barrett Brown’s release from FCI Three Rivers and the six-hour drive to his new residence, a halfway house near Dallas. The twenty-minute film called ‘Relatively Free’ features a skinnier, longer-haired Barrett discussing his time in federal prison, the fight for press freedoms to come under a Trump administration, and why his case is a “jackpot case” for reformers, should they choose to make use of it.

    • Dear TSA: The country is not safer because you grab vaginas

      Eventually your heart gets hardened when you hear about nightmarish scenarios with the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA. With my elite status as a TSA Precheck and a CLEAR traveler, I’d grown accustomed to breezing through the security screening process in five minutes or less.

      Randomly selected for additional screening? Child, please — not “Diamond on Delta” me. So when I was selected in a nearly completely empty Detroit Metropolitan Airport last night, I thought it was ridiculous.

      [...]

      The supervisor told me he would call his manager. He did. I repeated my protests: I have a Homeland Security background. This is a severe violation of my privacy and civil liberties. Please just let me get the scan again. I do not want my vagina patted.

      The agent began to insist that it was a backhanded pat around the upper thigh. At the same time, the manager says I can go through it or be escorted out. I really weighed my options. Did I really need to get on this plane to New York? I did.

    • Google sued by employee for confidentiality policies that ‘muzzle’ staff

      A product manager at Google has sued the company over its allegedly illegal confidentiality rules, which, among other things, prohibit employees from speaking even internally about illegal conduct and dangerous product defects for fear that such statements may be used in lawsuits or sought by the government.

      The alleged policies, which are said to violate California laws, restrict employees’ right to speak, work or whistle-blow, and include restrictions on speaking to the government, attorneys or the press about wrongdoing at Google or even “speaking to spouse or friends about whether they think their boss could do a better job,” according to a complaint filed Tuesday in the Superior Court of California for the city and county of San Francisco.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Global Average Internet Connection Speeds Reaches 6.3 Mbps in 3Q16

      The average connection speed is just that, the average of the all the connections that are made to Akamai’s global content delivery network platform. In contrast, the global average peak connection speed, which measures the highest speeds, was reported at 37.2 Mbps, for a 16 percent gain over the third quarter of 2015.

      Once again, South Korea was reported to be the top nation on the planet for average connection speed, with 26.3 Mbps. In contrast, the average connection speed for the U.S was reported at 16.3 Mbps. Singapore had the top peak speed at 162 Mbps, while the average peak connection in the U.S was 70.8 Mbps.

    • Canada Calls Broadband a ‘Basic’ Service, Funds Rural Expansion

      Canada’s communications regulator announced a C$750 million ($560 million) fund that companies like Rogers Communications Inc., BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. can tap to subsidize high-speed internet projects in rural parts of the country.

      The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said broadband internet should be seen as a “basic” service across the country. The C$750 million will be distributed over five years and doled out based on applications from telecommunications carriers.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Australian Govt Advisory Body Digs in Over Fair Use & Geo-Unblocking

        A final inquiry report published by the Australian government’s Productivity Commission is steadfastly maintaining the position that citizens should have the right to use VPNs to access geo-restricted content. The advisory body is also unmoved when it comes to delivering fair use exceptions, stating that rightsholder objections are based on flawed and “self-interested” assumptions.

12.21.16

Links 21/12/2016: Red Hat’s Results Not Positive, Raspberry Pi Goes for Debian

Posted in News Roundup at 6:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • OECD STI Outlook 2016: more open source in software, hardware and wetware

    Open source development practices will create further communities of developers, not only in software but also in hardware (Open Source Hardware, OSH) and “wetware”, for example in do-it-yourself synthetic biology. Together with the continued fall in the costs of equipment and computing, this creates greater opportunities for new entrants — including individuals, outsider firms and entrepreneurs — to succeed in new markets.

  • Google Open Up a Cool Collection of Cryptographic Security Tests

    With 2016 closing out, there is no doubt that cloud computing and Big Data analytics would probably come to mind if you had to consider the hot technology categories of the year. However, steady progress has been made in security software as well, and now Google has released Project Wycheproof, a collection of security tests that check cryptographic software libraries for known weaknesses that are used in attacks.

    This newly open sourced project, named for Mount Wycheproof, apparently the smallest mountain in the world, features a code repository on GitHub.

  • Kickstarter Open Sources its Own iOS and Android Apps

    If you’re familiar with Kickstarter, you know that it and other crowdsourced funding sites have helped fund numerous open source applications. Kickstarter actually has its own engineering team, though, and now that team has made the announcement that it is open sourcing its own Android and iOS creations.

    You can go to the team’s Android or iOS Github pages and find repositories. “The native team at Kickstarter is responsible for building and maintaining features for Android and iOS,” the team reports. The open source toolsets may be especially useful for startups to leverage.

  • Events

    • 2016 Hacktoberfest ignites open source participation

      DigitalOcean launched Hacktoberfest in 2014 to encourage contribution to open source projects. The event was a clear success, and in terms of attendance and participation goals reached, it’s also clear that Hacktoberfest has become a powerful force in driving contributions to open source. The lure of a t-shirt and specific, time-limited goals help new contributors get started and encourage existing contributors to rededicate themselves and their efforts.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Announces “MUFFIN” User Interface

      The Document Foundation today announced MUFFIN, a new user-interface concept for LibreOffice.

      MUFFIN is short for “My User Friendly & Flexible INterface.” MUFFIN focuses on a “personal UI” depending upon a user’s habits, is deemed user-friendly, and is flexible. These different UI elements will be available with the upcoming LibreOffice 5.3 and offer options for the default UI, a single toolbar UI, a sidebar with a single toolbar, and a new experimental “notebook bar” interface.

    • LibreOffice 5.3 to Launch with MUFFIN, a User-Friendly and Flexible UI Concept

      Immediately after informing Softpedia today, December 21, 2016, about the launch of a new LibreOffice Extension & Templates website, The Document Foundation company announced MUFFIN, a new tasty user interface concept for LibreOffice 5.3 onwards.

    • The Document Foundation announces the MUFFIN, a new tasty user interface concept for LibreOffice

      The Document Foundation announces the MUFFIN, a new tasty user interface concept for LibreOffice, based on the joint efforts of the development and the design teams, supported by the marketing team.

    • Oracle is cracking down on Java SE users who think it’s free

      ORACLE HAS begun an aggressive campaign of chasing licence fees for use of payable elements of its Java software.

      The company, which acquired Java owner Sun Microsystems in 2010, has already lost a case over the fair use of Java APIs in Google’s Android operating system, but as it awaits another appeal hearing, it’s going after a myriad of other companies that are using elements of the open source software that aren’t actually free.

      Oracle has been hiring a legal team this year to bolster its License Management Services, which in turn has forced companies to hire compliance specialists, as it looks like Oracle has made 2017 the year of kicking ass.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Leftovers

  • Velvet Underground, Sly Stone to Receive Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award

    The Velvet Underground, Sly Stone and Nina Simone are among the artists who will be awarded the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Awards in 2017, the organization behind the Grammys announced Monday.

  • How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

    To die-hard fans, Apple Inc.’s Macintosh sometimes seems like an afterthought these days.

    Mac upgrades, once a frequent ritual, are few and far between. The Mac Pro, Apple’s marquee computer, hasn’t been refreshed since 2013. The affordable and flexible Mac mini was last upgraded in 2014. And when a new machine does roll out, the results are sometimes underwhelming, if not infuriating, to devotees.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The thousands of U.S. locales where lead poisoning is worse than in Flint

      A Reuters examination of lead testing results across the country found almost 3,000 areas with poisoning rates far higher than in the tainted Michigan city. Yet many of these lead hotspots are receiving little attention or funding.

      ST. JOSEPH, Missouri – On a sunny November afternoon in this historic city, birthplace of the Pony Express and death spot of Jesse James, Lauranda Mignery watched her son Kadin, 2, dig in their front yard. As he played, she scolded him for putting his fingers in his mouth.

    • Old Dutch potato chips recalled over salmonella concern

      OTTAWA – Old Dutch Foods Ltd is recalling one of its potato chip brands because of possible salmonella contamination.

      The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says Old Dutch brand Cheddar and Sour Cream Potato Chips are sold in 66 gram and 255 gram bags.

    • China’s marriage rate is plummeting because women are choosing autonomy over intimacy

      One of the greatest fears of Chinese parents is coming true: China’s young people are turning away from marriage. The trend is also worrying the government.

      After a whole decade of increases in the national marriage rate, China witnessed its second year of decline in the number of newly registered unions in 2015, with a 6.3% drop from 2014 and 9.1% from 2013. This was accompanied by a rise in the age of marriage, which increased by about a year and a half in the first 10 years of this century.

  • Security

    • 5 Open Source Network Security Tools SMBs Should Consider

      You might think that because your business is small you aren’t an attractive target for hackers.

      But you would be wrong.

      According to the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), 82 percent of small business owners believe that they are not a target for cyberattacks, but 43 percent of last year’s cyberattacks targeted SMBs. And a single attack can cost SMBs up to $99,000.

      Cyberattacks of all kinds are on the rise with data breaches increasing 15 percent over the past year, NCSA says. And ransomware, attacks that freeze up organizations’ systems until they pay a ransom, has become particularly prevalent; in just the first three months of 2016, U.S. ransomware victims paid out $209 million to attackers, compared to $25 million for all of 2015.

    • Wednesday’s security updates
    • Rakos Malware Is Infecting Linux Servers And IoT Devices To Build Botnet Army

      In case you’re facing a problem of your embedded devices going overloaded with networking and computing tasks, there are chances that it might be due to some foreign elements trying to lure your ‘smart’ device into joining a botnet cult.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Two Derby terror suspects are ‘strict Muslims who fell out with neighbour for wearing shorts’

      A refugee who says he lives below the home where two Derby men were arrested for alleged terror offences said they were strict Muslims who fell-out with him for wearing shorts.

      Haji Ahmadi said he “had the shock of his life” when he discovered his neighbours in Leopold Street had been held in a major anti-terror probe in which six people were arrested – four were from Derby.

      Mr Ahmadi has lived on the ground floor of the home for five months and the former Afghan soldier said two of the four city men who have been arrested lived there when he arrived.

    • Can Indigenous Okinawans Protect Their Land and Water From the US Military?

      Three weeks ago, on a bus ride to Takae, a small district two hours north of Okinawa’s capital of Naha, a copy of a local newspaper article was passed around. “Another Takae in America,” the headline read, over a photograph of the Standing Rock Sioux marching against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. At the top of the page, someone had scribbled “water is life” in red ink. As we drove through the foothills along the coast, the article made its way around the bus—behind me, a woman said to another, “It’s the same struggle everywhere.”

      We were headed to the US military’s Northern Training Area, also known as Camp Gonsalves, which stretches over 30 square miles of Okinawa’s subtropical forest. Founded in 1958 and used for “terrain and climate-specific training,” the US military likes to call the training area a “largely undeveloped jungle land.” What they don’t like to acknowledge is that the forest is home to some 140 villagers, thousands of native species and dams that provide much of the island’s drinking water. Though Okinawans have long opposed US presence on the group of islands, their purpose on this day was to protest the construction of a new set of US military helipads in the forest of the Northern Training Area, which they consider to be sacred.

      Since 2007, Okinawans have been gathering in Takae to disrupt the construction of six helipads for the US Marine Corps, which come as part of a 1996 bilateral deal between Japan and the United States. Under the agreement, the US military would “return” 15 square miles of its training ground in exchange for the new helipads—a plan Okinawans say will only bolster the US military presence on the islands and lead to further environmental destruction.

    • US ‘got it so wrong’ on Saddam Hussein, says CIA interrogator of the Iraq dictator

      The US “got it wrong” about Saddam Hussein and Iraq, the CIA analyst who interrogated the former dictator has said.

      John Nixon had numerous conversations with the deposed leader and now says that America was critically mistaken about their intervention Iraq in a number of ways.

      In particular, he claims, the CIA’s view of Hussein’s attitude to using chemical weapons was wrong.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Solar and wind power keep breaking cost records – but Poland and Hungary resist
    • President Obama bans some ocean drilling areas forever

      President-elect Donald Trump may be staffing his administration with anti-environmentalists, but that isn’t stopping President Barack Obama from using his final weeks in office to protect the planet.

      The president is invoking a provision in a 1953 law known as the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act in order to indefinitely block drilling in large sections of the Arctic and Atlantic, according to CNBC on Tuesday. This will include most of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in the Arctic and 31 underwater canyons in the Atlantic.

    • Trump’s coal revival plan won’t work; clean energy tech is already cheaper

      Trump is likely to roll back several of the current administration’s clean energy policies, such as the 30% Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for solar power deployments, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) and U.S. support for the 195-nation Paris Agreement.

    • Going green in China, where climate change isn’t considered a hoax

      In mid-November, while Americans were preoccupied with election returns, China sent some of its clearest signals yet that it will continue to pursue an international leadership role on issues including climate. At an international climate change summit in Marrakech, the Chinese government reasserted its commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The government announced that its aggregate emissions will peak by 2030 or earlier, and that its emissions per dollar of economic output will decline sharply.

  • Finance

    • Uber’s Loss Exceeds $800 Million in Third Quarter on $1.7 Billion in Net Revenue

      Even as Uber Technologies Inc. exited China, the company’s financial loss has remained eye-popping. In the first nine months of this year, the ride-hailing company lost significantly more than $2.2 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. In the third quarter, Uber lost more than $800 million, not including its Chinese operation.

      At the same time, the company’s revenue has continued to grow even after leaving the world’s most populous country. Uber generated about $3.76 billion in net revenue in the first nine months of 2016 and is on track to exceed $5.5 billion this year, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.

    • Multilateral investment court would impede measures on climate change

      A multilateral investment court would lock in greater exposure, larger scope and the “highest possible level of legal protection and certainty”. Furthermore, due to inherent systemic issues with specialised and supranational courts a multilateral investment court would create a high risk on expansive interpretations of investors’ rights.

      A multilateral investment court would strengthen investments vis-à-vis democracy and fundamental rights. This undermines our values and ability to respond to crises.

    • EU court rulings a ‘real disappointment’ to multinationals in state aid cases, says expert

      A Spanish tax break that was only available to Spanish companies acquiring foreign companies constituted a ‘selective’ tax advantage in breach of EU state aid rules, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) said in two cases, overturning previous decisions of the EU General Court.

    • India surpasses Britain to become world’s fifth largest economy

      As Britain grapples with a depreciating pound sterling in a post-Brexit era and India continues to grow rapidly since its economic liberalization in 1991, the two have swapped spots in the rankings of world economies.

      For the first time in 150 years, India has surpassed its erstwhile colonial master in terms of GDP, which is now the fifth largest in the world after the U.S., China, Japan and Germany.

    • ECJ Advocate General Says EU Commission Cannot Make Trade Deals Without Member States

      Not all parts of the European Union-Singapore trade agreement “fall within the EU’s exclusive competence and therefore the agreement cannot be concluded without the participation of all of the Member States.” This is the result of an opinion of the European Court of Justice Advocate General Eleanor Sharpston published today.

      The Singapore Free Trade Agreement can only be concluded by the European Union and the member states acting jointly, according to the decision which clearly divides issues that fall under EU competency compared to such that need member states acting as well.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Electoral College Desecrates Democracy—Especially This Time

      The Electoral College was created 229 years ago as a check and balance against popular sovereignty. And, with its formal endorsement of Donald Trump for the presidency, this absurd anachronism has once again completed its mission of desecrating democracy.

      As of Monday afternoon, the actual vote count in the race for the presidency was: Democrat Hillary Clinton 65,844,594, Republican Donald Trump 62,979,616. That’s a 2,864,978 popular-vote victory. Yet, when the last of the electors from the 50 states and the District of Columbia had completed their quadrennial mission early Monday evening, the Electoral College vote was: Trump 304, Clinton 227.

      So-called “faithless” electors split from Trump and Clinton, casting votes for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, former secretary of state Colin Powell, Ohio Governor John Kasich, former congressman Ron Paul, and Native American elder (and Dakota Access Pipeline critic) Faith Spotted Eagle.

    • Trump’s still going wrong on Twitter

      When the President-elect speaks, people listen — and governments, businesses and ordinary citizens scramble to parse, interpret and, given his power, make snap decisions about how to respond.
      The post-election, pre-presidential Donald Trump has used social media with the same abandon as his campaign self — yes, to get his message out, unfiltered by the media he loathes, but also as a bludgeon against critics, a tool for disseminating misinformation and, as he nears the inaugural, an outlet for breeding confusion in business and international relations, purposefully or not.

    • Trump Leading Folks Astray

      During the election campaign, Trump used Twitter as a means to sidestep legitimate news media which tended to criticize or add commentary. He wanted to control everything in his stream of propaganda.

      However, while skilled at producing his content in volume, he had a very high error rate and/or showed himself to be a compulsive liar. He’s still doing that. He must know that one can fool some of the people all of the time but not all the people. Mustn’t he?

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Dental Firm Tries To Dodge Section 230 With Trademark Claims; Runs Headfirst Into Anti-SLAPP Law

      Abbey Dental of Las Vegas doesn’t like the number of negative reviews that are piling up at Pissed Consumer. But that’s about all it (and its lawyers) know. It seems to understand that taking on Pissed Consumer with a defamation lawsuit would be a complete failure, as would be any effort it made to sue individual reviewers. Nevada has an anti-SLAPP law in place, which would fit Abbey Dental’s attempt to artificially resuscitate its reputation to a tee.

      So, instead of handling this in the normal way (which would also be the route least likely to succeed), the company has decided to take a more oblique approach: a lawsuit filed in federal court (to better dodge the state’s anti-SLAPP law) centered on a variety of tremendously stupid trademark infringement claims.

    • South Carolina Senator Wants To Charge Computer Purchasers $20 To Access Internet Porn

      A state senator from South Carolina thinks he can save his constituents from a mostly-imaginary parade of horribles by erecting a porn paywall. Only none of this paywall money will go to porn producers or actors. Instead, it will all go to the fine state of South Carolina… you know, theoretically… if there were actually any way to effectively enforce this.

    • Encryption App ‘Signal’ Fights Censorship With a Clever Workaround

      Any subversive software developer knows its app has truly caught on when repressive regimes around the world start to block it. Earlier this week the encryption app Signal, already a favorite within the security and cryptography community, unlocked that achievement. Now, it’s making its countermove in the cat-and-mouse game of online censorship.

      On Wednesday, Open Whisper Systems, which created and maintains Signal, announced that it’s added a feature to its Android app that will allow it to sidestep censorship in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, where it was blocked just days ago. Android users can simply update the app to gain unfettered access to the encryption tool, according to Open Whisper Systems founder Moxie Marlinspike, and an iOS version of the update is coming soon.

    • Thailand’s military-appointed Assembly unanimously passes an internet law combining the world’s worst laws

      On Dec 15, an amendment to Thailand’s 2007 Computer Crime Act passed its National Legislative Assembly — a body appointed by the country’s military after the 2014 coup — unanimously, and in 180 days, the country will have a new internet law that represents a grab bag of the worst provisions of the worst internet laws in the world, bits of the UK’s Snooper’s Charter, America’s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the dregs of many other failed laws.

      Under the new law, sending “false computer data” is a criminal offense, as is transmitting material affecting “the maintenance of national security, public security, national economic security or public infrastructure serving public interest or cause panic in the public” — and ISPs are co-liable with their users if they fail to pre-emptively censor this broadly defined material.

      The statue mandates vaguely defined cryptographic back doors, and bans possession of “information that the court has ordered to be destroyed” — while also appointing a committee to order the removal of “dangerous content.”

    • Rosset by Barney Rosset review – a publisher’s fight against censorship
    • Turkey maintains Tor block, flicks social networks offline for 12 hours
    • Turkey’s answer to most problems is Internet censorship as it blocks Tor and social media

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • All General Obligations To Retain Traffic Data Found Illegal Under EU Law

      Combining a case brought by a group of UK politicians and organisations (698/15 Watson) and a Swedish case started by telecom operator Tele Sverige (C-203/15 Tele2 Sverige), the court declared both the British and Swedish data retention provisions illegal under EU law.

      Only targeted retention fighting serious crime is possible, with tight limitations applying, also with regard to access, according to the judges. Exfiltrated data for these cases must be stored inside the EU, too, the decision notes. Once more the court with this ruling reminded EU legislators about the severity of indiscriminate data collections.

    • US State Police Have Spent Millions on Israeli Phone Cracking Tech

      When cops have a phone to break into, they just might pull a small, laptop-sized device out of a rugged briefcase. After plugging the phone in with a cable, and a few taps of a touch-screen, the cops have now bypassed the phone’s passcode. Almost like magic, they now have access to call logs, text messages, and in some cases even deleted data.

    • CJEU judgment says UK Government’s bulk retention of our communications data is illegal

      The Court of Justice of the European Union today published the final judgment in relation to the Tom Watson MP (and formerly David Davis MP) case regarding the lawfulness of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA).

    • 4 Most Common Myths About Tor You Should Learn About

      Tor has become such a popular application in online anonymity circles that people have been using its name mistakenly to refer to the concept it operates under (onion routing). What it is, how it works, and what it can do is still mostly unclear to most people who use it on a daily basis which often leads to complacency based on certain slight misconceptions about its mechanism. Although using onion routing offers several advantages, it’s important to note what its limitations are. Understanding the risks associated with Tor can help you better protect yourself from measures that would compromise your privacy.

    • Investigatory Powers law setback: Blanket data slurp is illegal—top EU court

      The UK’s recently passed Investigatory Powers Act hit a major snag on Wednesday morning, when Europe’s highest court ruled that the “general and indiscriminate” retention of citizens’ data communications is unlawful where it is not being slurped for serious crime cases.

    • European Information Security Advisory Says Mandating Encryption Backdoors Will Just Make Everything Worse

      More and more entities involved in government work are coming out in support of encryption. (Unfortunately, many governments are still periodically entertaining backdoor legislation…) While recognizing the limits it places on law enforcement and surveillance agencies, they’re not quite willing to sacrifice the security of everyone to make work easier for certain areas of the government.

      [...]

      One agent’s facially-invalid search warrant is the same agent’s legally-unassailable judicial order. This is enough of a problem in the US, where multiple federal districts have resulted in contradictory opinions on identical legal arguments. In the European Union, the problem is only exacerbated. Not only are there multiple courts, but also multiple nations, all with their own laws. Sure, there’s an attempt to unify guidance on technical/legal issues under the EU, but only so much can be done. Deciding what is or isn’t abusive use of government-mandated backdoors is going to be far from consistent. And that, of course, requires a unified European stance on encryption backdoors, which isn’t likely to happen either.

      Ultimately, ENISA concludes that tech advancements do pose legitimate challenges to law enforcement/national security efforts, but backdoors are no way to solve the problem. But the solution it does suggest isn’t much better. Here in the US, courts routinely defer to Congress when the remedy sought isn’t within their power. Over in the EU, ENISA suggests legislative measures are the wrong approach.

    • EU’s highest court delivers blow to UK snooper’s charter

      “General and indiscriminate retention” of emails and electronic communications by governments is illegal, the EU’s highest court has ruled, in a judgment that could trigger challenges against the UK’s new Investigatory Powers Act – the so-called snooper’s charter.

      Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime is justified, according to a long-awaited decision by the European court of justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg.

      The finding came in response to a legal challenge initially brought by the Brexit secretary, David Davis, when he was a backbench MP, and Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, over the legality of GCHQ’s bulk interception of call records and online messages.

    • EU accuses Facebook of misleading it in WhatsApp takeover probe

      The European Commission has charged Facebook Inc (FB.O) with providing misleading information during its takeover of the online messaging service WhatsApp, opening the company to a possible fine of 1 percent of its turnover.

      However, the statement of objections sent to Facebook will not affect the EC’s approval of the $22 billion merger in 2014, the Commission said in a statement on Tuesday.

      Facebook becomes the latest Silicon Valley target of EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who has demanded Apple (AAPL.O) pay back $14 billion in taxes to Ireland and hit Google (GOOGL.O) with two market abuse investigations.

    • EU charges Facebook with giving ‘misleading’ information over WhatsApp

      The European commission (EC) has filed charges against Facebook for providing “misleading” information in the run-up to the social network’s acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp after its data-sharing change in August.

      The charges will not have an affect on the approval of the $22bn merger and is being treated completely separately to other European cases against Facebook, but could lead to Facebook being fined up to 1% of its global turnover in 2014 when the merger was approved, which was greater than $10bn for the first time.

    • EU Commission calls out Facebook over terms of Whatsapp takeover

      FACEBOOK HAS been accused of misleading regulators over its $19bn (later upped to $22bn) takeover of mobile chat platform WhatsApp.

      The European Commission is investigating the possibility that Facebook either out-and-out lied or negligently withheld data that was relevant to the takeover, specifically regarding the company’s ability to swipe data from the app to power its “personalisation”.

      Facebook will have until the end of January next year to respond to a “Statement of Objections” which will then potentially lead to a full investigation.

      If it turns out that Facebook really did lead the commission a merry dance, it could impose a fine equivalent to 1 percent of turnover, or $180m based on 2015 revenue.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Being an Apostate at Christmas

      “Don’t tell them you took me to Church yesterday and for God’s sake, don’t bring up Christianity.”

      These were the words hissed at me a few years ago by my mother, as we prepared for the onslaught of relatives coming over for dinner. If I am spending it with my mother’s side of the family, then this is how the standard Christmas Day begins — and this conversation sets the scene for the rest of the day.

      For those of you that are wondering, I left the religion that was assigned to me by my family at birth — Islam — when I was 19, and I was halfway through my first year of university. I found several different flaws with its teachings and had several objections to various parts of the Qur’an. I discovered Christianity a year later when a friend casually asked if I fancied going to a church service. I went on to explore it until, finally, I was baptised in December, 2014.

    • A three-second laser strike cost Barry Bowser everything

      That led to a 21-month prison sentence, though Bowser was released after 11. Prison cost him more than time; Bowser also lost several teeth.

      As we drove the few miles to the scene of his crime, Bowser told me that he had just come from a denture-fitting appointment at an orthodontist’s office, needed after a race riot at the county jail where he had been held at the request of federal authorities.

      “I got busted in the mouth with a lock in a sock, knocked my teeth out,” he said. “That was my first day in Fresno County jail.”

      And all for making a poor decision with a laser pointer.

    • “Her Life Depends on Obama Taking Action Now”: 100,000+ People Demand Obama Free Chelsea Manning

      As President Obama’s term nears to a close, more than 100,000 people have signed a petition urging Obama to commute the sentence of Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. In 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking more than 700,000 classified files and videos to WikiLeaks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy. Manning has been held since 2010 and been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement and denied medical treatment related to her gender identity. In a letter to President Obama, Chelsea Manning wrote, “The sole relief I am asking for is to be released from military prison after serving six years of confinement as a person who did not intend to harm the interests of the United States or harm any service members. I am merely asking for a first chance to live my life outside the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks as the person I was born to be.” For more, we speak with Chase Strangio, staff attorney at the ACLU, who is representing Manning in a lawsuit against the Pentagon.

    • Google sued over policies ‘barring employees from writing novels’

      Google is being sued over its internal confidentiality policies which bar employees from putting in writing concerns over “illegal” activity, posting opinions about the company, and even writing novels “about someone working at a tech company in Silicon Valley” without first giving their employer sign-off on the final draft.

      The lawsuit, revealed by industry news site The Information, accuses Google of breaching California labour laws through its confidentiality provisions, by preventing employees from exercising their legal rights to discuss workplace conditions, wages, and potential violations inside the company.

      It has been brought by an individual employee under a Californian act that allows employees to sue on behalf of co-workers; if the employee wins, the state gets 75% of the penalty, while the remaining payout would be split among Google’s employees. The maximum fine in Google’s case is almost $4bn.

    • Hope Not Hate reports huge response to Nigel Farage legal fund appeal

      Hope Not Hate says it has been overwhelmed by the response to an appeal to crowdfund possible legal action against Nigel Farage after he said the organisation, which combats political militancy, was itself extremist.

      Farage attracted significant criticism after saying the widower of the murdered Labour MP Jo Cox was tainted by extremism for supporting Hope Not Hate, which Farage called “violent and undemocratic”.

      Hope Not Hate, which campaigns mainly against rightwing extremism but also on areas such as militant Islamism, wrote to Farage warning him to withdraw the comments and apologise or face legal action.

    • First Amendment Defense Act Would Be ‘Devastating’ for LGBTQ Americans

      Earlier this month, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, through his spokesperson, told Buzzfeed they plan to reintroduce an embattled bill that barely gained a House hearing in 2015. But this time around, they said, the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) was likely to succeed due to a Republican-controlled House and the backing of President-elect Donald Trump.

    • Poland is in the middle of an existential struggle over the shape of its democracy

      Over the past week, the Polish parliament controlled by the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party passed legislations dismantling the current primary education system, finalizing its overhaul of the country’s constitutional court, and de facto limiting the freedom of assembly. A chaotic night on Friday has both sides of the political conflict accusing each other of a coup d’etat. Since then, opposition lawmakers have been occupying the parliament’s main hall. Meanwhile, on the streets of the country’s cities, people have been protesting tirelessly nearly every day. The desperation is palpable: some protesters have been blocking politicians’ cars with their own bodies, while others are camping out in front of the parliament in the middle of Poland’s frigid December. We’re only days away from Christmas, when Poles usually turn to the hearth. This year, for many of them, far more stressful than last-minute gift-shopping and making heaps of holiday pierogi is a political crisis for the history books. What is going on in Poland, which was supposed to be the former Soviet bloc’s beacon of democracy and a poster child of European Union integration?

    • Exclusive: Pirate Party MP Meets Edward Snowden In Moscow

      Birgitta Jónsdóttir has been back on Icelandic soil for less than twelve hours when we meet. During the previous three days, the Pirate Party MP, privacy activist and former Wikileaks volunteer quietly travelled to Moscow, where she took part in a documentary with Dr. Lawrence Lessig, and the world’s most famous whistleblower: Edward Snowden. The three were brought together by French journalist and documentarian Flore Vasseur, who has previously interviewed Birgitta and Lessig for the French media in her ongoing coverage of the current troubled state of democracy.

    • UK Police, GCHQ May Have Arrested Innocent Refugee, Not People Smuggling Kingpin

      The UK National Crime Agency (NCA) and secret intelligence service GCHQ are facing an embarrassing failure as it appears that the Eritrean man they accused as being one of the world’s “most wanted people smugglers” may actually be a victim of mistaken identity, according to Italian prosecutors.

      The high profile investigation has taken an embarrassing turn for the worst as the NCA and GCHQ appear to have seized the wrong man and the real criminal, a man named Medhanie Yehdego Mered, remains at large.

      In June 2016, British authorities claimed they had captured a human trafficking kingpin, nicknamed ‘The General.’ Mered was arrested and extradited to Italy on suspected charges of running a trafficking network, where he sent thousands of migrants to Europe, with many of them perishing at sea.

  • DRM

    • The kickstarted Pebble smartwatch is now a division of Fitbit, so they may “reduce functionality” on all the watches they ever sold

      If you’re one of the 60% of Pebble employees who didn’t get a job offer from Fitbit, the company’s new owner, you’re probably not having a great Christmas season — but that trepedation is shared by 100% of Pebble customers, who’ve just learned (via the fine print on an update on the Pebble Kickstarter page) that the company may soon “reduce functionality” on their watches.

      The watches are among the many cloud-based Internet-of-Things products that are reliant on the ongoing maintenance of server infrastructure for normal functionality. This problem is exacerbated by the widespread IoT deployment of DRM to lock devices into manufacturer-controlled infrastructure — thanks to laws like section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, developers who create software to replace cloud functions with alternative/self-hosted servers, or with local computing, face potential jail sentences and millions in fines. Add to that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which has been used to threaten and even jail researchers who improved services but violated their terms of service to do so, and the IoT space is the land of the contingent, soon-to-be-bricked devices: memory cards, cars, car batteries, phones, and home automation systems — not to mention printers.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

Links 21/12/2016: New BlackArch Linux and BusyBox 1.26 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Merry Linux to you!

    Get ready to start caroling around the office with these Linux-centric lyrics to popular Christmas carols.

  • 5% Market Share, Linus Upset, Wonderful Bluestar

    Monday was a busy day in the Linux world, there were way too many good headlines to cover. One of the more interesting was a prediction from Jack Wallen who said that Linux should reach 5% market share in 2017. Bad news is, vulnerability discoveries are liable to increase as well. Elsewhere, Mr. Wallen reviewed Bluestar Linux, an Arch derivative featuring a customized Plasma desktop, making it sound so good it will be my next experiment. The Register spotted another scolding from Linus Torvalds and blogger Dedoimedo said Fedora 25 GNOME is “an interesting distro.” Bryan Lunduke revived old 1992 BBS gaming and Adobe released an update for Flash.

  • Desktop

    • How can Linux get 5 percent desktop market share?

      Many people have been predicting the “year of the Linux desktop” for quite a while now, but it’s never happened. A redditor recently asked what it will take for Linux to actually achieve 5% desktop market share, and he got some interesting answers in the Linux subreddit.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • ‘Upset’ Linus Torvalds gets sweary and gets results

      Linus Torvalds has unleashed a little ripe language on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, and quickly got results for having done so.

      “This piece-of-shit branch has obviously never been even compile-tested”, Torvalds wrote after receiving a pull request for some fixes to the KVM hypervisor that it was hoped might make it into Linux 4.10.

      Torvalds’ ire looks justifiable, as the code he was asked to review included errors that the contributors added to their own branch.

      “Am I upset?” Torvalds asked on the list, answering “You bet I am. Get your act together. You can’t just randomly revert things without checking the end result.”

    • Towards Enterprise Storage Interoperability

      With Dell EMC’s contribution of the CoprHD SouthBound SDK (SB SDK) we’re staking a claim for better interoperability. The SB SDK will help customers, developers and every day users be able to take some control over their storage interoperability, with an assist from the OpenSDS community. Right now, you can create block storage drivers pretty easily, with the ability to create filesystem and object storage drivers coming up later next year. The reference implementation you see in the GitHub code repository is designed to work with CoprHD and ViPR Controller, but over time we hope to see other implementations in widespread use across the industry.

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • NVIDIA 375 vs. RADV+RadeonSI Mesa 13.1-dev Vulkan Benchmarks For Ending 2016

        The latest installment of our year-end benchmarks is focusing upon the performance of the NVIDIA Linux driver against the open-source Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver found within Mesa 13.1-dev. This comparison is particularly interesting given the continuous flow of improvements into Mesa Git, the NVIDIA 375.26 driver release from last week, the big Dota 2 7.00 update debuted earlier this month, and Croteam’s Vulkan improvements have rolled into TTP stable.

        Tested on the AMD side were the followign graphics cards that are supported (non-experimental) by AMDGPU DRM for RADV compatibility include the R9 285, RX 460, RX 480, and R9 Fury. Experimental GCN 1.0/1.1 benchmarks with RADV to come in its own article. For those curious about AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 fresh benchmarks on that front, I’ll post some more soon albeit there obviously is no changes over my earlier 16.50 benchmarks given the infrequent hybrid driver releases.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Icon Widget Properties

        A feature that went missing in the transition from Plasma 4 to Plasma 5 was the ability to configure the icon widget. The upcoming Plasma 5.9 release is where this dialog will finally make its entry into the 5.x series.

      • How input works – pointer input

        In the last blog post I discussed keyboard input. This blog post will be all about pointer devices – mostly known as “mouse”. Like my other posts in this series, this post only discusses the situation on KWin/Wayland.

      • QtCon Talks here

        Many KDABians attended QtCon and contributed to the unique new Qt event we co-created in Berlin, the summer of 2016, along with Qt Contributors, KDE Akademi, VideoLan and FSFE.

      • Embedded Devices with Qt and the INTEGRITY RTOS

        Qt 4.8 support has been available for a long time on the INTEGRITY RTOS. We are now pleased to announce that a proof-of-concept port of Qt 5.7 to INTEGRITY has been completed by Green Hills engineers. During the work, we tested the port on all major embedded HW platforms, including ones that have OpenGL ES support available. Work continues together with The Qt Company and the Qt ecosystem and thanks to this initial prototype, the upcoming Qt 5.9 is expected to contain INTEGRITY support.

      • What I’ve been upto

        Yup, this project has been in the pipeline for months. While it (mostly) works on a clean install of KDE, it has some bugs with copying with mtp:/ device slaves and isn’t very well integrated with Dolphin yet. It is in my best interest to have this shipped with KDE Frameworks as soon as possible, so I’m looking into patching Dolphin with better, more specific action support for my project.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 review

        For users with older computers, some of the modern Linux distributions can be too resource intensive. Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 is a lightweight distribution designed for those users. The minimum system requirements are a 500MHz processor, 128MB of RAM, and 4GB of disk space. The recommended requirements are a 1.0GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and 10GB of disk space. Available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, as well as a “Legacy” release for really old 32-bit systems, Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 can easily bring new life to older computers.

        Bodhi Linux offers a couple of download options beyond the 32-bit/64-bit choice. There is a Standard release and an AppPack version. The Standard release is very bare-bones with only a minimal set of pre-installed options, while the AppPack version comes with a larger number of bundled applications. The ISO for the 64-bit Standard version is 647MB and the 64-bit AppPack version is 1.21GB (about twice the size). For the purposes of this review, I opted for the Standard version, so I could customize my system as I wished. However, I will be mentioning some of the AppPack version’s additional software throughout this review.

      • Everything you wanted to know about Zorin OS 12

        Windows XP along with Windows 7 is one of the most favored operating system for millions of users around the world as of today, even though Microsoft has washed their hands off these operating system. No support for these platforms means, you will not get any security updates anymore and your data may be at risk. But there’s always a solution for all you Windows users, Linux is there for your rescue. And Zorin OS is one of the best desktop distribution for Linux desktops and with the new release Zorin OS 12, it only got better.

    • New Releases

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 for Raspberry Pi: An intriguing option for data centers

        SUSE announced recently that it managed to take its enterprise-grade platform, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and marry it with the Raspberry Pi. Fancy that—a platform created to support massive workloads and mission-critical services running on a $35 computer.

        You can download a 60-day evaluation of SUSE Enterprise Server 12 SP2 for Pi (login required). Be sure to check out the quick start guide. If you have trouble with subscription codes for SUSE Enterprise Server 12 SP2 for Pi, check out this forum thread.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Linux Kernel 4.9 Now Available in the Unstable Repos of Debian-Based SparkyLinux

          On December 20, 2016, the developers of the Debian-based SparkyLinux operating system announced the availability of the latest stable Linux 4.9 kernel series in the unstable repos of the GNU/Linux distribution.

          If you’re reading the news lately, you should be aware of the fact that Linux kernel 4.9 was officially released more than a weeks ago, on December 11, 2016, as announced by Linus Torvalds himself. This means that most Linux OS vendors should soon start preparing to migrate to the latest Linux 4.9 kernel branch.

          It might take some time for the new Linux kernel 4.9 packages to land in the stable repositories of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions available today, including Arch Linux, Solus, Ubuntu, etc., but it looks like it landed earlier on the unstable repository of SparkyLinux.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • This Intel board computer can be a powerful Ubuntu 16.04 Linux PC

            If you want a PC with Ubuntu Linux, you can turn to Intel’s Joule single-board computer instead of buying an expensive machine.

            Support for Ubuntu 16.04 desktop OS has been added to the Joule board, according to developer notes for Intel IoT Developer Kit 5.0 released late last week.

          • Where Does Ubuntu Fit Into the Internet of Things?

            Ubuntu Linux started off as a desktop focused Linux distribution, but has expanded to multiple areas of the years. Ubuntu Linux is today a leading Linux server and cloud vendor and has aspirations to move into the embedded world, known today as the Internet of Things (IoT).

            In a video interview, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical Inc., details some of the progress his firm has made in 2016 in the IoT world.

            Ubuntu has made past announcements about phone and TV efforts. While multiple Ubuntu phones exist, the standalone Ubuntu TV effort has evolved somewhat. Shuttleworth explained that Ubuntu Core, which is an optimized distribution of Ubuntu for embedded systems, is making some headway with TVs.

          • Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 Daily Builds Coming Soon, Budgie Desktop 10.2.9 Has Landed

            The development team behind the newest Ubuntu Linux flavor build around the lightweight Budgie desktop environment produced by the Solus Project, Ubuntu Budgie, published an informative newsletter about the latest news of the project.

          • Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) Linux OS to Use Swapfiles Instead of Swap Partitions

            Canonical’s Dimitri John Ledkov announced recently plans to drop Swap partitions for new installations of upcoming Ubuntu Linux operating system releases, and replace them with so-called Swapfiles.

            Not that this is big news for most of us who own computers with SSD or NVMe flash drives and a lot of RAM (system memory), but we thought it might be of interested to those who will attempt to install future versions of Ubuntu on PCs from ten years ago. If you’re not aware, Swap partitions or space is used when the amount of RAM) is full.

          • Canonical Patches 15 Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

            On December 20, 2016, Canonical published several new USN (Ubuntu Security Notice) advisories to inform users of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution about the general availability of kernel updates for their operating systems.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Happy Holidays: Linux Mint get a major upgrade

              With this long-term support Linux desktop, which is based on Ubuntu 16.04, Linux Mint is better than ever. Since I’ve already found Linux Mint 18 to be the best desktop out there of any sort, that’s saying something.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source challenger takes on Google Translate

    Researchers have released an open source neural network system for performing language translations that could be an alternative to proprietary, black-box translation services.

    Open Source Neural Machine Translation (OpenNMT) merges work from researchers at Harvard with contributions from long-time machine-translation software creator Systran. It runs on the Torch scientific computing framework, which is also used by Facebook for its machine learning projects.

  • Op-ed: Why I’m not giving up on PGP

    Every once in a while, a prominent member of the security community publishes an article about how horrible OpenPGP is. Matthew Green wrote one in 2014 and Moxie Marlinspike wrote one in 2015. The most recent was written by Filippo Valsorda, here on the pages of Ars Technica, which Matthew Green says “sums up the main reason I think PGP is so bad and dangerous.”

    In this article I want to respond to the points that Filippo raises. In short, Filippo is right about some of the details, but wrong about the big picture. For the record, I work on GnuPG, the most popular OpenPGP implementation.

  • Coopetition: All’s fair in love and open source

    PostgreSQL vs. MySQL. MongoDB vs. Cassandra. Solr vs. Elasticsearch. ReactJS vs. AngularJS. If you have an open source project that you are passionate about, chances are a competing project exists and is doing similar things, with users as passionate as yours. Despite the “we’re all happily sharing our code” vibe that many individuals in open source love to project, open source business, like any other, is filled with competition. Unlike other business models, however, open source presents unique challenges and opportunities when it comes to competition.

  • Illinois Turns Its Eye Toward Blockchain for Statewide Innovation

    Blockchain technology is the poster child for innovation in the financial tech space, but Illinois is taking an ambitious step forward by attempting to boldly adopt distributed ledger technology into several of its state agencies.

    The state announced last month at the Blockchain Conference Chicago that it was forming the Illinois Blockchain Initiative, a private-public partnership dedicated to exploring and utilizing blockchain in real-world and compelling ways, reports StateScoop.

    Blockchain technology “is a shared digital ledger, or a continually updated list of all transactions. This decentralized ledger keeps a record of each transaction that occurs across a fully distributed or peer-to-peer network, either public or private,” according to an article from international auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

  • Blockchain and the public sector – What happened in 2016

    Blockchain, also known as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), was the technology buzzword of 2016. The technology has been around since 2008. It underpins the digital cryptocurrency, Bitcoin and was conceptualised as a solution to the problem of making a database both secure and not requiring a trusted administrator.

  • Kickstarter Apps Go Open Source on iOS and Android Apps to Help Startups

    Kickstarter is known for giving startups the boost they need to get going. And independent developers will now get similar help by getting access to the functional programming used to create the app.

    Kickstarter announced recently the company had released open source iOS and Android. The announcement was made on the company’s official company blog.

    Kickstarter launched in 2009, but an official mobile app didn’t come around for some time. The site now has an Android and iOS version, and the company is doing one better by open sourcing the code for these native apps.

  • Open Source, Free Riders and Crowdfunding

    Until about ten years ago, “free as in speech, not as in beer,” was an often repeated expression heard in open source circles. These days, the same sentiment is usually phrased as “free as in freedom.” Even though it’s fallen out of favor, I prefer the former. I think it more clearly explains the philosophy behind the open source development model. At the same time, it explains a problem that many essential open source projects face finding funding.

    Open source software is free to use, but as another old expression points out, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Open source or not, software doesn’t get written for free — nor can it be maintained without cash flow. Another old saying that fits here: If you’re going to dance, you have to pay the piper.

  • Coreboot

    • Google “Poppy” Kabylake Board Added To Coreboot

      While Chromebook / ChromeOS fans have been looking forward to the Kabylake-based “Eve” device, it looks like another device is possibly forthcoming making use of these latest-generation Intel CPUs.

      A new board for “Poppy” was added yesterday to Coreboot Git. This Google Poppy board is indeed making use of an Intel Kabylake processor.

    • 100% Of The 289 Coreboot Images Are Now Built Reproducible

      Reproducible builds have been a big theme in particularly the last year or two with being able to verify the binaries offered by open-source projects are bit-for-bit the same against the same set of sources. With the latest Coreboot work, all of their generated images are now reproducible from source.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • 5 Essential LibreOffice Writer Tips to Improve Your Productivity

      LibreOffice is the frugal (or Linux) person’s choice of office suite, offering all the robustness of Microsoft’s dominant software while being fully open-source and not costing you a penny.

      While even the latest version of the word-processing part of LibreOffice, Writer, looks a little old-hat without the fancy ribboned interface of Microsoft office or WPS, don’t be fooled. It has all the tools you need to create quality documents quickly. Here are a bunch of tips to hone your LibreOffice craft.

  • Funding

    • Databricks $60 Million in New Funding to Advance its Spark Efforts

      People in the Big Data and Hadoop communities have been becoming increasingly interested in Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley. IBM has made a huge financial commitment to advancing Spark, and companies like Databricks are focused on it as well.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open source core to Greek govt procedure documentation

      The use of open source technology is a core part of a project to document Greek government procedures. The project, involving 200 public administration staff and university researchers, is creating or completing the documentation for Greece’s public sector procedures. Started in 2015, the Diadikasies project has so far completed documentation for 1652 procedures.

    • France, Germany promote open source in industry

      Industry in France and Germany should embrace open source, the governments of both countries say in the closing statement of the German-French digital conference in Berlin on 13 December. Open source is a key driver for digital innovation, the countries say.

    • France And Germany Get Free/Libre Open Source Software

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Seeking Open Access Deal, 60 German Academic Institutions Ditch All Subscriptions With Elsevier

        In the struggle to provide open access to academic research, one company name keeps cropping up as a problem: Elsevier. Techdirt has written numerous stories about efforts to rein in the considerable — and vastly profitable — power that Elsevier wields in the world of academic publishing. These include boycotts of various kinds, mass resignations of journal editors, as well as access to millions of publicly-funded papers in ways that bypass Elsevier altogether.

Leftovers

  • 2017 predictions from IT leaders on the future of technology

    As we approach 2017, we asked IT leaders what they see on the horizon for the future of technology. We intentionally left the question open-ended, and as a result, the answers represent a broad range of what IT professionals may expect to face in the new year.

  • Science

    • Brexit will damage world-class science in the UK; throwing money at it won’t help

      The UK gets more money for research from the EU—£8.8 billion between 2007 and 2013—than it contributes (£5.4 billion for the same period). Fortunately, that shortfall is a relatively easy problem to solve by throwing money around, and the UK government has done that, as a new report from the House of Lords titled A time for boldness: EU membership and UK science after the referendum notes. Importantly, this boldness comes in the form of new money: “It is an additional commitment from the Treasury to underwrite EU research funding.”

      However, the report also points out that “Reassurances on funding are welcome but if they were to expire, and are not replaced, this would undermine some of the benefit of the major increase announced in the 2016 Autumn Statement.” In other words, the UK government’s commitment to make up the shortfall needs to be long-term if it is to be effective.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • After Two Unconstitutional Anti-Abortion Bills Pass, We Have to Ask: What’s the Matter With Ohio’s Lame Duck Legislature?

      It’s lame duck season in the state of Ohio and this year seems like the “super special” version. During the lame duck session, the legislature has just a few short weeks to pass laws before all bills have to start over from scratch in the new year.

      In a matter of 72 hours, Ohio’s super-majority party has managed to attach, pass, and push through a nearly unbelievable amount of legislation.

    • Former Flint emergency managers, others charged in water crisis

      Michigan prosecutors on Tuesday charged four former government officials in Flint, including two city emergency managers, with conspiring to violate safety rules in connection with the city’s water crisis that exposed residents to dangerous levels of lead.

      Former state-appointed emergency managers Darnell Earley and Gerald Ambrose and former city employees Howard Croft, a public works superintendent, and Daugherty Johnson, a utilities manager, were the latest to be charged in the case, Attorney General Bill Schuette said.

      The defendants conspired to operate the city’s water treatment plant when it was not safe to do so, he told a news conference in Flint.

      “Flint was a casualty of arrogance, disdain and failure of management, an absence of accountability,” Schuette said.

    • ‘The Trump Administration Looks Like Bad News for Almost Every Element of Drug Policy Reform’ – CounterSpin interview with Ethan Nadelmann on John Kelly

      They were hard-won and a long time coming, but there were clear signs of hope that the punitive, racist, violent and ineffective war on drugs was not just fading away, but maybe being consciously reconsidered. And however cynical you want to be about motives, nascent bipartisan moves around over-incarceration and sentencing disparities looked set to change the lives of real people.

    • Media Legitimizing GOP’s ‘Universal’ Health Plan That Doesn’t Exist

      Members of the GOP leadership were likely jubilant when they read the New York Times (12/15/16) and saw the following headline: “GOP Plans to Repeal Health Law with ‘Universal Access.’”

      The Times’ decision to include the words “universal,” “health” and “plan” in the headline was extremely misleading and irresponsible. It gave readers the distinct—and deceptive—impression that Republicans have something resembling a “universal” health plan, and will use it to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

      It appears that the same corporate media who misled us into the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (Extra!, 4/10) are now misleading us out of it—and the Times’ reporting on the GOP’s health care agenda is a particularly egregious example of this.

    • Exxon Mobil Is Fighting to Keep Its Dangerous Chemicals in Children’s Toys

      Most of us know Exxon Mobil Corp. as an energy giant, which makes sense given that it is the world’s largest publicly held oil and gas company. Rex Tillerson, the company’s CEO, has spent his entire professional life prioritizing Exxon Mobil’s corporate interests over human rights, the environment, and the diplomatic interests of the U.S., all of which has prompted many journalists and commentators to point out that his appointment as secretary of state is not just a terrible idea but a joke seemingly ripped from the pages of a Marxist comic book.

      What’s less well known is that Exxon Mobil is also one of the world’s biggest chemical companies, and that its chemical interests also sometimes run counter to those of people in the U.S. and beyond. Petrochemicals accounted for more than a quarter of Exxon Mobil’s $16 billion in net profits last year and wound up in wide range of consumer products such as plastics, tires, batteries, detergents, adhesives, synthetic fibers, and household detergents.

      Among Exxon Mobil’s chemical products are phthalates, a family of chemicals widely used to make plastic pliable. Phthalates are in everything from food containers and plastic wrap to rattles, pacifiers, bottle nipples, and teething toys for babies. More than 75 percent of Americans have at least five of the chemicals in their body, according to a 2000 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    • ‘We’ve Seen Exxon Leading the Charge to Go After Groups That Criticized Them’

      A widely circulated news article on the appointment of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be secretary of State opens with the note that “the brash Texas oilman…helped forge or supervise exploration, production, and refinery projects in 50 countries on six continents.” But corporate media really only appear interested in one country, and that’s Russia.

  • Security

    • ADUPS Android Malware Infects Barnes & Noble

      ADUPS is an Android “firmware provisioning” company based out of Shanghai, China. The software specializes both in Big Data collection of Android usage, and hostile app installation and/or firmware control. Google has blacklisted the ADUPS agent in its Android Compatibility Test Suite (CTS).

      ADUPS recently compromised many BLU-phone models and was found to be directly transmitting call logs, SMS, contacts, location info, nd more from handsets within the US to Chinese servers using DES (weak) encryption.

    • New Linux/Rakos threat: devices and servers under SSH scan (again) [Ed: No, it’s not a “Linux” problem that some people or developers use a crappy and predictable password]

      Apparently, frustrated users complain more often recently on various forums about their embedded devices being overloaded with computing and network tasks. What these particular posts have in common is the name of the process causing the problem. It is executed from a temporary directory and disguised as a part of the Java framework, namely “.javaxxx”. Additional names like “.swap” or “kworker” are also used. A few weeks ago, we discussed the recent Mirai incidents and Mirai-connected IoT security problems in The Hive Mind: When IoT devices go rogue and all that was written then still holds true.

    • Security advisories for Tuesday
    • OpenSSL After Heartbleed by Rich Salz & Tim Hudson, OpenSSL

      In this video from LinuxCon Europe, Rich Salz and Tim Hudson from the OpenSSL team take a deep dive into what happened with Heartbleed and the steps the OpenSSL team are taking to improve the project.

    • OpenSSL after Heartbleed
    • Container Security: Your Questions Answered

      To help you better understand containers, container security, and the role they can play in your enterprise, The Linux Foundation recently produced a free webinar hosted by John Kinsella, Founder and CTO of Layered Insight. Kinsella covered several topics, including container orchestration, the security advantages and disadvantages of containers and microservices, and some common security concerns, such as image and host security, vulnerability management, and container isolation.

    • Google scales tiny mountain to hunt down crypto bugs

      Google’s Project Wycheproof is a new effort by Google to improve the security of widely used cryptography code.

      Many of the algorithms used in cryptography for encryption, decryption, and authentication are complicated, especially when asymmetric, public key cryptography is being used. Over the years, these complexities have resulted in a wide range of bugs in real crypto libraries and the software that uses them.

    • Mysterious Rakos Botnet Rises in the Shadows by Targeting Linux Servers, IoT Devices

      Somebody is building a botnet by infecting Linux servers and Linux-based IoT devices with a new malware strain named Rakos.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Marine Le Pen denies cash-for-support deal with Russia

      French far-right leader Marine Le Pen may have received funding from Russian-backed banks as thanks for supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea, French investigative news site Mediapart reported Tuesday, citing text messages exchanged between two Russian officials.

      In the messages, which Mediapart said it had obtained thanks to a hacking group called “Anonymous International,” Kremlin official Timur Prokopenko mentioned Le Pen dozens of times in exchanges with a person identified as Kostia. Anonymous International identified Kostia as Konstantin Rykov, a former pro-Putin MP who has a house in France and is known to have met with Le Pen.

      A few days before Crimea was due to hold a referendum on Russia’s annexation, in March 2014, Prokopenko wrote to Kostia asking to bring Le Pen to Crimea as an “observer” during the referendum. “We really need it. I told my boss you were in contact with her???”

    • Berlin terror suspect released

      The man arrested by Berlin police in connection with Monday’s deadly attack on a Christmas market in Berlin has been released, the federal prosecutor said in a statement Tuesday.

      “The investigations thus far have not produced urgent suspicion against the suspect,” the statement said.

      The man who was released is believed to be a Pakistani asylum seeker who had evaded immigration authorities’ attempts to question him after he arrived in the country a year ago, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said at a press conference earlier on Tuesday. The man had not been identified as a suspected terrorist prior to Monday’s events.

    • ISIS claims responsibility for Berlin attack, says driver was ‘soldier of the Islamic State’

      The German capital was on high alert Tuesday with one or more suspects still at large in the deadly truck assault on a Christmas market, even as the Islamic State claimed responsibility for an act that struck at the heart of Europe’s Christian traditions.

      Chancellor Angela Merkel decried the assault — which left 12 dead and 52 injured after a truck carrying a payload of steel careened into festive stalls and fairgoers in Berlin — as a presumed “terror attack,” even as German police scrambled to find the culprit. The only suspect to date — a Pakistani asylum seeker taken into custody shortly after Monday’s bloodshed — was released by police late Tuesday because of insufficient evidence.

    • Families Of Orlando Shooting Victims Sue Twitter, Facebook, And Google For ‘Supporting Terrorism’

      Remember that time when Google, Twitter, and Facebook helped shoot up a nightclub in Orlando, Florida? Me neither. But attorney Keith Altman does. He’s representing the families of three of the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in a lawsuit alleging [sigh] that these tech companies are somehow responsible for this act of terrorism.

    • Eva Bartlett and Joey Johnson

      For the first half of the program, Peter and Mickey discuss the conflict in Syria; their guest is independent journalist Eva Bartlett, who recently returned from Aleppo and is now on a US speaking tour. She explains why most corporate media coverage of Syria, and even some progressive coverage, doesn’t depict the actual situation there. In the second half of the program, the guest is Joey Johnson, whose burning of an American flag in 1984 became a US Supreme Court free-speech case, where they ruled in his favor in 1989. Johnson is facing charges again over the burning of a flag outside the 2016 Republican National Convention.

    • The Terrifying Executive We Need for the Wrong Reasons

      I understand why all of the often false, usually bombastic, reporting on Trump is angering me.

      You know the stuff — take a “fact,” real or fully made up, and conflate it with some apocalyptic prediction. Watch: Trump alternates between wearing boxers and briefs. Will his indecisiveness cause him to pull back when America is attacked by the Russians?

      The other story everyone writes now is based on the journalist’s apparent post-November 9 discovery of an element of fascism, racism and/or parts of the Constitution and presidential practice. And so someone is shocked that Trump will be able to choose drone kill targets, or have access to everything the NSA sweeps up about his enemies.

    • Trump’s Pick for Interior Secretary Was Caught in “Pattern of Fraud” at SEAL Team 6

      A Montana lawmaker tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be secretary of the interior committed travel fraud when he was a member of the elite Navy SEAL Team 6, according to three former unit leaders and a military consultant.

      In announcing the nomination of Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, a retired Navy SEAL commander, Trump praised his military background. “As a former Navy SEAL, he has incredible leadership skills and an attitude of doing whatever it takes to win,” Trump said last week.

      But when Zinke was a mid-career officer at SEAL Team 6, he was caught traveling multiple times to Montana in 1998 and 1999 to renovate his home. Zinke claimed that the travel was for official duties, according to the sources.

      He submitted travel vouchers and was compensated for the travel costs.

    • How Many Children Were Shot Dead Today? An Interview with Gary Younge

      Every day, on average, seven children and teenagers are shot dead in the United States. November 23, 2013 — the day Gary Younge chose randomly as the setting for his book Another Day in the Death of America — was “just another day in America.”

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Former church member launches ‘Mormon Wikileaks’ for anonymous tips and whistleblowers

      A former member of the Mormon church has launched a “Wikileaks”-inspired website in an effort to make the famously private Latter Day Saints more transparent.

      MormonWikiLeaks went live on Tuesday after two-and-a-half months of planning and, like the original WikiLeaks, will seek to expose validated documents or videos anonymous tipsters choose to send in. The group also plans to have social media pages.

      Founder Ryan McKnight, a resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, conceived of the idea for the site after he helped an anonymous source leak videos of senior church members at a twice-yearly conference in October. He has been “bombarded” with people looking to share information since.

    • Every month a whistleblower wants to report misconduct

      Since going public in June 2013, Commonwealth Bank whistleblower Jeff Morris is contacted at least once a month by company insiders asking for advice about reporting corporate misconduct.

      “When I explain the potential cost to them: the loss of not just their job but also their career, due to vindictive back channel smear campaigns; the lack of any effective protection or compensation, let alone rewards; most walk away,” he says.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate scientists are launching an anonymous hotline for government workers to report Trump meddling

      Climate scientists are predicting rough weather for their profession in 2017. US president-elect Donald Trump’s statements on climate change, his appointments to head environmental agencies, and the threatening actions of his transition team all have the nation’s weather professionals on alert and preparing for the worst.

      The Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has established a hotline for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees to report political meddling. There’s currently concern among NOAA scientists about who Trump’s pick to head the agency will be. “I am hearing a lot of worry,” union director Andrew Rosenberg told Bloomberg. “The worry is that they will be putting another ideologue in place.”

    • 70,000 Demand Obama Protect Climate from Trump Denialism

      ust one month from inauguration and with confirmation hearings looming for President-elect Trump’s climate-denier cabinet, an international coalition of human rights and environmental groups is appealing to President Obama to take one final action to advance justice and action on climate change in spite of Trump.

    • Collapse of West Antarctic Ice Sheet Reveals Inadequacy of Current Climate Strategies

      With president-elect Donald Trump and his army of climate deniers preparing to take office, it could be a hard battle to get the US to adhere to any sort of climate policy anytime soon. This is hard news because today’s suggested but nowhere-implemented climate policy was already much less restrictive than the climate policy from the mid-1990s. In a world where we have emitted as much carbon dioxide since 1987 as was emitted in the previous 230 years, why has policy not become more stringent? This outdated emissions reductions policy has earned the title “legacy,” not because it is worthy of recognition, or something we want to pass on to future generations, but because it is like “legacy software,” in that “it is difficult to replace because of its wide usage.”

      The climate policy strategy that we are attempting to implement in the face of Trump’s intransigence is conceptually similar to what we were supposed to adopt with the Kyoto Protocol back in the 1990s. That is, it involves a reduction of annual greenhouse gas emissions. The two relevant actions that we are now struggling to implement are the Clean Power Plan (CPP) and Obama’s Paris Climate Conference commitment. The CPP is still not implemented and has been sent back to District Court for further litigation. On paper, its emissions reductions are a fraction more restrictive than the initial Kyoto targets but overall, the CPP is significantly less restrictive than Kyoto because Kyoto targets were supposed to have been achieved in 2012. The CPP pushed the deadline back 18 years to 2030.

  • Finance

    • I make $2.35 an hour in coal country. I don’t want handouts. I want a living wage.

      I grew up in Dickenson County, Va. Like many who were raised in the heart of Appalachia, I come from a long line of coal miners. My great-grandfathers, grandfathers, uncles and cousins all went underground to dig the coal that kept the lights on for communities across our country.

      My family members, like thousands throughout coal country, took pride in their work. We stuck together and fought to make our jobs good jobs. In April 1989, the Pittston Coal Co. cut health care for mineworkers, and 2,000 miners walked out on strike. My pawpaw was one of them. When Pittston brought scabs in to work at lower wages and called on state troopers to break up the strike, the mineworkers, with their community behind them, didn’t back down — they fought harder. Through months of civil disobedience, blocking roads and mine entrances and holding public demonstrations, the United Mine Workers of America won the wages and benefits our families deserved in February 1990.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Teaching Civics in the Time of Trump

      Do we need a new Schoolhouse Rock! to remind us how to run a democracy?

    • Can We Fire the Electoral College? Probably Not, but We Can Put It Under New Management

      The electors of the Electoral College met this afternoon in their respective states and anointed as president the candidate who won the popular vote in a larger number of states — Donald Trump — regardless of the fact that another candidate — Hillary Clinton — won the larger number of votes by several million.

      The ACLU has opposed the Electoral College since 1969 for non-partisan reasons. By now — everyone, Republicans, Democrats, and none-of-the-aboves — should be fed up with its undemocratic and unpredictable nature.

      Unfortunately, amending the Constitution to eliminate this atavistic system is a practical impossibility for the same reason the Electoral College is a problem: The less populous states have a disproportionate share of voting power. Constitutional amendments require approval by three-quarters of the states, not a national majority or even super-majority of voters. Most states are currently Republican-dominated, and Republicans may believe at the moment that the peculiarities of the Electoral College will help to serve their partisan goals in future elections.

    • Republicans Will Review Recount Process

      But some Republicans say the recount surfaced issues that must be researched, and maybe fixed.

      “While the recount was more of a publicity stunt than anything else, at the very least it proved that our state has a fair and trustworthy system because of our efforts to reduce fraud with the implementation of voter ID,” said Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.

      “Moving forward, we will investigate additional ways to reform our election laws to reduce any chance of fraud,” Vos added. “The Assembly Republican caucus will also discuss changes to the recount statute to insure Wisconsin taxpayers don’t bear any of the costs of future recounts.”

    • Why US liberals are now buying guns too

      Gun ownership has traditionally been associated with the right wing in America but the election of Donald Trump has prompted some left-wingers to join gun clubs – and even start preparing for the collapse of society.

      “I really didn’t expect to be thinking about purchasing a gun. It was something that my father did and I rolled my eyes at him.”

    • Green Party Activist: No, Jill Stein’s Recount Was Not A ‘Front’ For The Clinton Campaign

      By now, it is clear that the two main corporate-backed political parties will never allow ballots to be re-counted in any U.S. Presidential election.

      I am writing on the morning that the electoral college will be voting on who will become the next president of the United States. Even at this late date the evidence mounts that hundreds of thousands of voters cast legitimate ballots in the 2016 elections that were never counted. Yet the Democratic Party and its candidate, Hillary Clinton, have refused to file any court challenges to the elections machinery, oversight, or illegitimate processes.

      And the Republican Party continues to go all-out to block Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s attempt to force three states to count every ballot by hand.

      One would think: “Who could be opposed to counting every ballot?”

      Both the Democrat and Republican parties and their candidates each twist rationalizations like pretzels to prevent a re-count.

    • The Electoral College Desecrates Democracy—Especially This Time

      The Electoral College was created 229 years ago as a check and balance against popular sovereignty. And, with its formal endorsement of Donald Trump for the presidency, this absurd anachronism has once again completed its mission of desecrating democracy.

      As of Monday afternoon, the actual vote count in the race for the presidency was: Democrat Hillary Clinton 65,844,594, Republican Donald Trump 62,979,616. That’s a 2,864,978 popular-vote victory. Yet, when the last of the electors from the 50 states and the District of Columbia had completed their quadrennial mission early Monday evening, the Electoral College vote was: Trump 304, Clinton 227.

      So-called “faithless” electors split from Trump and Clinton, casting votes for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Ohio Governor John Kasich, former Congressman Ron Paul and Native American elder (and Dakota Access Pipeline critic) Faith Spotted Eagle.

    • What Trump’s Cabinet of ‘best people’ lacks

      You’re hired. That’s what President-elect Donald Trump has been telling the select group of individuals whom he has chosen for his Cabinet. On Thursday he named Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Montana, to lead the Department of the Interior. “America is the most beautiful country in the world and he is going to help keep it that way with smart management of our federal lands,” Trump said in a statement. Now, with only the slots for secretary of agriculture and veteran’s affairs still open, it seems highly unlikely that any Latinos will have a spot in Trump’s Cabinet.

    • Detroit’s election woes: 782 more votes than voters

      Whether the result of machine malfunction, human error or even fraud, the unexplained voting discrepancies in Detroit last month were not sizable enough to affect the outcome in Michigan of the presidential election, according to a new Free Press analysis of voting precinct records.

      In 248 precincts, there were a total of 782 more votes tabulated by voting machines than the number of voters listed as picking up ballots in the precincts’ poll books. That makes up just three-tenths of 1% of the total 248,211 votes that were logged in Detroit for the presidential election. That number was far too small to swing the statewide election results, even in this year’s especially tight race that saw a Republican win Michigan for the first time since George Bush in 1988.

    • My President Was Black

      Obama’s ties to the South Side tradition that Washington represented were complicated. Like Washington, Obama attempted to forge a coalition between black South Siders and the broader community. But Obama, despite his adherence to black cultural mores, was, with his roots in Kansas and Hawaii, his Ivy League pedigree, and his ties to the University of Chicago, still an exotic out-of-towner. “They were a bit skeptical of him,” says Salim Muwakkil, a journalist who has covered Obama since before his days in the Illinois state Senate. “Chicago is a very insular community, and he came from nowhere, seemingly.”

    • Only one-third of Americans say Russia influenced 2016 election

      Just one-third of Americans say they believe Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

      Forty-four percent of the 2,000 voters polled Dec. 15 through Dec. 17 said they do not think Russia influenced November’s election, while a quarter are still unsure.

    • Trump on Free Speech and Freedom of the Press

      No one can know for sure what the incoming Trump administration will do, but President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized and threatened the media in the United States. In lieu of attempting the impossible and predicting the future, we’ve gathered all of Trump’s stated positions on free speech and freedom of the press. If you are aware of any additional statements that we have not included, please email kate@eff.org with a link to your source material, and we will consider it for inclusion.

      While running for president, Trump made his general feelings about the press very clear. He has called the media “dishonest” and described reporters as “scum,” “sleaze,” and “horrible people.” At a rally last February, he famously said, “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

    • Why Hillary Lost, According to Hillary

      It wasn’t her fault.

      The Clinton campaign, and Hillary herself, summed up her loss by blaming FBI Director Comey as an individual, the FBI as an organization, and of course the Russians and the Russians and the Russians and Putin himself for the loss. “Angry white men” got tagged as well. Nobody likes Huma Abedin anymore, either. That’s pretty much it.

    • Clinton’s Defeat and the Fake News Conspiracy

      There is an astounding double standard being applied to the US presidential election result.

      A few weeks ago the corporate media were appalled that Donald Trump demurred on whether he would accept the vote if it went against him. It was proof of his anti-democratic, authoritarian instincts.

      But now he has won, the same media outlets are cheerleading the establishment’s full-frontal assault on the legitimacy of a Trump presidency. That campaign is being headed by the failed candidate, Hillary Clinton, after a lengthy softening-up operation by US intelligence agencies, led by the CIA.

      According to the prevailing claim, Russian president Vladimir Putin stole the election on behalf of Trump (apparently by resorting to the US playbook on psy-ops). Trump is not truly a US president, it seems. He’s Russia’s placeman in the White House – a Moscovian candidate.

    • The Left’s Risk in Blaming Russia

      This week began with a mass email from the head of the Democratic National Committee, who declared: “By now, Americans know beyond any reasonable doubt that the Russian government orchestrated a series of cyberattacks on political campaigns and organizations over the past two years and used stolen information to influence the presidential campaign and congressional races.” DNC chair Donna Brazile went on: “The integrity of our elections is too important for Congress to refuse to take these attacks seriously.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • How Tech Companies Can Fight for Their Users in the Courts

      There are a lot of political uncertainties around the incoming Trump administration, but the threats to civil liberties are potentially greater than ever. President Obama failed to rein in the surveillance state, and Mr. Trump has nominated cabinet members like Mike Pompeo who are big fans of bulk surveillance. Now, given Mr. Trump’s campaign posture of being a “law and order” candidate who has openly criticized Apple for standing up for strong encryption, tech companies need to be even more vigilant in fighting for their users in the courts.

      EFF stands ready to support those who will be pioneers in these efforts. Below, we highlight a few ways companies can stand up for their users, along with some prominent examples of from the past. In addition, for the last six years EFF has produced an annual “Who Has Your Back?” report evaluating the practices of technology companies in categories such as insisting on a warrant for user content and issuing transparency reports. Companies can look at these reports to get a sense of best practices in the industry.

    • Trump and His Advisors on Surveillance, Encryption, Cybersecurity

      On encryption, Trump said in early 2016 that Apple should have to make available data stored on an iPhone linked to the shooter in last year’s attack in San Bernardino, California. Apple repeatedly challenged the FBI’s demands that the company build a tool to access the secure data on the encrypted device.

      “But to think that Apple won’t allow us to get into her cell phone,” Trump said in an interview. “Who do they think they are? No, we have to open it up.”

      Trump also famously called for a boycott of Apple until the company helped to unlock the device, criticizing Apple CEO Tim Cook for “looking to do a big number, probably to show how liberal he is.”

    • ORG’s first take on the leaked e-Privacy Regulations

      The leaked e-Privacy Regulation (ePR) brings many improved protections to our communications data, which are now extended to communications devices and internet services, not just traditional telecom providers. At the same time this modernisation has brought other fundamental changes that could have less welcome consequences.

      Here we focus on the basic changes to electronic communications. Most other analyses of the leaked ePR will probably focus on cookies and the impact on online advertising, and rightly so as this is really important. We don’t have the space here for a proper take on both here, but in the coming months we will also engage with those other areas: cookies, marketing, nuisance calls, as well as the enforcement aspects.

    • Court Says Abandoned Phone Locked With A Passcode Still Has Expectation Of Privacy

      A Florida Court of Appeals has handed down a somewhat surprising ruling [PDF] in a case centering on evidence obtained from a teen’s cellphone. (via FourthAmendment.com)

      Two juveniles fled their vehicle during a traffic stop, with one of them (referred to as “K.C.” in the ruling) leaving behind his cellphone on the car’s seat. This phone — whose lockscreen featured a photo of someone who “looked similar” to “K.C.” — was taken by the officer.

      Several months later, the PD’s forensic lab was asked to determine ownership of the phone. The phone was locked with a passcode, but the lab was able to unlock and retrieve this information. No warrant was obtained and the search apparently wasn’t limited to determining ownership. The use of evidence obtained from the phone was challenged, but the state felt it had plenty of warrant exceptions to save its search.

    • EFF urges companies to prepare for more surveillance and censorship

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation – a group of tech pioneers trying to keep the Internet open and free – have published an open letter to tech companies pleading them to prepare for an era of increased Internet surveillance and censorship. The EFF is citing statements by Trump and his advisors regarding Internet control, net neutrality, and freedom of speech and the press.

    • Donald Trump’s future NSA director met with Austrian party founded by Nazis

      The leader of Austria’s Nazi-founded Freedom Party has signed a cooperation agreement with Russia’s ruling party — only weeks after meeting with Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who will soon be national security adviser to President-elect Donald Trump. This muddies the waters as to the United States’ place in a geopolitical world that could be dominated by Russia in the near term.

      Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the Freedom Party, announced that he had signed the agreement with Putin’s own United Russia party on his Facebook page, The New York Times reported on Monday. The announcement also mentioned that Strache had visited Flynn a few weeks earlier in Trump Tower. The cooperation agreement itself includes plans for collaboration between United Russia and the Freedom Party on economic, business, and political projects over the next five years.

      Founded in the 1950s by former Nazis, the Freedom Party nearly captured the Austrian presidency (which is largely ceremonial) in May but lost a runoff election on Dec. 4. It nevertheless remains a potent force in Austrian politics, where it leads all opinions polls ahead of the two mainstream parties, and is best known for its hardline stance against immigration and its defensiveness toward Russia. Indeed, Russia’s signatory Sergei Zheleznyak identified Europe’s “migration crisis” as one of the key areas where the two parties could work together.

    • Report: Shadow Brokers Leaks Trace to NSA Insider
    • Report: ShadowBrokers Obtained Stolen NSA Info Via Rogue Insider
    • ShadowBrokers got NSA spy tools from rogue insider

      The ShadowBrokers didn’t break into the United States National Security Agency after all. The latest research into the group of cybercriminals selling alleged NSA spy tools reinforced the idea that they’d received the classified materials from an insider within the intelligence agency, security company Flashpoint said.

      Analysis of the latest ShadowBrokers dump, which was announced earlier in the month on the blogging platform Medium by “Boceffus Cleetus,” suggests the spy tools were initially taken directly from an NSA code repository by a rogue insider, Flashpoint said. The company’s researchers analyzed the sample file containing implants and exploits and various screenshots provided in the post and have “medium confidence” that an NSA employee or contractor initially leaked the tools, said Ronnie Tokazowski, senior malware analyst with Flashpoint. However, they were still “uncertain of how these documents were exfiltrated,” he said.

    • Shadow Brokers are back with ‘stolen NSA cyberweapons’, now 99.9% off

      That’s the self-styled, pseudo-semi-literate but surely satirical hacker group that claimed in August 2016 to have penetrated the NSA, or some other organisation of that sort, and made off with “cyberweapons” worth more than $500 million.

      They dumped a few files as tasters, with the claim that the files they were keeping back to sell were “better than Stuxnet.”

      That’s a bold claim, given that Stuxnet was the airgap-jumping USB virus that was allegedly written to sneak right into the heart of Iran’s uranium enrichment programme.

    • Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22 billion WhatsApp merger

      Brussels’ competition officials issued a charge sheet against Facebook on Tuesday, in which it is alleged that the free content ad network failed to disclose that “the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook users’ IDs with WhatsApp users’ IDs already existed” at the time of the merger.

      Antitrust chief Margerthe Vestager said that companies must provide “accurate information” during routine competition probes into planned acquisitions.

      “They must take this obligation seriously,” she said. “In this specific case, the commission’s preliminary view is that Facebook gave us incorrect or misleading information during the investigation into its acquisition of WhatsApp. Facebook now has the opportunity to respond.”

    • James Clapper’s Office To Finally Reveal NSA’s ‘Incidental Collection’ Numbers

      Prior to the Snowden leaks making it unignorable, the NSA denied the incidental collection of Americans’ communications was much of a problem. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall were two of the few members of the NSA’s oversight willing to ask tough questions. One of the questions they asked — all the way back in 2011 — was how many Americans were spied on by the NSA’s programs. The answer may shock you/cause uncontrollable eyerolling.

    • EFF’s full-page Wired ad: Dear tech, delete your logs before it’s too late

      EFF has run a full-page ad in this month’s Wired, addressed to the technology industry, under the banner “Your threat model just changed,” warning them that the incoming administration has vowed to spy on and deport millions of their fellow Americans on the basis of religion and race, and that they are in grave risk of having their services conscripted to help with this effort. (Trump is also an avowed opponent of net neutrality)

    • GCHQ should do more to guard against financial cyber crime, Tory MP urges
    • NCSC boss asked to detail efforts to protect financial services sector against cyberattacks
    • GCHQ must do more to protect banks against cyber attacks, Tory MP urges
    • Notable Analyst Coverage Update: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), Sempra Energy (NYSE:SRE)

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Unequal Sentences for Blacks and Whites

      In Flagler County, Fla., blacks convicted of robbery were given prison sentences nearly triple those of whites, even though the circumstances of the crimes were the same.

    • Malcolm Gladwell Likes Leaks When They Bolster Government Power

      But maybe more surprising than the class bias of the New Yorker’s resident deep-thinker is his take on the role of anonymous leaks. In a properly functioning media system, Gladwell argues, the purpose of leaks is to fool people into accepting government indoctrination—and it would be a shame if that system were to break down.

      Gladwell borrows (of course) this argument from Columbia law professor David Pozen (Harvard Law Review, 12/20/13), writing, “Pozen argues that governments look the other way when it comes to leaks because it is in their interest to do so.” Pozen makes a distinction between unauthorized “leaks” and “plants”—the latter being “a leak made with the full authorization of the White House.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T, Verizon Laugh At The FCC’s Last-Minute Attempt To Crack Down On Zero Rating

      So we’ve noted several times how the FCC’s decision to avoid banning zero rating when crafting net neutrality rules was a bad idea, as it opened the door wide to all manner of net neutrality violations — provided incumbent ISPs were just creative about it. And like clockwork, companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast quickly got to work exempting their own content from usage caps, while penalizing competitors (and non-profits or educational services). Meanwhile companies like Sprint and T-Mobile began charging users a steep premium unless they wanted games, video and music throttled by default.

      Unlike many other countries (Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, India), the FCC decided to avoid banning these kinds of practices as part of neutrality rules, instead saying they’d step in and act on a “cases by case” basis should ISP behaviors prove anti-competitive. But as ISPs increasingly made it very clear they were using arbitrary usage caps as anti-competitive weapons against competing streaming video services, the FCC did nothing. That is, until the agency reached out to AT&T and Verizon last month, formally accusing both companies of violating net neutrality.

      It’s a strange, belated decision by an FCC that, by most analyst accounts, is about to be defunded and defanged. Both the GOP and incoming Trump administration have clear they see no role for the agency as a consumer or competition watchdog. With FCC boss Tom Wheeler having just stepped down, both AT&T and Verizon are well aware the current FCC is a lame duck. As such both companies responded to the FCC’s inquiries this week with the legal equivalent of laughter.

    • Trump and His Advisors on Net Neutrality

      Through the combined efforts of EFF and a coalition of public interest groups — and four million of you who wrote in to the FCC — we won carefully tailored and essential net neutrality protections in 2015 and defended them in court in 2016. But how will the incoming Trump administration impact net neutrality in 2017? We’ve collected a range of statements on the positions of Trump, his transition team, and those who are likely to guide the new administration on this issue.

      Trump took a swipe at net neutrality in a November 2014 tweet, stating, “Obama’s Attack on the Internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target Conservative Media.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • How The DMCA And The CFAA Are Preventing People From Saving Their Soon-To-Be-Broken Pebble Watches

        I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think smartwatches are really wonderful, even as lots of people scoff at the concept (and sales have been disappointing across the board). The first device that clued me in to the possible power of the smartwatch was the original Pebble smartwatch, which I (and many, many others) backed on Kickstarter. I ended up backing their second Kickstarter campaign as well — but was disappointed in the end product and ended up moving on to another smartwatch instead (the Moto 360, though now it looks like Motorola is dumping that business as well). I didn’t end up backing Pebble’s latest Kickstarter campaign, which turned out to be a good thing, because as you may have heard, the company announced last week that it had sold its assets to Fitbit, and no more work would be done on Pebble watches (and people who backed the latest project would eventually get refunds, but no watches).

12.20.16

Links 20/12/2016: OpenSDS Project Grows, OpenSSH 7.4 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 9:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • An Open Source Driving Agent from comma.ai

    Last week, we open sourced an advanced driver assistance system in order to help accelerate the future of self driving cars and provide a platform anyone can build on top of. We released both openpilot, driving agent research software, and NEO, a robotics platform capable of running openpilot, under the MIT license.

  • How Praekelt.org and Open Source Provide Critical Services to Enable Social Change

    Praekelt.org runs exclusively on open source software, and the majority of their services are deployed on Ubuntu Linux servers. Recently, they launched a few services on the latest stable Debian release.

    The organization uses Apache Mesos to manage large clusters for their maternal health applications. “All applications on these clusters are distributed in Docker containers and are managed by Mesophere’s Marathon. To provision the machines we use Puppet. Our language of choice for all of our services is Python,” according to Simon de Haan, chief engineer atPraekelt.org and Ambika Samarthya-Howard, head of communications.

  • Five open source skills you’ll need in 2017 | Top skills IT pros will need to conquer the open source platform

    With more organisations opting to either use open source software or open up their platforms, most IT pros will be versed in basic open source practices. However, like most things in tech, the required skills can be subject to change.

    According to The Linux Foundation, a huge 87 percent of managers say it’s difficult to find open source talent, with 79 percent of mangers increasing incentives to retain their current open source employees.

    Computerworld UK spoke with CBT Nuggets trainer and open source expert Shawn Powers to discuss skills IT pros will need to conquer the open source platform in 2017.

  • Give back this holiday: Language input needed for literacy project

    Educational software programs like gCompis, Tux Math, Childsplay and KDE Edu may be familiar to free desktop users. This software is used by organizations such as Reglue, Partimus and KidsOnComputers who are bring educational opportunities to underprivileged children the world over. Even what you might consider to be business-focused software can make the world a better place, as we see with CouchDB who played a crucial role in the fight against the Ebola outbreak two years ago.

  • Kickstarter’s Engineering Team Begins to Open Source Crowdfunding Platform’s Android & iOS Apps

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Upstreams Chrome on iOS Source Code In Chromium

        Google developers today pushed a bunch of their Chrome on iOS code into the upstream Chromium Git repository.

        Over the course of 11 commits, Google appears to have upstreamed much of their Chrome iOS source-code into Chromium.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Survey Reveals Big Data Reaching Maturity, But Governance Fears Loom

      During its formative stage, the Big Data trend–sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information–remained an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are evaluating tools that can help them glean meaningful insights from the data they store. As we’ve noted, the open source Hadoop project has been one of the big drivers of this trend, and has given rise to commercial companies that offer custom Hadoop distributions, support, training and more.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD-Based OPNsense 17.1 Operating System for Firewalls & Routers Enters Beta

      The OPNsense project had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the first Beta images of the upcoming OPNsense 17.1 operating system developed for firewalls and routers.

    • OpenSSH 7.4 released

      OpenSSH 7.4 has just been released. It will be available from the
      mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.

      OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and
      includes sftp client and server support. OpenSSH also includes
      transitional support for the legacy SSH 1.3 and 1.5 protocols
      that may be enabled at compile-time.

      Once again, we would like to thank the OpenSSH community for their
      continued support of the project, especially those who contributed
      code or patches, reported bugs, tested snapshots or donated to the
      project. More information on donations may be found at:

      http://www.openssh.com/donations.html

    • OpenSSH 7.4 released!
    • OpenSSH 7.4 Removes Server Support for the SSH-1 Protocol, Adds New Features

      OpenSSH 7.4 has been released today, December 19, 2016, as the latest and most advanced stable release of the open-source and portable 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation used on Linux, BSD, and other Unix-like platforms.

      OpenSSH 7.4 is here four and a half months after the release of OpenSSH 7.3, and it promises to be primarily a bugfix release that addresses many of the security issues discovered since OpenSSH 7.3. But first, it looks like this version includes various under-the-hood changes that may affect existing configurations.

      For example, it removes support for the the SSH version 1 protocol as SSH2 is a more secure, efficient, and portable version of SSH (Secure Shell), which delivers SSH-encrypted SFTP functionality. It also removes 3des-cbc from the client’s default proposal, as well as support for pre-authentication compression.

  • Public Services/Government

    • DISA looks to open source to squash cyber bugs, reorganizes its data centers

      As part of the response to two massive data breaches involving systems at the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government decided to put the Defense Department in charge of building a new information technology backbone to house and process all of the data involved in security clearance investigations, one that would be safer from foreign attacks.

      As one way to achieve that goal, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the lead agency in charge of the IT development, is considering opening up the National Background Investigation System’s underlying source code to the general public as soon as it’s fully baked. The theory is that it’s far better for white-hat hackers to find and help squash security bugs before the new system comes online than for bad-guy hackers to discover and make use of them to steal yet another batch of data.

      Maj. Gen. Sarah Zabel, DISA’s vice director, said the idea was first proposed to her agency by the Defense Digital Service.

    • Smart Citizens roll out sensor network in Barcelona

      The roll out of the sensor network is part of a “beta pilot” marking the start of the Making Sense project. This project is partly funded by the EU under the Horizon 2020 programme and runs from 2015 till 2017. It aims to “explore how open source software, open source hardware, digital maker practices and open design can be effectively used by local communities to fabricate their own sensing tools, make sense of their environments, and address pressing environmental problems in air, water, soil and sound pollution.”

    • GDS says its open source code guidance needs to be more joined up

      Writing in a blogpost, Anna Shipman, a technical architect and open source lead at GDS, said that making code open – all new code written in government must be open by default – was “vital” to government’s plans to change the way it works.

      “By making our code open and reusable we increase collaboration across teams, helping make departments more joined up, and can work together to reduce duplication of effort and make commonly used code more robust,” she said.

      However, she acknowledged that the service’s guidance on open source code “is not as joined up as it could be” and that more work needed to be done to encourage good practice and make it easy for teams to collaborate.

      Shipman said she would be working to clarify the guidance and fill in any gaps, as well as addressing other barriers identified in user research.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • 3 Common Open Source IP Compliance Failures and How to Avoid Them

      Companies or organizations that don’t have a strong open source compliance program often suffer from errors and limitations in processes throughout the software development cycle that can lead to open source compliance failures.

      In part 3 of this series, we covered some of the risks that a company can face from license failures, including an injunction that prevents a company from shipping a product; support or customer service headaches; significant re-engineering; and more.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • OECD STI Outlook 2016: open science is next frontier

      Beyond open data, open science is now the next frontier. This is one of the main conclusions of the ‘Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2016′, published earlier this month by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

      “Open data access practices are increasingly widespread,” the authors of the report claim. “Encouraging the sharing and re-use of research data could generate more value for public money. Science is also becoming a less institutionalised endeavour, with citizens conducting their own research alongside the scientific community. However, deep changes in academic culture will be necessary to realise the full potential of a more open science.”

    • Open education is about improving lives, not taking tests

      Early in the book Couros says, “Sometimes it scares me to think that we have taken the most human profession, teaching, and have reduced it to simply letters and numbers,” Couros says early in the book. “We place such an emphasis on these scores, because of political mandates and the way teachers and schools are evaluated today, that it seems we’ve forgotten why our profession exists: to change—improve—lives.”

      In other words education has lost it’s “Why?”—and that is central to its mission.

      Immediately I saw the parallels to The Open Organization. Central to the open organization is a completely different model of organization. Conventional organizations are top-down, while open organizations are bottom-up. In conventional “What we do” and “How we do it” are most important. But in the bottom-up open organization “Why we do it” is most important, and this emotional connection between and among the members of the open organization motivates the community and drives innovation.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • SiFive Is Setting Silicon Free with Open-Source Chips

        Moore’s Law is dead…just not in the way everyone thinks. Technological advances keep allowing chips to scale, but the economics are another story – particularly for smaller companies that can’t afford chips in the volumes that the big chipmakers would like from their customers.

        The solution, according to San Francisco-based startup, SiFive, is open-source hardware, specifically an architecture developed by the company’s founders called RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”). Done right SiFive, which was awarded Startup of the Year at the 2016 Creativity in Electronics (ACE) Awards, believes that RISC-V will do for the hardware industry what Linux has done for software.

  • Programming/Development

Leftovers

  • Apple’s not very good, really quite poor 2016

    As they drift off for their one- or two-day vacations shortly, will Apple’s senior executives be patting themselves on the back? Or will they be slapping themselves on the forehead?

    Apple’s 2016 was garlanded with the usual hype, but not somehow with the usual excitement.

    Perhaps you’re excited by profits. Most real people, however, simply want to witness, feel and enjoy something that, to them, feels both new and exciting.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Superbacteria seep through Finland’s borders

      The last few years have seen more cases of antibiotic-resistant superbacteria infections in Finland. Even special strains of antibiotics that are saved for difficult cases may not necessarily have an effect on the so-called superbugs.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • [Older] Why Is Sweden Giving the “Alternative Nobel Prize” to Syria’s ‘White Helmets’?

      Sweden did not succeed in getting Bob Dylan to come to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nevertheless as a consolation the “White Helmets” did arrive to get the Right Livelihood Award.

      This article examines a likely geopolitical rationale that the Swedish elites had for selecting that organization. Facts suggest a congruence between the stances of those elites on Syria and the declared political aims of the organization White Helmets. The reviewing of the institutions involved in the award-decision and process can also result relevant in pondering the reason for the event. Finally, to inquire into the role of Carl Bildt, as member of the board of directors in the institution ultimately deciding, is interesting against the backdrop of his opposition regarding the participation of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden in previous international events organized by the same institutions –all of them under the umbrella of the Swedish Foreign Office.

    • Truck hits Berlin Christmas market, one dead: reports

      German media reported on Monday that a truck had ploughed into a Christmas market in central Berlin, killing at least one person and injuring several others, according to local media.

      Reports said the truck drove into the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz in central Berlin’s main shopping district. There was no immediate word on who was responsible, but the newspaper Berliner Morgenpost — whose offices are located on the square — said police suspected it was a terrorist attack.

    • Berlin Crash Is Suspected to Be a Terror Attack, Police Say

      The Berlin police said early Tuesday that the killing of at least 12 people and the wounding of dozens more when a truck plowed through a Christmas market on Monday night was “a suspected terrorist attack.”

      In a statement, the police added that they were working swiftly and with “necessary care” in the investigation.

      The truck jumped the sidewalk about 8 p.m. near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, whose jagged spire, a reminder of the bombings during World War II, is one of the most symbolic sites in Berlin.

    • Russian official found dead from gunshot wounds in Moscow

      THE head of a Russian foreign ministry department has been shot dead in Moscow, according to local media.

      The government has not yet confirmed the reports.

      A man’s body was found in an apartment with a gunshot wound to the head, REN TV reported.

      Two shells were found along with a gun under the sink in the kitchen, a source told the news outlet. They claimed the wife of the man was also in the apartment.

      Paramedics were filmed carrying a man wearing a white shirt into an ambulance.

      The news comes on a dramatic day after nine were killed by a truck driving into a Berlin Christmas market and a Turkish off-duty police officer pulled out a gun at an art exhibition in Ankara and killed Russia’s ambassador to the country, shouting: “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!”

    • ISIS claims responsibility for Berlin Christmas market attack

      ISIS has claimed responsibility for the deadly Christmas market truck crash in Berlin, a report says.

      The Iraqi Popular Mobilization Force tweeted that the terror group was taking credit for the incident, which left at least 12 people dead and more than 50 injured at major public market Monday.

      Using encrypted technology, the group said they found several jihadist Twitter accounts that had been claiming responsibility for the alleged attack, according to the Washington Times.

    • Three more charged over Nice truck attack

      Six people have already been charged so far over alleged links to the 31-year-old killer

      A French anti-terrorist judge has charged three more men suspected of helping to arm the Islamist radical who crushed 86 people to death with a truck in Nice, a judicial source said Saturday.

      The three, who were among 11 arrested on Monday in Nice and the western city of Nantes, were remanded into custody on Friday, said the source. The other eight have been released.

      The three, aged 24, 31 and 36, were charged in relation to a terrorist plot.

      The arrests come five months after Tunisian extremist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel ploughed a 19-tonne truck into a crowd on the Nice seafront, further traumatising a country reeling from a series of jihadist attacks.

    • Police escort FPI members during raid on Santa hats in Surabaya malls

      The Surabaya Police escorted Islam Defenders Front (FPI) members on Sunday as they raided shopping malls in the East Java capital to check whether outlets had ordered employees to wear Christmas attire such as Santa hats.

      For promotional purposes, many companies ask their employees to wear holiday season paraphernalia, including Santa hats, when serving customers ahead of Christmas and New Year celebrations. Recently, the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) issued an edict banning companies from forcing staff to wear such items, deeming it haram.

    • Russian ambassador dead: Video shows assassin shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ after shooting Andrey Karlov

      Video has emerged of the moments after a gunman shot dead the Russian ambassador to Turkey in Ankara.

      Andrey Karlov was several minutes into a speech at the embassy-sponsored exhibition in the capital when a man wearing a suit and tie shouted “Allahu akbar” and fired at least eight shots, according to an AP photographer in the audience.

      It was reported that the gunman shouted in Turkish: “Don’t forget Aleppo. Don’t forget Syria.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • The dirty deplorables: Who’s who on Donald Trump’s team and how they’ll destroy the environment

      What do Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees and advisers think about climate change and other sustainability issues? As you would expect, it’s not looking good for those of us concerned about a habitable climate and livable cities. Trump is putting together a climate-denying cabal of extreme right-wingers and corporate sympathizers likely to roll back environmental protections, halt smart-growth efforts and undo progress toward environmental justice.

      We’ll keep tabs on the most relevant nominees and appointees here, continuing as they make their way through the confirmation process, so check back for updates.

    • The United States of Climate Change Denial

      Donald Trump has promised to unleash an energy revolution by extracting billions of dollars in untapped fossil fuels and gutting incentives to invest in renewable energy. With the nominations of Rex Tillerson, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and Rick Perry to his Cabinet, the President-elect is poised to do more damage to America’s environmental legacy—and future—than any other leader in recent memory.

      Despite Trump’s untraditional approach to choosing Cabinet officials, nothing about their nomination is accidental. Each of them offers a range of qualifications and connections that, together, form a unified front against climate progress, human health, and energy security.

    • Finland’s future – Even darker winters with temperatures like Hungary?

      Hot summers, warm winters and plenty of rain, this is the future Finland may face if unbridled climate change continues, says a study by the Finnish Meteorological Institute FMI. If the emissions of greenhouse gases continue unchecked, by the end of the century the climate of central Finland could be as warm as it is today in Hungary.

    • Indonesia’s forestry ministry takes Greenpeace to court over freedom of information request

      The Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry is going to court over a successful freedom of information request by Greenpeace, setting the stage for a protracted legal battle over a form of data NGOs say they need if they are to play a monitoring role in the world’s third-largest democracy.

      Greenpeace Indonesia on Oct. 24 won its yearlong suit submitted to the Central Information Commission (KIP) against the ministry demanding access to seven different geospatial maps of Indonesia, including those showing oil palm, timber, and mining concessions as well as the archipelago country’s land cover.

      The group argued its case under the 2008 Freedom of Public Information Law, which established the KIP. “This is exciting news for us,” Greenpeace’s Kiki Taufik said immediately after the ruling came down. “The commission has made the right decision.”

  • Finance

    • IMF chief Lagarde found guilty of negligence by French court over payout to businessman

      The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, has been found guilty of negligence by a Paris court over a huge payout she approved to a business tycoon while serving as French finance minister in 2008.

      Despite the guilty finding, the Court of Justice of the Republic did not issue any sentence for the IMF chief.

      The official denies the negligence charges, and her lawyers will now look into appealing the court ruling, Reuters reported.

      The decision not to hand down a punishment was made considering Lagarde’s good reputation and international standing, Reuters reported, citing the main judge, Martine Ract Madoux. She added that “the context of the global financial crisis in which Madame Lagarde found herself” was “taken into account.”

    • When you thought trade deals could not get any worse — enter Wall Street

      What connects two proposed gold mines, one in the high-altitude wetlands of Colombia and one in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania?

      Both mines would require huge quantities of cyanide and threaten watersheds used by millions of people for drinking water. One would damage a unique, legally protected ecosystem and the other would destroy an ancient, UNESCO-nominated settlement. Both have been opposed by scientific bodies, protested by tens of thousands of people, and restricted by domestic courts.

      And in both cases, the Canadian mining corporations behind the projects (Eco Oro in Colombia and Gabriel Resources in Romania) have responded to the mining denials by using trade and investment deals to sue the governments in private tribunals. In fact, Eco Oro just launched its case last week. Using this backdoor process called “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS), the corporations can demand up to billions of dollars from the taxpayers in both countries. These ISDS claims are possible due to far-reaching rights that trade and investment deals grant to corporations.

      But there is another common element driving both cases: big money from Wall Street.

    • Brazil passes the mother of all austerity plans

      Imagine setting your budget today for every year through 2036. This week, the world’s ninth-largest economy made just such a decision.

      The Brazilian Senate on Tuesday approved a constitutional amendment to freeze social spending by the Brazilian government for 20 years — allowing it to rise only in tandem with inflation. The government says such a dramatic measure is necessary to get the country’s recession-bound economy back on track and gain control over public debt, which has grown sharply in recent years.

      With tough fiscal measures such as the amendment, “everyone will be able to project the numbers,” Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles said in an interview in June with the Financial Times. “A lot of the uncertainty is coming down.”

    • We’re about to sign a deal with Canada that’s just as bad as TTIP and could increase inequality across the whole of Europe

      CETA is an EU-Canada trade deal just like the controversial EU-US deal TTIP. It was secretly negotiated over five years, locks in the privatisation of public services and will permit corporations across the North America to sue European governments in a private justice system. Brexit may not happen for at least two years, but CETA will be voted on in February – if it passes, it will immediately apply to the UK.

      Inequality is grist to the mill for far-right populists, yet the European Commission and members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are failing to learn the lessons of Brexit and the rise of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. Instead, it’s big business as usual, and continued support for policies that generate inequality and, in turn, fuel the xenophobic right.

    • Apple given favorable treatment on tax? No way, insists Ireland

      On Monday, the Irish government said in its challenge against the European Commission—which ruled that Apple should pay Ireland €13 billion (£11.1 billion) in back taxes—that it “does not do deals with taxpayers,” adding that the country “did not give favourable tax treatment to Apple.”

      The commission’s antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager, said in August: “Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies—this is illegal under EU state aid rules.” But Ireland’s finance ministry countered that “the full amount of tax was paid in this case and no state aid was provided.”

    • If the U.S. Won’t Pay Its Teachers, China Will

      Cindy Mi leans forward on a couch in her sun-filled Beijing office to explain how she first got interested in education. She loved English so much as a child that she spent her lunch money on books and magazines to practice. By 15, she was good enough that she began to tutor other students. At 17, she dropped out of high school to start a language-instruction company with her uncle.

      Today, Mi is 33 and founder of a startup that aims to give Chinese kids the kind of education American children receive in top U.S. schools. Called VIPKid, the company matches Chinese students aged five to 12 with predominantly North American instructors to study English, math, science and other subjects. Classes take place online, typically for two or three 25-minute sessions each week.

    • Trump’s anti-education Education Secretary owes millions in election fraud fines

      Betsy DeVos is the self-described neo-Calvinist and wife of the heir to the Amway fortune who’s devoted her life to fighting against public education through a system of vouchers that allow for public funding of religious schools; in accord with the trumpian maxim of “a fox for every henhouse,” she has been selected to serve as Trump’s Education Secretary.

      In 2006, All Children Matter, DeVos’s anti-education PAC asked the Ohio Elections Commission whether it could transfer unlimited funds to its Ohio subsidiary, and were firmly told that the most they could transfer was $10,000 — a ruling DeVos ignored, transfering $870,000 to the Ohio affiliate. This resulted in the bipartisan commission fining DeVos $5.2m, a ruling upheld by an Ohio court.

      DeVos ducked out of the fines by shutting down the Ohio subsidiary and claiming that neither she nor her PAC were liable for its debts, including the whopping $5.2M fine.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Five reasons why we don’t have a free and independent press in the UK and what we can do about it

      While most of us don’t trust journalists, many of us are still under the illusion that we have a free and independent press. The truth is we don’t. Here’s five reasons why we should be very sceptical of the information we read in the corporate media and why there is hope for the future.
      1) The billionaires that own the press set the agenda

      Who owns the media shapes what stories are covered and how they are written about. The UK media has a very concentrated ownership structure, with six billionaires owning and/or having a majority of voting shares in most of the national newspapers.

    • BREAKING: FBI Ordered to Unseal Warrant Used to Get Clinton Emails During Weiner Probe

      A federal judge has ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to unseal at least a portion of search warrant it obtained after finding emails pertinent to the Hillary Clinton investigation during the Bureau’s Anthony Weiner probe.

      The FBI’s planned disclosure is directly related to an effort by well-known attorney Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, who filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Justice that sought the “immediate disclosure of the FBI search warrant for the e-mails of Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.”

    • Fact-checking the integrity of the vote in 2016

      Faith in elections goes to the core of the American idea of democracy. That faith has been challenged before, but this year, the attacks came from many directions.

      There were repeated allegations of voter fraud, which for the most part turned out to be false. The government warned that Russia tried to influence the election through hacking and strategic document dumps. And fake news reports about the presidential candidates circulated on the Internet and via Facebook.

    • Kent County to profit $10K from halted Michigan recount

      Kent County could profit as much as $10,000 from a halted recount of ballots cast in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

      The recount was halted by a federal judge after Kent County had completed two full days of reviewing thousands of paper ballots by hand.

    • Pennsylvania’s voting system is one of the worst

      In May 2006, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, launched an e-voting system, producing a nationally notorious election disaster in which every technical and management system failed. One of the largest election jurisdictions in the nation, the county used DRE touchscreens similar to Allegheny County’s.

      When the election tabulation database grew beyond what it was designed to handle — a flaw concealed by the manufacturer — it silently began dropping votes and other data, without notifying officials. An accurate recount was possible, however, because Ohio had required paper printouts of voters’ e-ballots. Recounts showed that some previously announced winners actually had lost. The hidden software problem did not extinguish anyone’s voting rights only because there was a paper trail.

      Experts in election technology have pointed out that most Pennsylvania counties — including Allegheny — use e-voting systems that have been outlawed by most states. The chief reason? The omission of voter-approved paper printouts that can be recounted and that allow for audits to check on the accuracy of the electronic machines. Even when voting systems are aged and vulnerable to hacking or tampering, durable paper ballots combined with quality-assurance audits can ensure trustworthy results.

    • Trump private security force ‘playing with fire’

      President-elect Donald Trump has continued employing a private security and intelligence team at his victory rallies, and he is expected to keep at least some members of the team after he becomes president, according to people familiar with the plans.

      The arrangement represents a major break from tradition. All modern presidents and presidents-elect have entrusted their personal security entirely to the Secret Service, and their event security mostly to local law enforcement, according to presidential security experts and Secret Service sources.

      But Trump — who puts a premium on loyalty and has demonstrated great interest in having forceful security at his events — has opted to maintain an aggressive and unprecedented private security force, led by Keith Schiller, a retired New York City cop and Navy veteran who started working for Trump in 1999 as a part-time bodyguard, eventually rising to become his head of security.

    • IBM workers protest against co-operation with Trump

      Employees of IBM have launched a petition against the statement made by the company’s chief executive Ginni Rometty to US president-elect Donald Trump in which she detailed various services the company could sell to the government.

      According to the Intercept, IBM had also initially refused to rule out creating a registry of Muslims in the US, something that it has ruled out now.

      The IBM protest is being led by cybersecurity engineer Daniel Hanley. He said he was shocked after reading Rometty’s letter which was published on an internal IBM blog along with a personal note from the chief executive to the company’s global staff.

    • Trump wins electoral college amid nationwide protests

      The US electoral college has certified Donald Trump as the 45th president, despite a last-ditch effort to deny him the White House.

      Six weeks after winning the polls, the Republican cruised past the 270 votes needed to formalise his victory.

      After the result, Mr Trump promised to “work hard to unite our country and be the president of all Americans”.

      Electors had been flooded with emails and phone calls urging them not to support the billionaire.

      But despite longshot liberal hopes of a revolt by Republican electors, only two – from Texas – ended up voting against him.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Turkey blocks Tor’s anonymity network

      Turkey’s President Erdogan and the ruling AKP party are increasingly bent on silencing online dissent, and that now affects you even if you’re smart enough to evade typical censorship methods. Watchdog group Turkey Blocks has confirmed that Turkey is blocking the Tor anonymity network’s direct access mode for most users. You can still use a bridge mode for now, but there are hints that internet providers might be hurting performance even then. The restrictions come alongside a recent government ban on virtual private network services.

    • Tor blocked in Turkey as government cracks down on VPN use

      The Turkey Blocks internet censorship watchdog has identified and verified that restrictions on the Tor anonymity network and Tor Browser are now in effect throughout Turkey. Our study indicates that service providers have successfully complied with a government order to ban VPN services.

    • Facebook patent hints at an automated solution for fake news

      Facebook may have said that it’s stepping up its fight against fake news in the past few weeks, but there are signs that it might have had a way to tackle this problem sooner. A recently published USPTO filing from 2015 reveals that Facebook has applied for a patent on technology that would automate the process of removing “objectionable content.” It’s ostensibly for eliminating hate speech, porn and other material that Facebook has objected to for years, but the system could easily be applied to bogus stories as well.

      The approach would supplement user-based content flagging with machine learning. The automatic system would generate a score for content based on the likelihood that it’s objectionable, helping human moderators decide which material to cut. It’d look at the number of users objecting to content, for example, as well as the age of the account making a complaint (to discourage harassment and trolling). The AI-like code would study valid flags and learn to make more informed decisions about objectionable content.

    • Google is threatening to throw me off Google+, but won’t tell me why

      Naturally, I assumed this was just the Russians trying to gain access to my hugely valuable store of e-mails, and ignored the message. However, the next time I logged on to my Google+ account, there was a further warning that Google was seriously thinking about throwing me off the service, and so I had better watch my step.

      Since I am not in the habit of posting “unwanted promotional or commercial content, or engaging in unwanted or mass solicitation” on Google+, this left me somewhat perplexed. I searched everywhere for some way of contacting the Google+ violation department, or whatever it’s called, but could find nothing other than a couple of pages offering “Tips for creating Google+ content” and one about “Limited access and profile suspensions.” The absence of any way to contact Google seemed strange: after all, before I could stop doing what I shouldn’t be doing, I needed to know what exactly that was.

      Although I was unable to find any official way of obtaining information on alleged violations, I did find a Google+ Help community. After I joined, I asked how I could find out what I had done to incur the wrath of the great god Google, and this led to a useful thread.

    • Facebook fake news: Germany threatens new law with €500,000 fine attached

      Germany’s coalition government is threatening to bring in legislation early next year that would see Facebook and other social media firms fined up to €500,000 (£420,000) for “publishing” fake news.

      “Market dominating platforms like Facebook will be legally required to build a legal protection office in Germany that is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” parliamentary chair of the Social Democratic Party Thomas Oppermann told Der Spiegel, which was translated on Deutsche Welle.

      “If, after appropriate examination, Facebook does not delete the offending message within 24 hours, it should expect individual fines of up to 500,000 euros,” Oppermann said. The subject of a fake news story would be able to demand a correction published with similar prominence, he added.

    • MPs suggest introducing web blocking to tackle suicide rates in UK

      MPs have suggested restricting access to sites which encourage self-harm or give detailed advice on methods for committing suicide as a means of tackling the “unacceptable” level of suicide in the nation.

      MPs have warned government that it has failed to do enough to tackle the UK’s suicide rates. Suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 49, and also the leading cause of death for people aged between 16 and 24.

      Over 6,100 deaths in the UK in 2015 were registered as suicides, though the actual number may be higher. While MPs placed much blame at the feet of government, they claimed there was also much to be done by internet providers and social media companies too.

    • France plans internet ombudsman to safeguard free speech

      France is considering appointing an official internet ombudsman to regulate complaints about online material in order to prevent excessive censorship and preserve free speech.

      A bill establishing a “content qualification assessment procedure” has been tabled in the French senate and the initiative was debated last week at a high level meeting attended by senators and judges as well as policy officers from Google and Twitter.

      The aim is to provide a simple procedure that will support firms operating online who are uncertain of their legal liabilities and to prevent over-zealous removal or censorship of material merely because it is the subject of a complaint. It could be copied by other European jurisdictions.

      Dan Shefets, a Danish lawyer who works in Paris has developed the proposal with the French senator Nathalie Goulet, said: “The problem which an internet ombudsman addresses applies to all countries in Europe [because] member states have to work with the e-commerce directive.

    • Proposed bill would block porn from computers sold in South Carolina, somehow

      South Carolina representative Bill Chumley has proposed a bill that would make it slightly more difficult for people in his state to watch porn. The bill would require manufacturers to install “digital blocking capabilities” on their computers that would ban access to internet porn, The Charlotte Observer reports.

    • South Carolina will debate bill to block porn on new computers

      A South Carolina politician is hoping to stop computer owners in his state from viewing pornography.

      State Rep. Bill Chumley, a Republican from Spartanburg, told his hometown newspaper that his Human Trafficking Prevention Act would require manufacturers or sellers of computers or other devices that access the Internet to install digital blocks to prevent the viewing of obscene content. Blocking websites that facilitate prostitution would also be required, he said.

      If a purchaser wants the filter lifted, he or she has to pay $20 to have it taken out—provided the person is over the age of 18.

    • The Call To Censor Bad News Isn’t New, Doesn’t Make Sense, And Should Frighten You A Great Deal

      The American citizen currently enjoys greater access to information than any average person in human history. But you wouldn’t know that from reading The New York Times, Buzzfeed or any other of the many outlets busying themselves calling for the administration, in concert with corporations, to censor fake news stories.

    • Arts Academy Under Attack: Police Questionings, Censorship and a Blow to Academic Freedom

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Cuts to open source monitoring tool could impact MoD intelligence, warn MPs

      BBC Monitoring is one of the few open source information gathering agencies, which has a global reach through its partnership with its US counterpart, Open Source Enterprise (OSE). BBC Monitoring covers 25% of the world and OSE the remaining 75%.

    • How to check if your VPN is leaking private data

      A virtual private network is a great way to keep your internet usage secure and private whether at home or on public Wi-Fi. But just how private is your activity over a VPN? How do you know if the VPN is doing its job or if you’re unwittingly leaking information to those trying to pry into your activities?

      One simple way to see if the VPN is working is to search for what is my IP on Google. At the top of the search results, Google will report back your current public Internet Protocol (IP) address. If you’re on a VPN, it should show the VPN’s IP. If it doesn’t, you know you have a problem.

    • U.S. Investigators Blame Autopilot in Facebook’s Big Drone Crash

      The wing on Facebook Inc.’s experimental high-altitude drone broke last summer in Arizona after the massive aircraft hit an updraft and its autopilot overcompensated seconds before touchdown on its maiden flight, a U.S. investigation has concluded.

      The end section of the right wing snapped off as the plane’s computerized flight controls made abrupt maneuvers to keep it on course, breaking the carbon-fiber structure, the National Transportation Safety Board said in conclusions posted online Friday.

      There were no injuries or damage other than to the drone.

    • Twitter Cuts Off Firehose Access To DHS Fusion Centers

      Earlier this year, Twitter pulled the plug on some of Dataminr’s customers, specifically the intelligence agencies it was selling its firehose access to. Twitter made it clear Dataminr’s access to every public tweet wasn’t to be repurposed into a government surveillance tool.

      That being said, everything swept up by Dataminr was public. There was no access to direct messages or tweets sent from private accounts. And Twitter seemingly is doing nothing to prevent Dataminr from selling this same access to the FBI, an agency that’s far more an intelligence agency than a law enforcement agency these days — one that thinks it should be allowed to do everything the CIA does, if not more.

    • Britain urged to increase cyber security in financial services

      Britain’s intelligence agencies need to do more to help regulators to protect the financial services industry from cyber crime, the head of an influential parliamentary committee said on Monday.

      Andrew Tyrie, a lawmaker in the ruling Conservative Party, said parliament’s Treasury Committee was concerned about the “opaque lines of accountability”, particularly between regulators and intelligence agencies.

    • GCHQ urged to ramp up security to protect Britain’s financial industry from escalating cybercrime
    • GCHQ must do more to protect UK banks from hack attacks, say MPs
    • Tyrie demands clarity on cybercrime
    • GCHQ asked to step up action against cyber-attack threat to financial services

      More action may be needed to protect the financial services industry from a devastating cyber-attack, the head of the Treasure select committee has suggested.

    • Edward Snowden, The NSA And Civil Liberties: Is Our Privacy Still Being Violated By The Federal Government And Its Intelligence agencies?

      Thanks to Edward Snowden, the ongoing debate between those who want to ensure the United States can gather any intelligence it needs to protect itself from terrorism and those who are concerned about civil liberties exploded into the public arena three years ago. As reported by NBC News, Snowden released a vast treasure trove of highly classified documents regarding the surveillance activities then being carried out by the NSA. But have these revelations really changed anything regarding privacy issues?

      In the immediate aftermath of Snowden’s release of these documents, many politicians and legal experts came forward to demand that the NSA be reformed. Following the leaks, President Obama assembled experts to evaluate the situation. In December of that year, the group published a report in which they recommended a number of significant reforms – such as halting the U.S. government’s gathering of bulk telephone data and limiting the extent of surveillance carried out on foreign leaders.

    • In Trump, beleaguered intelligence community faces a new challenge: A disparaging boss

      It’s been a bruising few years for America’s spies.

      Revelations about torture by the CIA and sweeping electronic spying on the part of the NSA have hurt their public image, casting them as aggressive or nosy rather than — as they tend to see themselves — quiet patriots forced to work in obscurity to protect the nation.

      Officials say falling morale has affected the agencies’ ability to hold on to employees — often highly skilled analysts and technicians who could earn many times as much money in the private sector.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Why General Motors is asking the Supreme Court to say it’s only 7 years old — not 108

      When a company reorganizes itself through a bankruptcy, is it the same company? And if so, is it liable for alleged wrongdoing committed by the previous version of itself?

      These are questions raised by General Motors’ efforts to dodge hundreds of lawsuits related to a potentially fatal ignition-switch flaw in millions of its older sedans. After receiving a stinging defeat in a federal appellate court this past summer, the automaker is now making a Hail Mary pass to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to convince judges that it has reincarnated into a seven-year-old car company free of liabilities from its previous life.

      With potentially billions of dollars’ worth of personal and financial injury claims at stake, the Detroit automaker’s lawyers argue that allowing these lawsuits to go through would undermine an important aspect of corporate bankruptcy: giving assurance to the buyers of troubled companies that they aren’t also buying a whole bunch of unexpected legal headaches.

    • Stupid law of the week: South Carolina wants anti-porno chips in PCs that cost $20 to disable

      Lawmakers in South Carolina are mulling over banning the sale of computers, tablets and phones unless they have a device that automatically blocks pornography from popping up on-screen.

      The Human Trafficking Prevention Act amendment, introduced by State Representative Bill Chumley (R‑Spartanburg), calls for manufacturers and resellers to be fined if they sell an internet-connected product in the US state without a filter capable of stopping smut from appearing by default. The proposed stiff rules, drawn up late last week, follow a crackdown in the state on human trafficking in 2015.

    • Disgusted by White Land Theft, Millionaire Gives Home to Tribe

      The $4 million property will turn into a prayer house for Indigenous youth to have a ‘safe space’ where they can get in touch with their roots, history and language.

      Expressing “disgust” for the historic land-theft perpetrated on Indigenous peoples in the United States, an eccentric Manhattan millionaire has decided to transfer his $4 million home back to the Lenape Tribe, the original inhabitants of Mannahatta – or land of many hills.

      Jean-Louis Goldwater Bourgeois, 76, the son of late sculptor Louise Bourgeois, is currently in the process of transferring the deed of his West Village home to Anthony Jay Van Dunk, the chief of the 5,000-member Ramapough Indians, who are part of the Lenape Nation. They met in 2011, introduced by a common acquaintance after Bourgeois had expressed his desire to return the land.

    • ‘This isn’t Paris. It’s only men here’ – Inside the French Muslim no-go zones where women aren’t welcome

      A quiet Paris bar where men play cards and bet on horses has become the unlikely focus of a national row over alleged no-go zones for women in predominantly Muslim areas.

      The bar in the impoverished north-eastern suburb of Sevran is accused of being one of many in France where women are effectively banned.

      The neighbourhood, near Charles de Gaulle airport, is notorious as one of France’s leading exporters of jihadists.

      “Au Jockey Club” is clearly a male preserve — there were no women when The Telegraph visited — but it serves alcohol and feels more akin to a high street bookmaker than a den of Islamists. Licensed as a betting shop, its mainly French Arab patrons gazed intently at giant screens showing the races at Deauville.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • European authorities crack down on zero-rating ISPs, defending net neutrality

      Telecom authority PTS is cracking down on the European ISP Telia for having unmetered traffic to Facebook and Spotify while metering other traffic, in violation of net neutrality. Earlier this year, the ISP launched a marketing scheme where accessing Facebook and Spotify didn’t count against your Internet traffic cap, causing net neutrality concerns. While the authority hasn’t made a final decision, sources say it will tell Telia to end the practice in no uncertain terms.

      In May this year, Swedish ISP Telia attracted global attention by blatantly violating Net Neutrality in zero-rating Facebook, later adding a selection of music streaming services (Spotify among them) to its zero-rating offer.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Groundless threats – Nvidia v Hardware Labs

      This judgment concerned the Defendant’s application for strike out/summary judgment of the Claimant’s claim to groundless threats, the Claimant’s application to stay their groundless threats claim pending an EU IPO decision, and the Defendant’s application for transfer to IPEC or the Shorter Trials Scheme.

      The groundless threats question turned on the location of a threat to sue. More specifically, can a letter sent in English from a Germany company to a US parent company regarding infringement of an EU trade mark constitute a threat to bring trade mark infringement proceedings in England and Wales?

    • Trademarks

      • Dunks And Drunks: Jagermeister Blocks Milwaukee Bucks Logo Trademark Application

        Just when you think you’ve seen it all in silly trademark filings, along comes a liquor company to block the trademark application for the logo of an NBA basketball team. Jagermeister, a liquor I haven’t thought about since my college days because I’m a grownup that drinks grownup drinks, has decided that the logo for the Milwaukee Bucks is too similar to its own logo and must be stopped.

      • Lee v. Tam and A Basket of Deplorable People

        In the case, the Department of Justice and USPTO are appealing the Federal Circuit’s determination that the disparagement provision of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. 1052(a) is facially invalid as in conflict with the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The provision at issue provides for the PTO’s refusal to register marks that consist of “matter which may disparage . . . persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” Mr. Tam’s band name – THE SLANTS – was refused under this provision.

12.19.16

Links 19/12/2016: NetworkManager 1.4.4, GNU Hurd 0.9

Posted in News Roundup at 9:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • ​The best Linux laptop: The 2016 Dell XPS 13

      This is a really, sweet design. The display bezel is only a quarter of an inch thick. This is as close to a real “edge-to-edge” display than I’ve ever seen. The 13.3 inch display itself is also sweet. It’s a 3,200×1,800 touchscreen. For those playing along at home that’s 280 pixels per inch. That’s 40 more than my prized 2015 Chromebook Pixel and 60 more than a MacBook Pro with Retina.

      The display is powered by Intel’s Iris 540 GPU. It looks, in a word, great. At 13.3 inches, the screen is a bit small for my taste, but I’m not complaining.

    • Why I *Still* Use Linux

      We talk a lot about why people should switch to linux. It got me thinking about why, after 10 years, am I still using linux and how the reasons are so different from why we tell people to switch.

    • Lenovo Yoga Book 2-in-1 PC With Chrome OS Coming In 2017

      Now this Chrome OS is a straightaway competition for Microsoft Windows PC. The primary user interface is Linux and the Chrome browser. It is dependent on the internet web based applications. So you won’t have to store anything locally on the hard drive of the device. Google recently updated the Chrome OS for supporting the Google Play station in September. It enables users to download and install the Android apps along with native Chrome apps.

    • Chrome OS Yoga Book Is Bad News For Android Tablets

      Just the other day, Lenovo made it official: a Chrome OS version of the Lenovo Yoga Book is coming in 2017.

      What Jeff Meredith said in addition to that confirmations is just as interesting, though.

  • Kernel Space

    • PCI Updates For The Linux 4.10 Kernel

      The PCI subsystem updates for the Linux 4.10 merge window were sent in a few days ago.

    • Hearing The Sound Updates For Linux 4.10

      Takashi Iwai submitted all of the sound driver updates on Wednesday for the Linux 4.10 kernel. Intel Skylake audio continues to be refined but there is also a lot of other hardware driver work.

    • Linux Kernel 3.12.69 LTS Has Many Networking Improvements, Updated Drivers

      Today, December 18, 2016, Linux kernel maintainer Jiri Slaby announced the release of the sixth-ninth maintenance update of the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series, which will be maintained until 2017.

      The Linux 3.12 kernel branch was supposed to reach end-of-life in spring this year, but it’s used in the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 1 (SP1) operating system, which is supported with security and software updates until 2017. As such, Jiri Slaby decided to move the EOL status of Linux kernel 3.12 to 2017 too, and the latest release, Linux kernel 3.12.69 LTS, changes a total of 48 files, with 414 insertions and 162 deletions.

    • Linux Kernel, tested by the Linux-version of PVS-Studio

      Since the release of the publicly available Linux-version of PVS-Studio, it was just a matter of time until we would recheck the Linux kernel. It is quite a challenge for any static code analyzer to check a project written by professionals from all around the world, used by people in various fields, which is regularly checked and tested by different tools. So, what errors did we manage to find in such conditions?

    • Linux 4.10 To Better Support Microsoft’s Surface 3 Device

      A few days ago I wrote about HID improvements for Microsoft’s Surface 3/4 tablets coming with Linux 4.10 while now there is additional driver work landing to benefit the Microsoft Surface 3 2-in-1 computer.

    • Graphics Stack

      • 3D-Accelerated Remote Wayland Displays Are Being Discussed Again

        The subject of remote Wayland displays with hardware-acceleration is again back to being talked about, this time initiated by the developer of VirtualGL.

        VirtualGL is one of the open-source projects working on remote Linux display support with the ability to run OpenGL applications with full 3D hardware acceleration via a GLX interposer and a high-speed X proxy. The lead developer of VirtualGL is wanting to go beyond just supporting X11 but also to handling Wayland/Weston.

      • The Strange Behavior Of My Radeon R9 290 Is Still There

        In recent days there have been a few Phoronix readers inquiring why I am not testing with my Radeon R9 290 graphics card in all our frequent comparisons and driver benchmarks. The short story is that the regression since Linux 4.7 remains and for my Radeon R9 290 and others with select Hawaii graphics cards, there still is a performance regression. Though over Christmas I hope to finally find the time to bisect it.

        So for those wondering but haven’t asked why the R9 290 hasn’t been used, it’s since there is still that pesky regression… While there was a fix for some, my HIS Radeon R9 290 and that of other select users still are having issues, likely due to differing video BIOS. AMD, meanwhile, reportedly hasn’t been able to reproduce this issue with their hardware.

      • RADV Vulkan Driver Patches To Support Compute Queues
      • AMD MxGPU Virtualization For The AMDGPU Driver

        The patches by AMD’s Xiangliang Yu work to implement CSA and KIQ along with mailbox communication with the GPU hypervisor. CSA is the Context Save Area. KIQ in this context is the Kernel Interface Queue, as described in one of the patches, “KIQ is queue-memory based initialization method: setup KIQ queue firstly, then send command to KIQ to setup other queues, without accessing registers. For virtualization, need KIQ to access virtual function registers when running on guest mode.”

      • VK9, the open source project to implement d3d9 over Vulkan reaches another milestone

    • Benchmarks

      • 2016 End-of-Year Open-Source Radeon Benchmarks With Linux 4.9, Mesa 13.1-dev On Many Different GPUs

        With 2016 soon drawing to an end, it’s time for all of my year-end recaps now of Linux drivers that I have been doing for the past 12 years. Today are benchmarks of a wide assortment of AMD graphics cards on both R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers when using Mesa 13.1-dev + LLVM 4.0 SVN and the Linux 4.9 kernel for providing a bleeding-edge look at the open-source AMD Linux graphics performance across hardware going from the Radeon HD 4890 series all the way up through the RX 480 and R9 Fury hardware. Here’s a fun look at the OpenGL driver performance across this range of GPUs.

  • Applications

    • Best Clock And Weather Widgets For Linux

      So there are a couple of handy desktop widgets that are available for your Linux desktop. Today we’ll take a look at a few Clock and Weather widgets that easily set up on your Linux desktop.

    • NetworkManager 1.4.4
    • NetworkManager 1.4.4 Supports Restart Without Connection Disruption, Fixes Bugs

      Lubomir Rintel, one of the developers working on the widely-used open-source network management solution for GNU/Linux distributions NetworkManager, announced the release of NetworkManager 1.4.4.

      NetworkManager 1.4.4 is the latest stable and most advanced build of the software, which should be used by all Linux-based operating systems that prefer this graphical solution for helping users to easily connect to Wi-Fi and wired networks, as well as Point To Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) or VPN (Virtual Private Network) connections.

    • Top 16 best network monitoring tools for 2016

      Towards the end of 2016 we made a short introduction to network monitoring and we told you about the main characteristics to keep in mind when selecting a network monitoring tool. This was meant for users whose installation couldn’t conform with standard syslog monitoring or standard bandwidths.

    • 4 Essential Tools to Search the Filesystem

      Desktop search is a software application which searches the contents of computer files, rather than searching the internet. The purpose of this software is to enable the user to locate information on their computer that they just cannot seem to find. Typically, this data includes emails, chat logs, documents, contact lists, graphics files, as well as multimedia files including video and audio.

      Searching a hard disk can be slow, especially bearing in mind the large storage capacities of modern hard disks. To ensure considerably better performance, desktop search engines build and maintain an index database. Populating this database is a system intensive activity. Consequently, desktop search engines can carry out indexing when the computer is not being used.

      One of the key benefits of this type of software is that it allows the user to locate data stored on their hard disk almost instantaneously. They are designed to be fast. They are not integrated with a different application, such as a file manager.

    • Don Libes’ Expect: A Surprisingly Underappreciated Unix Automation Tool

      In this article, I will attempt to convince you that Expect is an extremely underappreciated tool for automating terminal applications in Unix.

      Why do I feel so strongly about this? Well, if you’re like me you know that the best way to make a great impression at a party is to boast about your excellent understanding of the Unix command-line. However, if you really want to be the life of the party, you not only need to show that you know the commands, you must also demonstrate that you can automate everything.

    • Proprietary

      • After ignoring Linux for years, Adobe releases Flash 24 for Linux

        Adobe has just released the first final Adobe Flash Player stable release, Flash Player 24, for GNU/Linux in years.

        The company announced back in September 2016 that it would bring back Flash for Linux from the dead. This came as a surprise as it had ignored Linux for the most part when it comes to Flash.

      • Adobe Brings Flash For Linux Back From The Dead (How Cute)

        After years of neglecting to do so, Adobe has now released Flash Player 24 for GNU/Linux. Now Windows, Mac and Linux are being offered the same version of Flash Player for the first time in ages. But considering Flash is already dying a slow and painful death, this might be too little too late.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine or Emulation

      • The Out-of-Tree Wine Code To Run DOOM On Linux

        It’s sad that DOOM hasn’t seen a native Linux port with id Software having a falling out with Linux in recent years, particularly after they were acquired by ZeniMax. But fortunately there is now a patch for being able to run DOOM with Wine.

      • Second Wine 2.0 Release Candidate Fixes Hitman: Blood Money Crashes, 20 Bugs

        The second Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming major Wine 2.0 open-source implementation of Microsoft Windows on Unix-like operating systems arrived for testing.

        Wine 2.0 RC2 comes only one week after the release of the first RC build, and it looks like it’s here to patch even more of the remaining blockers before the final version hits the streets, which might happen just in time for the Christmas holidays if we’re lucky. If not, it will hit the streets in early 2017, as the project is now in code freeze.

      • PlayOnLinux Updated to 4.2.10, Install in Ubuntu/Linux Mint via PPA

        PlayOnLinux is a piece of software which allows you to easily install and use numerous apps and games designed to run with Microsoft Windows. Few apps and games are compatible with GNU/Linux at the moment and it certainly is a factor preventing the migration to this system. PlayOnLinux brings a cost-free, accessible and efficient solution to this problem.

      • World Wine News

        This is the 404th issue of the World Wine News publication. Its main goal is to inform you of what’s going on around Wine. Wine is an open source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Think of it as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available.

    • Games

      • Orwell, the surveillance simulation game is now on Linux

        Not long after requesting Linux testers for Orwell [Steam, Official Site], the surveillance simulation game, it’s now officially available on Linux.

      • The open source itch games client has been updated yet again
      • Dota 2 7.00 Benchmarks – Intel Vulkan vs. OpenGL On Linux – Mesa 13.1 + Linux 4.9

        In addition to big end-of-year AMD Radeon Linux benchmarks and the forthcoming NVIDIA data points among other interesting EOY comparisons, there is also ongoing fresh Intel Linux benchmarks as we end out 2016. For your viewing pleasure today are the latest Intel OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux benchmark results using last week’s Dota 2 7.00 game release.

        Last week were some fresh AMD Dota 2 benchmarks while here are the numbers from Dota 2 with Intel Skylake HD Graphics 530 as of this weekend. Testing was done with the Linux 4.9 kernel and Mesa 13.1-devel as of this past week from the Padoka PPA on Ubuntu 16.10.

      • It Looks Like CryENGINE’s Sandbox Editor Could Eventually Work On Linux

        While the CryENGINE 5.x game engine is supported on Linux, to date their sandbox editor isn’t compatible with Linux but it looks like eventually there could be said support.

        CryENGINE developer David Kaye has been commenting in our forums pertaining to the discussion around CryENGINE 5.3, which sadly didn’t ship with the Vulkan API support as planned. About the lack of Vulkan support in CryENGINE 5.3, the Crytek developer commented, “we looked at the state of Vulkan prior to branching for the stabilisation of 5.3 and decided that we weren’t happy with its level of stability, so we delayed it. This is also the reason the release as a whole was delayed. This prioritisation of stability over new features is something our community have requested.”

      • Political Animals Launches Linux version!

        We’re happy to finally be able to release the game on Linux! Thanks so much to the folks on r/linux_gaming/ for their help in testing the game on multiple distros. We hope you enjoy the game.

        There are a few known issues with Linux which we have shared in our community page. Please let us know if you find any issues and we’ll do our best to sort them out.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • ​XFCE Desktop Environment – A Linux Desktop Environment For Everyone

      One of the strong advantages of Linux over Windows or Mac is freedom. You find freedom in every corner of the Linux operating systems. You have freedom of choosing one out of hundreds of distros. Most new users of Linux are introduced to either Ubuntu or Mint. This helps in reducing the choices users have in terms of the number of distros. But here, we have one more choice to make within the distro itself. As you are already guessing, It is the DE (Desktop Environment).

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Gets A Systemd Genie; KDE Partition Manager 3.0 Released

        There are two noteworthy pieces of KDE news as the weekend comes to an end.

        First up, KDE developer Ragnar Thomsen has shifted his focus from systemd-kcm as the KDE configuration module for managing systemd into its own application: SystemdGenie. SystemdGenie is systemd-kcm turned into its own full-fledged Qt application. With morphing it into its own application, SystemdGenie offers more functionality and more UI options than being a KDE KCM module.

      • Killing the redundancy with automation

        In the past three weeks, the openSUSE community KDE team has been pretty busy to package the latest release of Applications from KDE, 16.12. It was a pretty large task, due to the number of programs involved, and the fact that several monolithic projects were split (in particular KDE PIM). This post goes through what we did, and how we improved our packaging workflow.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • GoboLinux 016 Arrives After 2 Years with Its Own Filesystem Virtualization Tool

        GoboLinux developer Lucas Correia Villa Real has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the final GoboLinux 016 operating system, an independently-developed GNU/Linux distribution that uses a custom file system hierarchy.

      • 4MRecover 21.0 Beta Ships with PhotoRec and TestDisk 7.0, Based on 4MLinux 21.0

        Polish developer Zbigniew Konojacki, the creator of the independently-developed 4MLinux computer operating system, informed Softpedia today about the release of 4MRecover 21.0 Beta.

        Based on the upcoming 4MLinux 21.0 distribution, which should be out in spring 2017, this Beta release of the 4MRecover 21.0 Live CD ships with the latest TestDisk 7.0 and QPhotoRec 7.0 software, which can be used for recovering lost partitions or photos from damaged disk drives or SD cards of all types and sizes.

        “4MRecover is a small Live CD designed for data recovery. It’s a part of 4MRescueKit, which in turn is one of the three main 4MLinux releases available for download,” said Zbigniew Konojacki in the release announcement. “This version includes TestDisk 7.0 and it uses 4MLinux 21.0 as the base system.”

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • GeckoLinux Static Editions Get Calamares Installer, Based on openSUSE Leap 42.2

        The developers of the openSUSE-based GeckoLinux computer operating system have announced the release of a new set of respined live ISO images of their GNU/Linux distribution, which is now rebased on openSUSE Leap 42.2.

      • openSUSE on ownCloud

        It is Chrismas time and I have got cookie cutters by openSUSE and ownCloud. What can you create as a happy Working Student at ownCloud and an openSUSE Contributor?

        Normally you deploy ownCloud on openSUSE. But do you know the idiom „to be in seventh heaven“ (auf Wolke 7 schweben)?

        I want to show you openSUSE Leap 42.2 on ownCloud 9.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Debian-Based SparkyLinux 4.5.2 Ships Budgie Desktop 10.2.9, Linux Kernel 4.8.15

          The development team behind the Debian-based SparkyLinux GNU/Linux distribution announced today, December 18, 2016, the release and general availability of a new ISO respin, versioned 4.5.2.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Releases Snapcraft 2.24 Snap Creator Tool for Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10

            Canonical’s Sergio Schvezov had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Snapcraft 2.24, the latest stable version of the tool application developers can use for packaging their apps as Snaps, a universal binary format for Linux OSes.

          • Serious Ubuntu Linux desktop bugs found and fixed

            The good news is that the problems have been patched. So, now that you’re almost done reading this, patch your system already.

            The bad news is there still aren’t enough eyes looking at older open-source code for overlooked security vulnerabilities.

          • Snapd 2.20 Snappy Daemon Brings Support for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Many Other Goodies

            Canonical’s Michael Vogt happily announced the release of the Snapd 2.20 stable build of the Snappy daemon used on Ubuntu Linux operating systems for providing out-of-the-box support for installing and running Snap universal packages.

            Snapd 2.20 was released on the same day with Snapcraft 2.24, the tool app developers can use to package their applications as Snaps for cross-distro distribution. Snapd 2.20 is an important milestone that, for the first time, introduced support for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system. It’s also available in the repositories of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak).

          • Never Miss a Desktop Notification Again With This Indicator

            Hate missing desktop notifications on Ubuntu? Well, with the Recent Notifications indicator you don’t need to. This handy tool collects and collates all desktop notifications you receive, regardless of whether you see them or not. Then, with one click, you can see and action them.

          • These Unity 8 Desktop Designs Show a Striking New Feature

            New Unity 8 desktop mock-ups shared by the Canonical design team show an interesting new approach to presenting Scopes to desktop users.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • How to upgrade to Linux Mint 18.1

              It is now possible to upgrade the Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 18 to version 18.1.

              If you’ve been waiting for this I’d like to thank you for your patience.

            • You Can Now Upgrade From Linux Mint 18 to Linux Mint 18.1, Here’s How to Do It

              After announcing the final release of the highly anticipated Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” operating system, which shipped with Cinnamon and MATE editions, project leader Clement Lefebvre published an in-depth tutorial on how to upgrade from Linux Mint 18.

              As expected, the release of Linux Mint 18.1 also opened the upgrade path for those who are currently using the Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” operating system on their personal computer, allowing them to upgrade to the latest release without to much hassle. But first, the developer urges users to think twice before attempting an upgrade.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Smart Projector With Built-in Raspberry Pi Zero

      You’ve heard of smartphones but have you heard of smart projectors? They’ve actually been around for a few years and are sort of like a TV set top box and projector combined, leaving no need for a TV. Features can include things like streaming Netflix, browsing in Chrome, and Skyping. However, they can cost from a few hundred to over a thousand dollars.

      [Novaspirit] instead made his own cheap smart projector. He first got a $70 portable projector (800×480 native resolution, decent for that price) and opened it up. He soldered an old USB hub that he already had to a Raspberry Pi Zero so that he could plug in a WiFi dongle and a dongle for a Bluetooth keyboard. That all went into the projector.

    • Pi Palette- Hacker’s Cosmetics Case

      A Raspberry Pi 3 running Kali Linux in a 3D printed enclosure to disguise it as as a (somewhat chunky) makeup palette.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Workload reference architectures address requirements for deploying OpenStack clouds
    • OpenStack, HPC and public clouds: What’s on the horizon

      Many outsiders probably think that in the world of science and HPC (high performance computing) there’s only room for supercomputers and the magicians who operate them.

      However, while that’s partially true, this area is much closer to the technology as we all know it than one would expect. And nothing proves this better than the fact that the earliest and most prevalent use cases for OpenStack are research and science. (To learn more about them, check out our OpenStack in Science web page.)

      Bringing together a group of technical specialists and researchers to solve the conundrums of how to efficiently use cloud computing technology for workloads, the RCUK Cloud Working Group recently held its second annual workshop in London. The event is an amazing opportunity to bridge the gap between the magicians of science and the magicians of technology to produce better and more efficient solutions by sharing expertise.

    • Pushing the boundaries of OpenStack – Wait, what are they again?

      As a Production Support engineer for many years, I love providing operational support for front- and back-end systems. That love of operations drives me to share knowledge on how you can push the boundaries of OpenStack. To do that, you must first know the boundaries.

    • 11 benefits to running your containers on OpenStack

      Enterprises today must keep up with increasing internal and external customer demand, or die trying.

    • Running containers, reducing complexity, and more OpenStack news

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • Difference Between Linux And BSD | Open Source Operating Systems

      When you start to get out of the Windows ecosystem, the very first thing you see is macOS. But, chances are less that you may go for it, mostly because of the price tag. Moving further, you come across Linux flaunting its open source badge. Most people confuse Linux as an operating system and it has been a topic of controversy for a long time. Thus, some people refer a Linux operating system as GNU/Linux.

      Soon, you start realizing how diverse is the Linux ecosystem with numerous Linux distributions and their derivatives. You almost believe that Linux and its family is the representative of the open source community. But there is a lesser-known family of operating systems known as the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), which also counts as one of the major names in the open source community.

    • The Current State Of OpenMP Offloading In LLVM’s Clang, Try It Today With Clang-YKT

      During last month’s SuperComputing 2016 conference in Salt Lake City was the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure in HPC workshop being hosted for its third year. The slides from that event were recently made available and one of the talks interesting me the most was about the state of Clang OpenMP offloading, including for GPUs.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Hurd 0.9 & Mach 1.8 Released: Adds Ethernet Multiplexer, Mach Drops ACPI

      There is an early GNU Christmas with the release of GNU Hurd 0.9 joined by GNU Mach 1.8. Yep, another rare released update to Hurd.

      GNU Hurd 0.9 supports its boot program running as an unprivileged user, an Ethernet multiplexer has been merged to support better virtual interfaces, the addition of the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) library, and many bug fixes.

      GNU Mach meanwhile as the microkernel upon which GNU Hurd systems are based, has seen many changes with version 1.8. Mach 1.8 has significantly reworked its memory management system, the virtual memory system now uses a red-black tree for allocations, and improved debugging / error reporting. There are also many bug fixes in Mach and GNU Mach has dropped its partial ACPI support.

  • Public Services/Government

    • 5 initiatives that pushed the free software envelope in Europe in 2016

      The public sector tends to lag—some would say drag—behind the private sector when it comes to adopting new technologies. This is also true when it comes to adopting free software: Although companies widely see free technologies as a boon, government organizations often are still locked into proprietary software and work with closed standards.

      That said, some countries are making progress moving toward open source technologies.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Ushering in a bold new era for open science

        Earlier this year, the Montreal Neurological Institute announced an ambitious – and, in many ways, unprecedented – commitment to the principles of open science.

        The Neuro will be eschewing patents for its discoveries and doing all it can to make its research findings – and all the data associated with that research – widely available. While there have been other large-scale open science initiatives – usually involving several partners collaborating in a specific area – the Neuro is the first major research institute of its kind to make such a wide-ranging commitment to open science.

        That commitment just received a huge boost, thanks to a $20-million gift from the Larry and Judy Tanenbaum family. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (BA’94) was on hand at a press conference on Dec. 16 to announce the launch of the Neuro’s new Tanenbaum Open Science Institute. “This is a catalyst,” says Neuro director Guy Rouleau of the Tanenbaum gift. “This is really going to allow us to get things done.”

      • McGill Neurology will no longer patent researchers’ findings, instead everything will be open access

        The Neurological Institute at Montreal’s McGill University is host to the “Tanenbaum Open Science Institute,” endowed by a $20M contribution; since last spring, the unit has pursued an ambitious open science agenda that includes open access publication of all research data and findings, and an end to the practice of patenting the university’s findings. Instead, they will all be patent-free and usable by anyone.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Using Blender and Python to 3D print a dress

        The opening ceremony at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio featured snowboarder Amy Purdy wearing a 3D printed dress, wearing prosthetics printed from the same material as the dress, and dancing with a Kuka robotic arm.

        The dance was a statement about the merging of the human spirit and technology. “The backstory, which mainstream media passed over, was the critical role open source software played in the making of the dress: it was created using Blender and Python.

  • Programming/Development

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Printer fun

      The current cartridges were running low for a while, but I didn’t need to change them yet. As I printed a user manual at the beginning of the week (~300+ pages in total), I ran out of the black half-way through. Bought a new cartridge, installed it, and the first strange thing was that it still showed “Black empty – please replace”.

      I powered the printer off and turned it on again (the miracle cure for all IT-related things), and things seemed OK, so I restarted printing. However, this time, the printer was going through 20-30 pages, and then was getting stuck in “Printing document” with green led blinking. Waited for 20 minutes, nothing. So cancel the job (from the printer), restart printing, all fine.

      The next day I wanted to print a single page, and didn’t manage to. Checked that the PDF is normal, checked an older PDF which I printed successfully before, nothing worked. Changed drivers, unseated & re-seated the extra memory, changed operating systems, nothing. Not even the built-in printer diagnostic pages were printing.

      The internet was all over with “HP formatter issues”; apparently some HP printers had “green” (i.e. low-quality) soldering, and were failing after a while. But people were complaining about 1-2-4 years, not 9 that my printer worked, and it was very suspicious that all troubles started after my cartridge replacement. Or, more likely, due to the recent sudden increase in printing.

    • That Didn’t Last Long: Samsung 960 EVO NVMe Already Fails

      I now have my first dead NVM Express SSD and it only lasted one week… It’s already time to RMA the Samsung 960 EVO and unfortunately lost a number of benchmarks that I was working on this weekend.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Lidl issues health warning after paint thinner chemical discovered in gravy granules

      Unsafe levels of a paint thinner chemical have been discovered in batches of gravy from Lidl.

      The discount supermarket has recalled two batches of Kania Gravy Granules after they were found to be contaminated with xylene, which occurs naturally in petroleum and crude oil, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) said.

      Exposure to the “harmful” chemical poses a health risk, causing irritation of the mouth, throat, nose and lungs and in severe cases leading to heart problems, liver and kidney damage and coma, according to Public Health England.

      An alert posted on the FSA website said: “Exposure to xylene in food products represents a health risk as it can cause adverse effects such as headache, dizziness, nausea and vomiting.

    • Paint thinner chemical found in Lidl gravy by Food Standards Agency

      Unsafe levels of a paint thinner chemical have been found in gravy granules sold at Lidl, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has revealed.

      The contamination affected two batches of Kania Gravy Granules, which were found to contain xylene.

    • Oklahoma Just Passed a Law Requiring Private Businesses to Turn Their Bathrooms Into Billboards for Anti-Abortion Propaganda

      The Oklahoma Legislature has outdone itself this time. In the latest of their absurd and callous efforts to shame and stigmatize women, Oklahoma legislators from both parties have passed into law a requirement that commands thousands of private businesses to turn their bathroom walls into billboards for anti-abortion propaganda.

      As part of a misguided effort to reduce the number of abortions in Oklahoma, Rep. Ann Coody and Sen. AJ Griffin introduced HB 2797 — the “Humanity of the Unborn Child Act.” Among other troubling provisions, the new law requires public schools, hospitals, restaurants, and nursing homes to post signs in their restrooms directing women to services aimed at discouraging abortion.

    • Can sub-Saharan Africa produce enough food to meet growing demand?

      Each year, the planet has to feed more hungry, hungry humans. Right now, projections suggest that we might just be able to meet the challenge of feeding our growing population in 2050, but only if we make better use of the land that we use for agriculture.

      For sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), though, the question gets a little more complicated. Even if there’s enough food globally to go around by 2050, will SSA be able to produce enough to be self-sufficient? A paper in this week’s PNAS suggests that the region might be stuck relying on imports unless it massively expands its croplands. This would be bad news for the environment, and it wouldn’t be easy.

      Every region on Earth relies on food imports to some extent, but importing large amounts of food is only really feasible in countries that are economically developed. For developing countries, affording large quantities of food imports can stifle economic development. Right now, SSA produces around 80 percent of the staple grains that it needs. By contrast, North and South America, Europe, and Australia all produce well above 100 percent of their own needs. And the population of SSA is projected to increase more than that of other regions.

  • Security

    • SELinux, Seccomp, Falco, and You: A Technical Discussion

      One of the questions we often get when we talk about Sysdig Falco is “How does it compare to other tools like SELinux, AppArmor, Auditd, etc. that also have security policies?” To help answer some of those questions, we thought we’d present a summary of other related security products and how they compare to Sysdig Falco.

    • PGP Never Gonna Give You Up

      Seeing that I was planning on carrying my long-term private keys around on my telephone (BlackBerry PRIV, FDE encryption active FWIW), I had to double-check the security of the secret key encryption.

      It turns out that PGP encrypts each of your secret keys with a hash of the passphrase you supply. My passphrase is significantly longer than the average, and consists of random characters (uppercase, lowercase, numbers, symbols). Passphrase length and complexity is by far the most important factor determining the safety of your encrypted secret key.

    • McAfee Virus Scan for Linux

      A system running Intel’s McAfee VirusScan Enterprise for Linux can be compromised by remote attackers due to a number of security vulnerabilities. Some of these vulnerabilities can be chained together to allow remote code execution as root.

    • The Coolest Hacks Of 2016

      No 400-pound hacker here: Lightbulb and ‘do-gooder’ worms, machines replacing humans to hack other machines, and high-speed car hacking were among the most innovative white-hat hacks this year.

      In a year when ransomware became the new malware and cyber espionage became a powerful political propaganda tool for Russia, it’s easy to forget that not all hacking in 2016 was so ugly and destructive.

      Sure, cybercrime and cyber espionage this past year turned the corner into more manipulative and painful territory for victims. But 2016 also had its share of game-changing “good” hacks by security researchers, with some creative yet unsettling ways to break the already thin-to-no defenses of Internet of Things things, as well as crack locked-down computers and hijack computer mice. Hackers even took a back seat to machines in the first-ever machine-on-machine hacking contest this summer at DEF CON.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Right and Wrong in the South China Sea

      John Pilger’s tremendous new documentary The Coming War With China explains Chinese motivations. China is ringed by 200 US military bases and installations, far from any State of the USA, in an unabashed display of American Imperial power. China by contrast has very few military outposts outside China at all and shows remarkably little interest in territorial ambition, given China’s current economic power. The stories of US exploitation and duplicity recounted in the Pilger documentary are overwhelming, and of course the entire venture is a massive transfer of money from struggling US taxpayers to the arms industry. One is left with a feeling of surprise that the Chinese reaction to naked US threat is so calm and not paranoid.

    • China Flexes Military Might After Trump Pokes Taiwan Policy with Stick

      Fears that President-elect Donald Trump’s questioning of the “one China” policy and recent phone conversation with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen would amplify military tensions with China were seemingly confirmed on Thursday after an editorial in the government mouthpiece, The Global Times, called for “use of force” to deter Taiwanese independence.

      “Time will tell after Trump’s team takes over the U.S., whether it will willfully utilize the one-China policy as leverage to blackmail Beijing or restrain itself in actual practice,” the editorial stated, referring to the diplomatic agreement that allows “the U.S. to do business with both China and Taiwan while only recognizing Beijing,” the Guardian explains.

      “In any case,” the editorial continued, “the current farce has made China vigilant.”

      Underscoring the threat, the Chinese navy announced late Thursday that it had, on an “undisclosed date,” carried out large-scale war exercises, using live ammunition, with the nation’s first aircraft carrier.

    • The Cold War, Continued: Post-Election Russophobia

      Mainstream TV news anchors including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes are reporting as fact—with fuming indignation—that Russia (and specifically Vladimir Putin) not only sought to influence the U.S. election (and—gosh!—promote “doubt” about the whole legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system) but to throw the vote to Donald Trump.

      The main accusation is that the DNC and Podesta emails leaked through Wikileaks were provided by state-backed Russian hackers (while they did not leak material hacked from the Republicans). I have my doubts on this. Former U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan and torture whistle-blower Craig Murray, a friend of Julian Assange, has stated that the DNC emails were leaked by a DNC insider whose identity he knows. The person, Murray contends, handed the material over to him, in a D.C. park. I have met Murray, admire and am inclined to believe him. (I just heard now that John Bolton, of all people, has also opined this was an inside job.)

    • ‘Castro Was a Living Reminder of the Limits of American Power’

      Fidel Castro, who died November 25 at age 90, will be remembered as someone whose work changed, not just Cuba, but the wider world. With US media ringing with denunciation—with some left over to denunciate those who aren’t denunciating enough—there’s little oxygen left for discussion of that work, and what it meant and still means.

      We’re joined now for some context on Castro and Cuba by Louis Pérez. He’s professor of history at the University of North Carolina and editor of Cuban Journal, and author of, among other titles, Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. He joins us now by phone from North Carolina.

    • CIA apologises to Turkey over ‘false claims’ of links to Daesh

      Diplomatic sources said that the United States main intelligence service, the CIA, had apologised to Turkey in a written statement for making “false claims” about alleged oil trading between Turkey and Daesh, Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah reported yesterday.

      The Turkish newspaper said that high-level Turkish diplomatic sources said that the CIA and the US Secretary of State John Kerry had apologised to Turkey following a report provided by the Turkish intelligence service which proved that the US claims were wrong in early 2015.

      According to Daily Sabaha, Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT) officials revealed that the geographic locations in the document that allegedly showed where Daesh’s oil trade was conducted in Turkey in fact showed an asphalt plant in Kilis in southeast Turkey.

      Following the MIT investigation of the CIA’s documents, the CIA apologised for the mistaken allegations at the end of 2015. “We have seen no evidence to support such an accusation. Turkey plays a vital role in the counter-ISIL coalition,” a statement by the CIA said, using another acronym for Daesh.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • How the Trump Administration Could Change the American Landscape, Literally

      With the election of Donald Trump, the management of America’s public lands could shift, altering the landscape in southern Utah and across the Western United States. Extractive projects like the Coal Hollow expansion that have stalled or been rejected under the Obama administration could be given new life. They include drilling in the Arctic, in the North Atlantic, in the forests of Colorado, and around Glacier National Park; uranium mining at the edges of the Grand Canyon; and ramped-up logging in the national forests of the Pacific Northwest.

      The federal government—we, the taxpayers—owns some 640 million acres, and about half of the land in Western states. Those lands are the source of roughly 20 percent of the oil and gas produced in the United States, and 40 percent of coal. Once burned, fossil fuels extracted from public lands account for more than a fifth of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Given the amount of carbon still locked in public ground—between 319 and 450 gigatons of potential carbon dioxide, according to a 2015 analysis by Ecoshift Consulting, more than half of the entire world’s carbon budget—increased development there has implications not only for local ecosystems and communities but also for the entire planet.

    • If GOP Gets Climate ‘Science’ From Breitbart, God Help the Planet

      The US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology recently tweeted an article by Breitbart, stating “@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence From Climate Alarmists.”

      [...]

      Breitbart makes much of the fact that El Niño, a cyclic Pacific Ocean weather phenomenon, has contributed to record temperatures this year and last year—as though the observation that El Niño years are warmer than usual were not a reality understood and acknowledged by every climate scientist.

      [...]

      These people don’t have any independent expertise in climate science; Smith is a lawyer, Walker has a master’s in political science and Shank’s degree is in aerospace engineering. If they’re getting their information about climate disruption from sites like Breitbart, a fraudulent degree from Trump University would probably be a better education.

    • ‘We Don’t Need to Get to Standing Rock to Be Part of the Front Line’

      The struggle of the Standing Rock Sioux against the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline rivets the attention of people around the world, not only as an environmental story, an emblem of what the fight to address climate change actually looks like, but also as a historic story, a chapter in the resistance of indigenous people to the violent power of state and corporate actors. The announcement that the Army Corps of Engineers would withhold an easement permit for the last part of the Dakota Access Pipeline, pending an environmental impact study, is a significant moment that should nonetheless not be mistaken for the end of either that environmental or that historical story.

    • Investigating Law Enforcement’s Possible Use of Surveillance Technology at Standing Rock

      One of the biggest protests of 2016 is still underway at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, where Water Protectors and their allies are fighting Energy Transfer Partners’ plans to drill beneath contested Treaty land to finish the Dakota Access Pipeline. While the world has been watching law enforcement’s growing use of force to disrupt the protests, EFF has been tracking the effects of its surveillance technologies on water protectors’ communications and movement.

      Following several reports of potentially unlawful surveillance, EFF sent technologists and lawyers to North Dakota to investigate. We collected anecdotal evidence from water protectors about suspicious cell phone behavior, including uncharacteristically fast battery drainage, applications freezing, and phones crashing completely. Some water protectors also saw suspicious login attempts to their Google accounts from IP addresses originating from North Dakota’s Information & Technology Department. On social media, many reported Facebook posts and messenger threads disappearing, as well as Facebook Live uploads failing to upload or, once uploaded, disappearing completely.

    • This Just Became the World’s Cheapest Form of Electricity Out of Nowhere

      Solar power is becoming the world’s cheapest form of new electricity generation, data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) suggests.

      According to Bloomberg’s analysis, the cost of solar power in China, India, Brazil and 55 other emerging market economies has dropped to about one third of its price in 2010. This means solar now pips wind as the cheapest form of renewable energy—but is also outperforming coal and gas.

      In a note to clients this week, BNEF chairman Michael Liebreich said that solar power had entered “the era of undercutting” fossil fuels.

  • Finance

    • Wells Fargo Is on a Losing Streak, But Still Has Some Trump Cards

      The embattled Wells Fargo Bank, famously accused of signing up its customers to multiple accounts without their knowledge, was discovered last week to be doing the same thing with a life insurance product sold in their branches by Prudential. This could prove even more damaging than the original fake account scandal, as bankers are not allowed to sell insurance, much less secretly sign people up for it.

      Then on Tuesday, the bank was suspended from doing any work for the city of San Francisco, its home town. Plus, Wells was the only U.S. bank to have their “living will” — a government-mandated roadmap for how to dismantle the firm in the event of a failure — rejected by federal regulators. This is the third time since 2014 Wells Fargo had its living will denied as not credible, and for the first time, that will lead to sanctions: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve announced they will prohibit Wells Fargo from establishing any international subsidiaries or purchasing any nonbank companies.

    • Whistleblower Vindicated: Massive Trading Firm Knight Capital Charged With Abusing “Naked Shorts”

      Back in September, I wrote a seven-part series at The Intercept chronicling how former Wall Street trader Chris DiIorio, determined to figure out how he lost a small fortune on a penny stock, came to the conclusion that gigantic market-making firm Knight Capital, now known as KCG, repeatedly violated federal regulations meant to prevent abuse in what are known as “naked short sales.”

      It was an explosive allegation. Naked short sales are when you sell a stock you don’t have. That’s illegal most of the time, for obvious reasons. DiIorio found evidence that KCG had illegally conducted nearly two billion dollars’ worth of them.

      It was a bit of a mystery story, with two unanswered questions at the end: Was DiIorio right? And if so, why hadn’t any regulatory authority done anything about it?

      One regulatory authority finally has, and its action would seem to confirm DiIorio’s suspicions.

    • Trump Transition Team Picks Up Yet Another Promoter of Cheap Foreign Labor

      Donald Trump the candidate campaigned on protecting the wages of American workers. In announcing his agenda for the first 100 days, he said he would task his Department of Labor to “investigate all abuses of visa programs that undercut the American worker.”

      But his transition team doesn’t reflect that perspective. Veronica Birkenstock, who runs a recruitment firm that secures visas for cheap temporary foreign workers, was named to Trump’s Department of Labor landing team — before being mysteriously disappeared after The Intercept reported on it.

      Next, the Trump team chose fast food executive Andy Puzder — an outspoken proponent of legalizing undocumented workers so they can provide cheap, low-skilled labor — to be the administration’s Labor Secretary.

    • 100 CEOs Have as Much Retirement Savings as 116 Million Americans

      While many Americans are facing a “frightening retirement reality,” 100 CEOs are looking at “colossal nest eggs” and can look forward to monthly retirement checks of over $250,000 for the rest of their lives.

      The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) puts a spotlight on this massive savings gap in its new report (pdf), “A Tale of Two Retirements.”

      “While slashing jobs and benefits for ordinary workers, CEOs of large companies have been feathering their own nests,” stated Sarah Anderson, report co-author and director of the IPS Global Economy Project. “It’s no wonder so many American workers are concerned about whether their golden years will be tarnished by financial stress.”

      In fact, these 100 CEOs have retirement funds that total $4.7 billion. That’s as much as the retirement savings of the 41 percent of U.S. families with the smallest nest eggs—that’s 116 million people. The report also notes that 37 percent of U.S. families have no retirement wealth at all.

    • Are we stuck with inequality?

      The latesT study of deepening inequality by three of the most careful scholars of the subject, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saens, and Gabriel Zucman, has prompted another round of shrugs from economists that inequality is just in the nature of the advanced economy.

      Supposedly, these inexorable trends reflect technology, globalization, and increasing rewards to more advanced skills. The poor are paid in correct proportion to their contribution to the national product, which, alas, isn’t much.

      A close look at political history suggests that this widespread inference is convenient nonsense — convenient to economic elites. In fact, the distribution of income and wealth has bounced around a lot in the past century and a half. It was extreme in the first Gilded Age of the late 19th century, a little less so in the Progressive Era, extreme again in the 1920s, and remarkably egalitarian in the period between the New Deal and the early 1970s — and now extreme again.

    • EU Commission ‘exceeded its powers’ in Apple tax case

      The Government has moved to pre-empt the expected publication of the full EU Commission ruling on the controversial €13 billion Apple tax case .

      In a statement early today, it said the commission had misinterpreted Ireland’s tax laws and wrongly ruled that profits not attributable to activity in Ireland should have been taxed here.

      The commission has found that Ireland deliberately decided to forego tax due from the US multinational over many years by giving it favourable tax treatment. But the Government says the commission has misinterpreted Ireland’s tax laws.

    • Apple appeals EU tax ruling, says it was a ‘convenient target’

      Apple (AAPL.O) has launched a legal challenge to a record $14 billion EU tax demand, arguing that EU regulators ignored tax experts and corporate law and deliberately picked a method to maximize the penalty, senior executives said.

      Apple’s combative stand underlines its anger with the European Commission, which said on Aug. 30 the company’s Irish tax deal was illegal state aid and ordered it to repay up to 13 billion euros ($13.8 billion) to Ireland, where Apple has its European headquarters.

    • Apple CFO: “What the [EU] Commission is doing here is a disgrace for European citizens, it should be ashamed”
    • An Analysis of Long-Term U.S. Productivity Decline

      This report from Gallup and the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, “An Analysis of Long-Term U.S. Productivity Decline” was released last week as a 120 page pdf. Here is the table of contents:

      01. THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM
      02. WHY IS GROWTH DOWN?
      03. UNDERSTANDING GDP GROWTH
      04. THE KEY SECTORS DRAGGING DOWN GROWTH
      05. HEALTHCARE
      06. HOUSING
      07. EDUCATION
      08. POSSIBLE INDIRECT CONSEQUENCES OF ECONOMIC DETERIORATION
      09. WHAT IS CAUSING ECONOMIC DETERIORATION?
      10. REVIVING GROWTH WILL REQUIRE A NEW STRATEGY
      ENDNOTES

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Zorka Milin on Rex Tillerson, Ethan Nadelmann on Trump’s Drug War

      This week on CounterSpin: More Trump appointments mean more work cut out for public interest advocates. There’s no need to pick which is most worrisome, but a strong contender would be making Rex Tillerson, longtime CEO of Exxon Mobil, secretary of State. We’ll hear about Tillerson from Zorka Milin, senior legal adviser at Global Witness.

    • Trump, Choices, and Qualifications

      Now that some of Donald Trump’s choices for important positions in his administration have been made, it is time to examine the reasons for some of those appointments. An early appointment was that of General Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor. He was selected for two reasons: his tenuous relationship with the truth, as shown by his promulgation of fake news over the years, a trait admired by Mr. Trump; and his former status as a general.

    • The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin

      Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state’s count by 10,704 votes. But hold on — a record 75,355 ballots were not counted.

      The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic.

      According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really?

    • Blaming Trump’s Win on the Age Group Least Responsible for It

      “Yes, You Can Blame Millennials for Hillary Clinton’s Loss” was the headline over a piece by the Post‘s Aaron Blake (12/2/16). “Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said Thursday that one particular group is especially to blame: Millennials.” Blake quoted another Post story citing Mook’s claim that “younger voters, perhaps assuming that Clinton was going to win, migrated to third-party candidates in the final days of the race.” “That’s why we lost,” Mook said.

      [...]

      Whoa, wait—”Clinton’s 55–36 margin among those ages 18 to 29″? Yep, Clinton won among voters under 30—the Millennials, basically—by 19 percentage points. Blake doesn’t spell it out, but this is the age group that delivered by far the biggest margin for Clinton. The next-best cohort for Clinton was those aged 39–44, who picked her by a 10-point margin. This is in sharp contrast to the 45–64 and 65+ age groups, who voted for Trump by margins of 8 and 7 percentage points, respectively.

      So who do we blame for Trump—the age group that voted for Clinton by the widest margin, or the ones that voted for Trump? If you’re the Washington Post, the biggest Clinton backers are responsible for Trump, naturally.

      You can play the same statistical games with race, by the way. For example, exit polls suggest that Trump did only 1 percentage point better than Romney among white voters, who went for Trump 58–37 percent. Among African-Americans, he only got 8 percent, but his losing margin was “only” 80 percentage points, as opposed to 87 points for Romney; Trump “overperformed” with black voters by 7 points.

    • No to the Sky deal. The Murdochs can’t be trusted

      Five years ago, after the phone-hacking revelations, the House of Commons unanimously rejected Rupert Murdoch’s bid for 100% of Sky. A year later, Sky was only passed by Ofcom as being fit and proper to hold a communications licence on the basis that there was not full Murdoch ownership and control. Today, the Murdochs want to turn the view of parliament and the regulator on its head. But what’s really changed?

    • North Carolinians Revolt Over Republicans’ Brazen Post-Election Coup

      Refusing to accept Republican lawmakers’ brazen power grab, hundreds of North Carolinians flooded the halls of the General Assembly building in Raleigh Thursday evening to shame the officials as they passed a series of measures aimed at stripping power from Governor-elect Roy Cooper.
      Tweets about #RespectOurVote OR #ncga OR #ncpol

      Twenty people, including one journalist, were reportedly arrested for disrupting the special session, during which the GOP-led legislature passed a number of bills that would limit the ability of the incoming Democratic administration to make appointments and control elections.

    • CNN Praises ‘Diverse Viewpoints’ of Trump’s ‘Bipartisan CEOs’

      On CNN (12/2/16), anchor Carol Costello introduced a story about how Donald Trump is convening a panel of prominent CEOs to consult with on a monthly basis on issues including job growth and taxes.

      CNN reporter Christina Alesci reported excitedly that the panel, assembled by the Blackstone Group’s CEO Stephen Schwartzman, will be made up of a “who’s who” of “bipartisan CEOs,” including GM’s Mary Barra, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, Disney‘s Bob Iger, Doug McMillon of Walmart and Jack Welch, former GE CEO.

    • Rick Luttmann, Greg Palast, Nadya Tannous, and Damanjit Singh

      In the first half of the program, mathematician Rick Luttmann discusses ranked-choice voting and why it is superior to the prevalent “plurality voting” system. Also, investigative journalist Greg Palast returns to Project Censored to explain how GOP voter supression tactics may have helped manipulate the outcome of the 2016 presidential election (he calls it a “Jim Crow election”). In the second half of the program, two activists recently returned from Standing Rock describe the violence police there are inflicting on the water protectors and their allies. Nadya Tannous and Damanjit Singh also explain why the Standing Rock confrontation is an anti-colonial struggle.

    • Voting with Risk-Limiting Audits: Better, Faster, Cheaper

      After extensive ups and downs, the election recount efforts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have concluded. The main lesson: ballot audits should be less exciting and less expensive. Specifically, we need to make audits an ordinary, non-partisan part of every election, done efficiently and quickly, so they are not subject to emergency fundraising and last-minute debates over their legitimacy. The way to do that is clear: make risk-limiting audits part of standard election procedure.

      After this year’s election, EFF joined many election security researchers in calling for a recount of votes in three key states. This was partly because of evidence that hackers affected other parts of the election (not directly related to voting machines). But more than that, it was based long-standing research showing that electronic voting machines and optical scanners are subject to errors and manipulation that could sway an election. In response to that call, Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s campaign raised more than $7 million to fund the recounts.

    • From Reagan to Trump: Reflecting on Three Disastrous Elections

      Like millions of Americans, I am alarmed that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. While Barack Obama’s record as president is mixed, Trump has peddled hatred and suspicion, threatening to reverse everything positive that Obama has accomplished. But along with worrying about what is to come, I’ve been reflecting on some past elections that were also shocking or wrong, elections that brought great harm — but not quite the end of civilization as we know it. The chances are that’s what will happen this time too.

    • The First Amendment requires the Pennsylvania recount

      Jill Stein and a handful of voters might succeed in forcing a recount that would make Hillary Clinton the next President of the United States.

      I say that on the basis of my experience testifying before the Florida Legislature’s Select Joint Committee on the Manner of Appointment of Presidential Electors in the 2000 Florida recount. I had been asked by Committee to provide advice on whether the many lawsuits filed by Democrats around the state could come to a conclusion in time for the Electoral College’s meeting and vote on December 18, 2000.

      If the lawsuits could not be timely concluded, a serious risk existed that Florida’s 25 electoral votes would not be counted. That would leave George w. Bush with just 246 electoral votes to Al Gore’s 266. The Committee asked for my view because I had handled hundreds of lawsuits, including many that involved expedited matters.

    • GOP electors cite rural voice in Electoral College

      When the Constitution was written, some signers wanted direct election of the president. Others wanted state legislatures or Congress to choose the executive. The Electoral College was the end result: Each state got a slate of electors numbering the same as its delegation in Congress. Electors vote, with rare exception, for whichever candidate won the most votes in their state — effectively meaning the presidential election is 51 separate popular votes.

    • Yes, Trump can lose the Electoral College — but then what?

      The Electoral College has remained a topic of hot conversation since Nov. 8.

      There has been much discussion about faithless electors abandoning their traditional role, Hamilton Electors and what happened in the past when electors have been thrown out during ballot counting by the House and Senate, such as in 1872, when Louisiana and Arkansas’ electors were thrown out.

      How could this happen again?

    • Rex Tillerson revealed as former director of US-Russian oil company in Bahamas

      Leaked documents show Donald Trump’s appointed secretary of state was a director of a Bahamas-based US-Russian oil company.

      Rex Tillerson, whose suitability for the top government position was already under question due to his potential conflicts of interest with the energy industry and his ties to Russia, is now revealed to have been the former director of ExxonMobil’s Russian subsidiary.

      Mr Tillerson was named director of Exxon Neftegas in 1998. His name on company filings – RW Tillerson – appears next to other directors based in Texas, Moscow and in far eastern Russia. The company is incorporated in the Bahamas, thousands of miles away from their most important Russian Arctic exploration projects and where the corporation tax rate is zero.

    • Trump anger smashes Vanity Fair’s subscription record

      Vanity Fair has had the last laugh after President-elect Donald Trump blasted the magazine over a snooty review of one of his restaurants: its subscription numbers have broken a company record.

      “Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine?” the incoming Republican commander-in-chief asked his 17.4 million followers on Twitter bright and early Thursday.

      “Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!” he added for good measure in reference to the magazine’s editor, with whom he has a feud dating back decades.

      Only it seems that offending the 70-year-old billionaire real estate tycoon is good for business — at least in the news industry.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Trump Promised To Help Tech Companies. What Does He Want in Return?

      Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, and 10 other technology company leaders trooped to Trump Tower in New York this week, where the President-elect told them they were “amazing” and said, “I’m here to make you folks do well.” He pledged to do “anything we can do to help.” We’re glad to hear it, and we have a few ideas for steps the new administration can take to fulfill that commitment.

      If Mr. Trump wants to help technology thrive, he should start by protecting users and innovation from policies and practices that threaten privacy, civil liberties, and a free Internet. Users are beset by overreaching digital collection and the tracking of personal information on all fronts. We exist in an era of unprecedented government invasions into our private lives, made easier by the digital devices we carry and the servers and cloud storage that hold information about every aspect of our lives—where we go, what we say, what we buy, and with whom who we associate.

    • Trump to Inherit Vast Surveillance Powers

      Many Democrats trusted President Obama with the vast surveillance powers inherited from President George W. Bush, but now the failure to curtail those powers means they pass on to Donald Trump, notes Nat Parry.

    • Facebook Finally Says It Will Not Help Build Muslim Registry [Ed: Nonsense. Facebook ALREADY has a “Muslim Registry”]

      At the beginning of December, The Intercept reported on eight major American technology firms unwilling to state on the record that they would not help the Trump administration create a national Muslim registry. Since then, 22 different advocacy groups petitioned those companies to respond —today, Facebook breaks its silence.

      The following statement was issued to The Intercept by a Facebook spokesperson:

      “No one has asked us to build a Muslim registry, and of course we would not do so.”

    • The New and Improved Privacy Badger 2.0 Is Here

      EFF is excited to announce that today we are releasing Privacy Badger 2.0 for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Privacy Badger is a browser extension that automatically blocks hidden third-party trackers that would otherwise follow you around the web and spy on your browsing habits. Privacy Badger now has approximately 900,000 daily users and counting.

      Third-party tracking—that is, when advertisers and websites track your browsing activity across the web without your knowledge, control, or consent—is an alarmingly widespread practice in online advertising. Privacy Badger spots and then blocks third-party domains that seem to be tracking your browsing habits (e.g. by setting cookies that could be used for tracking, or by fingerprinting your browser). If the same third-party domain appears to be tracking you on three or more different websites, Privacy Badger will conclude that the third party domain is a tracker and block future connections to it.

      Privacy Badger always tells how many third-party domains it has detected and whether or not they seem to be trackers. Further, users have control over how Privacy Badger treats these domains, with options to block a domain entirely, block just cookies, or allow a domain.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • The Lies at the Heart of Our Dying Order

      One should understand why people have lost trust in experts, the media, and politicians.

      It is not difficult, it is the same reason people lost faith in Soviet Communism: Promises were made that turned out to be lies, those promises were not kept.

      Soviet Communism was supposed to lead to a cornucopia and a withering away of the state. Instead it lead to a police state and a huge drought of consumer goods, and often enough, even food. Communism failed to meet its core promises.

      [...]

      Lying is bad policy. It may get you what you want in the short run, or even the medium run, but it destroys the very basis of your power and legitimacy. Lying is what neoliberal politicians, journalists (yes, yes they are neoliberal), and their experts have done to themselves and they destroyed both their own power and legitimacy and that of the order they supported. No one with sense trusts them: If you trust these people, you have no sense, it is definitional. I always laugh when some idiot says, “But 90 percent of economists think X is bad.”

    • Seth Rogen and Six More White Men Discuss Race, Gender in Animation

      If you’re planning to be asking questions like, “How do you approach different ethnicities and cultures in animation? Are you conscious of running the risk that some group could take offense?” or “Several of your movies have female protagonists. But they’re not looking for a prince,” you’d think that you’d try to get to get some kind of diversity in your panel of animation directors. Failing that, you might point out the monoculture in the room, and what it says about the animation business.

    • Widespread ethnic profiling by police: a call for EU action

      If you have never been stopped and search by the police, you might not see how it can affect those who are systematically stopped and searched, sometimes several times a week, for no apparent reason. Even if you have nothing to be blamed for, it is humiliating and frustrating to be targeted, singled out very often, just because of your perceived race, ethnicity or religion, rather than on the basis of individual behaviour or objective evidence.

      With the tightened border controls over migration concerns and the threat of terrorism, the increased perception of use of ethnic profiling has been reported by anti-racism organisations across Europe.

    • The Rise of White Racial Nationalism

      There is little doubt that white racism played a role in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. As Zach Beauchamp demonstrates in a Nov. 10 article at Vox.com, enthusiastic support for Donald Trump – 10 on a scale of 10 – among white voters in mostly white geographic areas was about 25 percent. However, in areas of growing ethnic and racial diversity, the percentage of all-in Trump support goes way up.

      Beauchamp quotes the research of the University of London scholar Eric Kaufmann, who surveyed Trump’s white supporters. Kaufmann’s original findings are reported in the policy blog of the London School of Economics. One result was that in areas that had experienced a 30 percent rise in Latino population, the number of whites who enthusiastically supported Trump rose to 70 percent.

    • Obama Can Stop the Trump Administration From Targeting and Discriminating Against Muslim and Arab Immigrants

      This Monday, December 12, the ACLU will be joining Color of Change, 18 Million Rising, MomsRising.org, MoveOn, DRUM — Desis Rising Up and Moving, and others to deliver over 280,000 petition signatures calling on President Obama to repeal the special registration system targeting Muslim and Arab immigrants before Donald Trump takes office.

    • The State of Alabama Last Night Tortured a Man While Slowly Snuffing Out His Life

      Alabama cruelly and excessively violated the bounds of human decency last night when it knowingly inflicted torturous pain during Ronald Smith’s botched execution.

      And it should never have come to this.

      Ronald Smith’s jury had voted to spare his life, but the trial judge in the case overrode the jury’s verdict and sentenced him to death under Alabama’s outlier practice. A divided Supreme Court then denied Smith’s request to postpone his execution to review the issue of judicial override, and Alabama moved forward with his execution.

      The execution of Ronald Smith last night took far longer than it should have, 34 minutes, during which time his body heaved as he struggled. He was almost certainly awake when the prison administered the agonizing drugs, whose administration without sedation is an open and shut violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

    • The California Transportation Department Is Cruelly and Unconstitutionally Destroying Homeless People’s Belongings

      Sometimes the trucks arrive early. Sometimes they come with no notice at all. Sometimes, while workers from the California Department of Transportation make their way down the row of tents—seizing property and cherished belongings—people have mere seconds to grab everything they can. Then they stand and watch as their bedding, clothes, tools, bikes, medicine, food, and other things are tossed into a trash compactor and destroyed.

      I’ve heard this story countless times from homeless people in the Bay Area and beyond. My colleagues who work on issues of poverty and inequality have too. For decades, save a few years where good practices and policies were followed because of lawsuit settlements, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and other government agencies in California have been conducting illegal sweeps of homeless encampments, cruelly and unconstitutionally seizing and destroying property.

    • The Dark Side of Christmas: The Impact on Sweatshops

      Television screens are filled with Christmas advertising, propagating the apparent need to buy something, and above all electronics, apparel, toys — the most popular Christmas gifts. The festive countdown is well underway.

      Three points specifically define the ‘festive’ season: advertisements and commercialisation, shopping and spending, and increased revenue for the Western economy. Data from Capgemini and new in the UK’s industry association for e-retail, the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), reveal that in 2015, British retailers took in over £24 billion (roughly $30 billion) during the Christmas period alone, more than the entire GDP of countries like Nepal or Honduras. This spending craze is linked with advertisement and the increasing consumerism promoted by mass-, and now social media.

    • Why Obama should pardon Chelsea Manning

      Today, Saturday 17th December, is Chelsea Manning’s 29th birthday. How will she mark the day? At Fort Leavenworth, the austere military prison in Kansas where she is serving out her 35-year sentence, time passes according to a strict and tedious regime: unlock, work detail, prisoner counts, security checks. There’s little scope for celebrations, and rules against “trafficking” mean other inmates are unlikely to be allowed to shower her with gifts.

      Post is probably as good as it gets, and one hopes the small desk in her cell is overflowing with cards and letters from friends and supporters. Letters might not seem like much but there’s one message, from one man, that could truly make her day. What, after all, would be a better birthday gift for an imprisoned whistle-blower than for Obama, presidential pen in hand, to sign off on her release?

    • Muslim chaplain of Canada’s army explains Quranic verse on wife beating

      Dr. Iqbal Al-Nadvi (Mohammad Iqbal Masood Al-Nadvi) is the Muslim Chaplain of the Canadian army, the Chairperson of Canadian Council of Imams (Canada’s top imam) and the Amir (President) of Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) Canada, a nation-wide Islamic organization that is striving “to build an Exemplary Canadian Muslim Community” by “total submission to Him [Allah] and through the propagation of true and universal message of Islam.”

      His previous positions include the following: Director of Al-Falah Islamic School in Oakville, Ontario from 2004 to 2011, Imam of Muslim Association of Calgary Islamic Center from 1998-2004 and as a member of the University of Calgary chaplaincy team.

    • Muslim cleric banned in Pakistan is preaching in UK mosques

      A Pakistani Muslim cleric who celebrated the murder of a popular politician is in Britain on a speaking tour of mosques. The news has alarmed social cohesion experts who fear such tours are promoting divisions in the Muslim community.

      Syed Muzaffar Shah Qadri has been banned from preaching in Pakistan because his sermons are considered too incendiary. However, he is due to visit a number of English mosques, in heavily promoted events where he is given star billing.

    • ‘They speak against it by day and cut girls at night’: fighting FGM in southern Kenya

      When Rampei Wuantai and his wife, Angela, decided not to make their daughters undergo female genital mutilation, they were not prepared for the backlash.

      The family live on a small homestead surrounding by acacia trees in the village of Illmotiok, in Kenya’s Kajiado county. Though outlawed in 2011, FGM is still widely practised in the area. The Wuantais were the first to reject the tradition.

      “Our first motivation to go against this culture was religion. We are Christians and the Bible does not tell us to cut our girls,” says Rampei, 53, a pastor and driver. He and his wife have 10 children: four girls and six boys.

      “Here, even chiefs and pastors still cut their daughters,” says Angela. “They speak against it during the day and cut their girls at night.”

      In Kenya, chiefs work under the provincial administration and are in charge of locations and sub-locations, the smallest administrative areas. Their role is to maintain law and order; constitutionally, they have power to arrest anyone breaking the law in their jurisdiction. As Angela points out, however, some turn a blind eye to the continued practise of FGM.

    • In Pakistan, five girls were killed for having fun. Then the story took an even darker twist.

      It was just a few seconds, a video clip of several young women laughing and clapping to music, dressed for a party or a wedding in orange headscarves and robes with floral patterns. Then a few more seconds of a young man dancing alone, apparently in the same room.

      The cellphone video was made six years ago, in a village deep in Kohistan, a rugged area of northwest Pakistan. It was the last time the young women, known only as Bazeegha, Sareen Jan, Begum Jan, Amina and Shaheen, have ever been definitively seen alive.

      What happened to them remains a mystery. Their fates have been shrouded by cultural taboos, official inertia, implacable resistance from elders and religious leaders suspected of ordering their deaths, and elaborate subterfuges by the families who reportedly carried out those orders.

    • Dutch government prepares to ratify EU-Ukraine deal

      The Netherlands’ government moved swiftly Friday to prepare legislation clearing the way for Parliament to vote on ratifying an EU-Ukraine free trade pact, despite Dutch voters rejecting the deal in a non-binding referendum.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • EFF to Supreme Court: Trademarks are Not Government Speech

        Today, together with the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Freedom of Expression, EFF submitted an amicus brief in Lee v. Tam. Our brief discusses an unusual but important question: are registered trademarks government expression? It is important to get the dividing line between government and private speech correct. This is because, while the government doesn’t get to control what you say, it does get to control what it says. As we argue in our brief, categorizing registered trademarks as government expression would threaten speech in many other areas.

        The case involves a rock band from California called The Slants. The band, like Dykes on Bikes®, intentionally chose a name containing a slur to reappropriate the term. The band attempted to register its name as a trademark but United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) refused the registration. The PTO concluded that the mark was not eligible under a statute prohibiting registration of any marks that “disparage” people. The PTO did not care how The Slants, an Asian-American band, intended for its mark to be understood. Rather, the fact that the term, standing alone, could be a slur was sufficient for it to deny registration.

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