11.08.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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The next wave of virtualization on servers is not going to look like the last one. That is the thinking of Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Linux project more than a decade ago and head of strategy and user experience at Canonical, the company that provides support services for Ubuntu.
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Kernel Space
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The networking subsystem update landed earlier this week in the Linux 4.4 Git code and it comes with several new features.
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Members of the Linux Foundation have met in San Francisco to push its newly announced Open API initiative. The collective want to harmonise efforts in the development of connected building technology.
Founding members of the Open API Initiative, including Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and PayPal, want to extend the range of Swagger, the popular framework for building application programming interfaces (APIs). Their collective ambition is to create a vendor neutral, portable and open specification for providing metadata for APIs based on the representational state architecture (REST).
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Graphics Stack
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The latest Nouveau Gallium3D driver work enables compute support for GeForce GTX 400/500 “Fermi” graphics cards.
But before getting too excited, this isn’t complete support nor is it good enough yet for executing your complex OpenCL kernels. The current state just handles simple compute kernels like for reading MP performance counters.
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At least for the Dell P2415Q 4K monitor that I bought a few weeks ago as the latest 4K test-bed, the Intel mode-setting support tends to be flaky unless using the new Linux 4.3 kernel. If booting Ubuntu 15.10 out-of-the-box, you may not have any luck getting a GUI. This has happened on both my Skylake systems and I believe a Haswell system too (it’s been going on for a few weeks but have just got around to writing this word of caution).
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Benchmarks
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This article is an OpenGL performance comparison between Windows 10 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 15.10 when upgrading to the very latest open-source graphics driver stack. Atop Ubuntu 15.10 was the upgrade to the Linux 4.3.0 stable kernel and also switching to Mesa 11.1-devel Git using the Padoka PPA. On the Windows side, the latest Intel 20.19.15.4300 graphics driver was used for benchmarking this Skylake system.
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Applications
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As you may know, Dekko is an open-source email client developed for Ubuntu Touch by one of the community members. For now, it is still a beta application and does not run flawless, but it has the basic features of a modern email client.
I have managed to install Dekko 0.5.8 Beta (the latest version available, so far) on Xubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet and Xubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf.
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As you may know, Rapid Photo Downloader is a free, open-source, software developed by a photography enthusiast. It has configurable file and folder names, the photos and videos can be backed up as they are downloaded, the software permits multiple download simultaneously, has support for many languages and supports GNOME, KDE and other DE.
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As you may know, Plank is the default dock app on Elementary OS 0.2 Luna, but it can be easily installed on other Ubuntu based systems, enabling the users to place their favorite apps in the dock, for an easier usage.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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I will go back to the game on vacations. Right now, and after all this time without playing Tomb Raider, I was satisfied with having Lara run around, walk, climb, jump, and shoot—on Linux!
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Games
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It has been a day over three years since Steam was initially put into a limited beta for Linux, and since then things have never quite been the same for Linux gaming thanks to SteamOS as well.
When it launched for Linux initially we had well under 100 games available on Steam, and look at the difference with a bit of influence from Valve. Checking on Steam there’s now 1607 games available for Linux, but as I’ve said it before it’s just a number. We need to keep up the push, and gain some more high quality games to bring people over to our platform.
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Steam for Linux has been around for three years, and it completely changed the landscape, bringing a lot of games to Linux and signaling to the industry that this OS is ready to become a gaming platform.
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With the Linux 4.4 HID update came support for the Logitech G29, a racing wheel for gamers, while just missing that pull are patches for another Logitech Driving Force Racing Wheel.
Simon Wood, who worked on the Logitech G29 support for Linux 4.4, published patches today on the kernel mailing list for the Logitech G920 Driving Force Racing Wheel. This racing wheel is currently the number one new release for PC Game Racing Wheels on Amazon and has a four-star rating from 21 customer reviews.
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It’s great to see it get a Linux release, as they originally tried funding on Kickstarter and failed, then they found a partner in Bandai Namco for funding. This new update uses Unity 5.1, and they decided to publish it for Linux after a beta test I was part of.
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2Dark is a Stealth Horror Adventure game in which you have to find and rescue kidnapped children from various serial killers.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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But I spent a few grips, I could not make the Qt link with VTK. At that time I had very little experience with Linux environment, which made me give up using VTK and and tried to use pure OPenGl with QOpenGLWidget, that Qt provides.
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FOSDEM is the biggest free software conference and KDE will have a stall and help organise the Desktop devroom for talks. If you have something interesting to talk about the call for talks in the devroom is open now. We should have a stall to promote KDE, the world best free and open source community. I’m organising the KDE party on the Saturday. And there are thousands of talks going on. Sign up on the wiki page now if you’re coming and want to hang around or help with KDE stuff.
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There were some complaints from our Windows people that it is difficult to build KActivities (on Windows) due to its usage of boost.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The Solus operating system is moving closer to a stable release and developers continue to make important updates to the Linux distro.
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New Releases
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We are pleased to announce the first public beta of MX-15 (codename ‘Fusion’)
based on the reliable and stable Debian Jessie (8.2) with extra enhancements from our packaging team.
Just like MX-14, this release defaults to sysVinit (though systemd is available once installed for those that prefer to use it).
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Arch Family
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With having an Arch-based Manjaro Linux installation around from the recent large Linux distribution comparison / performance showdown I carried out some extra tests this weekend.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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When it comes to numbers, SUSE Linux is a long, long way behind Red Hat, the 800-lb gorilla of commercial Linux companies.
Now that gap may widen even further after Red Hat signed a deal with Microsoft to collaborate on cloud installations.
But when it comes to making technology cool, SUSE does appear to have a better handle on things.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. announced that its Gluster Storage is available in Microsoft Azure as a fully supported offering. Through Gluster, Azure users will have a scale-out, POSIX compatible, massively scalable, elastic file storage solution with a global namespace. This announcement also means that existing Gluster users will have another public cloud environment to run Gluster in.
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Stock analysts at William Blair dropped their Q1 2016 earnings per share (EPS) estimates for Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) in a research report issued to clients and investors on Wednesday, Zacks reports. William Blair analyst J. Ader now expects that the brokerage will post earnings per share of $0.30 for the quarter, down from their previous forecast of $0.33. William Blair has a “Buy” rating on the stock. The consensus estimate for Red Hat’s Q1 2016 earnings is $0.32 per share.
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A number of other brokerages also recently weighed in on RHT. Mizuho reiterated a “buy” rating and issued a $88.00 price target on shares of Red Hat in a research note on Friday. Deutsche Bank upgraded Red Hat from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and lifted their price target for the company from $75.00 to $90.00 in a research report on Tuesday. Cowen and Company lowered Red Hat from an “outperform” rating to a “market perform” rating and set a $82.00 price objective on the stock. in a report on Thursday, October 22nd. Drexel Hamilton began coverage on Red Hat in a research note on Friday, October 9th. They issued a “buy” rating and a $90.00 price target on the stock. Finally, Pacific Crest reissued an “equal weight” rating on shares of Red Hat in a research note on Wednesday, September 23rd. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, seven have given a hold rating and twenty-six have assigned a buy rating to the stock. Red Hat currently has an average rating of “Buy” and an average target price of $83.52.
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Fedora
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The Korora Project is very pleased to announce that the beta release of version 23 (codename “Coral”) is now available for download.
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The server was built in 1998 and Fedora Core 1 was installed on May 12th 2004. I wish I could say that I always ran Linux or BSD on this box but the truth is it was originally a Windows 95 box and later on a Win2K box. One of the reasons why the uptimes weren’t longer was due to utility power failures. Currently the server has a decent APC ES 725 UPS connected via USB cable, but this will be upgraded in the near future.
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Debian Family
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A few problems were observed during the demo of RTC services at the Cambridge mini-DebConf yesterday. As it turns out, many of them are already documented and solutions are available for some of them.
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Then a 2 minute silence at 11.00 as is customary in the UK on this date.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu Touch platform is preparing for a new OTA update, and a large number of fixes have landed in the past few days.
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Phones
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Android
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Google may be trying to exert control over the Android ecosystem. Analysts suggest reasons Google might want to design chips for Android smartphones.
Google is reportedly seeking to design its own smartphone chips in a bid to gain more control over what it sees as a rapidly fragmenting Android ecosystem.
Earlier this year, Google spoke with some chip manufacturers apparently to gauge their interest in developing chips based on Google’s designs, The Information reported Nov. 5.
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Mlais is a Hong Kong-based company which has released a handful of smartphones thus far. We’ve reviewed a number of those devices, including Mlais MX Base, M7, M52 Red Note and M4 Note. Most of these devices managed to surprise us as far as quality and general performance goes, Mlais did a really good job overall. That being said, It seems like Mlais is getting ready to release a smartwatch, and it could be Android Wear-powered, which is very interesting. Anyhow, let’s see what’s what.
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Smart in-car infotainment systems are becoming a reality with various smartphone projection standards like Android Auto and Apple Carplay starting to see support from car makers, although the pace of uptake leaves a lot to be desired. The Android Auto project was announced at Google I/O 2014, and the mobile app for the same was released to the Google Play Store in March this year. For the uninitiated, what Android Auto does essentially is that it makes your phone’s apps and data available through the built-in touchscreen head-unit of a vehicle that supports the standard. Meaning, no more having to pick up the phone to access your contacts, text messages, calls, GPS navigation, internet access etc. What’s more, the calling and texting features are voice-controlled by default, which promises to cut down on the would-be distractions, thereby improving safety.
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It looks like AT&T won’t have a domestic exclusive on the BlackBerry Priv after all. Verizon Wireless has hinted on Twitter that it, too, will offer the keyboard-equipped Android phone to its customers. No other information is available on Verizon’s website, but the carrier does say that the phone is “coming soon.”
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Today we’re comparing the forth generation Apple TV to the NVIDIA Shield. These are quite possibly the two best set top boxes out right now. I won’t be going into every little detail here, but instead the things that are most important for myself. But before we get in-depth with either option, let’s take a look at specifications between the two…
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New Android phones appear with regularity, but far too few of them really seem … new.
Sure, cameras keep getting better and phones keep getting faster. For the most part, though, you’d be hard-pressed to single out many new features that aren’t just tweaks for the sake of tweaking. Though manufacturers frequently customize Google’s Android software to set their phones apart, those alterations often just make things worse by hiding features or breaking some apps.
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BlackBerry is still around, though, and that is a good thing. At least it is if you’re concerned about security and your privacy. BlackBerry has long been among the most secure devices available.
That will likely include its new PRIV (short for private), its first Android phone. In fact, the company’s security chief says PRIV will be the most secure Android device available, saying “it’s second to none in the industry.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I am happy to announce the second alpha release on the way to GNU Smalltalk 3.3.
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The countdown to Christmas in Manchester began tonight as the city’s lights were switched on.
Thousands of families filled Albert Square to watch Coronation Street’s Catherine Tyldesley and Kym Marsh flick the switch, with a spectacular 10-minute firework finale adding to the sparkle.
The soap stars were joined on the line-up by Scouting for Girls and Lemar, and there were also appearances from the cast of the Opera House’s Cinderella and The Lowry’s Sound of Music.
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Native American students have writhed for decades in a bureaucratic school system bogged down by a patchwork of federal agencies responsible for different aspects of their education.
Today, native youth post the worst achievement scores and the lowest graduation rates of any student subgroup. Last school year 67 percent of American Indian students graduated from high school compared the national average of 80 percent. And many of their school facilities have been equally neglected, lacking even basic essentials such as heat and running water.
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While Microsoft might be revved up about getting people onto Windows 10 as fast as possible, if you call your PC maker’s tech support line, you might be advised to roll back to older versions.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Mr Ma’s Nationalists – who are also known as the Kuomintang (KMT) – fled to Taiwan in retreat from Mao Zedong’s Communists at the end of the civil war. China maintains it will eventually reunify the island, by force if necessary.
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The mainland has never renounced the use of force to bring what it considers a breakaway province under its control.
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What shocks many people here is that Mr Murphy is by any standards a dedicated warmonger. He was a major and important proponent of the invasion of Iraq, and is the strongest of supporters of the massive increase of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, in breach of the Non Proliferation Treaty.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A trial taking place today brings attention once again to the plight of the 700-acre Briger Forest, a rare tract of pristine land in Palm Beach County that environmentalists have been trying to protect for years. Developers have begun to clear trees and build roads to construct homes, stores, and laboratories for the private, nonprofit Scripps Biotech Institute.
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s wealthiest charitable foundation, has been under an unprecedented amount of scrutiny regarding their investments in the fossil fuel industry lately.
Alongside a persistent and growing local Seattle-based campaign, about a quarter of a million people joined the Guardian in calling on the Foundation to join the $2.6 trillion worth of investors who have committed to divest from fossil fuels.
In response, Bill Gates has proffered two public rejections of fossil fuel divestment, the most recent in a lengthy interview on climate change in this month’s edition of the Atlantic. Both rejections were based on misleading accounts of divestment which created straw men of the divestment movement, and downplayed the remarkable prospects for a clean energy revolution.
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For the past two months, enormous forest fires have been raging across large swaths of Indonesia. So far, 120,000 active fires have been detected in the country. The smoke has been so bad it could be seen from space. Below is a guide to the basic facts you should know about the disaster.
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Thousands of the fires raging through the forests of Indonesia were deliberately started to clear land for industrial use. The results have been deadly
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The fires in Indonesia are more than just a threat to endangered orangutans. They have shortened by up to two years the window to reduce carbon emissions and avoid runaway climate change, according to one of the CSIRO’s leading climate scientists.
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Finance
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Yesterday, Roger Ver and the Bitcoin.com team hosted the largest bitcoin AMA, with the participation of prominent bitcoin entrepreneurs, startups and developers including Gavin Andresen, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, Xapo CEO Wences Casares, Overstock CEO Patric Bryne and bitcoin core developer Mike Hearn, which will continue until december, with over 70 respected figures from the bitcoin scene hosting Q&A sessions on forum.bitcoin.com.
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The Seattle-based company has been stockpiling a trove of historic photos since Gates founded Corbis in 1989. But recently, it has seen an “accelerated decline” in its ability to license its images, according to a memo CEO Gary Shenk sent employees this week that was obtained by Bloomberg.
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A source with knowledge of the situation told Bloomberg the cuts will affect 15 percent of Corbis workers.
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Here we go again. Another Bill Gates-funded education reform project, starting with mountains of cash and sky-high promises, is crashing to Earth.
This time it’s the Empowering Effective Teachers, an educator evaluation program in Hillsborough County, Florida, which was developed in 2009 with major financial backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A total of more than $180 million has been spent on the project since then — with Gates initially promising some $100 million of it — but now, the district, one of the largest in the country, is ending the program.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Ian Svenonius is a strange man. Anyone who’s followed his career over the past 25 years knows he has a knack for incendiary sloganeering that often borders on the surreal, first as the singer in the legendary Washington, D.C. punk band The Nation of Ulysses (he currently leads the “crime rock” group Chain and the Gang) then as the author of the nonfiction books The Psychic Soviet and Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group. In his stylish, suit-and-tie persona as a pop-culture gadfly and revolutionary rhetorician — which may or may not be a self-caricature; part of his appeal is his Andy Kaufman-like commitment to character — he’s put forth ideas as bizarre as comparing Fidel Castro to The Velvet Underground. Favorably, of course.
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But instead of including the awful word “fuck,” which may corrupt the minds of psychology students, Weiten takes a comical approach by just changing the word to “mating.” He of course could have used the word “fornicating,” but that just wouldn’t be funny at all.
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China has compiled a “blacklist” of keywords banned by its complex Internet censorship regime, known as the Great Firewall, and is now seeking to apply them well beyond its physical borders via a domain-name registry based in the United States, according to recent reports.
U.S.-based domain-name registry XYZ.com recently made a deal with the Chinese government requiring it to enforce Beijing’s censorship globally based on a list of banned words, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.
The registry will let China ban domain names based on a list of “sensitive words” including “freedom,” “democracy,” and a multitude of words seen as referring to the Tiananmen Square massacre, including the title of singer Taylor Swift’s 1989 album and tour.
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Google’s move back into China might not be as welcome as initially expected — not by China’s citizens, but the United States. The Web site for Google’s holding company is registered with a company that is helping China censor thousands of top level domain names, according to one report.
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Meanwhile, the .XYZ registry is not owned by a Chinese company but by Daniel Negari, a young American entrepreneur from Beverly Hills. Negari said by email that XYZ will formally address the issue on Wednesday afternoon.
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China is already famous for massive Internet surveillance and censorship inside its borders. Now, through a partnership with American company XYZ.com, Chinese authorities are also aiming to censor online content around the world in an unprecedented suppression of Internet privacy and freedom.
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EFF, along with the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the case of Backpage.com v. Dart.
Backpage.com sued Thomas Dart, the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, arguing that the sheriff’s successful campaign to get Visa and MasterCard to cease providing financial services to the website amounted to informal government censorship in violation of the First Amendment.
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More than 300 works are on display in Northern Ireland’s biggest visual arts show, but a controversy erupted this week over a square inch of canvas.
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A leading Orangeman has hit out at media backing for Orange Order brethren being depicted as Ku Klux Klan members.
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A WARNING notice has been placed beside a painting at a Belfast museum amid claims it shows members of the Orange Order dressed in Ku Klux Klan clothing.
The 7ft oil canvas entitled `’Christian Flautists Outside St Patrick’s’, was the last major work by renowned Belfast artist Joseph McWilliams before his death last month.
The painting depicts loyalist bands men marching in circles outside St Patrick’s Church in the city in 2012.
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Staff at the Ulster Museum have erected a sign to warn visitors that some images – including one linking Orange Order supporters with the racist Ku Klux Klan – are “potentially offensive”.
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LEAKED INTERNAL EMAILS from the powerful Democratic think tank Center for American Progress (CAP) shed light on several public controversies involving the organization, particularly in regard to its positioning on Israel. They reveal the lengths to which the group has gone in order to placate AIPAC and long-time Clinton operative and Israel activist Ann Lewis — including censoring its own writers on the topic of Israel.
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Three years ago two writers got run out of the Democratic thinktank the Center for American Progress by the Israel lobby. We wrote a lot about it at the time. Rightwing Republican Israel supporters smeared the writers for stuff they were writing about Israel at Think Progress; and lo and behold they were gone in months. Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton–all moved on to more independent pastures after they were censored by CAP.
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In the preface to his classic 1961 book about censorship, Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition, the conservative journalist Peter Coleman struck an unexpectedly elegiac note.
“It is still too soon,” he wrote, “to write an autopsy of Australian censorship, but nevertheless the censorship of morals, blasphemy and sedition has almost entirely disappeared, and the remaining cases of literary censorship, while irritating to many, are few in number.
“At the same time, since the new freedom of censorship has been accompanied by the emergence of ‘mass culture’, of a debased literature, and of a general attitude of indifference to cultural standards, the spirit of crusade has gone out of the old cause.”
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Australia says it is concerned at the erosion of the rule of law in Nauru, and has urged the Pacific nation to allow journalists to visit, stop censoring the internet and decriminalise same-sex relationships, in a frank assessment at the United Nations.
Nauru is being assessed before the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a quadrennial assessment of countries’ human rights record by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
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Their predecessors suffered torture, imprisonment and death at the hands of a diehard military regime for more than half a century. Now, Burma’s journalists — newly fledged, muscle-flexing but also still apprehensive — are challenged with the first general election since 1960 to be covered with relative freedom.
The independent press for months has been girding itself with training and strategy sessions, figuring out how to breach barriers to polling access and expose cheating and other irregularities — both widely anticipated during what is heralded as a historic showdown Sunday between the ruling party, backed by the still-powerful military, and one headed by pro-democracy opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
“It’s a milestone in my career and that of everyone here,” says Kyaw Zwa Moe, editor of The Irrawaddy, earlier imprisoned for eight years for publishing a political journal and participating in the pro-democracy movement. “I told my reporters, ‘You have to have passion to cover these elections. You are not only doing your duty as journalists but serving your country. You are opening people’s eyes.’”
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Thus, it was very good news when the festival made the decision to host several sessions as a platform for discussing the controversial events that occurred between Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, 1965 and the subsequential mass killings of alleged leftists.
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Censorship in Indonesia became a topic of public debate this week after local authorities moved to silence discussions on the 1965 anti-communist killings. Meanwhile, polls weighed in on Jokowi’s first year as president, and the first rains of the season offered some relief to areas affected by haze.
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Endy Bayuni was one of four panellists whose identities were overtly recorded last Thursday. Attendees were also photographed, and other events on Indonesia’s 1965 communist purges were cancelled.
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October marked 50 years since the Indonesian military launched one of the twentieth century’s worst mass murders. Yet the anniversary passed almost unnoticed. The massacre of some 500,000 members or sympathisers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) during 1965-1966 is the least talked-about genocide of the last century.
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Facebook, which just announced it averages 1 billion daily users, is actively censoring any mention of Tsu.co. The social media giant has accused the brash young startup of not complying with its spam policies and now cites every mention of the site made on Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram as spam, censoring any post that includes the site’s URL (Tsu, the popular Chinese name, is still permissible).
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The social media giant has deleted more than one million posts which mention small social media platform Tsu.co
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Log in to Facebook, create a post, and type in “Tsu.co.” Facebook will censor the link on all its platforms. That means facebook.com, as well as Messenger, Instagram, and the Facebook apps for iOS and Android.
Facebook did something a lot scarier, too. The retroactively censored over a million Facebook posts which mentioned Tsu.co. So those Facebook posts, and associated images, videos, or comments? All deleted by Facebook. Gone.
The word “Tsu,” which is a competing social network, is okay. But “Tsu.co,” or any links from the domain, are automatically censored.
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Yes, it is all well and good to defend Bahar Mustafa, the Goldsmiths student diversity officer arrested and charged under UK communications law. As the free-speech lobby English PEN claims, noting that the hashtag #KillAllWhiteMen ‘was clearly a joke’ rather than a real threat: ‘It was a political statement, however inadvisable it was for an elected students’ union official to post it.’
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Toledo-based attorney Terry Lodge accused the commissioners of violating his client’s First Amendment right to free speech. The policy, which has been listed in writing on the commissioners’ agendas for several weeks, requires would-be speakers at weekly commissioner meetings to disclose the subject of their comments prior to speaking.
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I, too, am disgusted by the delay in publishing the results of the Chilcot inquiry about the causes and consequences of the second Iraq War, which should have been unnecessary if George Bush senior had not lost his nerve, following the US massacre of retreating Iraqi troops on the Basis Road, after the liberation of Kuwait.
I doubt we will ever get the whole truth, because it is probably inconsistent with the whole idea of democratic government.
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Censorship of public information needs to justify itself, not the public’s right to know.
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Recently, a video of two opposition lawmakers being beaten by an angry mob went viral on social media. How do you think this speaks to cyber-democracy in Cambodia?
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For an example of just how bad the TPP is for Canadians, let’s take a look at the Intellectual Property (IP) chapter. For years, digital rights experts the world over have been calling it “one of the worst global threats to the Internet.”
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A deliberation on the contribution of the freedom to publish in guaranteeing freedom of expression was one of the first sessions on the second day of the 3rd Arab Publishers Conference. The debate was moderated by Sheikh Sultan Sooud Al Qasimi, an Emirati activist, writer, and former board chairman of the UAE branch of the Young Arab Leaders (YAL), with Ibrahim Al Moallem, Ola Wallin, and Ibrahim Al Abed as panellists.
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National Media Council adviser Ebrahim Al Adel says UAE open to all opinions and criticism
There is no censorship of books of any kind at UAE book fairs, a senior official told the third Arab Publishers Conference in Sharjah on Tuesday.
Ebrahim Al Abed, adviser to the chairman of the National Media Council (NMC), also said the UAE never rejects constructive criticism, even if it is about politics.
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The copyright provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership could curtail Internet users’ basic access to information and right of self-expression on the Web, criminalizing common online activities and enforcing widespread Internet censorship, writes digital rights campaigner Evan Greer at The Guardian.
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Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, intended to create political art with the use of Legos, and was denied the bulk use of Lego’s products to make his piece.
Lego’s spokesperson claimed that they “refrain, on a global level, from actively engaging in or endorsing the use of Lego bricks in projects or contexts of a political agenda.”
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Larry Salibra was traveling across China last month when he noticed something strange with his iPhone. Apple’s news aggregation app News and its Beats 1 radio station had worked fine in Hong Kong, where he began his trip and where there is basically no internet censorship, but became unavailable as he entered mainland China, where the internet most definitely is censored.
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In a surprise turn, the Malaysian cartoonist and his lawyers have applied to the country’s high court to consider whether the Sedition Act is constitutional
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Gadfly documentarian Michael Moore has chased down the chief executive of General Motors, annoyed President George W. Bush and stormed Wall Street with Rage Against the Machine.
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The Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon issued a message today on the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. The message reads:
“Today we remember the journalists and media workers who have been killed in the line of duty.
More than 700 journalists have been killed in the last decade — one every five days — simply for bringing news and information to the public.
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Facing the double threat of extremist violence and state repression, Bangladeshi bloggers daring to speak up for secular values are fighting for their lives
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The publishers of a magazine catering mostly to inmates has filed a lawsuit against Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux, claiming he violated county inmates’ First Amendment rights by not allowing them to receive the magazine.
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Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Legal Counsel Matt Bowman spoke before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit against a Pittsburgh censorship zone ordinance. In March, ADF attorneys appealed a district court decision that upheld the ordinance.
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The International Press Institute (IPI) released a report on the Joint International Emergency Press Freedom Mission to Turkey undertaken last week by a broad coalition of international free expression and press freedom groups.
The report builds on mission participants’ finding that escalating pressure on media in the period between parliamentary elections in June and repeat polls set for Sunday has significantly impacted journalists’ ability to report on matters of public interest and is likely to “have a significant, negative impact on the ability of voters in Turkey to share and receive necessary information, with a corresponding effect on Turkey’s democracy”.
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Syria’s authorities have yet to disclose the whereabouts of Bassel Khartabil, a software developer and defender of freedom of information, one month after his transfer to an undisclosed location, 22 organizations said today. Syrian authorities should immediately reveal his whereabouts and release him.
Military intelligence detained Khartabil on March 15, 2012. On October 3, 2015, Khartabil managed to inform his family that security officers had ordered him to pack but did not reveal his destination. His family has received no further information. They suspect that he may have been transferred to the military-run field court inside the military police base in Qaboun.
“Each day without news feels like an eternity to his family,” a spokesperson for the organizations said. “Syrian authorities should immediately reveal his whereabouts and reunite him with them.”
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When, according to a Gallup poll, almost half of the U.S. population mistrusts the police’s ability to enforce laws appropriately, one director voicing his negative opinions at a rally is irrelevant. This recent boycott by the NYPD and LAPD of their negative portrayal in the media is just a pathetic attempt to salvage their pride and does nothing to take actual responsibility for their public reputation.
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It’s true there are two sides in the YPG v Isis conflict. One side has both men and women fighting hard to protect their homeland and people from falling to brutal Islamist rule; the other pushes gay people off buildings, stones adulterers, sets fire to its prisoners of war, and mows down anyone who stands in the way of the growth of its creepy Caliphate. If you can’t ‘take sides’ in a conflict like that, then your moral compass is in serious need of repair.
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Monty Python’s Life of Brian has finally had its first public screening in Bournemouth after almost 35 years of being banned in the town. But it’s not the only film to suffer the shackles of local censorship.
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Privacy
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The Moscow Un-Summit wasn’t a formal interview. Nor was it a cloak-and-dagger underground rendezvous. The upshot is that we didn’t get the cautious, diplomatic, regulation Edward Snowden. The downshot (that isn’t a word, I know) is that the jokes, the humour and repartee that took place in Room 1001 cannot be reproduced. The Un-Summit cannot be written about in the detail that it deserves. Yet it definitely cannot not be written about. Because it did happen. And because the world is a millipede that inches forward on millions of real conversations. And this, certainly, was a real one.
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I asked Ed Snowden what he thought about Washington’s ability to destroy countries and its inability to win a war (despite mass surveillance). I think the question was phrased quite rudely—something like “When was the last time the United States won a war?” We spoke about whether the economic sanctions and subsequent invasion of Iraq could be accurately called genocide. We talked about how the CIA knew—and was preparing for the fact—that the world was heading to a place of not just inter-country war but of intra-country war in which mass surveillance would be necessary to control populations. And about how armies were being turned into police forces to administer countries they have invaded and occupied, while the police, even in places like India and Pakistan and Ferguson, Missouri, in the United States—were being trained to behave like armies to quell internal insurrections.
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Openness and the NSA are not happy bedfellows; by its very nature, the agency is highly secretive. But in recent years, post-Edward Snowden, the organization has embarked on something of a PR campaign in an attempt to win back public trust.
The latest manoeuvre sees the NSA promoting the fact that when it discovers security vulnerabilities and zero-days in software, it goes public with them in 91 percent of cases… but not before it has exploited them. No information about the timescale for disclosures is given, but what most people will be interested in is the remaining 9 percent which the agency keeps to itself.
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Edward Snowden has described the Democratic presidential debate last month as marking an “extraordinary change”in attitudes towards him.
In a lengthy interview with Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter published on Friday, Snowden said he had been encouraged by the debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, her main challenger for the Democratic nomination.
During the televised encounter, both candidates called for Snowden to face trial , but Sanders said he thought the NSA whistleblower had “played a very important role in educating the American people”.
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Even his separation from his girlfriend, whom he left in Hawaii when he fled the country, has been resolved. She has been living with him in Moscow for just over a year.
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The majority of the UK cabinet were never told the security services had been secretly harvesting data from the phone calls, texts and emails of a huge number of British citizens since 2005, Nick Clegg has disclosed.
Clegg says he was informed of the practice by a senior Whitehall official soon after becoming David Cameron’s deputy in 2010, but that“only a tiny handful” of cabinet ministers were also told – likely to include the home secretary, the foreign secretary and chancellor. He said he was astonished to learn of the capability and asked for its necessity to be reviewed.
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THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT on Wednesday published a proposed new law to reform and dramatically expand surveillance powers in the United Kingdom. The 190-page Investigatory Powers Bill is thick with detail and it will probably take weeks and months of analysis until its full ramifications are understood. In the meantime, I’ve read through the bill and noted down a few key aspects of the proposed powers that stood out to me — including unprecedented new data retention measures, a loophole that allows spies to monitor journalists and their sources, powers enabling the government to conduct large-scale hacking operations, and more.
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When confronted by a cyber-extortionist, do you pay the ransom or do you stand firm and not negotiate? It’s both an ethical and a procedural dilemma.
By paying the ransom, in some respects, the victim is enabling and perhaps encouraging the extortionist to commit future acts since after all, if it worked once, it might well work again. In giving extortionists what they want, the general idea is that the victim will get back what they want and it could well be the quickest route to resolving a ransom situation.
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This week, hackers won a million dollar bounty for discovering a long-sought iOS zero-day. Federal lawmakers introduced the Stingray Privacy Act, a new bill that would require state and local lawmakers to get a warrant before using the invasive surveillance devices. The world got its first look at the full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. We found out the UK’s TalkTalk telecom hack may not be as bad as it looked. Android users can finally use Open Whisper Systems’ RedPhone app and TextSecure messaging app in one app, called Signal. And Crackas With Attitude, the teens who hacked CIA Director John Brennan, are back with a new hack.
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Reading through the draft investigatory powers bill on Wednesday evening, one name came to mind, that of Frederick Douglass. He was an African American former slave who became one of the most eloquent campaigners for the abolition of slavery and was the living refutation of plantation owners’ contention that their “property” lacked the intelligence to function as independent citizens.
Douglass was a remarkable orator and at least as remarkable a writer. His autobiography is one of the glories of the 19th century. In it, he records how, as a slave, he managed to learn to read, partly due to the initial kindness of his owner’s wife. But when her husband learned of this, he forbade her to continue. “The first step in her downward course,” recalls Douglass, “was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband’s precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger.”
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In the terms of the intelligence world, “Spectre” is an argument between old-fashioned human intelligence (Humintel) and signals intelligence (SIGINT). The script imagines an expansion of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing program of the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to “Nine Eyes,” adding in countries such as China and South Africa. This expansion is spearheaded by a mole within MI6, “C” (Andrew Scott), though it seems clear that “C” is a stand-in for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Although the US National Security Agency became notorious for its lawlessness and massive reach after the Snowden revelations, GCHQ is even more unconstrained. Because internet communications bounce around the world before arriving at the recipient, many are routed through undersea cables across the Atlantic. These cables come up out of the water on the west coast of Britain, and GCHQ has put sniffers on them, scooping up petabytes of our information and data-mining it.
The government of David Cameron, and especially the crypto-fascist Home Minister Theresa May, have long engaged in massive domestic surveillance and now intend to the bulk collection and storage of information on all the websites a Briton visits. In addition, Cameron wants to outlaw consumer encryption of the sort Apple is now increasingly offering its customers (Apple can’t turn over information to the FBI or NSA because even it doesn’t have the encryption keys). It seems a little unlikely that any such encryption ban is possible.
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Civil Rights
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Hundreds gathered — many wearing Guido Fawkes masks made popular through the film V for Vendetta — all with an axe to grind with the establishment.
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A group of activists from the Anonymous hacktivist group invaded the Oxford Road restaurant on Thursday night.
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Around 1,000 activists disguised as Guy Fawkes are expected to march through the streets of Manchester city centre in a protest against austerity, corruption and censorship.
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Thousands of protesters took part in the Million Mask March in central London on Thursday (5 November), which ended amid violent clashes with the police. Many of the protestors wore the Guy Fawkes mask that has become synonymous with the Anonymous activist group.
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More than 600 cities saw crowds of masked protestors rage against issues including censorship, corruption, war and poverty.
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On 31 August 2015, Ann Linde, State Secretary for Home Affairs, announced on Twitter that “constructive negotiations started today with my State Secretary colleague from Ecuador on an agreement on mutual legal assistance”. Since then, however, a question of partisanship has arisen in terms of how influential the UK and US could be on a process brought about by the diplomatic standoff over Julian Assange’s asylum status. A series of tweets (see below) has revealed Linde’s schedule to have included a curious number of senior figures from the UK / US security establishments. Whilst these meetings could be coincidence, an opportunity for Assange’s political opponents to project their interests into the negotiations has arisen. Linde has also acted as a confidante to Robert Silverman, a diplomat at the US Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden.
Further, Secretary Linde’s advocacy of a “feminist foreign policy” has brought her into contact with Anna Ardin, a feminist and one of the complainants in the Assange case. Ardin and Linde have served together at the 2008 Stockholm Pride’s “We Are Family!” tents, have spoken at the 2008 Sweden-Asia Forum in Manila, Philippines, and Linde attended a 2009 book seminar organised by Ardin. It is therefore unlikely that Linde can be expected to conduct the negotiations in a truly impartial manner.
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The internet, while often associated with connectedness and information flow, is split, too. One factor is the set of information management techniques that construct a ‘clean’ and ‘safe’ internet. Filters that are voluntary in private use and mandatory in places such as schools and libraries work with blacklists of banned websites and whitelists of permitted ones. Amendments in 2014 and 2015 to the law regulating access to information on the internet enabled the swift temporary banning of websites by the prime minister and other ministers.
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The discrepancy between the opinion polls and the electoral results need not detain us here. What really matters is to explain the stunning volatility observed in the space of five months. Short of an apologetic cover-up for the AKP, the answer to the question of how the AKP rose from its ashes in such a short time should start with the characteristics of the electoral process that culminated in the polling of 1st November. Simply put, what took place cannot be characterised as an election. There was, to be sure, polling on election day and, judging from information so far available, the voting process conformed to internationally acceptable standards, barring certain exceptional but serious irregularities in the Kurdish region. The trouble is that electoral campaigning and propaganda had been rendered almost impossible for all parties except the AKP! These elections were unrecognisable in concrete experiential terms to anyone who has gone through a couple of electoral processes in Turkey. There were no such elections in living memory where the streets were empty during the period set aside legally for electioneering, where there were almost no rallies organised by even the major parties except for the AKP, where the only thing that reminded the populace of the existence of coming elections was television and … the state of media freedom was abysmal as we will see in a moment. These were phantom elections and therefore the results are only worth celebrations for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his cohort, but cannot serve as a loyal indicator of where Turkey is going.
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British volunteers on a humanitarian aid run to refugees in Calais were detained by police under legislation meant to be used against suspected terrorists, an aid group has told the Independent.
Two people working with the London2Calais group said they were stopped and held for three hours under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 while returning to the UK at Calais.
One of the pair, who were travelling in the same vehicle, said Kent Police counter-terror officers carried out the detention on the Calais side of the channel.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The internet service provider has often complained (such as when lobbying against net neutrality) that it must impose limits on service to prevent network congestion. The argument suggests that these measures are required for the public good: to manage traffic, to give everyone fair access to the “road,” to stymie abusive or selfish “drivers,” you shouldn’t be using more than 250 gigabytes of data each month.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A key U.S. senator said on Friday the Obama administration may have to renegotiate parts of a Pacific trade pact, heralding a tough battle to win support in Congress.
The administration notified lawmakers on Thursday it plans to sign the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, starting a countdown to a congressional vote that could come in the middle of next year’s election campaign.
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On Thursday morning, after months of questions about the contents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal negotiated and championed by President Obama, his administration released the agreement in its complex entirety.
The problem, though, is that it was released as a series of posts on Medium — and, worse, a collection of PDFs — making it hard to search for topics across the entire document.
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Copyrights
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The European Commission is preparing a frontal attack on the hyperlink, the basic building block of the Internet as we know it. This is based on an absurd idea that just won’t die: Making search engines and news portals pay media companies for promoting their freely accessible articles.
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Send this to a friend
11.07.15
Posted in News Roundup at 11:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The sheer versatility of the Linux kernel truly knows no bounds. It can be found, literally, everywhere. From your local library to your local big box retailer, Linux is barely a stone’s throw away. There are very few places in the world that can be considered Linux-free. A small tribal village? Maybe. A shade tree mechanic? Possibly. A Prison? Well … not really. That’s right. It seems that Linux has been sent to the joint, and it poised to be there for a very long time.
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The technology has withstood the test of time by continuously evolving to meet the needs of financial traders – though until recently new features have been largely developed with in-house, proprietary code.
The way Bloomberg keeps up with users’ expectations is changing, however, McCracken writes. The company is adopting open source technologies such as Linux, Hadoop, and Solr and contributing code back upstream.
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Croatia’s Ministry of Veterans has published a manual on how to use Linux and LibreOffice. The document is part of a feasibility pilot in the Ministry. “The text is intended for public administrations, but can be useful to others interested in using these tools”, the Ministry writes in its announcement on 5 November.
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Kernel Space
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The HID driver updates were mailed in on Friday for the Linux 4.4 merge window.
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Takashi Iwai has lined up the sound driver updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window.
Highlights in the sound/audio realm for Linux 4.4 include new device support for some Firewire sound devices along with MIDI functionality, more ASoC updates around the Intel Skylake support added to Linux 4.3, and Intel’s Lewisburg controller has been added to the HD Audio driver.
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Chris Mason sent in the pull request today for updating the Btrfs file-system for Linux 4.4.
The Btrfs file-system in Linux 4.4 has a number of sub-volume quota improvements, many code clean-ups, and a number of allocator fixes based upon their usage at Facebook. The allocator fixes should also help improve the RAID 5/6 performance when the file-system is mounted with ssd_spread as previously it hit some CPU bottlenecks.
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Dmitry Torokhov sent in the input driver updates today for the Linux 4.4 merge window.
New input driver support with Linux 4.4 includes handling the remote controls for the Google Fiber TV Box, FocalTech FT6236 touchscreen controller support, ROHM BU21023/24 touchscreen controller.
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Besides the Btrfs pull request being sent in today for the Linux 4.4 merge window, the EXT4 updates were also sent in today by Ted Ts’o.
The EXT4 changes for Linux 4.4 largely come down to a smothering of bug-fixes for this stable Linxu file-system. In particular, there’s also fixes around the EXT4 encryption support and Ted is encouraging any EXT4 encrypted users to update their patches against Linux 4.4 to avoid a memory leak and file-system corruption bug.
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One more thing: You know how many of us in FOSS consider the whole Linus Torvalds rant thing as a in-family squabble? Well, thanks to our friends at the Washington Post, now it’s out there for everyone to see — “everyone” meaning the general public and, worse, the non-tech parrots who will now say Linux is insecure (as an operating system, not as an idea). The article also operates under the subtext that because security is not Linus’ main focus, somehow Linux may be lacking in the security department. Internally we know better. Externally this is what the public sees.
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The Washington Post has been doing a series on the vulnerabilities of the Internet. Part five of the series focuses on Linus Torvalds and the state of security in the Linux kernel. Does Linus need to focus more on security?
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The Linux Foundation has announced the Open API Initiative, and some mighty powerful backers are on board. Founding members of the Open API Initiative include 3Scale, Apigee, Capital One, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, PayPal, Restlet and SmartBear.
“The Initiative will extend the Swagger specification and format to create an open technical community within which members can easily contribute to building a vendor neutral, portable and open specification for providing metadata for RESTful APIs,” the announcement notes. The new open specification is targeted to allow both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of respective services without a lot of implementation logic. The Initiative is also aimed to promote and facilitate the adoption and use of an open API standard.
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Don’t send me feature requests. I’ve got more than enough ideas for stuff *I* want to implement. Diffs speak louder than words.
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Graphics Stack
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This CLRadeonExtender project has complete GCN assembler/disassembler support for all GCN GPUs from GCN 1.0 through GCN 1.2, including full Fiji support. The assembler supports the binary formats of the AMD Catalyst driver with OpenCL 1.2 as well as Gallium3D compute for using the RadeonSI open-source driver.
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Benchmarks
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This is a larger and more interesting comparison than the Linux distro comparison of September plus the fact that all stable Linux distributions are now in use thanks to a lot of distributions having put out their Q4 updates recently.
OpenSUSE 42.1, Fedora Workstation 23, Ubuntu 15.10, Antergos 2015.10-Rolling, Debian 8.2, CentOS 7, and Manjaro 15.11 were all cleanly installed on the same system and carried out a variety of benchmarks to measure their out-of-the-box performance across multiple subsystems.
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Applications
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As you may know, Rendera is an open-source painting and photo-retouching software for Linux,
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As you may know, PyCharm is a Python IDE, having some interesting functions like: code completion, error highlighting, customizable UI and key-bindings for VIM, VCS integrations or automated code refactorings and good navigation capabilities.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Frozenbyte has issued a content update for Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power adding a free new level, as well as official support for SteamOS and Linux. Also included are various minor fixes and improvements, such as mid-level checkpoints for the Lost Page levels.
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Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at a Linux Kernel 4.1 update for SteamOS, Nvidia support for Vulkan, Objects in Space and open hardware, and more.
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Obviously, it’s been quite a while now since leaving beta and in just a few days (10 November) is when the Steam Machines are officially out and powered by Valve’s Debian-based SteamOS. Over the past three years we’ve seen Valve make significant investments into the open-source graphics stack and other areas of Linux (in part through their sponsorship of Collabora and LunarG), Valve developers are significantly pushing SDL2, seen more mainstream interest in Linux gaming, have tons more games available natively for Linux, they have been heavily involved in the creation of the Vulkan graphics API, they have given away their entire game collection to the Mesa/Ubuntu/Debian upstream developers, and much more.
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Left 4 Dead 2 looks like one I will be trying out soon when my Steam Controller arrives next week. Also great to see surround sound in more games!
It would be good to see Valve add native support for the Steam Controller to all of their games, but I am sure they are working on it bit by bit.
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A Story About My Uncle is a rather good looking first person adventure from Gone North Games and published by Coffee Stain Studios (think Sanctum 2 and Goat Simulator). It looks like it’s heading to Linux too, which is obviously awesome.
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Rise: Battle Lines is a quick and accessible multiplayer-focused battle game that delivers meaty strategy in a bite-size format. It’s just been released on Linux (via Steam) for the princely sum of $4.99/£3.99!
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The Rocket League developers recently did a reddit “ask me anything” and in it they stated the Linux port was almost ready.
This is really great news, as people seem to be falling over themselves playing this game. Checking on it today the peak player count was “26,428″, so it looks like it will still be just as popular when we get it.
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A fellow from Nordic Games has commenting about the disappearance of the announced Darksiders and Darksiders II Linux ports.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Last month our Wayland efforts made a huge step forward. In KWin we are now at a state where I think the big underlying work is finished, we entered the finishing line of the KWin Wayland porting. The whole system though still needs a little bit more work.
The big remaining task which I worked on last month was geometry handling. That is simplified: moving and resizing windows. Sounds relatively easy, but isn’t. Moving and resizing windows or in general the geometry handling is one of the core aspects of a window manager. It’s where our expertise is, the code which makes KWin such a good window manager. Naturally we don’t want to throw that code out and want to reuse it in a Wayland world.
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Packages for the release of KDE’s Applications and Platform 4.14.3 are available for Kubuntu 14.04.3. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.
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For KDE users interested in the latest Wayland porting process, one of the big tasks currently being tackled is on Plasma’s screen management handling.
KDE’s Sebastian Kügler has written a blog post about screen management in Wayland. The lengthy post goes over the good and bad of screen management in the Wayland world and how it’s going to be implemented within KDE Plasma’s Wayland support.
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KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin has written a monthly status update concerning the state of KWin and KDE Plasma on Wayland.
The German open-source developer explained that most of the underlying work is finished as is most of the KWin Wayland porting, but the complete stack still needs more time to bake with Wayland. Much of October was spent working on the geometry handling with Wayland and still dealing with X11-specific KDE code.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Fashion retailers are constantly investing in new technologies to keep pace with the ever-changing market demand. Mahindra Retail, part of the $6.3 billion Mahindra Group that operates the Mom & Me chain of stores in India, was looking to grow its business. However, its existing ERP system was posing a major challenge. The Bangalore-based fashion retailer implemented SAP ERP, with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the operating system – a move that has helped them to lower operational costs and boost business productivity.
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Red Hat Family
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Mizuho reaffirmed their buy rating on shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) in a research report report published on Friday, AnalystRatings.Net reports. They currently have a $88.00 target price on the open-source software company’s stock.
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Fedora
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A few weeks ago, Lenovo came out with the Yoga 900, which was the successor to last years Yoga 3 pro and it in turn my Yoga 2 pro. The stats and early reviews looked pretty nice, so I ordered one.
I was hoping for a smooth Fedora experience, but sadly I ran into two issues right away after booting from a Fedora Live USB.
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This week was the release week for Fedora 23, and the Fedora Project has again worked together with the DigitalOcean team to make Fedora 23 available in their service. If you’re not familiar with DigitalOcean already, it is a dead simple cloud hosting platform which is great for developers.
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One of the things I like about windows is the way the windows snap as you move the actual windows to the left or right of the screen. By default Mate in Fedora 23 doesn’t have this enabled, but it’s an easy fix
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On Monday, the Fedora Developer Portal was released to the public. This is for developers using Fedora, not about developing Fedora itself. It’s a central hub for numerous resources to help both new and current developers set up their workspaces for new projects. Interested? Read more in the announcement post — and please share with your software developer friends!
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This week marks five years since Mark Shuttleworth shared with us Ubuntu intended to eventually switch to a Wayland-based environment for their Unity desktop rather than an X.Org Server… Most Phoronix readers know how that turned out.
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The Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 update continues to receive all kinds of new packages and fixes, and it looks like the developers have had a really busy week.
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As you may know, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, code named Xenial Xerus will be the next big Ubuntu release, a lot of changes being scheduled for it.
Among the changes, there will be a brand new tool for writing ISO images to USB disks, the good old Startup Creator being completely redesigned. While the software has been ignored a lot lately, the developers are porting it to QML, in order to make it easier for them to maintain and update it.
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MYIR’s “MYC-C437x” and “MYD-C437X” COM and baseboard pair run Linux on TI’s Cortex-A9 Sitara AM437x SoC, and offer dual GbE ports and touchscreen options.
MYIR first tapped the Sitara AM437x SoC from Texas Instruments earlier this year with its Rico Board. While the Rico had an integrated SBC design, the new MYD-C437X development board is one of MYIR’s sandwich-style concoctions featuring a separately available MYC-C437X computer-on-module. Similarly, MYIR’s Zynq-based MYD-C7Z010/20 offers a sandwich-style alternative to its Z-turn Board SBC.
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Phones
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Android
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Google’s latest version of Android, Marshmallow, only started rolling out last month. As such, it shouldn’t come as surprise to see that the current adoption numbers for it are extremely low.
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Google has not confirmed reports that it intended to merge Chrome OS and Android. Is the idea really that far-fetched? Here’s how the resulting products of such a marriage would be beneficial to users and the enterprise.
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LG’s new V10 smartphone is a compelling device that remains one of the last remaining modern smartphones with a removable battery and microSD card. There’s more for the road warrior too.
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The fall from grace of the Canadian technology firm BlackBerry has been well documented, but a new release on Friday featuring some Google-developed software has won over critics who are calling it the “best BlackBerry in a decade.”
Officially launched in the U.S and the U.K. Friday, industry websites have been beaming out favorable reviews for the new Blackberry Priv. Thenextweb.com called it probably one of the best Android phones it has ever used and the U.K.’s Daily Mirror newspaper described it as “the comeback that gadget fans have been waiting for.” Technology website AndroidCentral stated that “BlackBerry can make one hell of an Android phone.”
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Google is hopeful that a shiny new phone will entice companies to give Android for Work a try. The first 3,000 companies to set up Android for Work with a participating enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution by December 31, 2015, will get a brand new Nexus 5X smartphone.
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The advantages of open source are well known: lower costs, the security and higher quality that arise from a large developer community and the absence of ties to one manufacturer are powerful arguments. In some areas open source products are already leaders in their field.
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As part of the company’s regular engagement with the wider coding community, Etsy engineers Maggie Zhou and Melissa Santos recently told an audience at O’Reilly’s OSCON open-source programming conference in Amsterdam exactly how Etsy successfully updates its technology to meet growing data demands.
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The Etsy team uses open-source software and is committed to keeping its coding practices transparent.
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SaaS/Big Data
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OpenStack is finding its way into carriers and enterprise deployments around the world, but what about developers? At the recent OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, Japan, developers gathered to discuss the Mitaka release of OpenStack, set to debut in 2016. One of the themes that is emerging in OpenStack is the idea of focusing on a developer story, according to Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski.
Mirantis is one of the largest contributors to OpenStack and has raised $200 million in equity to help fuel its efforts. Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski also sits on the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors, giving him particular insight into the open-source cloud project.
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Large funding rounds by Hadoop-focused startups seem to be par for the course these days, as the open source big data framework becomes more of an attraction for businesses everywhere. The concept of making Hadoop easier to use is also not new. We’ve reported on the new front-ends and connecting tools that are appearing for the platform.
Now, Cask Data, an open source software company that helps developers deliver enterprise-class Apache Hadoop solutions for simplifying its use, has announced that it’s raising a $20 million Series B financing round led by Safeguard Scientifics, with participation from Battery Ventures, Ignition Partners and other existing investors.
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Databases
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Pretty much every name offers some possibility for being turned into a schoolyard taunt. But even though I’m an adult who left the schoolyard decades ago, my name still inspires giggles among the technologically minded. My last name is “Null,” and it comes preloaded with entertainment value. If you want to be cheeky, you will probably start with “Null and void.” If you’re a WIRED reader, you might move on to “Null set.” Down-the-rabbit-hole geeks prefer the classic “dev/null.”
As a technology journalist, being a Null has served me rather well. (John Dvorak, you know what I’m talking about!) The geek connotations provide a bit of instant nerd cred—to the point where more than one person has accused me of using a nom de plume to make me seem like a bigger nerd than I am.
But there’s a dark side to being a Null, and you coders out there are way ahead of me on this. For those of you unwise in the ways of programming, the problem is that “null” is one of those famously “reserved” text strings in many programming languages. Making matters worse is that software programs frequently use “null” specifically to ensure that a data field is not empty, so it’s often rejected as input in a web form.
In other words: if lastname = null then… well, then try again with a lastname that isn’t “null.”
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Brescia explained that the Bitnami cloud launchpad is now available to Oracle Cloud users, providing over one hundred different open-source applications and development environments. Bitnami is no stranger to cloud deployments and is also available on the Google Cloud as well as other cloud environments. Bitnami’s core promise is that it enables users to rapidly deploy applications, which is a mission the company has been on since 2011.
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Business
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BSD
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pfSense® software version 2.2.5 is now available. This release includes a number of bug fixes and some security updates.
Today is also the 11 year birthday of the project. While work started in late summer 2004, the domains were registered and the project made public on November 5, 2004. Thanks to everyone that has helped make the project a great success for 11 years. Things just keep getting better, and the best is yet to come.
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Many moons ago, OpenBGPd was extensively used throughout the networking world as a Route Server. However, over the years, many have stopped using it and have migrated away to other implementations. Recently, I have been getting more involved with the networking community, so I decided to ask “why”. Almost exclusively, they told me “filter performance”.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In today’s Friday Free Software Directory IRC Meeting we started things off by getting some tips from Yaron Koren of WikiWorks related to improving our Approved Revisions process, which should be completed over the next week.
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Public Services/Government
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Italy’s Ministry of Defence is pioneering the use of open-source office productivity tools with the migration of 150,000 PCs to LibreOffice
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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In a speech earlier this week, Matt Hancock, minister for the Cabinet Office, referred to data as being “no longer just a record” but a “mineable commodity, from which value can be extracted” and outlined how the UK government intends to improve its use of the information at its disposal and help others exploit the data too.
“Government data is no longer a forgotten filing cabinet, locked away in some dusty corner of Whitehall,” Hancock said. “It’s raw material, infinite possibility, waiting to be unleashed. No longer just a record of what’s happened, but a map of what might be.”
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Programming
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Eclipse IoT, a working group of the Eclipse Foundation, has launched a challenge to encourage IoT developers to create innovative IoT solutions based on open source and open standards.
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His statement came shortly after Blatter’s spokesman, Klaus Stoehlker, said the 79-year-old Swiss official was under “medical evaluation” for stress-related reasons and had been told by doctors to relax.
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Sepp Blatter has been ordered by doctors to take five days off work after having a medical evaluation for stress.
The 79-year-old, currently suspended from his role as Fifa president, consulted a doctor after feeling unwell, and although no underlying problem was discovered he has been ordered to rest.
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If you grew up in the ‘70s or ‘80s, the name Ralph Bakshi got your blood pumping. His films were bold and profane, hysterical, politically incorrect, gothic and gorgeous to look at. They were shot through with a real sense of rock and roll and street smarts — see the dirty satire “Fritz the Cat” (a take on R. Crumb’s famously horny feline, which was the first animated film to be rated X).
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Health/Nutrition
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“Earlier this year, the surviving members of the Grateful Dead played sold-out ‘Fare Thee Well’ concerts in Santa Clara and Chicago to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of their band,” says Ben Mark of Collectors Weekly. “But Jerry Garcia and company did not start using the name Grateful Dead until December of 1965. The exact date is surprisingly hard to pin down, as my story for Collectors Weekly reveals, but we do know that the Grateful Dead’s sound grew out of its experiences as the house band at the Acid Tests of 1965 and 1966, which were organized (if that’s even the right word…) by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
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Trying to write a definitive history of the Acid Tests, a series of multimedia happenings in 1965 and 1966, in which everyone in attendance was stoned on LSD, is like trying to organize an aquarium’s worth of electric eels into a nice neat row, sorted by length. You will never get the creatures to stop writhing, let alone straighten out, and if you touch them, well, they are electric eels.
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The DEA is a bloated, wasteful, scandal-ridden bureaucracy charged with the impossible task of keeping humans from doing something they’ve been doing for thousands of years – altering their consciousness. As states legalize marijuana, reform sentencing laws, and treat drug use more as a health issue and less as a criminal justice issue, the DEA must change with the times. Federal drug enforcement should focus on large cases that cross international and state boundaries, with an exclusive focus on violent traffickers and major crime syndicates. All other cases should be left to the states.
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Security
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ProtonMail is getting its first taste of life as an entity known to criminals looking for a quick, easy payday.
Throughout most of yesterday and through to this morning, the encrypted email service, set up by CERN scientists in Geneva last year to fight snooping by the likes of the NSA, was offline. The company had to use a WordPress blog to disclose what was happening to customers.
Its datacenter was effectively shut down by waves of traffic thanks to two separate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. One of the groups responsible for flooding the servers demanded ProtonMail cough up 15 Bitcoin (currently worth around $6,000), or the attack would continue.
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A newly discovered ransomware is attacking Linux Web servers, taking aim at Web development environments used to host websites or code repositories.
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A new bit of ransomware is now attacking Linux-based machines, specifically the folders associated with serving web pages. Called Linux.Encoder.1 the ransomware will encrypt your MySQL, Apache, and home/root folders. The system then asks for a single bitcoin to decrypt the files.
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A federal judge Tuesday indicated he will dismiss with leave to amend a class action claiming Ford, Toyota and General Motors made their cars vulnerable to hackers.
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Over the last several weeks, reporting has revealed a coordinated insider effort at Volkswagen to insert a malicious piece of software—a defeat device—into the car’s electronic control module. The device was able to sense when emission tests were being conducted by monitoring things like “speed, engine operation, air pressure and even the position of the steering wheel,” and triggered changes to the car’s operations to reduce emissions during the testing process so that those cars would pass the tests. When the malicious software remained dormant, the emission controls were disabled and the cars spewed up to 40 times the EPA-mandated emissions limits. Through the defeat device, Volkswagen was able to sell more than half a million diesel-fueled cars in the U.S. in violation of U.S. environmental laws.
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Digital technology is often seen as a curiosity in revolutionary politics, perhaps as a specialized skill set that is peripheral to the hard work of organizing. But the growing trend of “cyber-resistance” might hold more potential than we have given it credit for. Specifically, the popularized use of encryption gives us the ability to form a type of liberated space within the shifting maze of cables and servers that make up the Internet. The “web” is bound by the laws of math and physics before the laws of states, and in that cyberspace we may be able to birth a new revolutionary consciousness.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A U.S. warplane shot people trying to flee a burning hospital destroyed in airstrikes last month, according to the charity that ran the facility.
“Thirty of our patients and medical staff died [in the bombing],” Doctors Without Borders General Director Christopher Stokes said during a speech in Kabul unveiling a report on the incident. “Some of them lost their limbs and were decapitated in the explosions. Others were shot by the circling gunship while fleeing the burning building.”
The hospital in Kunduz was bombed on Oct. 3 as Afghan government forces fought to regain control of the city from Taliban insurgents.
After the U.S. gave shifting explanations for the incident — which Doctors Without Borders has called a war crime — President Barack Obama apologized to the charity. The U.S. and Afghan governments have launched three separate investigations but the charity, which is also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is calling for an international inquiry.
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An information and intelligence shift has emerged in America’s national security state over the last two decades, and that change has been reflected in the country’s educational institutions as they have become increasingly tied to the military, intelligence, and law enforcement worlds. This is why VICE News has analyzed and ranked the 100 most militarized universities in America.
Initially, we hesitated to use the term militarized to describe these schools. The term was not meant to simply evoke robust campus police forces or ROTC drills held on a campus quad. It was also a measure of university labs funded by US intelligence agencies, administrators with strong ties to those same agencies, and, most importantly, the educational backgrounds of the approximately 1.4 million people who hold Top Secret clearance in the United States.
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The U.S. drone program creates more militants than it kills, according to the head of intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the U.S. military unit that oversees that very program.
“When you drop a bomb from a drone… you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good,” remarked Michael T. Flynn. The retired Army lieutenant general, who also served as the U.S. Central Command’s director of intelligence, says that “the more bombs we drop, that just… fuels the conflict.”
Not everyone accepts the assessment of the former JSOC intelligence chief, however. Still today, defenders of the U.S. drone program insist it does more good than harm. One scholar, Georgetown University professor Christine Fair, is particularly strident in her support.
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First there was an audio recording from ISIS’ Egyptian affiliate reiterating that they did indeed “down” the plane. Next, the ISIS home office in Raqqa (or Langley or Hollywood) released a video of five guys sitting in the front yard congratulating their Egyptian “brothers” on the accomplishment.
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Wednesday brought a veritable smorgasbord of “new” information about the Russian passenger jet which fell out of the sky above the Sinai Peninsula last weekend.
First there was an audio recording from ISIS’ Egyptian affiliate reiterating that they did indeed “down” the plane. Next, the ISIS home office in Raqqa (or Langley or Hollywood) released a video of five guys sitting in the front yard congratulating their Egyptian “brothers” on the accomplishment.
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David Cameron has said it is increasingly likely a “terrorist bomb” brought down the Airbus jet on Saturday, killing all 224 people on board.
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The rocket which reportedly came “within 1,000ft” of a British aircraft as it approached Sharm el-Sheikh in August was fired by the Egyptian military during a routine training exercise, the Government has said.
The Thomson flight took evasive action after the pilot spotted the missile, The Daily Mail reported.
Their source said: “The first officer was in charge at the time but the pilot was in the cockpit and saw the rocket coming towards the plane.
“He ordered that the flight turn to the left to avoid the rocket, which was about 1,000ft away.”
They reportedly went on to say that the staff were offered the chance to stay in Egypt, but chose to head back to the UK on a flight which took off with no internal or external lights.
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Arik, 54, works in an Israeli communications company that operates in Africa. He had intended to travel on to Israel after landing in Addis Ababa.
“About 20 minutes before the plane started its descent the passenger sitting behind me identified me as Israeli and Jewish,” Arik told Ynet.
“He came up behind my seat and started to choke me with a lot of force,” he continued, “and at first I couldn’t get my voice out and call for help.
“He hit me over the head with a metal tray and shouted ‘Allah akbar’ and ‘I will slaughter the Jew.’ Only after a few seconds, just before I was about to lose consciousness, did I manage to call out and a flight attendant who saw what was happening summoned her colleagues,” Arik added.
According to Arik, most of the passengers on the half-empty flight refrained from getting involved. “After they pulled him off me he hit me and shouted in Arabic. Some of the flight staff took me to the rear section of the plane and two guarded the attacked during the last part of the flight.”
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The US military-intelligence complex is engaged in systematic preparations for World War III. As far as the Pentagon is concerned, a military conflict with China and/or Russia is inevitable, and this prospect has become the driving force of its tactical and strategic planning.
Three congressional hearings Tuesday demonstrated this reality. In the morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a lengthy hearing on cyberwarfare. In the afternoon, a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee discussed the present size and deployment of the US fleet of aircraft carriers, while another subcommittee of the same panel discussed the modernization of US nuclear weapons.
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The new US Department of Defense Law of War Manual is essentially a guidebook for violating international and domestic law and committing war crimes. The 1,165-page document, dated June 2015 and recently made available online, is not a statement of existing law as much as a compendium of what the Pentagon wishes the law to be.
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As part of a major overhaul of the U.S. government’s strategy against the Islamic State, President Barack Obama last week authorized the deployment of “fewer than 50” U.S. special operations troops to northern Syria, where they will work with local forces in the fight against the militants, according to Military Times.
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When Cheney and Bush used the NSA to institute flagrantly, unabashedly unconstitutional surveillance on American citizens, I didn’t see you guys pulling out your side-arms. Were you protecting the constitutionally guaranteed right to assembly and redress of grievances against armed police in Ferguson, Missouri, or Baltimore, Maryland?
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Ford Motor Company, despite its much-hyped commitment to the environment, has been quietly funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group widely criticized for its promotion of climate change denial and for its opposition to the development of renewable alternatives to fossil fuels.
A Ford spokesperson, Christin Baker, confirmed the ALEC grant to the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch, but said that the funding was not intended to be used by ALEC to block action on climate change.
“Ford participates in a broad range of organizations that support our business needs, but no organization speaks for Ford on every issue. We do not engage with ALEC on climate change,” said Baker.
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And it gets worse. “From 1998 to 2005,” Egan writes, Exxon contributed “almost $16 million to organizations designed to muddy the scientific waters.” I suppose it isn’t shocking that a titan of the decaying industrial economy would seek to distort the science and profit from our collective predicament. What is shocking, however, is that such a campaign would be so successful.
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Today, three Iowa politicians signed a pledge calling for “a World War II-scale mobilization” to fight climate change. Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie, State Rep. Dan Kelley, and State Senator Rob Hogg, a leading candidate for US Senate, all Democrats, signed a document calling on the US government to reduce emissions 100 percent by 2025 by “enlisting” tens of millions of Americans to work on clean energy projects—creating full employment in the process.
It’s likely the most ambitious pledge to fight climate change put forward this election cycle, even if right now, it’s a symbolic gesture aimed at drawing attention to climate policy during the high season of presidential campaigning.
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The timing is accidental but impeccable. Just as governments are about to launch an unprecedented effort to curb global greenhouse-gas emissions, one of the biggest carbon-dioxide gushers ever known has erupted with record force. At times during the past several weeks, fires in Indonesia have released as much carbon as the entire U.S. economy, even as they have destroyed millions of acres of tropical forest, a natural carbon sink. Neighboring countries, along with economic giants such as the U.S., China and Europe, have to join forces to turn off this tap.
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Finance
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Discussions about changing the dynamic code that runs the Bitcoin blockchain should constantly be happening. Over the course of the past year, the talks of changing the block size have been an overwhelming topic of conversation. There have been some pretty stubborn people when it comes to changing the protocols code, and this is not to say that forking the code is the right step. There has been censorship and subsequently has created a rift between people who want to raise the block size and those that don’t. In time, other discussions may have to occur regarding the underlying hash functions involved with the Bitcoin protocol and to assume things will always stay the same may be naive.
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Of course, that confidence that the US government will kill the innovation is perhaps the biggest weakness of Dimon’s argument. We have no doubt that governments are already trying their damnedest to kill off innovation around cryptocurrencies, but the larger question is really whether or not that’s even really possible.
Here’s the problem for Dimon: should Bitcoin really reach the point at which Wall Street really views it as a true threat, then it’s probably too late for it to be stopped. That’s one of the (many) interesting parts about cryptocurrencies. The ability to stop them as they get more and more successful becomes significantly more difficult, to the point of reaching a near impossibility. But, it sure will lead to some amusing and ridiculous regulatory fights.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Israel “Izzy” Klein has left the Podesta Group for a small lobby shop, which is rebranding itself as Roberti Global: Irizarry-Klein-Roberti. He will serve as a managing partner at the firm, which has offices in Washington and New York. Prior to joining Podesta in 2009, Klein served as a senior aide to Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Ed Markey (Mass.).
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You hear a lot in the US media about a “clash of narratives” in the fighting between Palestinians and Israelis. But the truth is US news is shaped much more by one perspective than the other.
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Censorship
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In July this year, 16-year-old blogger was given a four-week backdated jail sentence after being found guilty of making offensive remarks against Christianity, and for circulating an obscene image.
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Well, well, well. It looks like there’s something perfect little Singapore is not excelling in: Freedom on the net.
We may be a powerhouse in a lot of areas — trade, commerce, economy, health, education and anti-corruption — but when it comes to freedom on the Internet, our results are pretty dismal. This was revealed in the report ‘Freedom on the Net 2015’, an annual study by the group Freedom House, an independent watchdog organisation dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world.
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The level of Internet freedom in Singapore declined this year, according to an annual report by US-based NGO Freedom House.
Singapore scored 41 on a scale of 0-100, with 0 indicating the most free and 100 indicating the least, up from 40 last year.
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Myanmar, Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Thailand and South Korea all saw declines in internet freedom over the last year, according to a report by US-based think tank Freedom House released this week.
Despite the introduction of mobile carriers Telenor and Ooredoo to the market, Myanmar saw the biggest decline in internet freedom in the region, followed by Australia, which is considered to have the freest internet in Asia Pacific (New Zealand was not measured).
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Facebook has brought out the ban-hammer on its competitors in the past. Most notably, the social media giant banned advertisements from users for links to Google+, when that was still a thing. That said, the most recent example of Facebook banning what can be seen as a competitive product has gone even further, preventing users from linking to Tsu.co in status updates or on its messaging service.
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Privacy
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But, in response to Vaz, May apparently insisted that there was nothing at all in her records that anyone might find surprising — leading some to question whether this was May agreeing to release her phone and internet records. Apparently Chris Gilmour decided to find out for sure, and has filed a Freedom of Information request in the UK for a bunch of May’s records (found via Ryan Gallagher).
Dear Home Office,
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I hereby request the following information from and regarding the Rt Hon Theresa May MP (Con), Secretary of State for the Home Department (the “Home Secretary”):
1) The date, time, and recipient of every email sent by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
2) The date, time, and sender of every email received by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
3) The date, time, and recipient of every internet telephony call (e.g. “Skype” call) made by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
4) The date, time, and sender of every internet telephony call (e.g. “Skype” call) received by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
5) The date, time, and domain address of every website visited by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
Yours faithfully,
Chris Gilmour
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In the past few days there have been a flurry of stories about the Russian plane that crashed in the Sinai peninsula, which investigators reportedly think may have been caused by a bomb. Notably, anonymous US officials have been leaking to journalists that they believe ISIS is involved, and it’s actually a perfect illustration of the rank hypocrisy of the US government’s position on the Edward Snowden disclosures.
Why do US officials allegedly have a “feeling” that ISIS was involved? According to multiple reports, US intelligence agencies have been intercepting ISIS communications discussing “something big” in the region last week.
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In an interview with Swedish media, whistleblower Edward Snowden opened up about CIA torture, ISIS, and mass surveillance. Two-and-a-half years after revealing the NSA’s mass surveillance tactics, he says he’s “very comfortable” with his choices.
The interview, conducted by journalists Lena Sundström and Lotta Härdelin for Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper, took place at a Moscow hotel. Just as you might expect at the beginning of an interview, the two reporters began by asking Snowden how he’s doing.
“It’s hard for me to talk about what it’s like, because anything I say is going to be used by US critics. If I say good things about Russia, you know, like ‘it’s not hell,’ then they’ll be like ‘he fell in love with the Kremlin’ or something like that. If I say something terrible, then it’s the same thing. Then they’ll go ‘oh, he hates it in Russia, you know he’s miserable,’” Snowden told the journalists.
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The Nameless Coalition letter was signed by over 80 individuals and organizations. The signatories, which include US-based groups like the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the ACLU as well as digital rights and human rights groups from Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia such as the Internet Democracy Project, India, serve different populations and work on different issues. But we all agree on one thing: Facebook should get rid of its names policy altogether.
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In this post, I want to focus on a narrow slice of Charlie Savage’s much-anticipated book Power Wars (published today…go ahead, order it now!), one that might not generate as much attention as the material covering more recent national security law episodes. In particular, I want to highlight the book’s discussion of an area of NSA surveillance activity sometimes labeled “transit authority.” It is a very useful case study of the way in which legal and policy questions may be impacted by technological change (and also a handy illustration of why it is significant that the private sector owns telecommunications infrastructure in the United States).
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Antivirus and security firms that serve enterprise and government customers on occasion disclose their source code to acquire lucrative contracts.
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In Britain, allegedly, no one cares that the state is collecting vast data on all of us. In the US things are clearly very different.
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As Cold War tensions increased throughout the 1970s, the Soviets pulled out all the stops when it came to digging up information from US diplomats. This NSA memo from 2012 explains how several IBM Selectric typewriters used in the Moscow and Leningrad offices were successfully bugged with electromechanical devices that could possibly have been the world’s first keyloggers.
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Leading up to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States, media buzzed with talk of an unprecedented cybersecurity agreement on par with previous governance around the creation and handling of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
But what was built up to be the first arms control accord for cyberspace actually turned out to be quite anticlimactic.
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Like millions of Americans, this past week I was sitting on my couch, drinking a cold beer, watching Game 1 of the World Series – professional baseball’s hallowed championship. Suddenly the satellite feed went out, the screen went dark. Naturally, as FOX Sports scrambled to get their live feed fixed, many of my fellow Americans took to twitter to speculate as to what had caused the outage. I was, sadly, unsurprised to see that the most common joke people were making was that China must have hacked the World Series.
On the one hand, it is understandable given the barrage of propaganda about Chinese hackers as a threat to corporate and national security; seemingly every week there is a new news item highlighting the great red cyber-menace. On the other hand, it is a perfect illustration of the hypocrisy and ignorant arrogance of Americans who, despite being citizens of unquestionably the most aggressive nation when it comes to both cyber espionage and surveillance, see fit to cast China as the real villain. It is a testament to the power of both propaganda and imperial triumphalism that a proposition so disconnected from reality, and bordering on Orwellian Doublethink, is not only accepted, but is ipso facto true.
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The TransPacific Partnership trade agreement has been released, and it goes way beyond resolving a few trade and tariff disputes. US and other trade negotiators leaped into a host of policy and legal matters, including the fight over when governments can demand access to encryption keys.
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Edward Snowden isn’t the only government leaker gunning to reform the nation’s surveillance laws: The former NSA contractor is credited with getting the USA Freedom Act passed earlier this year, but WikiLeaks source Pvt. Chelsea Manning now has a proposal of her own, which she revealed on Tuesday.
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Security seemed foolproof at the windowless vault in TRW corporation’s compound in Redondo, California. Understandably so – it was a core component of the Rhyolite eavesdropping satellite system that TRW built and operated for the Central Intelligence Agency in the mid-1970s. One of the vault’s key functions was to handle communications from the Rhyolite satellite ground station TRW operated under CIA guidance at Pine Gap near Alice Springs. But Redondo’s security measures did not stop Christopher Boyce, a young, dope-smoking, high school dropout, from stealing large quantities of classified information from the vault in 1975 and 1976, and selling it to the Soviet Union.
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FBI General Counsel James Baker today spoke about how encryption is making it increasingly difficult for law enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance. While the FBI has previously argued in favor of backdoors that let authorities defeat encryption, Baker said the issue must ultimately be decided by the American people.
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An executive order may allow the collection of American electronic communications that routinely cross international borders, a panel of experts appeared to agree Friday. But what exactly is being done under Executive Order 12333? The experts wouldn’t say.
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When it comes to snooping and surveillance, Glenn Greenwald is one of the most vocal advocates of the dangers of such services. In fact up until 2014, the anti-NSA crusader wrote a column for the Guardian on the ‘vital issues of civil rights, freedom of information and justice’.
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Just as the United States is taking a first step toward placating European privacy concerns about U.S. surveillance, several European countries are passing laws dramatically expanding their own spy programs.
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GCHQ and the other five eyes agencies have a large array of tools, as disclosed through the Snowden and other leaks. They also have internally developed tools, with funny names like SWAMP DONKEY and ANGRY PIRATE. We don’t know exactly what GCHQ can and can’t do. But every time there’s a leak, the details are often both impressive and scary from a hacker’s perspective.
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Two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the vast reach of U.S. and U.K. surveillance, the U.S. Congress rolled back the most manifestly unconstitutional element: the bulk collection of domestic phone data.
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In honour of Bonfire Night, The Huffington Post UK has imagined two possible outcomes if it came down to an epic battle between Guy Fawkes and Theresa May.
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Despite all this, Dropbox has been heavily criticised for its attitude to privacy. The company has Condeleezza Rice on its board of directors, regarded as one of the architects of the NSA PRISM snooping programme, leading whistleblower Edward Snowden to describe it as “hostile to privacy”.
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Timothy Libert, a researcher with the University of Pennsylvania, has published a study that provides an analysis of the privacy compromises on one million popular websites. In his findings, the study adds that almost nine in ten websites leak user information to third-parties and claims that the “users are usually unaware of.” Further, the study suggested that over six websites in ten spawn third-party cookies and over eight in ten load Javascript code from an external party onto a user’s system.
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Exasperated by the widening chasm between security theatre and reality, they wondered if there was another way to resist the industrial spying/marketing/data-siphoning complex, one that didn’t require major policy or technology overhauls. The resulting book bills itself as “a user’s guide for privacy and protest”, and as an encyclopedia of the various ways people have covered their tracks, it’s both intriguing and instructive. But if you were looking for something “for dummies”, it falls somewhat short as many of its best exemplars are has-beens or never-weres.
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On October 6, 2015, the European Court of Justice invalidated “Safe Harbor”, a pact which for nearly fifteen years allowed United States companies to transfer electronic data from European companies and satisfy accompanying European privacy standards by self-certifying that the American companies do, in fact, offer adequate privacy protections. European Union prohibits data from being transferred and processed to parts of the world that do not provide “adequate” privacy protections.
Legal challenges to Safe Harbor came after Edward Snowden leaked details about the National Security Agency’s (“NSA”) surveillance program known as the Prism, which allegedly resulted in NSA accessing, inter alia, Facebook data.
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The European Commission (EC) has effectively told the United States the ball is in their court regarding the future progress of the Safe Harbour data agreement.
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The 1995 EU Data Protection Directive sets out rules for transferring personal data from the EU to non-EU countries. Under these rules, the Commission may decide that a non-EU country ensures an “adequate level of protection”. These decisions are commonly referred to as “adequacy decisions”.
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Just a “handful” of senior cabinet ministers were aware the security services had powers to collect the phone records of British citizens in bulk, Nick Clegg has claimed.
Earlier, the Home Secretary Theresa May admitted that United Kingdom spy agencies MI5, MI6 and GCHQ secretly collected communications data for decades to protect “national security”.
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Home Secretary Theresa May has revealed the existence of an MI5 programme to collect vast amounts of data about UK phone calls – how and why was it kept secret?
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Journalists, not usually known for their computing skills, may be unsure how to go about familiarising themselves with the various techniques for encrypting their communications and data. This section, therefore, hopes to introduce a number of tools and concepts, together with resources for continued learning; hopefully, it can provide the basis for journalists to begin the journey.
All the tools detailed below, unless stated otherwise, are open-source and freely available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Given the high chance that Windows and Mac OS X are compromised, it is recommended to use Linux in situations where security is critical.
Naturally, as with all software, bugs and security problems are constantly being found (and hopefully fixed); it goes without saying that the latest (stable) version of all the following tools should always be used, and security warnings on the developers’ websites checked regularly.
For critical applications, one should already be familiar with the tools in question to avoid potential errors that could compromise security. Most of the tools described below provide comprehensive guides that should be studied carefully.
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In addition to encrypting communications, journalists will often need to encrypt documents they are working on, such as articles in progress or documents passed to them in confidence. Commonly used compression tools often provide encryption support; though commercial tools are potentially compromised and should not be trusted.
A reliable open source compression tool is 7zip, which supports the AES-256 encryption standard. As noted previously, the strength of the encryption will be compromised by a trivial password. The full set of US diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks was distributed as a 7zip-encrypted file; it was decrypted only after Guardian journalist David Leigh published the password in a book by mistake.
Another popular tool is Truecrypt (not strictly open-source, though the source code is available), which offers a wider range of cryptographic functions, such as encrypting entire file systems.
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If you were German, on the other hand, I’d adjust my expectations. There, I learned this week, it’s quite common for a suggested Skype video chat to founder on the discovery that your friend blocked up the little eye on their laptop long ago. Once it emerged, via Edward Snowden, that the snoopers of the National Security Agency had access to supposedly encrypted Skype calls, Germans reached for the duct tape. They wanted Big Brother to wear a blindfold.
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Do the British public, especially the younger generation, care about privacy? Are they apathetic, or is it that they just regard security in at time of Islamist threats as the overriding concern?
Polls suggest the UK, in contrast with countries such as the US or Germany, tends to be largely apathetic about privacy.
And yet the whistleblower Edward Snowden, sitting in exile in Russia, has attracted 1.6 million followers on Twitter, many of them from the UK. Scepticism about the pervasiveness of government surveillance has seeped into public conscious and culture, with people routinely joking about GCHQ or other agencies listening in on iPhones.
So privacy-v-secrecy has become a staple of in spy thrillers, from Homeland to Spectre. But there are big some big reasons to be concerned about the issue in real life.
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The former National Security Agency analyst said it had taken 30 years for Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam war, to shift from being described regularly as a traitor.
But not once in the debate had Snowden been referred to as a traitor.
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“When eventually I wanted to do something about it — I knew these programs were wrong and I was thinking about coming forward — I wanted to make sure I wasn’t a crazy person,” he said, noting he revealed his reservations to colleagues.
“Everybody has their shop talks,” Snowden added. “It’s not like anybody at the NSA is a villain. No one’s sitting there thinking ‘how can I destroy democracy?’
“They’re good people doing bad things for what they believe is a good reason. They think the end justifies the means.”
Snowden said the policies of the U.S. government often end up creating unintentional harm.
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In 2013, the world learned that the NSA and its UK equivalent, GCHQ, routinely spied on the German government. Amid the outrage, artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter thought: Well, if they’re listening … let’s talk to them.
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Former NSA contract worker and whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke about online surveillance and cybersecurity via Google Hangout to students and the public at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville on Tuesday.
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The talk runs from 6:30 pm to 8pm – doors open at 6pm – with a 45 minute keynote address by Snowden about the changing nature of surveillance and current state of espionage, followed by a 35 minute question period moderated by Dr. David Lyon of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s.
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Neurosurgeon, author, and new GOP frontrunner Dr. Ben Carson weighed in this week about the future of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
When ThinkProgress asked Carson during a book signing on Tuesday outside of Tampa whether he would be open to pardoning Snowden, he replied: “It would set a very bad precedent. There are appropriate ways to reveal things, and that was an inappropriate way, because it jeopardized our country.”
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WHEN former US spook Edward Snowden leaked masses of classified National Security Agency (NSA) data two years ago, he did something heroic.
This is not because leaking classified intelligence is inherently virtuous or even because of the huge personal sacrifices Snowden made — giving up his well-paid job and his relationship and being forced to live in exile.
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The U.S. National Security Agency, seeking to rebut accusations that it hoards information about vulnerabilities in computer software, thereby leaving U.S. companies open to cyber attacks, said last week that it tells U.S. technology firms about the most serious flaws it finds more than 90 percent of the time.
The re-assurances may be misleading, because the NSA often uses the vulnerabilities to make its own cyber-attacks first, according to current and former U.S. government officials. Only then does NSA disclose them to technology vendors so that they can fix the problems and ship updated programs to customers, the officials said.
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Britain is working to push through new laws that will effectively ban the use of strong encryption in the country, forcing companies to provide unscrambled content if served with a court warrant.
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Given the widespread abuse of RIPA by the police, and coppers then covering it up, this is a concerning attack on the most fundamental basics of press freedom. They’ll be entering newsrooms to smash up hard drives next…
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While the world was distracted by the UK Pry Minister’s ban-working-encryption, log-everything-online Investigatory Powers Bill, the civil service was urging government and enterprises to adopt better cryptography for voice calls.
CESG, “the information security arm of GCHQ, and the national technical authority for information assurance”, dropped new guidance (called “Secure voice at OFFICIAL”) about protecting voice calls, noting that the PSTN has been considered insecure (“suitable for UNCLASSIFIED calls only”) for some years.
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Today, the UK government will announce details of the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, a piece of legislation that will propose sweeping surveillance powers for law enforcement. These are expected to include the retention of citizens’ internet browsing history, and restrictions on encryption.
The Telegraph reports the legislation will ban companies such as Apple from offering customers robust end-to-end encryption which results in communications not being accessible to law enforcement even when they have a warrant. Other reports suggest the idea of a ban will be walked back.
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“You can’t just uninvent encryption, so if this government stops innocent people using unbreakable encryption via legitimate businesses, the only people left using it will be the criminals.”
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The Investigatory Powers Bill could leave UK citizens at risk of data theft even though end-to-end encryption has not been banned.
Home Secretary Theresa May presented the proposed legislation, known colloquially as the Snooper’s Charter, to Parliament today, and if passed, it would require ISPs to store Internet Connection Records (ICRs – which domains people visit) for up to 12 months.
This includes details of which services a device has connected through, such as a website or instant messaging (IM) platform.
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Shami Chakrabarti, the Liberty director, has just been on BBC News making the same point David David Davis has been making. (See 4.20pm.) She said:
I’m hugely disappointed with this bill … I have to tell you there is no judicial authorisation for interception in this bill. At most, there is a very, very limited role for judges in a rubber-stamping exercise. It is not judicial sign-off, it is not acceptable in a modern democracy …
They have spun it as a double lock, but the second person, the judge, does not actually have a key.
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On Wednesday, the Investigatory Powers Bill was published in draft form, but it was in the wake of 9/11 that the UK government started its mass surveillance programs, spying on the online activities of British citizens. Under the guise of the 1984 Telecommunications Act, this surveillance was moved up a gear in 2005. Former deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg says that very few politicians knew about it.
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Hacking powers, known officially as computer network exploitation, can involve anything from remotely hacking into servers, to localised systems like keyboard loggers, that record every key pressed.
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Perhaps the most profound change is that it requires all internet service providers (ISP) to retain a log of all customers’ internet usage for one year. So under the new rules, everything you do online will be accessible by the security services or the police should they want to take a look.
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While in the US modest attempts have been made to curb the NSA’s powers in the wake of the Edward Snowden surveillance revelations, the UK is going the other way.
The British government on Wednesday published draft legislation on surveillance, its response to the documents disclosed by Snowden to the Guardian two and a half years ago revealing the scale of snooping by the NSA and its British sister agency, GCHQ.
The UK’s draft bill not only consolidates in law bulk data collection but it adds even more intrusive powers. Privacy, according to polls, is less of a concern for the British than security.
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A new, more limited system for monitoring Americans’ phone calls for signs of terrorist intent is so slow and cumbersome that the U.S. National Security Agency will likely never use it, a senior Senate Republican said.
Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opposed the new system when it was mandated earlier this year. He said this week he was not concerned by how the NSA will transition to it because it will probably not be used.
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A new, more limited system for monitoring Americans’ phone calls for signs of terrorist intent is so slow and cumbersome that the U.S. National Security Agency will likely never use it, a senior Senate Republican said.
Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opposed the new system when it was mandated earlier this year. He said this week he was not concerned by how the NSA will transition to it because it will probably not be used.
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A group of engineers — myself among them — decided to create and fund open source hardware engine designs capable of strong and reliable encryption and decryption for email, plus public-private key encryption for digital signatures, DNSSEC, files and other uses.
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For the Bush-Cheney administration, the introduction of warrantless wiretapping outside the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) brought to fruition the aspirations that Vice President Dick Cheney had harbored from his time in the Ford administration. Savage explains that Cheney “wanted to refight the battles of the 1970s, reducing the power of Congress and the courts and restoring the power of the presidency” (page 43). The architects of the Bush-Cheney era shared a common goal — to leave the Presidency stronger than when they found it. The point was not whether the President already had the authority. To the contrary, the administration “was in the business of creating executive-power precedents” (page 46).
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Disclosing a ruling showing how the government proposed using data that the National Security Agency tapped from the “Internet’s backbone” could “reasonably be expected to cause grave damage to national security,” a federal judge ruled.
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In October, the European Union’s highest court struck down the “Safe Harbor” Privacy Principles, a provision that allowed for the sharing of European personal data between the EU and U.S. The verdict is meant to preserve EU citizens’ inherent right to privacy given the reality of U.S. national security laws, specifically The Patriot Act, which provide the NSA nearly unilateral access to data managed by U.S. companies.
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James Bridle’s new essay (adapted from a speech at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes event in Toronto last month) draws a connection between the terror of life in the nuclear shadow and the days we live in now, when we know that huge privacy disasters are looming, but are seemingly powerless to stop the proliferation of surveillance.
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With just over a year left in office, President Obama is running out of time to fulfill his longstanding promise to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. The imprisonment of foreigners at Guantánamo is one of several Bush-era policies that continue under Obama’s presidency. While Obama has shut down the CIA’s secret prisons and banned the harshest of Bush’s torture methods, many others—the drone war, presidential secrecy, jailing whistleblowers and mass surveillance—either continue or have even grown. The story of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism legacy is told in the new book, “Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Charlie Savage.
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The Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law heard testimony on the security risks posed by the multibillion-dollar data-broker industry that mines, analyzes and sells consumer information.
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The European Parliament voted on October 29 to drop all criminal charges against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and offer him asylum and protection from rendition from third parties, The Independent said that day.
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By urging EU members to stop the persecution of Edward Snowden, the European Parliament showed its independence from the United States, the chairman of the independent non-profit organization Workshop of Eurasian Ideas told Radio Sputnik.
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The EU Parliament has adopted a non-binding resolution calling on member states to give Edward Snowden asylum.
And Alternativet and Enhedslisten have drafted a resolution encouraging a vote to give Snowden residence.
PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen begs to differ.
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Reading news online, you could be forgiven for thinking that trolling is a synonym for “doing something on the internet.” Gamergaters are “trolling” women. Edward Snowden is “trolling” the NSA. President Obama is “trolling” Republicans — with a “hilarious ‘grumpy cat’ meme,” no less. You don’t even need to be online to troll: The Walking Dead is, apparently, “trolling” its audience.
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Anyone who values their privacy will be aware of Tor, the distributed “onion routing” network that makes it possible to avoid surveillance (though it is thought that even the sophistication of the Tor system may not be enough to avoid NSA scrutiny if they really want to get the login for your Ashley Madison account).
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The web most of us use isn’t one built for privacy — the NSA aside, advertising is what makes the World Wide Web go ’round, and advertising often means marketers getting to know you better than you’d like. While most of us probably aren’t getting actively snooped on, maintaining high standards for privacy is good practice in general, and there are many activists worldwide who have good reason to think they’re being spied on. That’s why Tor exists — a system of web browsing that bounces server requests along several nodes to obscure the source of the request (that’s you). Until now, Tor has been used mostly for secure web browsing, but that technology has finally been extended to instant messaging, and it’s going to work for some services not exactly known for their sterling privacy records.
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The Federal Communications Commission said Friday that it can’t force Internet companies like Google, Facebook and ad providers from tracking users online. The commission had been petitioned by the privacy advocacy group Consumer Watchdog to make the “Do Not Track” setting in many browsers illegal to ignore.
“Do Not Track” was created by researchers as a standard signal browsers can send along with other data when visiting a website. When detected, it is supposed to limit the amount of data advertisers and other online tracking companies collect. That reduced collection, however, must be voluntary: The setting merely indicates a preference, it doesn’t obscure the user’s data the way encryption does.
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The Going Dark encryption debate surfaced again on Wednesday at a small security conference here, and as in previous iterations before larger technical audiences and even Congress, the issue continues to spin on a hamster wheel going nowhere.
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Civil Rights
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A veteran FBI agent who was caught on camera shoving a 15-year-old boy to the ground and threatening the teen with his gun has been found guilty of assault.
Gerald John Rogero, 45, was off-duty last December when he meddled into a Maryland family’s dispute over a child custody drop-off.
The agent, who knew one of the family members involved, was rebuking a man for being late to drop off his child when a teenager confronted him for intruding.
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“[S]ee what you can do without drawing attention. This involves family so I don’t want anyone to know.”
That’s what a North Carolina local judge told an FBI official in seeking the agent’s cooperation to get the text messages of two different phone numbers, according to the federal indictment (PDF) lodged against Wayne County Superior Court Judge Arnold Ogden Jones.
How much is that illegal, warrantless surveillance worth?
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About three weeks ago, a team of teenage hackers managed to hack into the personal AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan. In the process, they were not only able to access Brennan’s personal correspondence, but also sensitive security information regarding top-secret Intelligence matters.
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Hackers who broke into the personal email account of CIA Director John Brennan have struck again.
This time the group, which goes by the name Crackas With Attitude, says it gained access to an even more important target—a portal for law enforcement that grants access to arrest records and other sensitive data, including what appears to be a tool for sharing information about active shooters and terrorist events, and a system for real-time chats between law enforcement agents.
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A cybersecurity expert once told me something I’ll never forget: “don’t underestimate what bored teenagers can do.”
A group teenagers that call themselves “Crackas With Attitude” reminded me of those words when they were able to hack into the personal AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan. The teenagers, who described themselves as “stoners,” even had the guts to give multiple media interviews, boasting about their feats.
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A human rights group has criticised the “smokescreen” surrounding the ongoing probe into CIA rendition flights landing at Scottish airports.
Amnesty International’s Naomi McAuliffe said “excessive secrecy” was “fuelling the national security threat”.
Police Scotland is investigating claims airports were used as stop-offs for planes transferring suspected terrorists to secret jails overseas.
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A sneak peek of a soon-to-be-released documentary reveals mixed sentiments among former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency on the United States’ use of torture.
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I joined the CIA in January 1990.
The CIA was vastly different back then from the agency that emerged in the days after the 9/11 attacks. And it was a far cry from the flawed and confused organization it is today.
One reason for those flaws — and for the convulsions the agency has experienced over the past decade and a half — is its utter lack of ethics in intelligence operations.
It’s no secret that the CIA has gone through periods where violating U.S. law and basic ethics were standard operating procedure. During the Cold War, the agency assassinated foreign leaders, toppled governments, spied on American citizens, and conducted operations with no legal authority to do so. That’s an historical fact.
I liked to think that things had changed by the time I worked there. CIA officers, I believed, were taught about legal limits to their operations — they learned what was and wasn’t permitted by law.
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More than two dozen civic groups groups are asking why government agencies haven’t found somebody to respond to possible human rights violations within the agencies’ areas of responsibility — as required by a 1998 executive order.
The groups sent letters to six agencies on Wednesday — the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — echoing their past request for a point of contact who can respond to violations of international human rights treaties.
The authors of the letter, including government accountability, civil rights, and consumer advocate organizations, pointed to the recent decision by the EU Court of Justice — invalidating a free-flowing data-sharing pact between the U.S. and Europe out of privacy concerns — as a reason for urgency in filling the role.
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The US intelligence community is in a very poor position to be trusted with protecting civil liberties while engaging in intelligence work. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you’re a skilled intelligence professional, everything looks like a vital source for collection.
Members of the intelligence community are, it’s true, under immense stress to prevent a devastating national catastrophe. I understand a little of how that feels: while working as an analyst in Iraq, thousands of military personnel, contractors and local civilians were dependent on our ability to effectively understand the threats we were facing, and to explain them to US military commanders, the commanders of Iraqi forces and the civilian leadership of both nations.
General Keith Alexander, the former director of the National Security, frequently pushed very hard to “collect it all”; during my time as an intelligence analyst, I completely agreed with his mantra. So it’s not surprising that today’s intelligence community – as well as law enforcement at all levels of government – aggressively pursue an increasingly large and sophisticated wish list of intelligence tools regardless of whether appropriate oversight mechanisms are in place.
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The intelligence community’s top lawyer said Thursday that giving contractors whistleblower protection is “complicated.”
Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of national intelligence, said a contractor “isn’t working for the government,” and as a result, under current law: “The government doesn’t straight out have the authority to say whether that person can be fired; that’s up to the contractor.”
The lack of whistleblower protection for intelligence community contractors has become a central issue in the debate over whether Edward Snowden, then working at the National Security Agency as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, did the right thing in taking his concerns about surveillance programs — and a trove of documents — to journalists. Public figures including Hillary Clinton have incorrectly asserted that Snowden would have been protected from reprisal had he gone through proper channels.
Litt was correct in saying that whistleblowers who work as contractors for intelligence agencies can be fired, silenced, or otherwise retaliated against for blowing the whistle with almost no legal protections.
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Earlier this year, a hacking group broke into the personal email account of CIA director John Brenner and published a host of sensitive attachments that it got its hands on (yes, Brenner should not have been using his AOL email address for CIA business). Now, Wired reports the group has hit a much more sensitive and presumably secure target: a law enforcement portal that contains arrest records as well as tools for sharing info around terrorist events and active shooters. There’s even a real-time chat system built in for the FBI to communicate with other law enforcement groups around the US.
The group has since published a portion the data it collected to Pastebin and Cryptobin; apparently it released government, military, and police names, emails, and phone numbers. But the portal the hackers accessed held much more info. All told, they got their hands on a dozen different law enforcement tools, and Wired verified that a screenshot of the Joint Automated Booking System (JABS) provided by the hackers was legitimate. The JABS vulnerability is noteworthy because it means the hackers can view arrest records as they’re entered into the database — regardless of whether or not the arrests were under court seal. Typically, those arrests might not be made public for long periods of time as a way of keeping big investigations secret.
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New Zealand’s spy watchdog has launched an inquiry into her country’s links to the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.
Cheryl Gwyn, the inspector general for intelligence and security, said the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report released in December 2014 named a number of countries that were involved in the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees — “but the names of those countries have been redacted.”
That wasn’t OK with her.
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The government has rubbished calls for changes to the oversight of the country’s spy agencies as the Inspector General investigates any links between them and the CIA’s torture programmes.
A report revealed the SIS failed to provide the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Cheryl Gwyn with copies of visual surveillance warrants as required by law.
Instead, the Inspector General discovered them during a warrant review process.
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Sabrina De Sousa is one of nearly two-dozen CIA officers who was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced by Italian courts in absentia in 2009 for the role she allegedly played in the rendition of a radical cleric named Abu Omar. It was the first and only criminal prosecution that has ever taken place related to the CIA’s rendition program, which involved more than 100 suspected terrorists and the assistance of dozens of European countries.
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Last week, it was written here that federal bureaucrats issued a burdensome judge-less subpoena to McDonald’s after the company took a position on the minimum wage contrary to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)’s. McDonald’s had already spent a million dollars to produce documents complying with a judge-less subpoena from the SEIU’s “partner” in government, the National Labor Relations Board, and the NLRB still wanted the emails of McDonald’s employees.
[...]
The 4th Amendment’s protections of the security of papers and effects were designed to prevent the political abuses now found in the use of administrative subpoenas. Administrative subpoenas, which are issued without approval by judges, are impossible to reconcile with the 4th Amendment. They are a bigger threat to liberty than the NSA’s warrantless collection of phone call metadata precisely because they are used to intimidate and silence political opponents.
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The same decades that saw the growth of national-security secrecy saw the rise of the public’s “right to know.”
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An actress from Iran has gone on the run after igniting a backlash by posting photos of herself on social media showing her not wearing a hijab, the traditional Muslim head cover. Sadaf Taherian began posting the controversial photos on Facebook and Instagram over the last two weeks and the response from Iranians was as swift as it was extreme. In an interview with Masih Alinejad, a journalist who runs a Facebook page called “My Stealthy Freedom,” which features photos and videos of Iranian women walking in public with their heads uncovered, Taherian reportedly said she was initially “nervous” about the reaction the images might trigger. Indeed, many Iranians lashed out at Taherian with insults and called her “immoral.”
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No one reads those interminable terms of service agreements on Instagram, WhatsApp and their like. But they could make the difference between life and death, according to Rebecca MacKinnon.
“It may be about whether you get tortured for what you wrote on Facebook or not, or whether you get tried based on some of the stuff you had in your text messages or something you uploaded. They’re worth a lot to human beings,” said MacKinnon, the leader of a new project that hopes to show people just what they are signing away when they blindly click “agree”.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The assertions by Australia and USTR that the ISDS provisions do not apply to intellectual property were efforts to spin and exaggerate the importance of several limited exceptions to the ISDS, most of which do not actually remove key decisions and policy from ISDS arbitration.
There is, as in earlier drafts, a limited exception for compulsory licenses or the “issuance, revocation, limitation or creation” of intellectual property rights, but only ” to the extent that the issuance, revocation, limitation or creation is consistent with Chapter 18 (Intellectual Property) and the TRIPS Agreement.” This means private investors will have the right to use the ISDS mechanism to interpret the IP chapter of the TPP and also the TRIPS agreement itself.
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The deal is long and complex: it stretches to 2,000 pages and is written in largely technical and legal language, making quick analysis difficult.
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President Barack Obama announced on Thursday that he intends to agree to the massively controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in a letter to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate.
The letter, released just hours after the full text of the agreement became public after years of secret negotiations, is basically a formality. Still, it shows that Obama is serious about signing the TPP, and highlights the fight ahead.
Even if Obama is gung-ho on the deal, prominent fellow Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have strongly opposed the TPP as it currently stands. There’s no guarantee that Congress will approve of the agreement.
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Copyrights
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The RIAA is demanding a preliminary injunction to bring the downed Aurous music service to its knees. While Aurous is fighting back, the RIAA’s lawyers are giving their adversaries a legal beat down, using developer Andrew Sampson’s words against him and giving his legal team a mountain to climb. But with all that said, peace is now on the horizon.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.06.15
Posted in News Roundup at 1:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Docker 1.9 is out this week, bringing new storage, scalability and clustering features to the open source container platform.
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Kernel Space
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This reactive approach is fine for a world where it’s possible to push out software updates without having to perform extensive testing first, a world where the only people hunting for interesting kernel vulnerabilities are nice people. This isn’t that world, and this approach isn’t fine.
Just as features like SELinux allow us to reduce the harm that can occur if a new userspace vulnerability is found, we can add features to the kernel that make it more difficult (or impossible) for attackers to turn a kernel bug into an exploitable vulnerability. The number of people using Linux systems is increasing every day, and many of these users depend on the security of these systems in critical ways. It’s vital that we do what we can to avoid their trust being misplaced.
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Intel’s Darren Hart has sent in the x86 platform driver updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window.
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Between the companies that recognize the critical nature of this work, and with Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative happy to start funding specific work in this area, I think we can really make a dent.
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Graphics Stack
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Peter Hutterer is back to working on tablet protocol and support for Wayland/Weston. In this context, it’s for drawing tablets like the popular Wacom hardware.
There’s been some work done before on a tablet protocol while published today was a largely redone version of this protocol. The protocol is largely new, Peter noted, “Too many changes from the last version (a year ago or so), so I won’t detail them, best to look at it with fresh eyes.”
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Applications
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The Calibre application, a complete solution to edit, view, and convert eBook files, has been upgraded once more, and it comes with a new and important tool for editors, named “Smart Comment,” and a fix for Amazon metadata.
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Some may describe it as their passion, while some may consider it as their stress reliever, some may consider it as a part of their daily life but in every form listening to music has become an undetachable part of our lives. Music plays different roles in our lives.
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Proprietary
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The keyboard features in Linux Virtual Desktop 1.0 had limited support for non-English input.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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November will be a very crowded month, and a lot of high-profile games are scheduled to launch, but it looks like the community forgot one of the biggest launches of all, the Steam Machines from Valve.
With all the excitement about November, the community forgot about the upcoming launch of the Steam Machines, but Valve is also to blame. The company hasn’t said anything in a long while, and it doesn’t seem to have any kind of marketing campaign in place.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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The MATE desktop environment has been updated to version 1.12, and the new iteration brings quite a few improvements, the most notable being the support for GTK 3.18.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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One of the bigger things that is in the works in Plasma’s Wayland support is screen management. In most cases, that is reasonably easy, there’s one screen and it has a certain resolution and refresh rate set. For mobile devices, this is almost always good enough. Only once we starting thinking about convergence and using the same codebase on different devices, we need to be able to configure the screens used for rendering. Especially on desktops and laptops, where we often find multi-monitor setups or connected projectors is where the user should be able to decide a bunch of things, relative position of the screens, resolution (“mode”) for each, etc.. Another thing that we haven’t touched yet is scaling of the rendering per display, which becomes increasingly important with a wider range of displays connected, just imagine a 4K laptop running north of 300 pixels per inch (PPI) connected to a projector which throws 1024*768 pixels on a wall sized 4x3m.
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A Minuet is a musical form (occasionally with an accompanying social dance for two people) originated in the 17th-century France, initially introduced to opera but later also to suites such some of those from Johann Sebastian Bach. Although composing a minuet for KDE wouldn’t be bad at all :), my musical skills don’t make me feel like doing so by no means and, therefore, this post is gonna be about – you know – software and KDE! But software for music 
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Hello all,
Tarballs are due on 2015-11-09 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.18.2
stable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which
were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule
so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will
be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that
will probably be too late to get in 3.18.2. If you are not able to
make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late,
please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll
the tarball for you!
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CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is a Linux distribution specifically designed for digital forensics. It is based on Ubuntu.
The latest edition is CAINE 7, code-named DeepSpace. It is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and, therefore, UEFI and Secure Boot ready.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Martin Jambor at SUSE is looking to begin mainlining the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) support within the GCC compiler.
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Last year SUSE announced KGraft as a new form of live Linux kernel patching to reduce downtime by avoiding reboots when applying kernel security updates, etc. The initial combined infrastructure work of kGraft and Red Hat’s Kpatch was merged in Linux 4.0. Here’s how SUSE is showing off their live kernel patching method.
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Red Hat Family
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The first-ever systemd conference began today in Berlin and runs through Saturday.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT): 17 analysts have set the short term price target of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) at $85.06. The standard deviation of short term price target has been estimated at $5.09, implying that the actual price may fluctuate by this value. The higher and the lower price estimates are $ 92 and $72 respectively.
Research firm Zacks has rated Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) and has ranked it at 2, indicating that for the short term the shares are a buy. 18 Wall Street analysts have given the company an average rating of 1.44. The shares have received a hold rating based on the suggestion from 3 analysts in latest recommendations. Strong buy was given by 13 Wall Street Analysts. The shares had a buy rating from 2 analysts.
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Fedora
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Another major piece of engineering that I have covered that we did for Fedora Workstation 23 is the GTK3 port of LibreOffice. Those of you who follow Caolán McNamaras blog are probably aware of the details. The motivation for the port wasn’t improved look and feel integration, there was easier ways to achieve that, but to help us have LibreOffice deal well with a range of new technologies we are supporting in Fedora Workstation namely: Touch support, Wayland support and HiDPI.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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I can hardly believe that this month marks the fifth year I have been working on Bodhi Linux stuff. What started as a project to save me from having to compile EFL + E updates on six different Ubuntu computers every month has become so much more than that. I would just like to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to Bodhi Linux over the years. Without your code, forums posts, documentation, monetary donations, translations, and many other things I am sure I am forgetting – we would not still be here today. The power of the open source community continually impresses me and I am honored to be a part of it – giving back in whatever way I can.
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Mentor Graphics announced a Linux-ready IoT gateway System Design Kit (SysDK) as part of an IoT solution that offers cloud services and TrustZone security.
Mentor Graphics unveiled an end-to-end, hardware/software Internet of Things solution for wired and wireless edge device aggregation, featuring a System Design Kit (SysDK) for IoT gateways. The SysDK runs a version of Mentor Embedded Linux on a quad-core, Cortex-A9 based Freescale i.MX6 SoC, along with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC storage.
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DJI is probably best known for its iconic Phantom drones, but the company’s lineup goes far beyond those consumer-facing gadgets. The firm offers some powerful technology to developers, and its latest product may be the most impressive yet.
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Phones
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Android
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Google is reportedly taking a page out of Apple’s playbook and expressing interest in co-developing Android chips based on its own designs, according to a report today from The Information. Similar to how the iPhone carries a Ax chip designed by Apple but manufactured by companies like Samsung, Google wants to bring its own expertise and consistency to the Android ecosystem. To do that, it would need to convince a company like Qualcomm, which produces some of the top Android smartphone chips today using its own technology, to sacrifice some of its competitive edge. Google did not respond to a request for comment.
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Intex, soon after launching the Aqua Young, has now introduced the Aqua Q7 smartphone. Priced at Rs. 3,777, the smartphone is now listed on the company website and can be expected to go on sale soon.
The dual-SIM Intex Aqua Q7 runs Android 5.1 Lollipop, and features a 4.5-inch FWVGA (480×854 pixels) display with a pixel density of 320ppi. The new Intex smartphone is powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core Spreadtrum SC7731 SoC, coupled with 512MB of RAM.
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We’ve pointed out before that Android has a lot of somewhat questionable birthdays, but November 5th is arguably the birth of the platform. On this day in 2007 the Open Handset Alliance was formally announced, uniting Google, HTC, Samsung, LG, Sony, Motorola, and dozens of software companies, chip manufactures, and mobile carriers, in the cause of promoting Android. It was presented as an open-source alternative to then-dominant mobile operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, RIM’s BlackBerry, Nokia’s Symbian, and – at least at the time- the looming specter of the iPhone.
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Normally I just download the developer image tarball, verify the checksum and extract it, boot my phone to the bootloader (volume down and power buttons), install android-tools on Fedora and run “fastboot oem unlock“, then run the “flash-all.sh” script from the image tarball, followed by “fastboot oem lock” once I get back to the bootloader.
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In a bid to attract more organizations to sign up for its Android for Work service, Google is giving away a free Nexus 5X smartphone, allowing them to try out a handful of latest updates catered specifically to Google’s Marshmallow.
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Priv, which is pronounced “priv” as in privilege, represents the Google-ization of BlackBerry. You can bark out “OK, Google” to activate a voice search. You can take advantage of Google Now for predictive searches Google thinks you’ll be interested in. And in opening up Android to the BlackBerry loyalist — you’re still out there — devotees get access to the complete catalog of apps in the Google Play Store. On other recent BlackBerrys you could get apps from the BlackBerry World (which you cannot get to from this phone) or the Amazon App Store.
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Today, the Priv has to contend with the iPhone, and Apple’s own continued focus on security and privacy. That’s one of many reasons the Priv isn’t going to put BlackBerry back on top again. Still, it is a really good phone for people who want a keyboard and a more secure Android experience. And can spend $700 to get it.
For the first time in years, BlackBerry has a phone that can win back the hearts and dollars of people it lost years ago—at least enough that I’ll once again spot a BlackBerry owner or two among my friends and colleagues.
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Do you think that open source projects are less prone to accumulating technical debt? Or do they suffer from the same problems?
That’s a tricky question. Any project is capable of becoming burdened with technical debt. The difference is that it’s rare for an open source project to accumulate much debt once set into the wild. It’s only when you have a population of captive developers that are tasked with adding features to a code base with no choice in their participation that you can achieve the truly abysmal levels of code quality that is out there. When a project is open source, developers simply move on when it becomes too much to deal with and the project dies.
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LinuxCon 2015 brings together some of the brightest minds in technology today. What makes Linux attractive to such talent? Duncan Johnston-Watt, founder and CEO of Cloudsoft Corp., feels that Linux is playing a key role in the community’s ability to collaborate.
Johnston-Watt stopped by theCUBE, from SiliconANGLE Media, to speak with host Jeff Frick about the role Cloudsoft is playing within the community.
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Databases
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Open source products in the enterprise are becoming increasingly common. Five or six years ago they were seen as a nice idea in theory, but unrealistic in a world that requires strict SLAs and support to make things work. But times have changed and thanks to the likes of Facebook, Google and eBay publicly praising the benefits of adopting open source technologies at scale, everybody wants a piece of them.
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Education
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Raising awareness and training users bolster the free software policy of the Basque Country (Spain). The government of the autonomous region continues to expand its use of free software, according to SALE, the Basque Country’s free software resource centre.
The SALE resource centre is advising Basque government organisations such as IVAP, the Institute of Public Administration and SPRI, the Business Development Agency. It is also helping to other organizations providing free software courses to citizens and companies, and is involved in training the users of publicly accessible Internet access points across the Basque Country – all running free software.
Over 2,300 PCs in the network of 270 public Internet access points, KZgunea, are running KZnux, based on the Ubuntu Linux distribution. KZgunea is providing training for free software to the about 100 KZgunea staff members. These centre’s are used by some 400,000 citizens per year.
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FUD/Openwashing
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360is has a new service available which provides a risk report on the open source software in use within an organisation.
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BSD
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Nicholas Marriott (nicm@) has replaced the aging version of less(1) in the OpenBSD base system with a more modern fork from illumos founder Garrett D’Amore.
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Licensing
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As we pick through the secret, 2,000-page treaty, we’re learning an awful lot of awfulness, but this one is particularly terrible.
As software becomes more tightly integrated into cars and buildings and medical devices (and everything else), many governments have enacted procurement policies requiring contractors to disclose and/or publish the sourcecode of the products they supply to public bodies. For example, if Volkswagen were to supply a fleet of diesels to the National Parks Service, the government might tell them that they have to turn over their source-code so that it can be audited for “defeat devices,” or Chrysler might have to disclose source on their jeeps before they’re sold to the Army, which could result in them being made secure against over-the-Internet attacks on steering and brakes.
[...]
The article in question could well have been written by a Microsoft lobbyist.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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One of the more effective ways to advance an agenda is to attach requirements to grant funding. The U.S. Department of Education has an interest in broadening the impact of its grants, so it announced a notice of proposed rule making (NPRM) on October 29. The proposed rule would require intellectual property created with Department of Education grant funding to be openly licensed to the public. This includes both software and instructional materials.
Under current regulations, creators of grant-funded work retain unlimited copyright and rights to royalty income. The Department of Education is granted a royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable right to publish, use, and reproduce the work. This means that the public can request copies from the Department, however practice has shown that this rarely happens.
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Standards/Consortia
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Tomorrow the Japanese TeX User Meeting 2015 will be held in Tokyo. Since I have come to Japan I have attended more or less every year this meeting, and in 2013 we could get the (international) TeX User Group Meeting to Tokyo and had a joint conference TUG 2013, which was a great success.
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Science
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I’m commiserating with a friend who recently left the technology industry to return to entertainment. “I’m not a programmer,” he begins, explaining some of the frustrations of his former workplace, before correcting himself, “—oh, engineer, in tech-bro speak. Though to me, engineers are people who build bridges and follow pretty rigid processes for a reason.”
His indictment touches a nerve. In the Silicon Valley technology scene, it’s common to use the bare term “engineer” to describe technical workers. Somehow, everybody who isn’t in sales, marketing, or design became an engineer. “We’re hiring engineers,” read startup websites, which could mean anything from Javascript programmers to roboticists.
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Atlas, in Manchester, was one of the first supercomputers; it was said that when Atlas went down, the UK’s computing capacity was reduced by half. Today supercomputers are massively parallel and run at many, many times the speed of Atlas. (The fastest in the world is currently Tianhe-2, in Guangzhou, China, running at 33 petaflops, or over a thousand million times faster than Atlas.) But some of the basics of modern computers still owe something to the decisions made by the Atlas team when they were trying to build their ‘microsecond engine’.
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Health/Nutrition
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A Welsh MP will try to change the law today to allow doctors to prescribe life-saving and low-cost drugs that are currently unavailable but which could help a range of conditions such as breast cancer and MS.
The treatments known as ‘off-patent’ would be inexpensive to the NHS because their original patent has expired and which could be used to treat new conditions. But new treatments require new licenses that drugs companies are unwilling to apply for.
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The war on drugs is simply not working, according to a new report by Christian Aid.
Where old approaches to drugs treat the issue like a “malignant tumour”, apart from the whole body, the reality today is that this tumour “has become an almost necessary part of the whole body, rendering conventional treatments ineffective. Removal could cause certain organs to fail,” according to Eric Gutierrez, a senior advisor at Christian Aid.
The reality in many countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, Mali and Tajikstan, is that the drugs trade is not a sub-sector of the economy that can be identified and retracted without huge implications for other parts of the economy and society.
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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At the end of November, delegations from nearly 200 countries will convene in Paris for what is billed as the most important climate meeting ever held. Officially known as the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the 1992 treaty that designated that phenomenon a threat to planetary health and human survival), the Paris summit will be focused on the adoption of measures that would limit global warming to less than catastrophic levels. If it fails, world temperatures in the coming decades are likely to exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 degrees Fahrenheit), the maximum amount most scientists believe the Earth can endure without experiencing irreversible climate shocks, including soaring temperatures and a substantial rise in global sea levels.
A failure to cap carbon emissions guarantees another result as well, though one far less discussed. It will, in the long run, bring on not just climate shocks, but also worldwide instability, insurrection, and warfare. In this sense, COP-21 should be considered not just a climate summit but a peace conference — perhaps the most significant peace convocation in history.
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In the opening days of the month when National Geographic magazine is scheduled to be turned over to 21st Century Fox, the magazine’s employees were told to stand by their phones to wait for calls – one by one – to come to Human Resources to learn the fate of their jobs.
A memo sent to all staff on Monday from CEO Gary Knell told the magazine’s employees to return to Washington to Geographic’s headquarters if possible to wait for an eMail on Tuesday which would give them more information about their employment status.
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The memo went out, and November 3rd 2015 came to the National Geographic office. This was the day in which Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox took over National Geographic. The management of National Geographic sent out an email telling its staff, all of its staff, all to report to their headquarters, and wait by their phones. This pulled back every person who was in the field, every photographer, every reporter, even those on vacation had to show up on this fateful day.
As these phones rang, one by one National Geographic let go the award-winning staff, and the venerable institution was no more.
The name now belongs to Rupert Murdoch, and he has plans for it. The CEO of National Geographic Society, Greg Knell, tried to claim back in September that there “there won’t be an [editorial] turn in a direction that is different form the National Geographic heritage.” Murdoch’s move today only served to prove Knell’s words hollow, with hundreds of talented people now served their pink slips. And with the recognition that Murdoch’s other enterprises do not reflect the standards held by National Geographic, and with Murdoch’s history of changing the editorial direction of purchased properties, today’s move indicates that we can expect a similar shift for National Geographic.
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Ahead of its acquisition by 21st Century Fox, National Geographic is beginning to eliminate staff through a mix of voluntary buyouts and layoffs, POLITICO has learned.
About 180 employees, or nine percent of the total workforce, were subject to “involuntary separation” (i.e. layoffs) and an unspecified number of additional employees have been offered “voluntary separation agreements,” a spokesperson for the company confirmed.
The Fox acquisition, announced in September, is expected to close on Nov. 16.
Gary Knell, the president and CEO of National Geographic Society, sent an email to employees yesterday instructing them to be available today for individual consultations with human resources.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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This week, two major Wisconsin employers sent shockwaves through the state when they announced plant closures and layoffs that could affect thousands of jobs.
The Republicans who control the Wisconsin state senate called an “extraordinary session” for Friday–not to address the loss of family-supporting jobs in Wisconsin, but to allow out-of-state billionaires to secretly pour even more money into state elections.
Rep. Terese Berceau, a Democrat, calls the bills nothing short of “an effort to create a permanent one-party state,” helping give job security to Republicans for years to come.
[...]
The press managed to connect political donations to WEDC grants because those donations were disclosed. Yet one of the bills being voted on this week would make it harder to connect those dots. Under the bill, a CEO seeking a WEDC grant could make a contribution to a politician’s dark money political operation with no requirement that it be publicly reported. The politician will know where their support comes from, but the public and press will not, making it impossible to determine whether those supporters later receive special treatment or taxpayer-funded loans or grants.
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Censorship
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The Kremlin on Friday angrily condemned France’s Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine for publishing political cartoons on the Egypt plane crash in which 224 people died, most of them Russian tourists.
“In our country we can sum this up in a single word: sacrilege,” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
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Privacy
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The programme has been running for 10 years under a law described as “vague” by the government’s terror watchdog.
It emerged as Home Secretary Theresa May unveiled a draft bill governing spying on communications by the authorities.
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The last few days have not been easy for ProtonMail, the Geneva-based encrypted email service that launched last year.
The last few days have not been easy for ProtonMail, the Geneva-based encrypted email service that launched last year.
Earlier this week, the service was extorted by one group of attackers, then taken offline in a large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by a second group that it suspects may be state sponsored.
ProtonMail offers a full, end-to-end encrypted email service. It raised more than US$500,000 last year after a blockbuster crowdfunding campaign that sought just $100,000.
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On Wednesday 4 November, the government published a draft of its Investigatory Powers Bill.
Amongst the many controversial measures announced in the bill were plans to require web and phone companies to store records of websites visited by every citizen for 12 months for access by police, security services and other public bodies.
The publication of the bill comes just weeks after the TalkTalk hack, which was simply the latest in a long line of high profile losses of personal information.
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Suddenly he opens the door. DN’s Lena Sundström and Lotta Härdelin had a unique meeting with the whistleblower who has fans all over the world but risks lifetime imprisonment in the home country he once tried to save.
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Civil Rights
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Quentin Tarantino appeared on “All In With Chris Hayes” Wednesday night to defend himself against allegations that he’s “anti-police.”
Police unions across the country have called for a boycott of the director’s work after he spoke at an anti-police brutality rally in New York last week. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “I’m doing here [sic] because I am a human being with a conscience, and when I see murder, I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”
After being criticized by the presidents of the police unions in Philadelphia and New York City, Tarantino told The Los Angeles Times that he “never said” all cops are murderers. “I never said that. I never even implied that.”
“What they’re doing is pretty obvious,” he added. “Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people were bringing up, instead of examining the problem of police brutality in this country, better they single me out.”
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The NYPD is jerking around FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) requesters again. Usually, the NYPD just pretends it’s the CIA (somewhat justified, considering its hiring of former government spooks) and claims everything is so very SECRET it couldn’t possibly be edged out between the multiple exemptions it cites in its refusals.
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Fox News co-host Eric Bolling dubiously claimed violence against police officers has been increasing, and attributed the supposed increase to the Black Lives Matter movement and criticism of police.
On the November 5 edition of Fox News’ The Five, the show’s hosts discussed recent comments from film director Quentin Tarantino regarding police officers and Drug Enforcement Administration head Chuck Rosenberg speculating that the “Ferguson effect” — the idea that increased scrutiny and criticism of police brutality is leading to increased violence, especially against police officers against police officers — was real and recent criticism of the police was leading to more violence.
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Condemnation came quickly when video surfaced on social media of a South Carolina police officer assaulting a female high school student in class in the process of arresting her for, according to reports, either not participating or refusing to put away a cell phone. But while demands to fire school resource officer Ben Fields, who had a history of racialized brutality, were answered, we still haven’t had a deep-going conversation as to why he was in the room in the first place.
The incident at Spring Valley High School is sadly reflective, too, of ways that black women and girls in particular encounter state violence on a daily basis. That’s the problem explored in the report Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, produced by the African American Policy Forum, on whose board I serve.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement may have been signed by the 12 countries involved but that doesn’t mean it is a done deal.
The parliaments of all 12 countries — Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam — still have to ratify the deal in its entirety; there is no question of picking and choosing.
And that means there is still a role for the Labor Party to play. The big question is whether Labor wants to protect the interests of the people or not.
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Trade offices involved in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement have finally released all 30 chapters of the trade deal today, a month after announcing the conclusion of the deal in Atlanta. Some of the more dangerous threats to the public’s rights to free expression, access to knowledge, and privacy online are contained in the copyright provisions in the Intellectual Property (IP) chapter, which we analyzed based on the final version leaked by Wikileaks two weeks ago and which are unchanged in the final release. Now that the entire agreement is published, we can see how other chapters of the agreement contain further harmful rules that undermine our rights online and over our digital devices and content.
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A key U.S. senator said on Friday the Obama administration may have to renegotiate parts of a Pacific trade pact, heralding a tough battle to win support in Congress.
The administration notified lawmakers on Thursday it plans to sign the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, starting a countdown to a congressional vote that could come in the middle of next year’s election campaign.
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In the final days of the federal election, with the Liberals leapfrogging over the NDP on an ostensibly progressive platform, one question dogged Trudeau to the end: what was his position on the recently completed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP)? We still don’t quite know the answer, though we may soon enough.
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Trademarks
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We’ve already established that the University of Kentucky is sort of insane when it comes to overly restrictive trademark practices. We’ve also established that many other educational institutions are equally asshat-ish when it comes to trademark issues, in particular, for some reason, on any matter that in any way has to do with alcohol brands. The beer and liquor industries are dealing with their own trademark issues resulting from the explosion in craft brewing, but this is the story of how the University of Kentucky has managed to convince itself and, apparently, the USPTO that it has sole ownership of the very name of the state in which it is located for use on apparel.
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Copyrights
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Felines can often demonstrate great feats of stretchiness and overall flexibility, which can only be attributed to hard work at all-important cat yoga sessions. Whether you partake in yoga or any similar types of new age forms of exercise (in popularity, less so in origin), you cannot have been unaware of their growing popularity, especially among us Millennials. The classes aim to train the body and mind, each style of yoga doing so through different means and various poses. With this variety of styles, could one protect yoga poses through copyright?
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For several years YTS/YIFY has been one of Hollywood’s biggest arch-rivals but both sides came to an unprecedented agreement in recent weeks. Instead of going to trial over the alleged widespread piracy facilitated by the site, the MPAA signed a deal with its operator, ending a multi-million dollar lawsuit before it really got started.
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As Kim Dotcom’s extradition hearing defense continues, the U.S. government has just asked the presiding judge to rule all of the Megaupload founder’s evidence inadmissible. However, Dotcom informs TorrentFreak that the effort failed. “The Judge has said he wants a fair extradition,” he said.
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There’s a chance that after four years Megaupload users may be reunited with their lost files. U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady has asked several stakeholders to chime in on the possible return of the Megaupload servers, which also holds crucial evidence for Kim Dotcom’s defense.
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Send this to a friend
11.05.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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According to a press release by Inventec, their company is currently in collaboration with Xiaomi Corp. to produce two new laptops. Xiaomi will start selling two Linux laptops early next year, according to a report. Both will be introduced under the Xiaomi name brand and are reported for a scheduled release date in the early part of 2016.
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The Twitch in the Shell project has successfully installed Arch Linux using hundreds of people simultaneously hammering keys in a terminal. One of the organizers has explained to The Reg how it was done.
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Server
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Most technologists have heard about software containers (or simply “containers”) – a technology that became popularized by Docker, which is an open platform for building, shipping and running distributed applications through containers. Containers use shared operating systems to create a capsule, of sorts, to contain your application.
They are increasingly popular, but are not the panacea able to solve all the new challenges cloud computing presents. Problems mainly pertaining to security tend to hinder this technology. However, a new technology on the rise — unikernels — holds great promise for the next generation of cloud infrastructure.
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Disaggregated Junos software is part of Juniper’s effort to extract that software value in a more meaningful way, while providing more choice to customers. With the disaggregated model, instead of simply just putting Junos on top of hardware, now there will be a thin Linux kernel with containers into which Junos, services and other third party tools and apps can be deployed.
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The October ISG Cloud Comparison Index™ shows configurations that are run on a public cloud version of the Linux operating system can be highly cost competitive with those run on internal information technology. However, when deciding between options, buyers need to consider the significant price differences between cloud providers and the added costs of running enterprise-class operating systems on the public cloud, the report said.
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Kernel Space
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Besides landing the LightNVM / Open-Channel SSD supprot, another pull request by Jens Axboe is adding another new feature for Linux 4.4.
Axboe sent in generic block reservation support. This pull adds support at the block level for persistent reservations and implements it at the core level as well as for the SCSI and NVMe drivers.
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Exhausting travel aside, kernel summit in Seoul was a good use of time.
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Feminists in tech have been staging attempted “honey traps” to frame prominent male software developers for sexual assault, according to explosive claims on the blog of Eric S. Raymond, a pioneer of the open source movement. In allegations that will rock the world of software development, prominent targets included Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.
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The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.
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According to well-known open-source contributor Eric S Raymond, various “feminists” are trying to frame Linus Trovalds for sexual harassment.
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Many 64-bit ARM (ARM64) changes are inbound for the Linux 4.4 kernel.
First up with the Xen feature pull there is support for 64 KiB guest pages on 64-bit ARM along with CPU hot-plug support on ARM.
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While the DRM-Next pull request hasn’t even been issued yet for the Linux 4.4 merge window, AMD’s Alex Deucher has already sent in some extra fixes for the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver.
AMD already sent in their Stoney APU support and various other improvements last month for their Radeon and AMDGPU DRM kernel graphics drivers. Sent in today by Alex are some fixes.
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Linus Torvalds attacks the work of Kernel developer with strong language, again
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With the Open API Initiative, the Linux Foundation and its partners — including IBM — plan to make the next generation of APIs easier to find, use, document, and transform
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Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in his staging driver patches for the Linux 4.4 kernel on Wednesday.
He commented on the pull request, “Here’s the big staging driver update for 4.4-rc1. If you were disappointed for 4.3-rc1 that we didn’t contribute enough changesets, you should be happy with this pull request of over 2400 patches. But overall we removed more lines of code than we added, which is nice to see.”
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Red Hat’s Paolo Bonzini sent out the KVM updates today for the Linux 4.4 kernel.
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine updates for Linux 4.4 include a number of fixes for s390 and PowerPC systems, along with many ARM fixes and improvements, but the x86 KVM changes dominate this pull request. The x86 KVM code updates for Linux 4.4 include support for VT-d posted interrupts, more Microsoft Hyper-V functionality has been implemented, nested virtualization now supports VPID, NVDIMM support improvements, and various other x86-specific KVM virtualization advancements.
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Even more broadly, the battle over Linux security is a battle over the future of the online world. At a time when leading computer scientists are debating whether the Internet is so broken that it needs to be replaced, the network is expanding faster than ever, layering flaw upon flaw in an ever-expanding web of insecurity. Perhaps the best hope for fixing this, some experts argue, lies in changing the operating system that — more than any other — controls these machines.
But first, they have to change the mind of Linus Torvalds.
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Most of the F2FS patches for Linux 4.4 are for enhancing the stability and performance of the file-system’s in-memory extent caches feature. There’s also new ioctls to test behavior during power failures and checkpoints, a new background_gc=sync option to do garbage collection synchronously, periodic checkpoints support, and a number of bug-fixes.
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Graphics Stack
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Prolific Mesa contributor Ilia Mirkin has taken initial steps towards working on parallel shader compiles in Mesa.
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One month after the release of the Enlightenment 0.20 Alpha with much better Wayland support that led to the Wayland support from Enlightenment 0.19 being removed, the support continues to mature.
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Intel’s Mesa driver is finally seeing work done to support 16x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA).
With a series of commits since last night, the 16x MSAA support is being implemented. Up to now the Intel driver just supported MSAA sample counts of up to eight.
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Applications
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The fourth alpha release for Kodi 16 “Jarvis” is available this Sunday for testing.
Kodi 16 Alpha 4 brings Android Surface Rendering support to improve the display output for Android devices, drops libstagefright in favor of Android’s maturing MediaCodec implementation, changes to the add-on manager, drops support for the karaoke mode, and adds multi-touch support on Linux.
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Kubernetes and Docker Swarm are probably two most commonly used tools to deploy containers inside a cluster. Both are created as helper tools that can be used to manage a cluster of containers and treat all servers as a single unit. However, they differ greatly in their approach.
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Today we’re releasing Docker 1.9 – and it’s a big one. Docker Swarm and multi-host networking are production-ready, Docker Engine has a new volume management system, and Docker Compose has much better support for multiple environments. These in combination establish the foundation for scaling your distributed apps in production.
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Telegram Desktop is an open-source and cross-platform Telegram client for Linux. The client has support for notifications, sending messages and media files, and inserting emoji.
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As you may know, DrawPile is an open source drawing program, used for creating sketches. Among others, it enables the users to share the drawing live and draw simultaneously on the same picture.
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As you may know, Terminology is the terminal emulator from the Enlightenment desktop environment, having the main functions of any terminal emulator: support for backgrounds, themes for the layout and design, support for both X11 and Wayland, multiple tabs, support for block text selection and link handling and path and email address detection.
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Like a lot of people involved in the open source movement, though I use a variety of different tools for real time communications, I just can’t seem to get away from IRC. While IRC isn’t perfect, and I don’t love some of its quirks, it’s here to stay for at least the foreseeable future as its low barrier to entry and wide selection of open source clients make IRC, and particularly Freenode, the go-to place for open source projects to collaborate.
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So the work on lumail2 is going well, and already I can see that it is a good idea. The main reason for (re)writing it is to unify a lot of the previous ad-hoc primitives (i.e. lua functions) and to try and push as much of the code into Lua, and out of C++, as possible. This work is already paying off with the introduction of new display-modes and simpler implementation.
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As you may know, Guake is an open-source drop-down terminal emulator, inspired by the Quake console and written in Python and C. The users can open and hide it, by pressing a single keystroke only, which was configured to do such a thing.
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I have just released version 1.18 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what the program does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Rising Star Games has announced the launch of Poncho, an new pixel art platformer for the PlayStation 4 computer entertainment system, PC, Mac and Linux.
A robot finds himself waking with no memory in a strange and desolate world, with nothing on his person but a strange and ancient artifact from a bygone era – a red poncho.
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One month after Trine 3 went into beta on Linux, this action role-playing game has been officially release for SteamOS / Linux.
Frozenbyte’s Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power was released for Windows in August as the sequel to Trine 2. One month after being in beta, Trine 3 is now ready for its official Linux debut and just in time for the shipping of Steam Machines with SteamOS.
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We know how terrible Larian has been at over-promising Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition for Linux, but with the game now listing Linux on SteamDB they are actually working on it.
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As you may know, Hedgewars is a clone of the popular Worms game, but it uses hogs, not worms. The users can choose from a lot of 2D maps, use different weapons or punches to kill the hogs from the rival teams.
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While Epic Games is still hard at work on their Unreal Tournament game powered by Unreal Engine 4, this afternoon they surprisingly announced a new game: Paragon.
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Rising Star Games have announced that their pixel-art platformer Poncho is now available on PlayStation, PC, Mac and Linux. They also discussed plans to release the game on PlayStation Vita as well as Wii U in the coming months.
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Grow Home from Ubisoft owned studio “Reflections” looks like it will come to Linux, the game looks pretty damn interesting too.
I shot off a message to my Ubisoft PR guy who has yet to respond, but why else would they add a Linux depot to Steam if they weren’t at least toying with the idea eh?
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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This release, we focused on cleanup, polishing and quality-of-life improvements, with over 400 issues fixed and dozens of new translations. We have also gained two new frameworks: Solid, which replaces liblxqt-mount and some custom power management code and libkscreen, which replaces system xrandr calls and is wayland forward-compatible.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE will have an exhibit in the Expo at the upcoming LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference. The full conference takes place November 8 ‒ 13 in Washington D.C. The Expo is open on the 11th and 12th. There is no charge to attend the Expo.
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It’s hard to believe that more than a year has gone by since BogDan and I did our Qt on Android webinar! Like all good things that come to an end, so has the hosting for the archived version of the webinar. We hate to deprive anyone of still useful content, so here’s a link to the slides from the webinar for anyone who’s looking for them.
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We’re looking forward to exposing some gems hidden in the KDAB knowledge base. And we’d love feedback too—tell us if you find these tips useful, or what dramatic results you’ve achieved. We love to help, and we love hearing stories about how we helped. Your feedback helps us know that we’re on the right track.
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I have been hard at work to bring to you 4.14.3 Bugfix release for Trusty!
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One of the new useful tiny plasmoids that will be available in Plasma 5.5 is one called Activity Pager: you can find it in the kdeplasma-addons package of the release.
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We’re all excited for the new release of Plasma coming in less than a month and we at the Visual Design Group want to make it more exciting for our users too.
Every other release we try to change the extra wallpapers that we’re shipping with Plasma to our users and now it’s time the refresh the collection again.
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One of the most important dependencies for our phone project is libhybris. Libhybris is a neat technology to allow interfacing with Android drivers allowing for example to bring Wayland to a device where all we have are Android drivers.
Given that KWin provides a hwcomposer backend which uses libhybris to create an OpenGL context. All other applications need libhybris indirectly to have the Wayland OpenGL buffer exchange work automatically.
[...]
As we now use upstream libhybris I hope to see distributions to pick up the work and provide a Plasma phone spin. I’d love to see an openSUSE phone or a Fedora phone (or any other distribution).
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Having Six talks on the event, whe managed to talk about beginner stuff to advanced ones without leaving anyone behind.
Our talks this year
– KDE Sysadmin: You can help even if you don’t progam (speaker Gomex)
– KDE and Linus: Living Dangerously – my adventures in Programming (speaker Tomaz Canabrava)
– KDE: First Steps to Contribute (speaker Icaro (Igor) Jerry Santana)
– KDE Plasma Mobile (speaker Helio Castro)
– KDE Plasma 5: Full of Resources (speaker Henrique Sant’Anna)
– KDE: The structure behind it (speaker Helio Castro)
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We are happy to announce the release of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active 2.9.9. It is recommended update for the 2.9 series of the applications and underlying development frameworks.
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The ninth semi-monthly bug fix release of Krita is out!
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As you may know, Krita is an open-source image manipulation software, allowing the user to either create pictures from scratch or edit existing images. It is good because it supports most graphics tablets very well.
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And this is the reason behind my disappearance, my job at BlueSystems was not fun anymore and every project I mantained at KDE felt more like a chore than anything else. After a month of not jumping out of the bed to head to work it was time to move on. So I passed maintainership to the people that were actually doing the job (special mention to David) and I quit my job as a full time KDE hacker.
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KDAB believes that it is critical for our business to invest into Qt3D and Qt, in general, to keep pushing the technology forward and to ensure it remains competitive.
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And the giveaway is over! I want to thank everyone for entering and showing your support for Krita.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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After 5 months of development the MATE Desktop team are proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.12. We’d like to thank every MATE contributor and user.
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As many of you will be aware, Christian Hergert recently stepped down from the GNOME Foundation Board. As a result, we’ve had a place on the board to fill. In these situations, the bylaws [1] state that the Board of Directors may choose a replacement of their choosing [2].
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Ideally something like this would be completely hidden by the toolkit, and the application would just use the regular file chooser APIs. However, the Gtk+ filechooser APIs expose too much details about the file chooser dialog, which means it has to be a regular in-process widget. Unfortunately this means we can’t replace it by an out-of-process dialog.
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CoreOS has taken the wraps off Tectonic, a commercial distribution of the Kubernetes container manager, one focused for enterprise usage.
Tectonic can be used to run container-based workloads across a variety of cloud services, or within an organization’s own data center, or it could be used to shuffle containers across these environments.
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Eleven months later, the decline seems to be continuing at about the same rate, with the number of active distributions down to 276, and the decline is starting to seem an actual trend.
Critics might argue that the apparent trend might not be a trend at all. It could be a reflection of Distrowatch’s criteria for listing a distribution, or how quickly Distrowatch posts new distributions. However, given that the site regularly posts announcements of new releases for both new and established distros, there seems no reason for either to be a factor. Admittedly, Distro Hunt, a newer, similar site, includes listings that Distrowatch does not. But since projects can add their own descriptions to Distro Hunt, it’s possible that some of its entries have never had a release or disappeared without taking down their descriptions. Moreover, unlike Distrowatch, Distro Hunt provides no easy way of counting the total. The best available (if tentative) evidence, then, is that the trend exists.
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Reviews
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The GALPon MiniNo distro is akin to a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It will rival any of the leading Linux communities for performance.
Widespread acceptance in the educational and consumer markets with non-Spanish-speaking users is at risk. The developers have to improve on the language localization issues.
Critical packages like the system update launchers display in Spanish only. Others software titles have the same problem. Others suffer from bits and pieces of vocabulary crossover
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New Releases
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This release features not just the Unity Desktop, but Gnome-shell and the ever popular Gnome 2 fork called Mate, though we primarily will support Unity only.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Following yesterday’s article about openSUSE 42.1 Leap being tweaked for better out-of-the-box performance, I ran some benchmarks on the officially-released openSUSE 42.1 to compare it to the older benchmarks I did when Leap was still under development.
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PhillipOS is a linux distro I developed that is based on OpenSUSE 13.2. I first started developing operating systems in 2005 when I started to develop Ingos Linux build one, based on Ubuntu 4.10. When I finished it, I sent to a few of my friends via email, and they all liked it.
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The latest version of the openSUSE operating system is the first to combine community-developed software with professionally-developed source code from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE).
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If you are a more advanced user, or you are interested in learning more in depth about Linux, then you might be a bit happier with Fedora. But that really is a gross simplification of their overall state, and with a small amount of effort either of these could be made just as suitable for any task as the other one.
So pick one, install it, and give it a try! Or do as I have, and install them both in a dual-boot configuration, and compare them for yourself to see which you like the best.
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Red Hat Family
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The SME Server development team is pleased to announce the release of SME Server 8.2 which is based on CentOS 5.11.
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Most executives will say you are what you read, and that’s no different for Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.
The former chief operating officer of Delta and the author of “The Open Organization” oversees more than 8,000 employees in 80 countries at the open-source software company. His unique views on corporate culture — including the importance of killing terminally nice cultures and his belief that employees who cry are good hires — have been shaped by several thought leaders along the way.
To find out what most influenced his career and leadership style, we asked him to share the business books that have been his biggest sources of inspiration. Read on to see his top recommendations.
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Fedora
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Fedora 23 is the latest edition of the Fedora Linux distribution, released just this week.
The first screenshots from a Fedora 23 test installation that I posted are from the Cinnamon Spin, which you may view here.
In this post are screenshots from a test installation of Fedora 23 KDE, the most popular of the Fedora Spins.
Fedora 23 KDE features the latest KDE Plasma 5. Figure 1 shows the login window.
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The marketing group was a bit disorganized in the F23 cycle, and we can do much better. I hope to do more in the F24 cycle, but I can’t do it alone, and don’t really want to! So if you want to see Fedora succeed wildly, I hope you’ll find a way to join our efforts. Read the full piece on Fedora Magazine, and feel free to ask if you need help jumping in!
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Valve is getting really close to the launch of the Steam Machines, and the developers are preparing the SteamOS distro. They have just released a new stable update, and it comes with a ton of updates.
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My Linux migration story started in 2009, when I bought a tiny Asus Eee pc netbook pre-installed with Linux, a version of Xandros that I did not like much.
In trying to replace it, I had my first encounter with Xubuntu (no wi-fi support), Debian (minimal shell), and Mandriva, which I installed because it supported wi-fi out of the box.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Users of the Xenial Xerus desktop will find that the familiar (and somewhat cumbersome) Ubuntu Software Centre is no longer available.
GNOME’s Software application will – according to current plans – take its place as the default and package management utility on the Unity 7-based desktop.
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So this is the week of the Ubuntu Online Summit, and many of the sessions are discussing Snappy. As you may know, Snappy is currently pretty geared toward embedded, headless devices. However, it is the successor to Click, and eventually the phones will be based upon it. To drive that effort forward, a few colleagues and I had a session (you can watch the video) where we discussed the path forward for supporting snaps on other devices, specifically the phone and the desktop.
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The Ubuntu Online Summit for developers and contributors to Ubuntu Linux begins tomorrow and runs through Thursday as planning gets underway for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, a.k.a. the Xenial Xerus.
The Ubuntu Online Summit runs from 3 November to 5 November and can be monitored via summit.ubuntu.com.
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The video is embedded below for those interested in detail what Mark had to say during his nearly hour-long talk. Among the focuses were reiterating that Ubuntu 16.04 is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, work is ongoing towards the Ubuntu convergence goals and they are making progress, and also talk of Ubuntu in other areas like drones.
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For years Ubuntu developers have been working on moving from Python 2 to Python 3 and for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS next April that goal will hopefully be finally realized.
There were some dreams that the Python 2 to Python 3 migration would happen for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS so that Python 3 would be the default, now two years later, it looks like it might finally happen for the Xenial Xerus. A session was held today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for migrating over to Python 3 by default and to no longer ship Python 2 as part of the default package-set.
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Canonical is looking to make some substantial changes to the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus), and the developers are preparing to drop Ubuntu Software Center and replace it with GNOME Software.
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Canonical just revealed that the latest Firefox 42.0 is now in the official repositories for the users of Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
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Canonical has invested a lot of time and resources in the new Snappy packages, so it’s only natural that the developers want to make sure that people will be able to use it in the regular deb-based Ubuntu system.
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Ubuntu developers have a lot of plans for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and it already seems like it’s going to be a fascinating release. They have just announced that the Brasero and Empathy apps will no longer be included by default, and GNOME Calendar will be implemented.
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The application used in Ubuntu systems to write ISOs to USB disks, the Startup Creator, is being redesigned and rebuilt for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).
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As you may know, Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch is used by default on Meizu MX4, BQ Aquaris E4.5 and BQ Aquaris E5 and officially supported on the LG Nexus 4. While the BQ phones are mid-range, Meizu is among the most popular phone vendors in China, the MX4 being a premium headset.
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Aside from trying to make Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Python-3-only, Kubuntu developers planning for Xenial, and Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote, there’s also been a lot of other interesting sessions to happen over the first two days of this week’s Ubuntu Online Summit.
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Ubuntu 15.10 will be supported for 9 months for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin along with all other flavours.
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Wind River unveiled a “Helix Cloud” platform for IoT development and management, plus two small-footprint OSes: a “Rocket” RTOS and “Pulsar Linux.”
Intel subsidiary Wind River has released Wind River Pulsar Linux, an IoT-oriented version of its commercial Wind River Linux distribution, as well as a new Wind River Rocket RTOS. Both of these embedded OSes are designed to work with a newly unveiled Wind River Helix Cloud platform for developing, testing, monitoring, and analyzing cloud-connected IoT applications. Wind River Helix Cloud is available in App, Lab, and Device versions, and is said to provide “anytime, anywhere access to development tools, virtual labs, and deployed devices.” (see farther below).
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Innovative Integration’s “Cardsharp” SBC is an XMC form-factor board that runs Linux on a Zynq-Z7045, and provides an FMC slot compatible with FMC modules.
Innovative Integration has launched a “turnkey embedded instrument” called the Cardsharp designed for embedded and mobile instrumentation, remote autonomous I/O, and distributed data acquisition applications. The Linux-based, 149 x 74mm XMC form-factor single-board computer is also said to be “perfect for portable or vehicle-based data loggers or handheld field equipment use.”
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Phones
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Tizen
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Earlier this year, Tizen overtook the Firefox Operating System (OS) and became the world’s No.5 Smartphone OS in Q2 2015. That was an Important step for the Linux based OS to gain wider recognition. Now, according to a published report, Tizen has overtaken Blackberry to become the Fourth largest OS shipping in Q3 2015. Android saw a slight Increase in market share whilst Apple gained momentum with their new iPhone models and Microsoft, Blackberry and firefox all drilled down.
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Tizen the OS of Everything. That was the slogan that the Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) 2015 in Shenzhen this year. Tizen was Introduced to devs as a versatile OS that is light on CPU, Battery and Memory. You can develop WebApps using HTML5 / CSS3 / JS and also Native apps using Native – C / EFL. There are also Hybrid Apps, but as the name suggests are a mix between Web and Native apps.
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Android
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Smartwatches really only came onto the scene in a major way in the past two years — Google, Apple, and Samsung are all hoping it’ll be the next big computing platform. Since then, we’ve seen lots of manufacturers try different strategies for strapping a computer on your wrist, but they were all pretty bad experiences — until right around now. More importantly, smartwatches have stopped looking like hideous wrist gadgets and more like, well, watches.
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So far, most of the signs for a potential merger have occurred on the Chrome OS side rather than Android. In April of this year Google opened up its App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), enabling the porting of Android apps to Chrome OS. In addition, the Chrome OS Chrome Launcher 2.0 features a more Android-like Material Design, and integrates Android’s Google Now personal assistant.
There was not much evidence of a Chrome OS infusion in the most recent Android 6.0 “Marshmallow” release. However, Google recently furthered its vision of Android on the desktop with the Pixel C, a keyboard-convertible tablet developed by Google’s Chromebook team.
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A user switches to Android after six years of iPhones
There’s been quite a lot of stories in the media about Android users switching to the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. But there are also some iPhone users who have gone the other way and switched to Android.
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Before I switched to Android I googled like crazy for similar articles. I was interested in the most common experience of former iPhone users on Android phones. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find too much. So I want to share my notes to help fill this gap a little bit.
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It’s Nexus time again, the time each year when Google ships its hero devices in the Nexus line. That’s a brand of phones and tablets commissioned by the company starting in 2010 — not to be huge sellers, but to show the world the best of its Android operating system.
Nexus phones are meant to present the latest versions of Android, in pure form, unadulterated by the software overlays and bloatware apps added by the hundreds of Android phone makers. They also give Google a chance to showcase its own latest apps and services, which are sometimes missing entirely from Android phones, especially in emerging markets. And, unlike most other Android devices, they get updated almost as soon as Google releases patches.
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At the Big Android Barbecue 2015, we had the honor of interviewing Alin Jerpelea from Sony, after his great talk on Sony’s plans to open up the hardware of their devices as well as future plans for their developer programs. You can find the full, highly recommendable talk here.
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The Linux Foundation report states that in 2013, many cloud projects were still working out their core enterprise features and building in functionality, and companies were still very much in the early stages of planning and testing their public, private or hybrid clouds.
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openCypher promises to accelerate a quickly expanding graph data space because it offers new benefits for users, tooling providers, organizations and end users.
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The decision represents a market shift for Kustodian, a multinational provider of penetration-testing and other security services that has worked extensively with commercial SIEM platforms in the past. However, CEO Chris Rock told CSO Australia, it recently became clear that open-source solutions – in particular, the ELK stack from Elasticsearch – offered a significant new opportunity to democratise the delivery of SOCs that often weighed in north of $1m using conventional commercial products and services.
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Trying to understand open source adoption is a challenging task. In contrast to public companies, the metrics of open-source projects mostly rely on the number of GitHub stars (which is public) or the number of downloads (which is often unknowable).
As a co-founder and CEO of Logz.io, I’ve been heavily involved in the open source log analytics domain through working with with the community and focusing on the ELK Stack.
The background: The ELK Stack is the combination of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana that is used specifically in log analytics. Logstash ships log data to Elasticsearch, which indexes the information in a searchable datastore. Kibana then takes the datastore and shows the information in graphical format for log analysis.
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As you might expect the Open Source Initiative (OSI) uses quite a few open source tools to support our work in promoting and protecting open source software, development, and communities—things like content management systems (Drupal), wikis (XWiki), issue tracking/bug reporting (Redmine), desktop sharing (BigBlueButton), membership management (CiviCRM), etc.
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Not every new open source project needs a new foundation. In fact, the rise of all these new foundations could be hurting the open source cause
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Cross-community collaboration is developing and thriving inside the walls of this year’s LinuxCon 2015, and people like Diane Mueller, director of community development at Red Hat OpenShift, are leading the charge.
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The ability to scale up and stronger security has seen a pervasive proliferation of open source software (OSS) although these don’t have as many competitive features as proprietary software, according to the Ninth Annual Future of Open Source Survey conducted by Black Duck Software, a company that facilitates the adoption of OSS.
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The first step was to find a notebook and a pen and just write down 100 ideas for interesting open source projects. These project ideas ranged across all manner of topics, depth, and quality. I thought of wild language ideas, new features in existing projects, system designs, protocols, missing documentation, interesting forks, golfing code, games, prototypes, implementations of paper ideas, second-systems, whatever.
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My advice for anyone starting out in open source is simple: Be humble, but bold. The great thing about open source is that you can make a great impact, but you have to do it within the confines of a community, and learning how to bring your best while working in sometimes challenging interpersonal situations is a skill that you can only acquire through practice.
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My position on free and open source software is somewhere in the spectrum between hard-core FSF/GNU position on Free Software, and the corporate open source pragmatism that looks at open source as being great for some things but really not a goal in and of itself. I don’t eschew all proprietary software, and I’m not going to knock people for using tools and devices that fit their needs rather than sticking only to FOSS.
At the same time, I think it’s important that we trend towards everything being open, and I find myself troubled by the increasing acceptance of proprietary tools and services by FOSS developers/projects. It shouldn’t be the end of the world for a FOSS developer, advocate, project, or company to use proprietary tools if necessary. Sometimes the FOSS tools aren’t a good fit, and the need for something right now overrides the luxury of choosing a tool just based on licensing preference. And, of course, there’s a big difference between having that discussion for a project like Fedora, or an Apache podling/TLP, or a company that works with open source.
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To foster engagement and keep people posted, publish and share both individually and as a team. Setting a schedule is difficult, but you should try to publish at least one reflective post per month (I do one a week). Pre-populate tools like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite during meetings. Utilize tools like IFTTT, Zapier, Buffer, etc. There are easy ways to share ideas around the Web. Use them!
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla published Firefox 42.0 as the newest version of their cross-platform web browser.
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With the Firefox 42 debut, Mozilla introduces a new tracking protection feature and provides patches for 17 security advisories.
Mozilla’s today released the Firefox 42 browser, which provides users with improved privacy and security capabilities.
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SaaS/Big Data
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I was in the buzz-making business long before I learned how it was done. That happened here, at Linux Journal. Some of it I learned by watching kernel developers make Linux so useful that it became irresponsible for anybody doing serious development not to consider it—and, eventually, not to use it. Some I learned just by doing my job here. But most of it I learned by watching the term “open source” get adopted by the world, and participating as a journalist in the process.
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Databases
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MongoDB Inc. announced a new version of its open source-based NoSQL database with features designed to make it more attractive for enterprise use.
MongoDB 3.2 can handle a wider range of mission-critical applications, its parent company said, and has been extended to handle new enterprise-oriented tasks “by deeply integrating with the modern CIO’s technology stack.”
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Oracle/Java
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NetBeans IDE 8.1 provides out-of-the-box code analyzers and editors for working with the latest Java 8 technologies–Java SE 8, Java SE Embedded 8, and Java ME Embedded 8. The IDE also has a range of new tools for HTML5/JavaScript, in particular for Node.js, KnockoutJS, and AngularJS; enhancements that further improve its support for Maven and Java EE with PrimeFaces; and improvements to PHP and C/C++ support.
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The NetBeans 8.1 IDE continues to be focused around the latest Java 8 technologies from Oracle, but there’s also a number of new tools for HTML5, JavaScript, Node.js, KnockoutJS, and AngularJS. NetBeans 8.1 has a number of additions for easing development with Node.js, adds/enhances support for a wide variety of HTML5 and other JavaScript technologies, also advances some PHP and C/C++ language handling, and the NetBeans profiler has been redesigned while adding new features. There’s also better Git support with NetBeans 8.1.
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CMS
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October is a content management system (CMS) based on the Laravel framework. Many of my readers will already know that I am a huge fan of Laravel. The framework makes development workflow a breeze and takes care of a lot of the mundane tasks. Linuxphile is, in fact, built on Laravel. I had also developed http://twistedtastes.com using Laravel. After the development of Twisted Tastes my wife and I came across October.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source/Openwashing
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We are pleased to announce GNU Guile release 2.1.1. This is the first pre-release of what will eventually become the 2.2 release series. It provides many improvements, most notably in speed: it starts up faster than Guile 2.0, runs your programs faster, and uses less memory; see below for full details. We encourage you to test this release and provide feedback to address@hidden
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We are pleased to announce the next alpha release of GNU Guix, version 0.9.0.
The release comes with USB installation images to install the standalone GuixSD, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of a running GNU/Linux system, either from source or from binaries.
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Licensing
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The TPP E-Commerce chapter has a provision banning requirements to transfer or provide access to software source code. This applies to “mass market software.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Researchers around the globe who want to customize medical capsule robots won’t have to start from scratch – a team from Vanderbilt University School of Engineering did the preliminary work for them and is ready to share.
Through a website and a paper revealed at a pair of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) conferences, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Pietro Valdastri, Associate Professor of Computer Engineering Akos Ledeczi and their team made the capsule hardware and software open-source.
The paper, titled “Systematic Design of Medical Capsule Robots,” ran in a special issue of IEEE Design & Test magazine dedicated to cyber-physical systems for medical applications. Within years, Vanderbilt’s capsule robots, made small enough to be swallowed, could be used for preventative screenings and to diagnose and treat a number of internal diseases.
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Open Access/Content
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It’s really somewhat astounding just how absolutely hated journal publishing giant Elsevier has become in certain academic circles. The company seems to have perfected its role of being about as evil as possible in trying to lock up knowledge and making it expensive and difficult to access. A few years ago, we noted that a bunch of academics were banding together to boycott journals published by the company, as more and more people were looking at open access journals, allowing them to more freely share their research, rather than locking it up. Elsevier’s response has been to basically crack down on efforts to share knowledge. The company has been known to charge for open access research — sometimes even buying up journals and ignoring the open licenses on the works. The company has also been demanding professors takedown copies of their own research. Because how dare anyone actually benefit from knowledge without paying Elsevier its toll. And that’s not even mentioning Elsevier’s history of publishing fake journals as a way to help giant pharmaceutical companies pretend their treatments were effective.
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Finally, a bit of good news on the college costs front: A study out of Brigham Young University finds that free open source textbooks do the job pretty darn well.
The study of nearly 17,000 students at 9 colleges found that open source textbooks (or open educational resources — OERs in academic lingo) found that students learn the same amount or more from the free books across many subjects. (Here’s a sampling of the sorts of texts available, via a University of Minnesota site.)
What’s more, 85% of students and instructors said open textbooks were actually better than the commercial ones. The research focused its results based on measurements such as course completion, final grade, final grade of C- or higher, enrollment intensity, and enrollment intensity in the following semester.
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Programming
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A lot has happened in the eight months since the 0.3 release: the 0.4 release contains 2000 commits, three times as many commits as either the 0.2 or 0.3 release. Moving forward, our plan is to release every four months, but for now please enjoy a double-sized release.
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A US software company has signed on with IBM to release a new native build of Big Blue’s OS/2.
Arca Noae said its “Blue Lion” build of OS/2 will run on the bare metal of PCs without the need for an emulator or hypervisor.
Those still using the 28-year-old operating system and its applications typically run the stack in a virtualized environment on modern reliable hardware. The bare-metal OS will be freed from its virtual prison, and released to the world, in the third quarter of next year, we’re told.
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The nation’s bars, pubs and discos will be jam-packed with drunken partiers decked out in Santa hats and elf costumes on Friday. Welcome to the strange Danish ‘holiday’ known as J-Day.
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Hardware
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Unlike the current, 400MHz Quark X1000, found on the Intel Galileo hacker SBC and numerous IoT gateway products, these new microcontroller-like Quarks run at only 32MHz, and support bare-metal code and real-time operating systems (RTOSes), but not Linux.
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Security
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Hackers are exploiting SQL injection flaws to infect MySQL database servers with a malware program that’s used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Security researchers from Symantec found MySQL servers in different countries infected with a malware program dubbed Chikdos that has variants for both Windows and Linux.
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Kaspersky says that 45.6% of all recorded DDoS attacks were launched from Linux computers.
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RAT stands for Remote Access Trojan (some use the term Tool as well) and refers to a particular piece of malware that infects user computers via a client component, which then starts communicating with a server counterpart. This allows an attacker to steal data from a target, spy on the user, and even take control of the victim’s device.
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Many of the recently developed security features for containers, such as per-container ulimit, capability reduction, device access restrictions, improved handling of Linux Security Modules (SELinux, AppArmor), improved user namespaces and others are all examples of defense-in-depth (multiple layers of protection).
Despite these efforts, the fundamental problem with containers compared to hypervisors still persists as they have an exceedingly large “attack surface” making them inherently vulnerable, despite efforts to use minimal Linux distros. This is why technologies that try to combine virtualization with containers — such as Hyper, Clear Containers and Xen Containers — are starting to build momentum.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Bush’s own Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told 60 Minutes in 2004 that Bush “sought a way to invade Iraq.” Recent emails show Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair planning the Iraq war a whole year before 9/11. Put simply, the Bush administration didn’t need “convincing”—what it needed was fodder to convince the American public (not all of whom, of course, were ever convinced). These are two entirely different readings of history that have, in the past 48 hours, become dangerously conflated by some.
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With helicopters hovering overhead, and surrounded by an army of security forces, this is how America transports its nuclear weapons. However, as this onlooker captures, amid police harrassment for filming, it appears one of the military trucks was just a little too close and rear-ends a truck carrying a nuclear missile.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A new NASA study found that there has been a net increase in land ice in Antarctica in recent years, despite a decline in some parts of the continent. The study’s lead author astutely predicted that climate science deniers would distort the study, even though it does nothing to contradict the scientific consensus on climate change or the fact that sea levels will continue to rise.
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The final text of a huge 12-country trade agreement has confirmed the “worst nightmares” of environmental groups, with no mention of climate change in its lone environment chapter and weak enforcement mechanisms, Australian academics say.
The text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement was finally released on Thursday, with Trade Minister Andrew Robb saying the deal will deliver “substantial benefits for Australia” in the rapidly growing Asia Pacific.
The TPP is the biggest global trade deal in 20 years, involving 12 countries in the Pacific region which collectively represent over 40 per cent of world GDP.
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Finance
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One of Techdirt’s earliest posts on corporate sovereignty was back in October 2013, when we wrote about the incredible case of Chevron. It used the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism to suspend the enforcement of a historic $18 billion judgment against the oil corporation made by Ecuador’s courts because of the company’s responsibility for mass contamination of the Amazonian rain forest. Given the huge sums involved, it’s no surprise that things didn’t end there.
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We Americans have been deceived by the notion that individual desires preempt the needs of society; by the Ayn-Rand/Reagan/Thatcher aversion to government regulation; by the distorted image of “freedom” as winner-take-all capitalism; by the assurance that the benefits of greed will spread downward to everyone.
Our current capitalist-driven inequalities will only be rectified when people realize that a strong community makes successful individuals, not the other way around.
Here are a few of the ways we would benefit with a social democracy.
[...]
Nationally, we spend over $1 trillion per year on defense. Not just the half-trillion Pentagon budget, but another half-trillion for veterans affairs, homeland security, “contingency operations,” and a variety of other miscellaneous military “necessities.”
But that’s not enough for the relative few at the top of our outrageously unequal society. The richest Americans build private fortresses to protect themselves from the rest of us, as they scoff at the notion of a 1950s-like progressive tax structure that would provide infrastructure funding for all of us.
[...]
In the extreme capitalist mind, Steve Jobs started with boxes of silicon and wires in a garage and fashioned the first iPhone. The reality is explained by Mariana Mazzucato: “Everything you can do with an iPhone was government-funded. From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touchscreen display and even the SIRI voice activated system— all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Navy, and even the CIA.”
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When some of us hear Jeb Bush’s new slogan, “Jeb can fix it,” we don’t think of a mechanic getting under the hood and fixing the nation’s problems. We don’t even think of Jimmy Savile, the notorious British pedophile, whose show was called “Jim’ll fix it,” although some people sure will. No, we think about Election 2000 and the Florida recount, where Jeb proved that his slogan isn’t all hot air. Whatever else he did as Governor of Florida, when it came to that election, Jeb fixed it.
Anyone old enough to remember that election night, which was 15 years ago today, will remember that the outcome of the electoral college depended on that one state. And what came next is exactly what anyone would have predicted would happen when an election is so close it triggers a recount in a state in which the levers of power and the electoral machinery are run by one of the candidates’ brothers. That candidate was the one who became president.
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China’s commerce regulator will investigate accusations by JD.com Inc. that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is unfairly pressuring merchants to shun competing platforms, JD said, ratcheting up a battle between the nation’s two biggest online retailers.
The State Administration for Industry & Commerce accepted JD’s request to look into Alibaba’s attempts to lock in merchants ahead of the crucial “Singles’ Day” promotion next week, JD said in an online post Thursday. China’s second-largest Web retailer has accused its larger rival of forcing merchants to choose between the two, which it said hampers competition and violates regulations.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Billionaire mega-donor Charles Koch admitted that the handful of billionaires who bankroll political campaigns are doing it because they expect something in return.
Yet the outsized influence of the .00001% doesn’t threaten democracy, he said, as long as a fellow billionaire thinks those big donors have the right intentions.
Koch appeared with his brother David on MSNBC”s “Morning Joe” this week as part of a PR blitz to soften the Koch brothers’ image ahead of the 2016 elections, where the Koch network plans to spend $250 million on direct electoral activities and a total of nearly $1 billion on broader political work.
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Censorship
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Another day, another example of copyright being used to censor. A few weeks ago, we wrote about a sketchy crowdfunded “food scanning device” company called TellSpec, which had ridiculously threatened the online publication Pando Daily with laughably ridiculous defamation claims. The threats were ridiculous for any number of reasons, including the fact that the statute of limitations had expired and the commentary wasn’t even remotely defamatory. There were also some weird (and stupid) threats about suing in the UK, despite TellSpec being based in Toronto and Pando in the US. At some point, TellSpec then denied having made the threats, but that appeared to be pure damage control.
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The National Endowment for the Humanities announced last Wednesday the “Chronicling America” contest to create projects out of historical newspaper data. The contest is supposed to showcase the history of the United States through the lens of a popular (and somewhat ephemeral) news format. But looking at the limits of the archival data, another story emerges: the dark cloud of copyright’s legal uncertainty is threatening the ability of amateur and even professional historians to explore the last century as they might explore the ones before it.
Consider that the National Digital Newspaper Program holds the history of American newspapers only up until 1922. (It originally focused on material from 1900-1910 and gradually expanded outwards to cover material from as early as 1836.) Those years may seem arbitrary—and it makes sense that there would be some cut-off date for a historical archive—but for copyright nerds 1922 rings some bells: it’s the latest date from which people can confidently declare a published work is in the public domain. Thanks to the arcane and byzantine rules created by 11 copyright term extensions in the years between 1962 and 1998, determining whether a work from any later requires consulting a flow chart from hell—the simple version of which, published by the Samuelson Clinic last year, runs to 50 pages.
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Privacy
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The total redrafting of UK surveillance laws was under growing challenge last night after an initially broad political welcome gave way to alarm at the detail of the proposed sweeping powers for spies.
MPs and privacy groups raised concerns about the proposed judicial oversight regime set out by Theresa May – while the home secretary also revealed that since 2001 ministers have issued secret directions to internet and phone companies to hand over the communications data of British citizens in bulk.
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The Government’s just published the draft Investigatory Powers Bill. It will decide the surveillance powers that the police and intelligence have for years to come.
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“This Bill will redefine the relationship between the state and the public for a generation. The government needs to get it right and made sure that the UK’s law enforcement and security agencies can fight serious crime while upholding all of our human rights.”
“However, at first glance, it appears that this Bill is an attempt to grab even more intrusive surveillance powers and does not do enough to restrain the bulk collection of our personal data by the secret services. It proposes an increase in the blanket retention of our personal communications data, giving the police the power to access web logs. It also gives the state intrusive hacking powers that can carry risks for everyone’s Internet security.”
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The past week has seen the most bizarre spinning. The BBC and the Times suddenly “managed to secure” exclusive stories about the wonderful world of secret intelligence, shamelessly pegged to the premiere of the film. The Times offered a gushing prospectus of work inside GCHQ. The BBC’s Frank Gardner sat, obsequious, in a darkened room and asked faceless voices what it was like being “the real James Bond”. It was like a spoof promotion video for the Stasi.
[...]
Despite the fearmongers, Britain faces no threat to its territory or political stability, nothing that remotely justifies the massive intrusion into privacy originally sought by GCHQ and the police. Today’s threat is from fanatics and criminals who want to shoot people and explode bombs – extremely dangerous but not a state threat. The question is, does this require Britons to have their every phone call, email and browser record stored, scanned, registered and, inevitably, shared with spies, the police and – whatever anyone says – a wide range of public officials?
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So why is the majority of the British press so relaxed about mass surveillance? Why do they not associate this threat with the ‘300 years of press freedom’, which they hold so dear? Have they not read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which explicitly links the death of freedom with the death of privacy? Even the United Nations (not always first off the mark where human rights are concerned) is able to see the danger here, as evidenced by the creation this year of a new special rapporteur on ‘the right to privacy in the digital age’.
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The intention is that the draft Bill will be the basis of consultation, with a revised Bill being published in 2016. This revised Bill will need to be enacted by the end of next year, as the current Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act expires on 31 December 2016 and one section of it has been quashed by the High Court as from March 2016.
Publication is therefore the start of what may be a year-long legislative process. On the face of it, the government intends to take the legislative process seriously. The Bill has been published with extensive explanatory materials, fact sheets and impact assessments. The page count of those documents is higher than that of the bill itself — the government wishes to give the impression this process is to be done properly and thoroughly.
Of course, what the government brings to parliament next year may not correspond to this draft, and it may be that the government pushes measures through at speed next year which are not in this version. So it is too early to say that this draft Bill puts “parliament in charge” as the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation said on Wednesday.
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The Government has published a draft Bill on Investigatory Powers that it hopes to see through Parliament within a year. If it becomes law, the Investigatory Powers Bill will replace much, but not all, of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, as well as the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014.
It is the Government’s response to the Edward Snowden revelations, and to three different reports that made almost 200 reform recommendations between them.There will be much debate about the powers set out in the draft Bill. It proposes to give certain powers of the intelligence and security services a (new) legal basis in statute and will consolidate much of the law in this field. While the nature and extent of these powers is open to disputation, if there are to be such powers, it is surely better that there is avowal and regulation, rather than secrecy and denial.
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The total redrafting of UK surveillance laws was under growing challenge on Wednesday night after an initially broad political welcome gave way to alarm at the detail of the proposed sweeping powers for spies.
MPs and privacy groups raised concerns about the proposed judicial oversight regime set out by the home secretary, Theresa May, who made the dramatic admission that ministers had issued secret directions since 2001 to internet and phone companies to hand over the communications data of British citizens in bulk.
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Jimmy Wales has suggested that Apple should stop selling iPhones in the UK, if the government passes a new law that would prevent technology firms and service providers from using end-to-end encryption to protect private communications.
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Britons could soon have their web surfing recorded for later police consultation, but the government has reportedly backed off plans to order companies like Apple to unlock encrypted phones and messages
A threatened ban on encryption has been banished from a draft bill on surveillance powers in the U.K. — but the government plans to explicitly allow bulk surveillance of Internet traffic by security and intelligence agencies.
U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May began by listing the things the draft bill did not contain as she introduced it in Parliament on Wednesday.
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A year after its launch, Microsoft is making some changes to its OneDrive cloud storage plans—including eliminating the unlimited storage offered to Office 365 subscribers, because according to Microsoft, some people got greedy.
In a post to the OneDrive blog, Microsoft wrote: “Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.”
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MICROSOFT HAS ADMITTED that Windows 10 is collecting more data than any of its predecessors, and there’s not much you can do about it.
In an interview with PC World, Microsoft corporate vice president Joe Belfiore defended the collection of what the company refers to as “basic telemetry”, explaining that it is a necessary part of improving Windows’ functionality.
Windows has always collected information like this. Every blue screen of death creates an error report which is uploaded to Microsoft. But so much more is collected now and, yes, this does mean that search terms that you enter into Windows as well as anonymous machine gibberish is going up to the cloud.
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The long-awaited Investigatory Powers Bill has been published at last. The draft Bill is almost 300 pages long so it is going to take us a while to go through the detail but here is our first take on what it contains.
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Civil Rights
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The United States is governed at the national level by two major parties: the right-wing Republicans and the center-left Democrats.. It has been 165 years since someone was elected president who did not come from this political duopoly, which does not represent the full range of views held by the U.S. electorate but has worked hard to ensure that the candidates it puts forward are often the only ones from which voters can choose.
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The United States House of Representatives passed legislation to establish an “insider threat” program at the Department of Homeland Security, which would permit the continuous monitoring of credit, criminal, and social media activities of DHS employees and would potentially impact national security whistleblowers.
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Law enforcement agencies around the country are increasingly embracing biometric technology, which uses intrinsic physical or behavioral characteristics—such as fingerprints, facial features, irises, tattoos, or DNA—to identify people, sometimes even instantly. Just as the technology that powers your cell phone has shrunk both in size and cost, mobile biometric technologies are now being deployed more widely and cheaply than ever before—and with less oversight.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The text of the TPP was released by TPP Parties on 5 November 2015 and can be accessed by Chapter below. Legal verification of the text will continue in the coming weeks. The Agreement will also be translated into French and Spanish language versions.
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Instead of combatting the ability to bring cases such as Eli Lilly’s, the TPP’s investment chapter invites them. Any time a national court – including in the U.S. – invalidates a wrongfully granted patent or other intellectual property right, the affected company could appeal that revocation to foreign arbitrators. The new language would also make clear that private companies are empowered by the treaty to challenge limitations and exceptions like the U.S. fair use doctrine, or individual applications of it. Adoption of this set of rules in the largest regional trade agreement of its kind would upset the international intellectual property legal system and should be subject to the most rigorous and open debate in every country where it is being considered.
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Copyrights
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As IPKat readers will promptly recall, last May the EU Commission issued its Digital Single Market Strategy (DSMS) [here and here]. In this document this EU institution promised policy and legislative action in a number of areas, including copyright.
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The site that provides much of the content for illegal movies shown on the “Popcorn Time” app, PopcornTime.io, has been shut down after the Motion Picture Association of America won court orders in Canada and New Zealand.
“Popcorn Time and YTS are illegal platforms that exist for one clear reason: to distribute stolen copies of the latest motion pictures and television shows without compensating the people who worked so hard to make them,” said MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd in a statement (PDF).
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An interim injunction handed down by a judge in Canada has granted forensic experts under MPAA supervision access to hosting accounts and domains operated by Popcorn Time, including VPN.ht, its official VPN service. Nevertheless, VPN.ht remains defiant, insisting that its service exists outside Canada and has not been compromised.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.04.15
Posted in News Roundup at 2:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“Twitch Installs Arch Linux”—billed as a “cooperative text-based horror game”—began on Halloween. After beating both Pokemon and Dark Souls earlier this year, thousands of people are now trying to do something even geekier: collectively install Arch Linux. The stream is now back up after a botnet took over and partially installed Gentoo, another Linux distribution.
You can tune into the stream at Twitch Installs Arch Linux. It works just like Twitch Plays Pokemon and Twitch Plays Dark Souls. Viewers vote on which key press to send to the terminal. Every ten seconds, the most popular key press is sent to the terminal. Arch Linux is a particularly good candidate for this, as it’s not the kind of Linux distribution you can install with a few clicks—it requires some terminal commands. You have to know what you’re doing, or at least be able to follow an installation guide.
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Kernel Space
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In looking for any EXT4/Btrfs/XFS/F2FS file-system performance changes, I tested the three latest kernel series atop a PNY 120GB SSD. Ubuntu 15.10 64-bit was running on the system.
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The GNU Linux-libre maintainers also cautioned against Intel and Qualcomm/Atheros Bluetooth hardware and now Intel Skylake sound support too. Skylake sound support was added to Linux 4.3 but apparently there too the code isn’t “free” enough for GNU Linux-libre.
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Herbert Xu mailed in the crypto subsystem updates this morning for the Linux 4.4 merge window.
The Linux 4.4 Crypto update brings a new wrap algorithm, a few API changes, alterations to the akcipher interfacem Intel SHA Extension SHA1 and SHA256 optimized functions, support for the ST and STM32 RNGs, support for the mxs-dcp crypto device, and other crypto driver improvements.
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Trusted Platform Module 2.0 support has been around for a few kernel cycles now and with the forthcoming Linux 4.4 kernel it will be in much better shape.
Last month I wrote about how with the code lined up the developer was saying TPM 2.0 is ready for distributions and that code is now set to land as part of the sent out security subsystem pull request.
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LWN’s 2015 Kernel Summit page now has coverage from the open day of the event, which focused primarily on technical topics. Subscribers are invited to have a look. Coverage from the final day is in the works and will be posted within the next day or so.
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Linus Torvalds’s latest rant underscores the high expectations the Linux developer places on open source programmers—as well the importance of security for Linux kernel code.
Torvalds is the unofficial “benevolent dictator” of the Linux kernel project. That means he gets to decide which code contributions go into the kernel, and which ones land in the reject pile.
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Octavian Purdila of Intel has announced today the Linux Kernel Library, a.k.a. LKL, for re-using kernel code more easily in user-space.
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Jens Axboe sent in the patches today for landing support for LightNVM and Open-Channel SSDs within the mainline Linux kernel!
The developer at Facebook wrote, “This first one adds support for lightnvm, and adds support to NVMe as well. This is pretty exciting, in that it enables new and interesting use cases for compatible flash devices.”
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Applications
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There is no single technology hotter today than Docker containers. Today the open-source Docker project released version 1.9.0 of Docker engine, providing an important milestone update.
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Kakoune is a command-line code editor that’s inspired by Vim and its advertised features are support for multiple selections, many customization possibilities, a client/server architecture so many clients can collaboratively edit the contents of a file, and advanced text manipulation primitives.
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Hello all! I’m excited to announce v0.1 of Activipy. This is a new library targeting ActivityStreams 2.0.
If you’re interested in building and expressing the information of a web application which contains social networking features, Activipy may be a great place to start.
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Proprietary
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The new browser by Opera founder and ex-CEO Jon von Tetzchner is available as a beta today, after ten months in preview. You can grab it for Windows, Mac and Linux – and he’s promised that a mobile version will follow.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Coming in just a few days after the Wine 1.7.54 release is the experimental Wine-Staging 1.7.54 release with a few extra features.
New to the Wine-Staging patch-set are multiple improvements and fixes to the Wine IDL (WIDL) compiler that reads data from Microsoft’s Interface Definition Language and converts them into alternate formats, which in turn are used by scripting languages wanting to communicate with COM objects.
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Games
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Although Windows is still the most-used operating system for PC gaming, Linux has seen an impressive rise in the gaming scene. A few years ago, Linux had virtually no games available for it, aside from some oft-mentioned open source ones. Fast forward to today, and Linux now has more than 1,500 games available on Steam alone, with a few AAA titles littered among those 1,500.
If you’ve become interested in gaming on Linux, using SteamOS as your Linux distribution of choice is a good idea. But how do you get SteamOS on your computer so you can start playing on it? Here’s a detailed guide that will cover every step and possible question you may have along the way.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Me, Carlos and others has been working on improving the newcomer experience. GNOME is a 15 years old project. Our community conventions and infrastructure which newcomers have to learn all bear signs of this. Over time such project in the size of GNOME build up vast amount of information, historial baggage and complex navigation structure. To me this is all a natural healthy sign of a large project swiftly advancing the Linux desktop.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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SUSECon 2015 kicked off today in Amsterdam. One of the biggest highlights of the keynote was SUSE’s entry into the platform as a service (PaaS) landscape: the company is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
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The wait is over and a new era begins for openSUSE releases. Contributors, friends and fans can now download the first Linux hybrid distro openSUSE Leap 42.1. Since the last release, exactly one year ago, openSUSE transformed its development process to create an entirely new type of hybrid Linux distribution called openSUSE Leap.
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SUSE has announced its Enterprise Storage 2 product.
This is the latest version of its self-managing, self-healing, distributed software-based storage solution for enterprise.
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We reviewed OpenSUSE 13.2 and we still believe it is an excellent release. It will be supported for a long time still. According to our OpenSUSE source, probably until the first quarter of 2017.
So how does the new release OpenSUSE 42.1 Leap rate? Let’s take a look.
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Red Hat has CentOS. Canonical has Ubuntu. Both these operating systems can be installed at no cost, and they are enterprise grade operating systems running on servers and cloud. However, SUSE doesn’t have any such distro; The openSUSE codebase is way too diverged from the SUSE codebase.
But that’s changing. The openSUSE community is taking a big leap, dropping the old regular release cycles of openSUSE and moving to openSUSE Leap. The community has released the first version of openSUSE Leap today at SUSECon 2015.
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Red Hat Family
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Deutsche Bank upgraded Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) from Hold to Buy with a price target of $90.00 (from $75.00). Analyst Karl Keirstead noted the company’s cloud opportunity.
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Following the recent BusyBox 1.24 release, the developers behind this “Swiss Army Knife of embedded Linux” have decided to drop systemd support.
BusyBox developer Denys Vlasenko pushed this commit where he explained, “systemd people are not willing to play nice with the rest of the world. Therefore there is no reason for the rest of the world to cooperate with them.”
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The first task any accomplished technical writer has to do is write for the audience. This task may sound simple, but when I thought about people living all over the world, I wondered: Can they read our documentation? Readability is something that has been studied for years, and what follows is a brief summary of what research shows.
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Red Hat, Inc. provides open source software solutions to enterprise customers worldwide. It develops and offers operating system, virtualization, middleware, storage, and cloud technologies. RHT has a PE ratio of 76. Currently there are 14 analysts that rate Red Hat a buy, no analysts rate it a sell, and 4 rate it a hold.
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Fedora
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Fedora 23, the latest edition of the Fedora Linux distribution, was released earlier today.
It is the first edition of Fedora that features a Cinnamon Spin. That means it comes with its own Live installation image, making it easier to install a Fedora Cinnamon desktop without having to use a netinstall image or the Everything image.
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Fedora 23 has rolled out this week after six months (give or take) of hard work by the Fedora Project. Job done, right? Not exactly–we still need to tell the world that Fedora 23 exists, and why they should be giving it a try.
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Welcome back for another installment of the systemd series. Throughout this series, we discuss ways to use systemd to understand and manage your system. This article focuses on how to convert legacy scripts you may have customized on your system.
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Debian Family
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My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.
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Distributions have been working on it for years to let the X.Org Server run without root privileges. This feat has now been accomplished for Debian testing users where if using systemd and a DRM/KMS graphics driver, you can run the xorg-server as a user.
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Derivatives
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Tails, a Live operating system that is built with the declared purpose of keeping users safe and anonymous while going online, has been updated to version 1.7. This is a major upgrade and users have been advised to make the switch as soon as possible.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The next Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 update is scheduled to arrive in about two weeks and the developers are now putting the final touches. There is a certain number of bug-fixes still left to be added, but they are slowly getting implemented.
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1-Net today announced that its public cloud service, Alchemy, has officially joined Canonical to be the Southeast Asia’s first Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud Service Provider. Alchemy is a high performance and secure IaaS platform, which enables users to build and manage scalable infrastructures on demand.
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Flavours and Variants
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While Jonathan Riddell stepped down as the Kubuntu release manager immediately following the Kubuntu 15.10 release and Kubuntu’s post-15.10 future was portrayed as uncertain, the developers still with the project are focusing on making a great 16.04 “Xenial Xerus” release.
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Gumstix has opened up its quick-turn expansion board design service to third-party COMs and SBCs like the BeagleBone Black, with Raspberry Pi coming soon.
Gumstix launched its web-based Geppetto custom design-to-order (D2O) platform for embedded boards back in 2013. Later that year, the company added new crowd-funding features to the drag-and-drop embedded board design service, and released version 2.0 last December. Previously, the service has been limited to a few Gumstix computer-on-modules such as the company’s TI Sitara AM3354-based Overo modules, as well as its dual-core, Cortex-A9 OMAP4430-based DuoVero modules. Today, however, Gumstix is extending Geppetto’s support to expansion board designs for use with other companies’ TI Sitara AM335x-based COMs and single-board computers (SBCs). The company also plans to soon add support for COMs and SBCs that use SoCs beyond TI’s, notably including the Broadcom BCM2835-based Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Compute Module.
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A London-based startup called “Starship,” launched by Skype co-founders, is developing a wheeled, Linux-based robot and service for package delivery.
Former Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis announced the formation of a London-based robotics services company called Starship Technologies, “which aims to fundamentally improve local delivery of goods and groceries, making it almost free.” The 30-employee company, which also has offices in Estonia, showed off some images and a few specs for a prototype delivery robot that will enter trials in 2016. The robot runs on a Linux operating system, according to a Starship rep.
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Phones
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Tizen
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October has come to an end and it’s time to have a look at last month’s Top 20 Best Tizen Apps. WhatsApp still remains as the number one downloaded app for the Tizen Store and it just shows you how many people actually use this application. At number two we have the new comer Truedialer phone & contacts app.
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Android
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Of course, not every young person grows up with an Apple device in hand. As a group, Android-powered devices far outsell iPhones. That’s in part because they’re often cheaper than Apple’s premium handsets. So it’s safe to assume lots of young Americans grew up not with an iPhone, but with an Android device. Would they prefer a more powerful Android device to take with them into the business world?
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These rival platforms are updated every year, when their creators are bringing new devices running on them. The latest Android version is 6.0 Marshmallow, while Apple launched iOS 9 and a few updates in the meantime. In order to get to know these platforms better and to find out what new features they brought, check out this article.
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The Android 6.0 Marshmallow update is yet to be available for non-Nexus devices. Various smartphone manufacturers like Samsung, Sony and Motorola have announced the list of smartphones from the respective companies that will receive the Android 6.0 upgrade. Motorola is likely to make the upgrade available first to its 2015 devices such as Moto X Pure Edition (Moto X Style), Moto X Play, Moto G (Gen 3) and Moto E.
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Google today announced that over 19,000 organizations are now either testing, deploying or using its Android for Work service.
Android for Work makes it easier and safer for businesses to allow their employees to bring their own Android devices to work. It separates business apps from personal apps. Thanks to this, the IT department still retains control of its data and apps, while the employee can still play Angry Birds on the device, too. This program, which Google first previewed at its I/O developer conference in 2014, officially launched in February of this year.
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“With the Libyan High National Elections Commission (HNEC) and consultative support from the United Nations Support Mission to Libya, we have open sourced their elections management platform today under a permissive Apache 2.0 license,” read a blog post published by Caktus Group. “Open sourcing means other governments and organizations can freely adopt and adapt the elections tools which cover nine functional areas. The tools range from SMS voter registration, the first of its kind, to bulk alerts to voters and call center support software,” read the statement.
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A timetable for those negotiations has not been set. But election officials are starting to prepare. Libyans can now register to vote and receive election updates from their homes thanks to a new text messaging system created by a digital consultancy group in the United States. Smart Elect, designed by Caktus Group, a technology firm based in Durham, North Carolina, is a free open source platform that can be used by anyone to build an SMS [short message service] voter registration system as well as the tools needed before, during and after an election to support it.
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Then, five years later, at 24, I founded TuxWeb with a mission to solve clients’ problems using open source technology. Creating a startup has been fun (even here in Italy where funding does not come so easily), and in 2011 I cofounded a second startup with Luca Garulli, the creator of OrientDB, called NuvolaBase.
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Blockchain consortium The Distributed Ledger Group (DLG), which is managed by R3CEV expects to license its technology as open sourced by early next year, according to R3CEV officials.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Check out “What’s New” and “Known Issues” for this version of Firefox below. As always, you’re encouraged to tell us what you think, or file a bug in Bugzilla. If interested, please see the complete list of changes in this release.
We’d also like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox!
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As we wrote previously, we think it’s important for users to be able to protect themselves from non-consensual online tracking. That’s why we created Privacy Badger, which enforces Do Not Track around the Web. But it’s also important for browser vendors to join in the fight to protect user privacy. Mozilla has done just that with today’s announcement.
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We’re releasing a powerful new feature in Firefox Private Browsing called Tracking Protection. We created this feature because we believe in giving you more choice and control over your Web experience. With the release of Tracking Protection in Firefox Private Browsing we are leading the industry by giving you control over the data that third parties receive from you online. No other browser’s Private Browsing mode protects you the way Firefox does—not Chrome, not Safari, not Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Finally, Gnocchi 1.3.0 is out. This is our final release, more or less matching the OpenStack 6 months schedule, that concludes the Liberty development cycle.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation’s Italo Vignoli today announced two LibreOffice updates. These two minor number bug fix updates cover the Fresh and Still branches of LibreOffice and user are advised to upgrade. Fedora 23 was officially released to the general public today and folks have been talking about that. Phoronix reported today that Debian had moved to rootless X server instances and Mozilla announced a new privacy feature for Firefox.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source/Openwashing
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BSD
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Want to run something other than Linux on a ARM 64-bit server? Soon you can: a small software company has shown FreeBSD running on a 96-core server.
Semihalf, which is based in Poland, demonstrated a beta version of FreeBSD running on a server board built with Cavium’s ThunderX processors. That’s the first hardware based on ARM’s 64-bit processors to run FreeBSD.
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Or everything I didn’t know about unix. The OpenBSD source tree has lots of example code for solving any number of problems, but I like to do things my own way. Occasionally this means something gets overlooked. A few examples. Previous thoughts on rewrites and reuse: out with the old, in with the less and hoarding and reuse.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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A group of 15 schools in rural areas in Denmark, Italy, Greece, Macedonia (FYROM), Spain, and the United Kingdom are using open source software solutions for learning, teaching and working together. An EU-funded consortium of research institutes and public administrations has developed and trialled software specifically for rural schools.
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The management tools for Andalucia’s standard corporate desktop, GECOS – Guadalinex Escritorio COrporativo eStandar, is ready for reuse by others, companies and public administrations alike, says Juan Conde, head of the free software promotion project of the Andalusian Ministry of Finance and Public Administration. “The potential user base outside of the Junta de Andalucía is huge.”
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The software was designed to run on the Debian and Ubuntu free software distribution, but can be adapted to other distro’s such as Redhat and CentOS with little effort, he says. At the moment, GECOS is of limited use for managing proprietary desktops, says Conde, “until someone adds the equivalent management policies.”
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An agreement has been reached between the Cabinet Office and software firm Collabora Productivity, for the provision of a new range of open source applications for desktop, mobile and cloud.
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Pessimistic economists have predicted overpopulation problems based on exponential growth trends, but statistics point to lower birth rates as countries become more industrialized. So now, there’s a different kind of problem — aging populations and minimal population growth in certain countries. How will we deal with people living longer and having fewer and fewer kids?
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Security
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FreeIPA’s X.509 PKI features (based on Dogtag Certificate System) continue to be an area of interest for users and customers. In this post I summarise recently-added PKI features in FreeIPA, work in progress, and what we plan to do in future releases. Then I will outline my personal vision for what the future of PKI in FreeIPA should look like, noting how it will address pain points and limitations of the existing architecture.
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That is one of the most common questions that we get when a new CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) appears. We explain SELinux as a technology for process isolation to mitigate attacks via privilege escalation.
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In April 2015 we took a look at a years worth of branded vulnerabilities, separating out those that mattered from those that didn’t. Six months have passed so let’s take this opportunity to update the report with the new vulnerabilities that mattered across all Red Hat products.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The onset of the rainy season in Indonesia brings hope of extinguishing forest fires that have raged for weeks, spawning both an environmental and political crisis in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.
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Conservative media outlets are wrongly claiming that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is hiding data related to a recent study that challenged the so-called “pause” in global warming, and echoing Republican House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith’s baseless accusation that NOAA manipulated temperature records to show a warming trend. In reality, the NOAA study’s data is publicly available online, and NOAA routinely makes adjustments to historical temperature records that are peer-reviewed and necessary to account for changes to measuring instruments and other factors.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Filkins apparently intended to write a journalistic portrait of Nisman and the disputed circumstances in which he died of a gunshot wound last January, rather than to explore the case itself. But in order to write such a portrait, Filkins had to deal with the evidence Nisman used in his AMIA indictment, and Filkins stumbled badly in writing about those issues.
Filkins’ failure goes to the root of a systemic problem of news media coverage of Iran and many other issues. Certain narratives about episodes and issues in recent history have become so unanimously accepted among political and media elites as to be virtually unchallengeable in media reporting. Such narratives have been repeated in one form or another for so many years that reporters simply would not think to question them for a moment, much less actually investigate their truth.
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Privacy
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If it was good enough for them… it’s pretty ridiculous that we’re still having this debate now. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve heard from a few different folks who have insisted that there are bills sitting in drawers ready to go to “ban encryption” (not just backdoor it), and that’s so ridiculous in a world where encryption is used all the time and is a key driver of how we all live. But it’s even more ridiculous when you understand how often it’s been used throughout history.
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It’s been a rough few weeks for legal challenges to NSA surveillance. First, a federal district court in Maryland dismissed a lawsuit brought by the ACLU challenging the NSA’s Upstream surveillance of the Internet backbone. Then, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant the ACLU a preliminary injunction against the NSA’s bulk telephone records program, despite having previously found that the program was illegal. Essentially washing its hands of the case, the court refused to even consider the ACLU’s arguments that the phone records program is unconstitutional because the program will stop in its current form at the end of November.
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Communications companies will be required to store records of customers’ phone and internet use for 12 months in long-awaited measures overhauling the laws on surveillance by the state being published today.
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has dropped several measures from legislation – dubbed the “Snooper’s Charter” – which was blocked by the Liberal Democrats in the Coalition government.
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Protecting members of Parliament from mass surveillance by bulk collection is “exceedingly simple”, according to the US co-inventor of the high technology devices and programs now used by GCHQ to intercept optical fibre cables carrying Internet data in and out of Britain.
Bill Binney, formerly Technical Director of the NSA’s Operations Directorate, dismissed as “absolute horseshit” claims by government lawyers to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), reported in an adjudication last month, that “there is so much data flowing along the pipe” that “it isn’t intelligible at the point of interception”.
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Theresa May is to propose a major extension of the surveillance state when she publishes legislation requiring internet companies to store details of every website visited by customers over the previous year.
The home secretary will try to sweeten the pill of her revived snooper’s charter on Wednesday by announcing that the police will need to get judicial authorisation before they can access the internet connection records of an individual – something that is currently banned in the US and every European country, including Britain.
She will also try to strengthen the oversight of Britain’s surveillance by replacing the current fragmented system of three separate commissioners with an investigatory powers commissioner who will be a senior judge appointed by the prime minister on the recommendation of the lord chief justice.
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The smallest member of the Five Eyes spying alliance is rolling out a “protected disclosures” policy to enable would-be Edward Snowdens to safely blow the whistle on suspected wrongdoing by security agencies.
New Zealand’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Cheryl Gwyn, said a formal internal policy for handling protected disclosures, or “whistleblowing”, has been developed by her office in liaison with security agencies.
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The UK home secretary, Theresa May, confirmed today that the UK government will seek to force all ISPs to retain a record of your Web browsing history for the previous year, even though the existence of tools like Tor and VPNs can make such data useless. This “Internet Connection Record” will be “a record of the internet services a specific device has connected to, such as a website or instant messaging application,” and does not include details of individual Web pages visited.
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A former college math professor at James Madison University has been charged with the brutal murder of his wife in their Maryland home.
Jason Martin, 41, bludgeoned his wife, 42-year-old Carla Dee Martin, with a dumbbell while their three children slept upstairs, according to Howard County Police.
Martin was a mathematician with the National Security Agency, PEOPLE reports.
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A Maryland man has been charged with murdering his wife by allegedly bludgeoning her with a dumbbell, police say.
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A onetime division chief for the National Security Agency is expected to plead guilty this month to child abuse resulting in death, according to records filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court.
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Brian Patrick O’Callaghan had been charged in February of 2014 with first-degree murder of little Hyunsu. The boy died just several months after he was adopted by O’Callaghan and his wife, who lived in Damascus, Md.
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A former division chief within the National Security Agency is slated to plead guilty beating his three-year-old son to death, according to records filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court.
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Bad news for Apple users. A firm which describes itself as “a premium exploit acquisition platform” has just paid $1 million to undisclosed hackers to remotely jailbreaking the latest iPhone operating system – which potentially opens way for spy agencies abusing it too.
The French cybersecurity company Zerodium’s modus operandi is largely the collection of so-called zero-day vulnerabilities – holes in software unknown to the vendor which can be exploited by hackers without fear that they would be patched up.
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Hacking Apple’s iOS isn’t easy. But in the world of cybersecurity, even the hardest target isn’t impossible—only expensive. And the price of a working attack that can compromise the latest iPhone is apparently somewhere around $1 million.
On Monday, the security startup Zerodium announced that it’s agreed to pay out that seven-figure sum to a team of hackers who have successfully developed a technique that can hack any iPhone or iPad that can be tricked into visiting a carefully crafted web site. Zerodium describes that technique as a “jailbreak”—a term used by iPhone owners to hack their own phones to install unauthorized apps. But make no mistake: Zerodium and its founder Chaouki Bekrar have made clear that its customers include governments who no doubt use such “zero-day” hacking techniques on unwitting surveillance targets.
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Bamford then suggests the super-fast computers are part of the High Productivity Computing Systems program located in Oakridge, Tenn. (of Manhattan Project fame), specifically in Building 5300 according to a former senior intelligence official involved in the project interviewed by Bamford.
The official mentions that security intensified in a big way when the Building 5300 team made a huge breakthrough, adding, “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”
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A federal appeals court has denied a request to immediately halt the National Security Agency’s collection of data on Americans’ phone calls, ruling that Congress intended it to be allowed through November.
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Unsurprisingly, the Pennsylvania lawyer who tried to single-handedly challenge the Obama Administration’s surveillance infrastructure has had his case dismissed. Like similar cases, it was tossed for lack of standing.
While Elliott Schuchardt talked tough, US District Judge Cathy Bissoon found that he could not prove that he himself had been surveilled by the federal government, according to her 11-page opinion handed down in late September 2015.
Just a few weeks ago, the divorce lawyer appealed the decision to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
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In 2013, the world learned that the NSA and its UK equivalent, GCHQ, routinely spied on the German government. Amid the outrage, artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter thought: Well, if they’re listening … let’s talk to them. With antennas mounted on the roof of the Swiss Embassy in Berlin’s government district, they set up an open network that let the world send messages to US and UK spies listening nearby. It’s one of three bold, often funny, and frankly subversive works detailed in this talk, which highlights the world’s growing discontent with surveillance and closed networks.
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New legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives aims to prohibit federal, state and local government agencies from using without a warrant so-called stingrays or cell-site simulators often used to intercept mobile communications.
New legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives aims to prohibit federal, state and local government agencies from using without a warrant so-called stingrays or cell-site simulators often used to intercept mobile communications.
Stingrays or “IMSI catchers” track the location of mobile phones by mimicking cellphone towers
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Many people are guilty of over-sharing on Facebook — whether they realize it or not — and the potential consequences of what people post on social media are getting even worse.
There once was a time when the only thing at stake was your reputation, but those days are long gone. Most people are well aware of the potential risks of social media these days, and it’s no secret that a Facebook post can get you fired from a job or prevent you from getting a job in the future.
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Civil Rights
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The FBI wants to deputize the nation’s schools into its anti-terrorism posse. At this point, it’s unclear whether the program will escalate to the elaborate Rube Goldberg machinations the FBI currently employs to generate terrorism suspects (putting the “rube” back in “Rube Goldberg machinations”), but for now, it appears to be “edutainment” that applies a ridiculous metaphor with blunt force precision.
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Are there limits to what a company can put in a standard form contract, like a click-through agreement? Can a company take away its customers’ freedom of speech?
The Consumer Review Freedom Act, now pending in Congress (S.2044, H.R.2110), would limit several ways that companies attempt to keep their customers from criticizing them on the Internet.
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In August 1951, inhabitants of the picturesque French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit were suddenly tormented by terrifying hallucinations. People imagined lions and tigers were coming to eat them. A man jumped out of a window, thinking he was a dragonfly. At least seven people died, dozens were taken to the local asylum in straitjackets and hundreds were affected.
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Channel 2 reported Sunday that the information security department, part of the IDF’s intelligence force, issued a call to its officers and soldiers to beware of recruitment attempts by the CIA.
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The militarily intelligence services of Israel have reportedly warned members of the country’s defense forces about being recruited by CIA officials. Soldiers and officers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) were warned last week not to divulge important security information about plans for possible military action in the Middle East region.
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The details of the inquiry are outlined in the 2015 annual report of the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security.
The United States Senate Committee Report documented instances of torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the period between 2001 and 2009.
In her annual report, Ms Gwyn said there were a number of other countries involved with the programme – but the names were redacted.
“My decision… does not suggest or presuppose that New Zealand agencies or personnel were in any way connected with those activities.
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Voters in Seattle, Washington on Tuesday approved a first-in-the-nation “democracy voucher” ballot initiative that could serve as a national model on campaign finance reform.
Initiative 122 (I-122), which was endorsed by nearly every Seattle City Council candidate and enjoyed the support of dozens of local and national progressive groups, passed 60-40, according to the King County Elections Office.
Supporters say the innovative public campaign financing program could give everyday voters more control over the city’s elections while limiting the power of corporate and special interests.
The initiative states that for each city election cycle, or every two years, the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC) will mail four $25 vouchers to each voter. They can only be used in Seattle campaigns for mayor, city council and city attorney. The SEEC will release money to the candidates that agree to follow I-122′s rules, which include participating in three debates and accepting lower contribution and spending limits.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is building his own internet alternative called Meganet. With Meganet, he promises to offer you a way to communicate with the world without any fear of censorship and away from the continuous surveillance.
Kim Dotcom aims to do this by making a P2P-based internet service that won’t need an IP address and all the communications will be encrypted. On Thursday, in New Zealand, the Hollywood foe Kim Dotcom revealed this vision of a more secure Meganet. It should be noted that Kim is wanted in the U.S. under criminal copyright violation charges.
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For the last few years, we’ve noted a worrying trend of a few law professors, who have decided that the best way to make people nice on the internet is to do away with Section 230 of the CDA. As we’ve noted repeatedly, Section 230 of the CDA is without a doubt the most important law on the internet. The internet would be a massively different (and worse) place without it. Almost every site or service you use would be very different, and the internet would be a much more bland and sterile place. Section 230 is fairly simple. There are two key elements to it:
People cannot blame service providers for content posted by users.
Service providers who decide to moderate/delete content cannot be held liable for the content they choose not to moderate (or the content they choose to moderate).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Jay Radcliffe is a security researcher with diabetes. In 2011, he gave a talk at Black Hat, showing how his personal insulin pump could be hacked—with potentially deadly consequences.
As a result of his 2011 presentation, he worked with the Department of Homeland Security and the Food and Drug Administration to address security vulnerabilities in insulin pumps.
“The specific technical details of that research have never been published in order to protect patients using those devices,” he wrote in his testimony to the Librarian of Congress and the US Copyright Office.
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The major movie studios of the MPAA are behind the recent shutdown of the torrent site YTS, the associated release group YIFY, and the main Popcorn Time fork, PopcornTime.io. In an international effort spanning Canada and New Zealand, visits were carried out at the premises of at least two key suspects
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As Kim Dotcom’s extradition defense enters its second day, the court has heard that none of the 13 charges against the Megaupload founder are enough to extradite him to the United States. The U.S. is characterizing the alleged offenses as extraditable fraud but Dotcom’s team believes that copyright violations can not be prosecuted as such.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.03.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Linux Torvalds announced the release of Linux 4.3 yesterday with some new and improved features. Eclipsing the new kernel release was another salty post by the famous Linux founder beginning, “Christ people. This is just s**t.” In other news, a couple more Ubuntu reviews were posted and Adam Williamson has an important Fedora 23 public service announcement.
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Enrique Sevillano (age 42) is a recipient in the Sys Admin Superstar category and works as an IT manager at an energy utility company in the United States. He recently decided to move the company’s architecture to Linux. By doing so, he says, they have optimized services on old servers that otherwise would have been cost prohibitive. Enrique says Linux and open source have allowed him to deploy a high-availability virtualization infrastructure as well as affordable storage and cloud solutions.
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The new stable Linux kernel is out there supporting Intel’s Skylake and a reworked open source support platform for Nvidia graphics cards.
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Applications
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Fotoxx is an open source photo editing program, working on Linux. It has support for the most important image formats, including JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF and RAW. Fotoxx is mostly used for cropping, resizing or retouching photos, without using layers, like Photoshop.
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As part of my job at the Université Catholique de Louvain, one of my projects is to develop gCSVedit, a small and simple text editor to edit CSV files.
gCSVedit is now a free/libre software (GPLv3+ license) and is currently hosted on GitHub.
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As you may know, PhotoFlow is an open-source, non-destructive photo editing software for adjusting photos from RAW images to high-quality printing.
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As you may know, Simple Screen Recorder is a screen recorder application, with support for X11 and OpenGL. Having a simple and intuitive GUI built by using the Qt libraries, it enables the users to easily record both the entire screen (having multi-monitor support also) or parts of it only, or OpenGL applications.
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Containerbuddy is a shim written in Go to help make it easier to containerize existing applications. It can act as PID1 in the container and fork/exec the application. If the application exits then so does Containerbuddy.
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This release of Mejiro is all about fixing minor problems and annoyances. As you may know, in order to display photos, Mejiro must generate thumbnails for all uploaded photos. Depending on the number of photos and hardware, this task can take considerable time during which the entire app “stalls.” This may give the impression that the app is either unreachable or non-functional. To avoid this, the new version of the app displays notifications when it is generating thumbnails.
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To provide an insight into the quality of software available for Linux, I feature below 5 excellent open source web proxy tools. Some of the them are full-featured; a couple of them have very modest resource needs.
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Proprietary
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Bomgar, a leader in secure remote support and access management solutions, today released Bomgar Remote Support 15.2, the latest version of its enterprise-leading remote support software.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I know it’s an advert, but sometimes adverts really are quite nice. ZOTAC now seems to be stepping up their SteamOS Steam Machine hype with a trailer for their NEN unit.
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I have to hand it to Alienware as they really are trying to do a push for their Steam Machine units, we have another video to show off, this time from Trisha Hershberger.
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Euro Fishing immerses you deep into the adrenaline-packed action, fun and beauty of Europe’s most famous lakes. Sounds okay, and the graphics look quite nice too.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Cinnamon is a relatively new desktop environment from the same developers responsible for Linux Mint, a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, and Linux Mint Debian Edition, also a desktop distribution based on Debian.
Cinnamon 2.8 is the latest edition, just released yesterday November 2 2015.
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The Linux Mint developers have finally released the stable version of the Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment. It’s a huge release, and all users of this desktop environment are in for a treat.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Back in 4.x we provided two binaries for KWin: one compiled against OpenGL (kwin) and one compiled against OpenGL ES (kwin_gles). The reason for that is that one can only reasonably link either OpenGL or OpenGL ES and OpenGL ES is only a subset of OpenGL, so one needs to hide the OpenGL calls (especially the OpenGL 1 calls).
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I can’t say that she was a close friend, but we knew each other since way back in time. She was a constant companion in search of good food and during several free software conferences, she and I took the lead of a group of hackers, finding them nourishment for the night and day ahead. So I was saddened today to learn that Telsa Gwynne has passed away.
My first exchange with Telsa was around Christmas of 1998. We were talking about Christmas gifts, and whether Alan Cox, her husband, wouldn’t like to get a nice printout of RFC-1149, the “Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers”. Little did we know at the time that Alan would later support a group of Norwegian hackers in actually implementing that very specification!
Telsa never had an easy time in the free software community. From the very early days when we started talking, she was frequently and repeatedly abused by people trying to use her to get to her husband. Over the years, she withstood harassment and abuse of almost any sort from people in the free software community. She got to witness first hand the darkest corners of our community and the worst kind of people anyone can ever imagine.
Some of Telsa’s contribution to the free software community before that included a lot of work on explaining GNOME to people. She served on the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors, contributed translations and wrote comprehensive FAQs about both GNOME and the GNOME Foundation.
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On 2015-10-04 it was announced that the governing body of the GNOME Foundation, the Board, has a vacant seat. That body was elected about 15 weeks earlier. The elections are very democratic, they use an STV system to make as many votes as possible count. So far, no replacement has been officially announced. The question of what strategy to use in order to find the replacement has been left unanswered. Let me summarise the facts and comment on the strategy I wish the GNOME project to follow.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Arch Family
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The Manjaro Community announced, through the voice of Stefano Capitani, the maintainer of Manjaro-Budgie, that a new version of the Budgie flavor has been released and is now ready for download.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Opensuse Leap 42.1 should be available on Wednesday Nov. 4th. So here are a few notes that some readers might find useful.
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Red Hat Family
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Deutsche Bank’s Karl Keirstead upgraded the rating on the company from Hold to Buy, while raising the price target from $75 to $90.
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Deutsche Bank upgraded Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) from Hold to Buy. Red Hat shares closed at $80.14 on Monday.
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Fedora
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As of today, the Fedora Project is proud to announce the new Fedora Developer Portal. The Developer Portal supports developers working on software projects with Fedora as their primary operating system or inside a virtual machine. It helps them install essential development tools, language runtimes, and databases. It also introduces distribution and deployment options using COPR and OpenShift.
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It’s (approximately) Halloween, so you know what that means — new Fedora! The Fedora 23 release is here, and it’s better than ever before. We’re pleased to bring you the latest incarnations of the three main Fedora editions — Fedora Workstation, Fedora Cloud, and Fedora Server, each built with love by the Fedora community to custom-fit your needs in different areas. Fedora 23 is also available in alternate desktop Spins, curated software Labs, and special images for the ARM processor architecture.
If that’s all you need to hear, download from https://getfedora.org/, or if you already use Fedora, follow the simple upgrade steps. Otherwise, read on for details.
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Fedora 23 Workstation is now released. It’s a reliable, user-friendly, and powerful operating system aimed at home users, hobbyists, students, and software developers. Fedora 23 Workstation features the latest GNOME 3.18 release courtesy of the GNOME community. This release of GNOME includes updates to the Files browser, and the new Calendar and Todo applications. Fedora 23 Workstation is the first release of Fedora to include LibreOffice 5.
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Not all Linux distributions are created equal. The focus of its maintainers can vary wildly, leading to very different experiences. I still insist that there are too many distros, leading to confusion and resources being spread too thin, but c’est la vie.
Today, my favorite Linux distro, Fedora — which is also the operating system of choice for Linus Torvalds — reaches a new milestone. Yes, Fedora 23 is finally here and it comes with Linux kernel 4.2. If you are a fan of open source, security, frequently updated packages and free-software ideology, this is the Linux-based operating system for you.
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Fedora 23 is now hitting the streets and has been officially released. You’ll likely want to upgrade your system. If you’ve upgraded from past Fedora releases, you’re likely familiar with the fedup tool. However, Fedora 23 features a new release method using some of the perks provided by the dnf package manager introduced in Fedora 21. To upgrade to Fedora 23, you will use the DNF system upgrade plugin. Using this plugin will make your upgrade to Fedora 23 simple and easy.
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Dunno how many of you know but Just in time was invented in Japan. Same way FAD day 1 started just in time as planned Everyone was at meeting points at the time. Information about G11N FAD available at Wiki.
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To win new users and later on new contributors, you have to go locally and that means also to translate Fedora to the local language. For Cambodia and his language khmer we had no translation since Fedora Core 6. We planned since last year to re-initiate the translation for this language, it took as some time to arrange everything, getting the mailing list setup, making the wiki pages and so on.
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Debian Family
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The work is not yet entirely over us for Roland and I, since we’re now busy updating the French translation of the book. It should be available in the upcoming weeks. Keep posted!
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Derivatives
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This release fixes numerous security issues. All users must upgrade as soon as possible.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Distro time! After a quiet distro slayin’ period here in Dedowood, we embark on the great hunt once more, and we pay an excessive amount of time to Ubuntu and its derivatives, starting with the original beast. If you’ve followed my reviews lately, you know that I found Trusty to be excellent, and Vivid was also rather cool.
Let’s see what the latest in the series can do. Our test machine will be Lenovo G50, which comes with the modern obstacles of multi-boot, Windows 10, UEFI, Secure Boot, and other things that make Linux folks raise a skeptical brow. Let us.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu comes with a couple of different flavors which are largely defined by the desktop environment that’s included in the each flavor, and by the default set of software applications included, to some extent.
While there are about nine flavors (official), targeting various kinds of end-users, I thought making a comparison of the three major flavors, specifically concerning their performance (since I’m more of a technically oriented individual, plus you can easily find their various new features on most other websites anyway), namely Ubuntu 15.10 (Unity desktop 7.3.2), Kubuntu 15.10 (KDE Plasma 5.4.0) and Ubuntu Gnome 15.10 (GNOME Shell 3.16) would come in handy for someone who’s trying to decide which to use.
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Aaeon’s rugged, Linux-ready “Boxer-6404” industrial controller offers quad- or dual-core Bay Trail SoCs, plus four GbE ports and -20 to 60°C operation.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The IoTivity project has recently reached an important milestone – its 1.0.0 release, which includes Getting Started instructions for Tizen.
IoTivity is the reference implementation for the work of the Open Interconnect Consortium, who are defining a standard and a certification program for the device-to-device connectivity needs of the Internet of Things (IOT).
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Android
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Sundar Pichai, the new CEO of Google under Larry Page’s Alphabet, even dropped a hint about Chrome OS and Android’s future during Google’s last earnings call. Pichai said that “mobile as a computing paradigm is eventually going to blend with what we think of as desktop today.”
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Since it first appeared in Apple’s App Store last year, the free encrypted calling and texting app Signal has become the darling of the privacy community, recommended—and apparently used daily—by no less than Edward Snowden himself. Now its creator is bringing that same form of ultra-simple smartphone encryption to Android.
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These days we’re spending more time than ever on our smartphones. Despite this trend, there is still a lot of work that gets done on our desktop PCs. In this article, I’ll share some Android applications that you can use to remotely access your desktop computer.
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Following Android Alpha and Android Beta, Google has always named its Android OS updates after sweet treats, and in alphabetical order. So far we’ve had Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop and Marshmallow.
Next in line is Android ‘N’, sure to be a sweet treat, but Google won’t reveal the operating system’s full name until the second half of 2016.
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The Huawei Watch is the best Android Wear smartwatch yet and one of the best cross-platform smartwatches. It easily passes as a traditional watch while providing access to information and notifications on your wrist.
It isn’t a standout “look at me” piece of technology, which is good if you’re more interested in function and classic design than showing off, and is comfortable to wear. The higher resolution sapphire screen is the best available at the moment and the battery lasted two days in my testing with the screen on all the time.
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Slack is a popular team communications application for organizations that offers group chat and direct messaging for mobile, web, and desktop platforms. While Slack offers many benefits to customers, there are also downsides to using the platform, including high subscription fees and the risk of a massive leak of private data if Slack’s servers are ever breached (again).
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I’ve noticed that more and more projects are using things like Slack as the chat medium for their open source projects. In the past couple of days alone, I’ve been directed to Slack for Babel and Bootstrap. I’d like to try and curb this phenomenon before it takes off any more.
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Business problems today are too big for any one person to solve. Agile teams are much more effective at solving problems than are lone geniuses. So why do we still reward the smartest people in the room more so than those who excel at working with others? You know who I’m talking about: the people who brazenly take over meetings by showing off how much they know or how witty they can be at the expense of any other voice in the room—and who often end up getting all of the boss’s attention.
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This article provides an overview of free and open source software (FOSS) that may be of use to students and researchers in academia, based on my own experience in psychology studies.
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Open source software is being seen increasingly as a viable option for CIOs seeking to drive innovation, build platforms, increase agility and cut costs in the enterprise, but barriers to adopting open source remain to IT executives seeking to put together a business case to using open source applications.
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Will your car be controlled by open source software one day? Ericsson Research is taking this question seriously, with the help of the open source Restlet Framework project, where a simple text message can turn on the air conditioning before you walk back to your car.
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Are you a mentor? Or, maybe you’re someone who identifies as a bridge builder, just looking for the right opportunity to help someone out—because working in tech can, well, be hard sometimes.
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Chef, the workflow automation tool company, has announced the general availability of its DevOps tool Chef Delivery. The product was initially launched in April.
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Over on PaulGraham News, there’s an ongoing discussion about using Slack for FOSS projects. It’s interesting but almost entirely focuses on the technical and UX aspects of why IRC has failed, while ignoring what is in my opinion the most important aspects of a chat platform: The social aspects.
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Events
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Back from OpenStack Summit in Tokyo. It was really a interesting conference with many interesting meetings, a lot interesting talks and also events.
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The Creative Commons Summit, a bi-annual meeting of members of the CC network and friends of the Commons, took place in mid-October in Seoul, South Korea. One of the event’s tracks was devoted to copyright reform advocacy. The track was organised by member organisations of Communia, including Creative Commons.
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MINIX has been around now for about 30 years so it is (finally) time for the MINIXers to have a conference to get together, just as Linuxers and BSDers have been doing for a long time. The idea is to exchange ideas and experiences among MINIX 3 developers and users as well as discussing possible paths forward now that the ERC funding is over. Future developments will now be done like in any other volunteer-based open-source project. Increasing community involvement is a key issue here. Attend or give a presentation.
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I’m quite excited by this event as it is the first time two succesful and longstanding events in Paris have merged: Linux Solutions on the one hand and the well known Open World Forum. The venue is worth a look as well: the Docks are the rehabilitated industrial area just north of Paris and close to the Stade de France.
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OpenStack summit Tokyo anyone? I’ve been there and thought it was a very well organized event, in a nice location. Every minute together with peers seemed worth it to me. This said, let’s talk about the actual sessions. I spent most of my time at the TripleO and Heat sessions, with a little detour on Magnum. Plus some booth crawling.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The OpenStack community gathered in Tokyo to learn about the latest developments in the open-source cloud world, including the upcoming Mitaka release.
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Software Defined Networking (SDN) vendor Midokura first open-sourced its MidoNet technology in 2014 and hasn’t looked back since. At the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo last week, the company announced an update to its Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) platform and participated actively in Summit sessions.
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IBM acquired privately-held managed OpenStack vendor Blue Box in June of this year. Now barely six months later, Blue Box is out with a new solution and the company’s founder is aggressively hiring major talent in the OpenStack developer space. Proudman has managed to attract 55 people to help IBM build out its OpenStack cloud efforts.
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I’ve attended the summit mainly to discuss and follow-up new developments on Ceilometer, Gnocchi, Aodh and Oslo. It has been a pretty good week and we were able to discuss and plan a few interesting things. Below are what I found remarkable during this summit concerning those projects.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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28 October 2015 – The Apache OpenOffice project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of OpenOffice 4.1.2. You can download it from the official website http://www.openoffice.org/download
Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2 brings stability fixes, bug fixes and enhancements. All users of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.1 or earlier are advised to upgrade.
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The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.0.3 “fresh”, the 4th release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family, and LibreOffice 4.4.6, the 7th release of the LibreOffice 4.4 family. So far, the LibreOffice 5.0 family is the most popular LibreOffice ever, based on feedback from journalists and end users.
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Business
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For any business or enterprise, objective is to improve revenue, cost efficiency, business processes, and create more agile organizations. Gartner predicts that by 2016, 99% of Global 2000 Enterprises will have incorporated Open Source Software (OSS) into their technology portfolios and half of the leading non-IT organizations would have embraced OSS.
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Semi-Open Source//Openwashing
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BSD
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Oct 2015 is the 20th anniversary of the OpenBSD source tree!
This episode is brought to you by the id utility, which returns the user identity. id appeared in 4.4 BSD.
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Public Services/Government
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The application will be published using the European Union’s public software licence, EUPL.
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Licensing
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The signers respectfully request that the commission carefully balance the important work of protecting the radio spectrum with the immeasurable value in experimentation, innovation, and freedom for law-abiding users. Additionally, the signers invite the commission and other regulatory agencies to collaborate with industry; free, open source, and proprietary software developers; and device users on developing wireless device policies and recommendations that meet the needs of regulatory agencies and protect the ability of users to inspect, modify and improve their devices.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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The entire editorial staff of the prestigious academic title Lingua have resigned in protest over the high cost of subscribing to the journal, and the refusal of the journal’s publisher, Elsevier, to convert the title completely to open access. The open access model allows anyone, whether an academic or not, to read a journal online for free. Currently, most academic journals are funded by subscriber payments; with open access journals, the model is flipped around, with institutions paying to publish their papers.
As Inside Higher Ed reports, the academics who have made Lingua into one of the top journals in its field through their editorial work all gave up their roles after telling Elsevier of the “frustrations of libraries reporting that they could not afford to subscribe to the journal and in some cases couldn’t even figure out what it would cost to subscribe.”
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Open Hardware
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Once again Aleph Objects finds themselves being honored by Make: by taking home the “Best Overall” award for the LulzBot TAZ 5, as well as the “Outstanding Open Source” award. According to Make: editors, the TAZ 5 was selected Best Overall because the latest iteration of the TAZ is an example of LulzBot’s ongoing “commitment to excellent engineering.” TAZ 5 was selected as Outstanding Open Source because LulzBot continues “holding true to its open source roots.”
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Programming
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If you thought Fortran and Cold War-era assembly language programming is pointless and purely for old-timers, guess again. NASA has found an engineer comfortable with the software to keep its old space-race-age systems ticking over.
In an interview with Popular Mechanics this month, the manager of NASA’s Voyager program Suzanne Dodd said the retirement of the project’s last original engineer left the space agency with a shortage of people capable of communicating with the 40-year-old craft.
Launched in 1977, the two Voyager crafts rely on mid-1970s hardware controlled by purpose-built General Electric interrupt-driven processors. After 38 years in space, the two probes are on the outer fringes of the Sun’s influence, heading into interstellar space.
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Standards/Consortia
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The German Federal Office for Information Security (‘Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik’, BSI) has joined the FIDO Alliance, an industry consortium working on open standards for easier and secure online authentication technologies, the two organisations announced in early October.
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The Harvard Law professor and internet pioneer launched his campaign just after Labor Day, and from the start, it was clear that to call his bid quixotic was to sell Cervantes’ protagonist short. Lessig said he was running to win the Democratic nomination, but of course it was clear that his candidacy was more of a classic protest run. Having focused strongly on campaign-finance reform in recent years—including in a string of Atlantic articles—he made passing the Citizens Equality Act of 2017, which would enact universal voting registration, campaign-finance limits, and anti-gerrymandering provisions, the single issue of his candidacy.
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Ever since Larry Lessig announced his campaign for the Presidency a few months ago, we noted that it wasn’t just a long shot, but seemed more like a gimmick to get the (very real) issue of political corruption into the debates. I like Larry quite a bit and support many of his efforts, but this one did seem kind of crazy. I’m glad that he’s willing to take on crazy ideas to see if they’ll work, because that’s how real change eventually comes about, but the whole thing did seem a bit quixotic. That said, the last thing I expected was that the Democratic Party would be so scared of him as to flat out lie and change the rules to keep his ideas from reaching the public. Yet, that’s what it did, and because of that, Lessig has dropped his campaign for the Presidency.
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How the Supreme Court built a monster out of America’s campaign finance law.
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At the time social media offered a way for new political voices to be heard, and BorisWatch was one of those new voices: informed, focused, critical, often witty, and always happy to engage.
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Science
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George Boole was a British mathematician whose work on logic laid many of the foundations for the digital revolution. The Lincolnshire-born academic is widely heralded as one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th century, devising a system of logic that aimed to condense complex thoughts into simple equations. His development of ‘Boolean logic’ paved the way for the computer age.
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Security
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Last week, CIA director John O. Brennan became the latest victim of what’s become a popular way to embarrass and harass people on the Internet. A hacker allegedly broke into his AOL account and published e-mails and documents found inside, many of them personal and sensitive.
It’s called doxing — sometimes doxxing — from the word “documents.” It emerged in the 1990s as a hacker revenge tactic, and has since been as a tool to harass and intimidate people on the Internet. Someone would threaten a woman with physical harm, or try to incite others to harm her, and publish her personal information as a way of saying “I know a lot about you — like where you live and work.” Victims of doxing talk about the fear that this tactic instills. It’s very effective, by which I mean that it’s horrible.
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A THIRD SUSPECT in the TalkTalk hack has been released on police bail, as the telco provides more information about the scale of the attack, claiming that it was smaller than first thought.
A 27-year-old man was arrested and released in Staffordshire under the Computer Misuse Act, as officers from several forces continue to close the net on the cyber criminals responsible.
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And yeah, Heartbleed and Shellshock turned out to be much less of a threat than the tech world predicted. However, in various forums and other places where tech folks choose to hang out, Windows folks had a field day with all variants of “told-ya-so.” I pictured server admins running in circles with their hands flailing in the air, shouting that Armageddon was indeed here.
[...]
Fortunately, that rootkit was discovered fairly soon by Mark Russinovich, co-founder of Winternals. After the disclosure, Microsoft didn’t waste any time moving toward the acquisition of Russinovich’s company, although for complete disclosure, Russinovich had been offered a job by Microsoft years before. It is suggested in some circles that Microsoft purchased the company so quickly in order to quell the entire Microsoft/Sony duplicity rumors, as some believe that Microsoft would have to know about the rootkit, given how deeply it burrowed into Redmond’s proprietary code.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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One after another, our citizens are being killed, but we are yet to see a proactive approach from the government. Maybe they don’t realise that the blogger killings are damaging the country’s stability. What the government must understand is that by killing the bloggers and publishers, the extremists are actually killing freedom of speech and freedom of expression. The question is: why is the government unable to look at this in a broader perspective? They should be looking at it in a much more strategic way.
Terming these as“isolated incidents” is one way of depoliticising them. Such statements will only embolden the terrorists to carry out more attacks. This government was involved in the Liberation War, so they must know how guerrilla tactics work. Terrorist attacks are always isolated incidents. The main point is whether or not the government is willing to take anti-terrorist strategies.
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The horrific cycle of killing of secular bloggers in Bangladesh, which has already claimed at least four lives this year, and the fresh murder of publisher Faisal Arefin Dipon, in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, on October 31, is deeply disconcerting. The Ansar al-Islam, an Islamic extremist group, which identifies as the local affiliate of al-Qaeda, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
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Two businessmen who had published the works of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American known for his critical writings on religious extremism, were stabbed on Saturday by groups of men in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, the police said. The attack came eight months after Mr. Roy was himself stabbed to death with machetes.
One of the publishers, Faisal Arefin Dipan, died of his wounds immediately, the police said. The other, Ahmed Rahim Tutul, was in critical condition late Saturday.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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THE annual haze that blankets swathes of South-East Asia usually begins to recede in October. This year however the smoggy conditions—caused by fires set to clear farmland in rural Indonesia—only got worse. On October 26th Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president, cut short a state visit to America to handle the crisis, which has become one of the worst in memory. With the onset of this year’s rainy season delayed by the “El Niño” weather cycle, it could be a month or more before all flames are doused.
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NPR executive editor Edith Chapin and ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen agree it is “unfortunate” that NPR has thus far failed to cover groundbreaking reports documenting that ExxonMobil funded efforts to sow doubt about climate science for decades after confirming that burning fossil fuels causes climate change.
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Morning Joe’s interview “exclusive, first-ever joint interview” with industrialists Charles and David Koch was full of softball questions and worshipful praise. They also gave the Koch brothers a pass for claiming they oversee one of “the safest and environmentally protective” companies. The fawning interview follows months of pro-Koch coverage by the MSNBC hosts.
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Finance
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Sweden is shaping up to be the first country to plunge its citizens into a fascinating — and terrifying — economic experiment: negative interest rates in a cashless society.
The Swedish central bank held its benchmark interest rate at -0.35% today, the level it has been at since July.
Although retail banks have yet to pass on that negative to rate to Swedish consumers, the longer it’s held there the more financial pressure there is for banks to pass the costs onto their customers. That’s a problem because Sweden is the closest country on the planet to becoming an all-electronic cashless society.
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Privacy
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It seems Google does record audio from microphones all the time, despite attempts to play down the situation. The “hotword” searching – when you initiate a search by saying “Ok Google” – has been criticized before, when it was downloaded to open-source browsers running Chromium. However, major privacy concerns remain as Google doesn’t start recording when you say “Ok Google”; it was recording before you said the hotword.
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We require people to use the name on Facebook that their friends and family know them by, and we’ll continue to do so.
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Proposals in the UK’s imminent Snooper’s Charter, which would allow police and security forces access to everyone’s Web browsing history, have been dropped, according to The Guardian. In a statement, “senior sources” in the UK government apparently said that “rather than increasing intrusive surveillance, the [Investigatory Powers] bill would bar police and security services from accessing people’s browsing histories,” and that “any access to internet connection records will be strictly limited and targeted.” The Guardian also claims that other controversial options for the Investigatory Powers Bill, due to be published on Wednesday, have been shelved.
These include the suggestion that companies would be restricted or perhaps banned from using encryption, and the requirement that UK telecoms would have to capture and store Internet traffic originating from US companies in order to allow UK intelligence agencies to access them even if the companies refused to hand over the data.
However, as many experts have pointed out, neither idea was feasible: online business would become impossible without encryption, and end-to-end encryption means that storing traffic from US-based companies would be largely useless anyway.
These facts raise the possibility that the UK government’s latest “climbdown” is actually nothing of the sort; rather, it would appear that the UK government has been feeding journalists exaggerated stories of what might be the Snooper’s Charter, so that it could then appear to back down graciously in the face of the inevitable outrage those ideas generated.
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Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to under the Investigatory Powers Bill
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The bulk collection of communications data without targeted suspicion is mass surveillance. The bulk collection of global communications data should end. Surveillance should be targeted, necessary and proportionate.
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Civil Rights
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It was a huge victory. We were up against a powerful billionaire and we won. But it came at a great cost: at least $2.5 million for us and our insurer, and $650,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for Mother Jones, to be precise. Everyone’s been asking whether we can recoup our attorney’s fees from VanderSloot, but unfortunately the answer is no.
The win means a lot to me, personally, too. As someone who writes about rich and powerful people, it’s good to know that the First Amendment is alive and well. And it makes me beyond proud to write for Mother Jones: Not too many other shops would have had the guts to fight back, but we knew you’d expect us to, and that you’d have our back if we took a stand.
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A US paramedic has reportedly been suspended without pay for making an “unauthorised” stop to try to save the life of a choking little girl.
Qwasie Reid, an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) in New York City, was transporting a nursing home patient to a doctor’s appointment in an ambulance last week when he was flagged down by a “frantic man” near a Brooklyn school who said a student was choking.
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Back in 2011, we wrote about a troubling ruling in the Supreme Court in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the case which basically said that it’s perfectly fine for businesses to put in place “binding arbitration” clauses, that take away people’s rights to take a company to court over some sort of wrongdoing. As I noted at the time, ever since taking a series of classes on arbitration in college, I’ve been fascinated with the process, which sounds like a good idea. But it’s yet another case where theory and reality don’t necessarily match up.
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Quick–who’s missing from this New York Times chart (11/2/15)?
The point of the chart, based on one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that US non-Hispanic whites aged 45-54 have a rising mortality rate, unlike the similarly aged groups included for comparison purposes: Hispanics in the US, and people in France, Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia and Sweden.
The most obvious omission is African-Americans, who make up about 12 percent of the US population. They are left out of the chart not because they don’t support the point—they, too, have a falling death rate in the 45-54 demographic, unlike US whites—but presumably because they would require a larger graph, since the black mortality rate is still well above whites in this age group: 582 vs. 415 per 100,000.
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AT exactly 5 p.m. on March 13, 2007, just as I was preparing to leave my cubicle in Washington for the day, I got a phone call from the journalist Jonathan Landay of McClatchy Newspapers. To this day, I remember his exact words.
“One of your congressman’s constituents is being held in an Ethiopian intelligence service prison, and I think your former employer is neck-deep in this.”
The congressman was Rush Holt, then a Democratic representative from New Jersey, for whom I worked for 10 years starting in 2004. The constituent was Amir Mohamed Meshal of Tinton Falls, N.J., who alleges that he was illegally taken to Ethiopia, where he was threatened with torture by American officials. My “former employer” was the Central Intelligence Agency, but it soon became apparent that the agency “neck-deep in this” was the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Facebook has been trying to get India to fall in love with its Free Basics service for several months since it launched in February. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even visited the capital of New Delhi last week and attempted to address concerns about it during a Townhall Q&A session.
But he still doesn’t get why Indians are opposed to the social network’s zero-rating service.
More than 330,000 people signed a petition to oppose zero-rating and uphold net neutrality principles in the country and numerous Web and media companies dropped off Facebook’s offering in support of the initiative.
Zuckerberg still thinks that Free Basics will serve India well, and believes that campaigns against it don’t factor in the benefits it brings to those who are still offline.
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In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices. Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail journal – “postjournal” in Norwegian) is public information and thanks to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages. The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal – OEP) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting journal entries .
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The World Trade Organization is poised to announce this Friday its approval of a limited 17-year extension of a 2001 waiver of obligations in the TRIPS Agreement, set to expire at the end of this year, the terms of which exempt Least Developed Countries (LDCs) from requirements to grant patents or related intellectual property rights on pharmaceutical products.
The decision to grant the 17-year waiver represents a compromise between the United States, which had asked for a ten-year waiver, and Least Developed Countries, which wanted an indefinite extension of the waiver that would have lasted for as long as a country remained least developed per UN classification. An indefinite waiver would have been a clear victory for LDCs, as it would have recognized their needs above the United States’ continuing promotion of more restrictive intellectual property rules.
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Copyrights
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Lawyers for Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom accused the United States of misrepresenting evidence and of trying to “contort the law” in a bid to persecute their client.
This is do-or-die time for Dotcom and three other former Megaupload execs at the now defunct Megaupload. On Monday, their attorneys began arguments at an extradition hearing in Auckland on why the New Zealand government should not hand them over to the United States on criminal copyright violations.
The US Department of Justice claimed in a 2012 indictment that Megaupload’s leadership generated $175 million by helping users pirate movies, and wants them brought to the US to stand trial.
The hearing began with at least one serious allegation made by Dotcom’s lawyer, Ron Mansfield. The way Mansfield tells it, either DOJ attorneys speak very poor German or they intentionally misrepresented the meaning of Dotcom’s internal communications to blacken his image before the public and the court.
Throughout the six-week hearing, New Zealand prosecutors, arguing on behalf of the United States, have told presiding Judge Nevin Dawson that Dotcom referred to himself and several other former Megaupload managers as “evil.”
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After proceedings began in September, Kim Dotcom began his extradition hearing defense in New Zealand today. His legal team argued that U.S. prosecutors cherry-picked evidence, intentionally mis-translated discussions to make the entrepreneur look bad, and created criminal liability for service providers where none exists.
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The RIAA is asking a New York federal court to issue a default judgment against the ‘reincarnation’ of the defunct Grooveshark music service. The record labels are demanding more than $13 million in piracy damages plus another $4 million for willful counterfeiting.
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After nearly a year of debate and deliberation, the Library of Congress (LoC) has granted gamers and preservationists a limited legal method to restore access to games that are rendered unplayable thanks to defunct, abandoned authentication servers.
In new guidelines published today, the Librarian of Congress said that gamers deserve the right to continued access to “local play” on games that they paid for, even if the centralized authentication servers required for that play have been taken down. So if Blizzard, for instance, decides to take down the authentication servers required to verify a new copy of StarCraft II online, players will now be legally allowed to craft a workaround that allows the game to work on their PCs.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It is hard to remember that IBM was not exactly sitting on the sidelines when Linux swept over the datacenter in the early 2000s in the wake of the dot-com bust. Big Blue saw the rise of Linux early on, among its supercomputer customers, and it was unsure how to preserve its revenue streams from AIX and OS/400 systems while at the same time embracing Linux. Here we are 15 years later, and it looks like IBM finally has its Linux act together on Power.
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Today I have in my possession several hundred CDs, several hundred more LPs, a few 7″ 45s, a few more cassettes, and a growing number of music downloads.
I am going to focus on music in digital formats, stored somewhere on a hard drive, whether ripped from CD or purchased as downloads. Moreover, since I am a Linux kind of guy, I’m going to take a Linux kind of perspective on this topic.
But before I get into the details of digital formats, I’m going to cover some introductory material.
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IBM midrange shops have a distinction and a notoriety for being do-it-yourselfers. They like to invent, construct, and organize according to the individual characteristics of their business environments. They prefer tailor-made to off the rack. That’s why it seems open source development is well suited for the IBM i community. That and the fact that open source allows pilot testing without a purchase approval process. That’s important, too.
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I hope you all rolled your eyes a bit, because although there’s a kernel of truth there, everyone knows it takes a lot more than using Linux to be successful in IT. It takes hard work, planning, strategizing, maintaining and a thousand other things system administrators, developers and other tech folks do on a daily basis. Thankfully, Linux makes that work a little easier and a lot more fun!
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Desktop
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It isn’t just Windows and Apple Mac PCs that get new versions of their operating systems, Linux does too. Yesterday Ubuntu 15.10 was released, which saw me immediately downloading the update and installing it.
Linux is free, which means you can try it out for yourself on an old PC (or a new one if you are brave enough) and not have to worry about breaking the bank.
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If you want to try a Chromebook without spending any money, a free method from Neverware makes this easy.
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Server
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IBM introduced several significant new elements for its Linux server stack last month: support for KVM on its z Systems mainframes, Linux-only models in both the z Systems and Power Systems ranges, and a new purchasing model.
The most technically interesting new development is mainframe support for KVM, the Linux kernel’s built-in hypervisor. Although this is just a new way to access facilities that existing IBM products offer, it may help drive migration of x86 workloads onto IBM’s highest-end kit.
Big Blue’s big iron already has rich virtualisation offerings. At the lowest level, the PR/SM facility splits each machine’s resources into multiple logical partitions (LPARs), each appearing as a separate machine with a portion of the host’s processing and storage capacity. Even if the machine’s configured as a single unit, it’s really one LPAR.
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In this article, we will address some of the questions we asked in the previous story: Is IaaS or OpenStack right for every enterprise? Are there cases where you don’t need IaaS? How does it affect the cost? What things should you consider before moving to IaaS? What are the tools available?
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has detailed the launch of the Linux 4.3 kernel, a new release with significant security enhancements.
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Applications
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The new Kodi 16.0 Alpha 4 has been released today by its developers, and it looks like things are progressing nicely on all fronts.
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As you may know, KKEdit is a text editor combining Mac’s BBEdit, Gedit and Leafpad. While it has interesting features like: jump to function declaration, search and replace via regular expressions, options for saving and restoring sessions, support for multiple bookmarks and source code highlighting, it is not an IDE.
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Pascal Brachet released version 4.5 of Texmaker and I have now updated the Fedora package (for F22 and F23) to this latest version.
A new feature that is available in this new release is the ability to count the number of words in the open PDF and in the current page (using internal viewer).
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As you may know, Deluge is an open-source, multi-platform, multi-interface (GTK+, web and command-line) BitTorrent client based on libtorrent-rasterbar. The Deluge daemon can run on headless machines with the user-interfaces being able to connect remotely.
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Yet another monthly upstream Armadillo update gets us the first changes to the new the 6.* series. This was preceded by two uploads of test released to GitHub-only. These two were tested both against all reverse-dependencies as usual. A matching upload to Debian will follow shortly.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Valve has published the new Steam Hardware & Software Survey for October, and it looks like the Linux platform is continuing its rise, although it’s still not above 1.0%.
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Voxel Blast certainly caught my interest recently, as it reminds me of some really old 3D space shooter games I played as a teen, and the music is pretty damn cool too.
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With the advent of Linux powered console gaming upon us, we’ve seen a massive increase in games releasing with day-one support for Linux and more and more older games getting Linux ports. What is perhaps more surprising is how prevalent Linux support has become in crowdfunding, and lately we have even seen biggies like The Dwarves, Indivisible and First Wonder go out of their way to provide Linux versions of their games. These are games hinging on tight funding margins, so what is it that makes our small platform worth the extra effort during a busy crowdfunding campaign? We know a couple of key reasons that developers often decide to support Linux even with our small numbers.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Krita contributor Scott Petrovic has released his new book Digital Painting with Krita 2.9. This is the first book on Krita in English! At over 230 pages long, the book is packed with useful information on how Krita works!
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To view analysis results you need to be a member of KDE Coverity project. If you are not yet then please send an appropriate request in Coverity describing your role in KDE and one of KDE Coverity project admins will approve it.
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We often get confuse which Linux distribution we are going to use. We think about it a lot. It mainly depends for which purpose you are going to use Linux. Depending on your purpose, you need to select the right Linux Distribution.
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New Releases
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The Solus developers have had a very busy week, and they’ve pushed quite a few updates out the door, not to mention the first Release Candidate for the project.
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OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run the Kodi (XBMC) media player hub, has been upgraded to version 6.0 and is now ready for download.
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Manjaro 15.09 (Bellatrix) is getting a new update, and this is an important one. The developers have finally managed to get the Catalyst drivers working for Linux kernel 4.2.
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If you want to watch media in your living room or bedroom, there are many options nowadays. The easiest, of course, is to buy a box like Roku, Amazon Fire TV or the popular AppleTV. Some “smart” televisions even have this capability built in.
The more hands-on alternative, however, is to build a HTPC (home theater PC). The problem with that? Windows 10 no longer supports Media Center. While this is a huge pain-point for the HTPC community, the good news is that Linux is — once again — here to save the day. Whether you choose to build a computer, or buy a compatible device like the low-cost Raspberry Pi, the mature OpenELEC Linux distribution will give you an amazing media experience.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Arch Family
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Hundreds of people are trying to install Arch Linux on a machine at the same time in the same terminal, using a voting system to decide the next keypress.
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Red Hat Family
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Over the past few weeks, enterprise tech giant Red Hat has made announcements which makes clear the path in which the firm is travelling. The company recently acquired IT automation provider Ansible, as well as announcing membership of the Node.js Foundation as a platinum member, alongside companies such as IBM, Intel, and Microsoft among others.
The former represents a continued move towards providing DevOps capabilities for its customers, accelerating application development and smoothing out problems for the line of business. The latter is attacking a similar goal through a different method, optimising application throughput for the real-time web.
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Fedora
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All the repositories have been updated for Fedora 23, so if you trigger an update, everything should update properly. CUDA enabled programs are still building.
A few notes:
HandBrake has been updated to a pre-release of 1.0 for Fedora 23. Updated x264/x265/FFmpeg libraries should give a speed bost to all encoding operations.
The Spotify 0.9.x repository has been removed. It will never receive updates anymore, and now the 1.x builds are on feature parity, including 32 bit support. If you haven’t upgraded, just do it now.
Nvidia drivers version 358.09 do not yet support X.org driver ABI 20, so you’re probably going to have some lock ups or random issues.
The SteamOS and X-Box replacement driver have been updated to the latest upstream.
Please let me know if you have any upgrade issue.
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Over the last week or two, several folks in the wider FOSS realm have taken the Fedora Project to task, mostly if not entirely on social media, for not releasing Fedora 23 on time.
Actually, the release of the next Fedora release is on time — tomorrow, if you want to go over to the Fedora Project site and give it a download — but even if it was released “late,” the standard by which a distribution is released on time depends on one thing and one thing only.
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Hi, folks. Just wanted to get an important word out there: if you have a Fedora system running as a FreeIPA server, do NOT upgrade it to Fedora 23 yet! There are several bugs in the upgrade process and you will wind up with a broken server which requires some tricky manual fixing.
So for now, do not upgrade. Subscribe to this bug to follow progress on fixing the upgrade process.
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After a one week delay, the final release of Fedora 23 should be available tomorrow.
I have done walk-throughs of the installers for Manjaro, openSuSE, and Ubuntu recently, and I have been looking forward to continuing this with Anaconda, which is by far my favorite of the installers. While the other installers seem to be a simple linear walk through all of the steps which may be required to perform an installation, I think Anaconnda is very nicely designed and engineered to provide a logical view of the necessary tasks and easy access to those which are required, without forcing you to go through every single one whether you really need to or not.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Think Canonical and you’ll think Ubuntu – the free operating system that perhaps doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Sure, it’s barely nibbled at the edges of Windows’ market share on the desktop, and it’s not even flavour of the month among the Linux community any more, but household names such as Amazon, Netflix and Uber have built their cloud businesses on Ubuntu.
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I had mixed feelings from my time with Ubuntu. On the one hand, the distribution feels fairly polished and the installer, applications and system tools all worked well. My desktop’s hardware was properly detected and utilized and this release offers us updated versions of popular software. However, in a virtual machine, Ubuntu performed poorly and this surprised me since the previous release worked quite smoothly in a VirtualBox instance. Not only that, but this version of Ubuntu used quite a bit more memory than the last version did on the same test equipment.
What really stood out most about Ubuntu 15.10 though was this release felt virtually identical in every way to Ubuntu 15.04 and very similar to 14.10. One of the few changes I noticed was that this version of Ubuntu appears to no longer support both the Upstart and systemd init programs, as the previous version did. I see this as an unfortunate (though expected) change as Canonical moves to support just one init package. On the one hand, this lack of adjustments in 15.10 is good news for people who do not want to experience a lot of change. The development team appears to have been working almost exclusively over the past year to fix bugs and keep things working as they have been. This makes Ubuntu feel like a more stable platform.
On the other hand, having a platform that does not boast any new features makes me wonder if there is a point to pushing out a new release. The minor package updates presented probably could have been handled by a backports repository for Ubuntu 15.04. While projects like openSUSE and Fedora are experimenting with new system admin tools, file system snapshots, Wayland and boot environments, Ubuntu appears to be sitting idle. I know there are behind-the-scenes changes planned (such as Snappy packages, Mir and a new version of Unity), but those items keep getting pushed back. In short, I feel this release of Ubuntu was good, but it isn’t bringing anything new to the table over the previous version.
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Mentor Automotive has launched a Linux-based, GENIVI compliant “Connected OS” that improves upon its ATP automotive stack with ADAS, eAVB, and CE support.
The Mentor Automotive division of Mentor Graphics announced the availability of a Mentor Automotive Connected OS stack that appears to replace its Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP), moving beyond in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) to add support for driver information, consumer electronics device integration, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) functionality, among other features. Like ATP, Connected OS is said to be compliant with the open source GENIVI automotive spec, and run on Linux. Connected OS is supported with AXSB hardware reference platform.
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They say the first step of coming to terms with addiction is admitting you have a problem… I have a problem with collecting ARM devices… there I said it! How big is this problem you ask? How about I list them out and let you decide!
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Samsung Z3, the companies second Tizen smartphone, has been released In India and will be coming to Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka soon. Previously we reported on the Z3 coming to Europe and today, according to Insiders, there are 11 European countries that the Z3 is currently being tested for launch in.
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Android
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Facebook’s chief product officer is reportedly requiring a number of team members to switch from iPhones to Android phones so they can experience how most people interact with the social network.
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An earlier report by Matt Weinberger of Business Insider UK noted that Sony had initially offered Craig $5 million to carry around its Xperia Z4 phone in the movie.
Discussions involved an $18 million marketing commitment from Sony, escalating to a $50 million marketing and promotional package from Samsung as well as a $5 million product placement for Bond to be seen using an Android phone with Samsung’s brand on it.
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There’s never been a better time to buy an Android smartphone. Not only is there a huge array of different handsets from a multitude of manufacturers to choose from, but what you get for your money is simply incredible.
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2015 was (and still continues to be) the year of innovation in mobile technology. Android phones as well as iPhones and Windows Phones have advanced to another level, one which some expected, others didn’t. We got releases that blew our minds this year, as well as devices that aren’t as impressive as others. Some companies failed to get out of the rut they were in while others made huge progress in the industry. IoT got a big boost this year and mobile development is headed for new frontiers. Windows 10 has introduced universal Windows apps and Android will be doing the same – as soon as it becomes a cross-platform OS like Google recently announced.
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Once the mobile maker to beat, BlackBerry is fighting for survival. Its secret weapon: the first-ever BlackBerry phone powered by Google’s Android software.
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It’s still unclear what form this new operating system would take. Would it look like Chrome OS with access to the Google Play Store? Or will it look more like Android does now, but redesigned to look and work like a desktop operating system?
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Where do the developers in my FOSS community live? For large open source communities where personal contact with developers is impossible, answering this simple question may be difficult.
In some projects, developers have the option of registering personal geographical information such as a country or city of residence or GPS coordinates. For example, this is the case with Debian (shown below). In other projects, IP addresses—on which geolocation analysis can be performed later—are collected. This information permits tracking different kinds of access (to the development repositories, to the download area, to the forums, etc). But most projects don’t have these tracking capabilities.
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In a move that Pivotal says will make massively scalable, high-performance big data processing much more accessible, the company has turned its Greenplum data analytics platform into an open source product.
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If you attend LISA15 in Washington D.C. this month, you’ll want to catch James Mickens’ closing keynote, It Was Never Going to Work, So Let’s Have Some Tea. James Mickens has a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, and he is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard. In the past, he worked in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research. And he’s hilarious.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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As you may know, Pale Moon is an open-source, cross-platform browser based on Mozilla Firefox, being up to 25% faster then the original.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Crown Commercial Service has announced a new Open Source desktop suite as an alternative to Microsoft.
The new offering, Collabora GovOffice is based on LibreOffice from vendor Collabora Productivity, and is compatible with Google Docs and Microsoft Office (including Office 365).
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CMS
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IoT
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The world of smart devices talking to each other—and to us—is well underway and here to stay. To connect to the Internet of Things opportunity, it’s key to design and build networking infrastructures that can handle massive amounts of new data. Read more in this whitepaper.
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Devices are being connected to the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) at an increasingly rapid rate — this we already know to be true.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source//Openwashing
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Netflix is taking steps to make its collaboration with open source developers easier by overhauling the Netflix Open Source program. Among other changes, the company will now release open products as Docker containers to simplify access.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Hi!
Please see
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Text-only version:
GNU Hurd 0.7, GNU Mach 1.6, GNU MIG 1.6 released.
We’re pleased to announce new releases!
GNU Hurd 0.7, NEWS:
Version 0.7 (2015-10-31)
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Public Services/Government
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The European Parliament calls upon the Commission “for the systematic replacement of proprietary software by auditable and verifiable open-source software in all the EU institutions, and for the introduction of a mandatory open-source-selection criterion in all future ICT procurement procedures”.
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The association of Italian municipalities (ANCI) is working on an interoperability manifesto to improve the information exchange between public administrations. The association is proposing standards and guidelines to make computer systems and database systems able talk to one another.
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Openness/Sharing
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Wikipedia is one of the great success stories of the Information Age: a free, open-source encyclopedia with over 37 million articles in 250 languages, all compiled by anonymous volunteer editors. There are no managers, no pay, and anyone can be an editor. It is one of the first results on any search engine and is the most common source of information for anyone first learning about a topic. These topics are generally objective and educational, and Wikipedia reports that its reliability rating approaches the Encyclopedia Britannica. While systemic bias admittedly exists on Wikipedia, it is supposedly limited to a few minor articles.
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Open Hardware
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One of the many advantages of inventing something is that you get to name it. Even better if your name and the thing you have created have some sort of phonetic connection – it just seems right then that the creators of an entirely 3D printed violin, Matt and Kaitlyn Hova, combined their name with their instrument and have released the Hovalin.
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Programming
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The R Consortium and the Linux Foundation are investing in a new code-hosting platform that will help streamline the development and distribution of software packages for R, the popular statistical programming language.
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Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has said new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is a “conviction politician” like Margaret Thatcher was.
He said anti-austerity and anti-war MP Mr Corbyn is someone viewed as extreme but who could shift the political scenery like the former Conservative prime minister.
Speaking to Sky News, Mr Varoufakis admitted he was “one of those strange left-wingers who missed” the late Tory leader.
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Security
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For some time infosec pros have known that plugins for WordPress, Joomla and other content management systems are being leveraged by attackers.
More evidence of that has come in a report from Akamai’s Security Intelligence Research Team (SIRT), which discovered a widely distributed botnet that leverages CMS systems to launch co-ordinated brute-force spamming campaigns.
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How do you get high-end security-monitoring skills without the high-end price? Industrial giant BlueScope recently found out after its CSO worked with a key service provider to build a robust, global security operations centre (SOC) using open-source components.
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Over 14,000 keys used to unlock files encrypted by CoinVault and Bitcryptor have been released, signaling the death of the ransomware variants.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Climate change may have many economic impacts, including loss of crops, changes in water supply, increased incidence of natural disaster, and spikes in health care costs related to infectious diseases and temperature-related illnesses. However, hard evidence about the effects of climate change on economic activity has been inconsistent.
A new paper published in Nature takes on the ambitious task of connecting micro- and macro-level estimates of climate costs. The study finds that climate change can be expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23 percent by the year 2100. This study is important because it solves a problem that has existed in prior models of climate change effects on economics: discrepancies between macro- and micro-level observations. This study presents the first evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled in some way to global climate. The study also sets up a new empirical paradigm for modeling economic loss in response to climate change.
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Climate change deniers should come to Ghana
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Freed from the physical reality that places the United States in the temperate zone of a tilted planet, Schrager is free to reorganize regional schedules in the name of “economic efficiency” without regard to what this would actually do to people’s lives. She wisely declines to describe the results of her scheme, maybe realizing that the idea of putting the West Coast permanently on what is now Central Standard Time would have limited appeal had she spelled out that in mid-December, the Sun would set at 2:43 pm in Los Angeles, 2:27 pm in Portland and 2:18 pm in Seattle.
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Reverse mortgage pitchman and former Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) passed away on November 1, 2015, at the age of 73, but his legacy of giving the Koch Brothers a pass on one of their first major forays into funneling money into mysterious groups to try to win elections continues unabated.
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Finance
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Millions face ever deeper income and wealth inequalities, ecological dangers, politics corrupted by money.
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Privacy
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Internet and social media companies will be banned from putting customer communications beyond their own reach under new laws to be unveiled on Wednesday.
Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.
Measures in the Investigatory Powers Bill will place in law a requirement on tech firms and service providers to be able to provide unencrypted communications to the police or spy agencies if requested through a warrant.
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Pending before federal magistrate judge James Orenstein is the government’s request for an order obligating Apple, Inc. to unlock an iPhone and thereby assist prosecutors in decrypting data the government has seized and is authorized to search pursuant to a warrant. In an order questioning the government’s purported legal basis for this request, the All Writs Act of 1789 (AWA), Judge Orenstein asked Apple for a brief informing the court whether the request would be technically feasible and/or burdensome. After Apple filed, the court asked it to file a brief discussing whether the government had legal grounds under the AWA to compel Apple’s assistance. Apple filed that brief and the government filed a reply brief last week in the lead-up to a hearing this morning.
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Hopefully, it won’t take a lot of convincing for folks to understand just how wrong-headed this is. For starters, if the plaintiffs are correct, they are currently being subjected to unconstitutional government surveillance for which they are entitled to a remedy. The fact that this surveillance has a limited shelf-life (and/or that Congress was complicit in it) doesn’t in any way ameliorate the constitutional violation — which is exactly why the Supreme Court has, for generations, recognized an exception to mootness doctrine for constitutional violations that, owing to their short duration, are “capable of repetition, yet evading review.” Indeed, in this very same opinion, the Second Circuit first held that the ACLU’s challenge isn’t moot, only to then invokes mootness-like principles to justify not resolving the constitutional claim. It can’t be both; either the constitutional challenge is moot, or it isn’t.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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On October 23, the Anti-Monopoly Guidelines Regulating Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights(Draft for Comments) were made available to USITO by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) for review and comment.
The five-part draft provides guidance on how to regulate IPR-related monopoly agreements, abuse of market dominant position, monopoly involving standards-essential patents, and concentration of undertakings.
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Copyrights
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Is there copyright in very short phrases?
As copyright enthusiasts know, this invariably proves to be one of the thorniest issues to determine when it comes to specific cases. Just a couple of days ago it was reported that Taylor Swift has been sued for copyright infringement over inclusion of ‘haters gone hate’ and ‘playas gone play’ in her song Shake It Off.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.31.15
Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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You feel safe, wrapped in that comforting blanket of Linux. It soothes you and protects you from the lumbering monsters that hide within your server closet. That innocent penguin has always been there to ward away the evil…it’s glowing red eyes peering through the Windows of a house made of glass. And you stand tall, knowing the open source platform will always have your back. Or, will it?
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Desktop
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Psst, want a cheap laptop? Philadelphia’s Nonprofit Technology Resources wants to save a pile of laptops from the scrapyard. So Ed Cummings, the president of the organization, said the organization is having a “Linux Laptop Pizza Party” on Saturday in the City of Brotherly Love, according to Juliana Reyes writing in Technical.ly.
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Server
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Kernel Space
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With recently having picked up four Western Digital Black HDDs, I decided to run some fresh hard drive benchmarks with the most common Linux file-systems to see how the performance compares atop Ubuntu 15.10.
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While there was still a fair amount of code churn this week, if Linus remains comfortable with the state of the kernel, Linux 4.3 will be released this weekend.
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Alex Deucher sent in another pull request of new AMDGPU/Radeon DRM material for landing in DRM-Next to in turn make it into Linux 4.4.
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Intel has published a new set of patches fpr speeding up AES-CBC encryption for processors having the AVX2 instruction set extension.
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Graphics Stack
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Martin Peres at Intel has sent out the latest revised patches for supporting Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 (DRI3) with EGL.
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Alex Goins of NVIDIA posted the patches yesterday evening as version two of PRIME synchronization for the i915 DRM. The patches aren’t big but will hopefully fix tearing for those using PRIME on dual GPU systems.
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Maxime Ripard of Free Electrons published a set of nineteen patches yesterday for adding Allwinner A10 display engine support via a new DRM driver for the Linux kernel.
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The Mesa i965 DRI driver enables ARB_shader_clock support for Intel Ivy Bridge “Gen 7″ graphics and newer. This work will be part of Mesa 11.1.
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Complementing yesterday’s Are The Open-Source Graphics Drivers Good Enough For Steam Linux Gaming? article is a look at the Steam Linux gaming performance for three different Intel Linux systems running Ubuntu 15.10 and firing up the latest Steam client. This is the last of the planned series that began one week ago with the a 22-way comparison of NVIDIA/AMD GPUs on SteamOS.
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Following the 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS Linux and 22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA/AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS For Steam Linux Gaming articles, a few Phoronix readers were inquiring about the CPU and GPU utilization metrics during testing.
So I started work on some follow-up tests to look at the CPU/GPU utilization during testing to try to answer that question. The Phoronix Test Suite is able to do so by simply setting MONITOR=cpu.usage,gpu.usage as an environment variable prior to running any benchmarks (or see phoronix-test-suite system-sensors or MONITOR=all for the other system sensors supported through Phodevi – The Phoronix Device Interface).
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As there’s been some discussion lately about the “size” of the different open-source Linux graphics drivers, here are some fresh looks at the rough code size of each of the main DRM/KMS kernel drivers as well as the Mesa/Gallium3D user-space drivers.
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Over the past week on Phoronix have been several featured articles looking at the performance of SteamOS with the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA graphics drivers: 22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA/AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS, 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS, and Is SteamOS Any Faster Than Ubuntu 15.10 Linux? One of the frequent questions that have come up since then is how the open-source driver performance compares to that of the binary blobs on SteamOS, so here are some of those benchmarks.
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Applications
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Furius ISO Mount is an application that allows users to mount a large number of images in their operating systems with minimal effort. It’s designed to be used by beginners and experts alike, although the need for such apps has diminished.
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In Cockpit we run thousands of integration tests per day against pull requests and git master. Each test brings up up Cockpit in a full operating system VM, and hammers on it in some way. Without these tests it’s impossible to validate that Cockpit actually works.
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Thanks to everyone who contributed with bug reports and testing. What isn’t generally visible is that a lot of this happens behind the scenes downstream on distribution bug trackers, IRC, and so forth.
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PyRoom is the kind of application that you don’t ever hear people talking about, but that is completely surprising once you open it. It’s a distraction-free text editor that allows writers to focus on the writing and less on anything else.
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Arun Raghavan from the PulseAudio project has had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the first point release of the PulseAudio 7 open-source sound server.
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The developers of the open source GStreamer multimedia framework have announced a few hours ago the release and immediate availability for download of the first maintenance version of the GStreamer 1.6 series.
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The developers of the open source, MPlayer-based MPV video player software have announced the release and immediate availability for download of version 0.12.0.
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Proprietary
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If you are a systems administrator and you are tasked with ensuring your systems have a backup and replication process, Veeam is likely in your arsenal of tools.
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The Vivaldi developers, through Olafur Arnason and Ruarí Ødegaard, have announced the release of two consecutive Snapshots of the upcoming Vivaldi web browser for all supported operating systems.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Implementation of the TransmitFile function.
– More implementation of the Web Services DLL.
– Improved video decoding.
– Alternative for the deprecated prelink tool.
– Major Turkish translation update.
– Various bug fixes.
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Alexandre Julliard announced earlier today, October 30, the immediate availability for download and testing of a new development version of the Wine software that lets users run Windows apps and games on any GNU/Linux operating system.
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Wine 1.7.54 was released this morning as the latest bi-weekly Wine development release.
Wine 1.7.54 offers improved video decoding, an implementation of the TransmitFile function, more of the Web Services DLL has been implemented, and more.
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Games
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For Linux gamers, you can now set extra mouse buttons to do things, which is apparently a big thing (I never use mine).
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A new Humble Weekly Bundle has been released, and it’s called Day of the Devs. With one exception, all the games that have been made available also come with Linux support.
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Not the news I expected to hit my inbox this week. Fishing Planet an online fishing game aimed at realism is heading to Linux.
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The game was ported to Linux in time for the Halloween sale on Steam and is a bargain for fans of puzzle platformers.
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Guild Software thought that it will be nice for its Vendetta Online players to receive a new double update of the game, so that they don’t get bored on Halloween night.
Guild Software thought that it will be nice for its Vendetta Online players to receive a new double update of the game, so that they don’t get bored on Halloween night.
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One of the things I do here is contact developers who promised a Linux version of a game which hasn’t yet surfaced, and the latest user request for me to check was Moebius: Empire Rising. It took a while to get a response on it, but they did kindly reply and allow me to publish their answer.
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On the flip-side, there are companies like Valve (with Steam) and Nvidia (with their Shield line) that are enabling some amazing, but proprietary, games to come to Linux (I still haven’t managed to make myself write it as “GNU/Linux”… I still think that looks goofy as a name). All of which lets me feel a bit better about playing these closed games.
By buying games written for, and running on, a Free Software platform… I am helping to encourage further development, testing, and usage of that platform. Which is good.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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After introducing the first maintenance version of the soon-to-be-released Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment, the most anticipated release of Cinnamon, Clement Lefebvre presents the second point release.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Some time ago KDE project bet on the separation of base libs, on somehing called frameworks, that create a set of libraries to be capable to be used for any other software project.
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This month began with a super KDE Sprint for KDevelop and Kate. I’ve mentioned the things I did and learned in my previous blog post.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Hi GNOMErs!
The development of the next GNOME release, 3.20, has started, and the
first development release, 3.19.1, is now available.
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The GNOME developers are working around the clock to implement the most awesome GNU/Linux technologies in their highly acclaimed open-source desktop environment used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems by default.
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Christian Hergert has shared a blog post with some of his plans for what he hopes to accomplish during the GNOME 3.20 cycle with regard to his GNOME Builder integrated development environment.
GNOME Builder continues to be to GNOME as KDevelop is to KDE. GNOME Builder so far has supported features like extensive inline code completion, quick file access, code assistance, integrated GNOME/GTK document viewing, live markdown previews, and many other features. If you are not familiar with the current state of GNOME Builder, see the GNOME Wiki.
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Javier Jardón announced the release of GNOME 3.19.1 today as the first development release aiming toward GNOME 3.20.
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I’ve been busy working on the plumbing for what will become Builder 3.20. We have a really ambitious cycle ahead of us, so getting these core changes in place as soon as possible will help give us time to stabilize.
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Reviews
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You can use BackBox as your main Linux distro and do nothing more involved that run its security envelop to harden your immediate computing environment and surf the Web with anonymity.
You can use BackBox more productively to dig deep into your network to sniff out security risks and lock down your connectivity and data. BackBox’s security tools are professional class.
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Pinguy Builder is a very useful app that can be used by anyone to create an Ubuntu Live CD from scratch or to back up an existing Ubuntu installation. The process should work with all the other Ubuntu-based distributions.
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New Releases
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Suman Chakravartula has had the great pleasure of informing Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of the Fedora-based Rockstor 3.8-9 Linux operating system, known as an open-source, powerful and smart NAS (Network-attached storage) solution.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon 15.11 is a modern and easy to use Linux distribution based on Gentoo, following an extreme, yet reliable, rolling release model.
This is a monthly release generated, tested and published to mirrors by our build-servers containing the latest and greatest collection of software available in the Entropy repositories.
The Change-log files related to this release are available on our mirrors.
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The Sabayon developers are happy to announce the release of their monthly rolling ISO images, dubbed Sabayon 15.11, which include all the updates that have been released during the month of October 2015.
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Arch Family
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Twitch playing Pokémon was easy mode. Tomorrow, Twitch viewers will be invited to do something altogether more challenging: install Arch Linux. Using the same Twitch chat-driven concept as the collaborative Pokémon playthrough, anyone will be able to enter commands and control the installation process.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Now that the Release Candidate of the forthcoming openSUSE Leap 42.1 GNU/Linux operating system was made available for download and testing during the last two weeks, the time has come to take a look at Leap’s most prominent features.
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Red Hat Family
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I met Alison Chaiken at LinuxCon 2010 in Boston, not long after she joined Nokia as a Meego technical consultant. A few months later, I interviewed her about her role at Nokia and her predictions about where open source technology was headed in 2011. She predicted an increasing role for cameras and microphones in mobile. “Cameras and microphones are used deliberately to take photos and record voice commands, but in the future they will be always on, gathering ambient data about the environment of users on the go,” she said.
These days Alison works on automotive Linux systems programming at Mentor Graphics’ Embedded Software Division, and she spends a lot of time working with, contributing to, and speaking about systemd. She’ll be leading a training session, systemd, the Next-Generation Linux System Manager, at LISA15 in Washington D.C. on November 9. In this interview, she makes another prediction—that sys admins will enjoy using systemd.
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Multinational software company, Citrix, has partnered with open source company, Red Hat, on new product integrations for building OpenStack Clouds. As part of the collaboration, Citrix unveiled the integration and certification of its application delivery controller, NetScaler, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
Citrix said, in a statement, that this partnership will enable customers to assemble their Cloud infrastructure using components from Citrix and Red Hat for the first time.
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Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ansible, Inc., a provider of powerful IT automation solutions designed to help enterprises move toward frictionless IT.
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Wall Street brokerages expect that Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) will post $0.31 earnings per share for the current quarter, according to Zacks Investment Research. Nine analysts have provided estimates for Red Hat’s earnings. The highest EPS estimate is $0.32 and the lowest is $0.30. Red Hat posted earnings of $0.30 per share in the same quarter last year, which suggests a positive year-over-year growth rate of 3.3%. The firm is expected to issue its next earnings results on Thursday, December 17th.
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The Ceph Community, an open-source object and file cloud storage stack, has formed an advisory board that will work in governance with the community.
The Ceph Advisory Board will assist the community in driving open-source software-defined storage technology, and in collaborating with the community’s technical and user committees.
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Fedora
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In somewhat of an embarrassing move and indicating that KDBUS likely won’t be proposed for Linux 4.4, this in-kernel IPC mechanism is being temporarily stripped out of Fedora.
Fedora developers added KDBUS to their Rawhide kernel this summer at the request of the systemd developers involved in KDBUS development. With systemd 221, the upstream developers also encouraged Linux distributions to begin shipping KDBUS even though it wasn’t part of the mainline kernel. This turned out to be a mistake.
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You might have heard of the C.H.I.P., the 9$ computer. After contributing to their Kickstarter, and with no intent on hacking on more kernel code than is absolutely necessary, I requested the “final” devices, when chumps like me can read loads of docs and get accessories for it easily.
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While Fedora 23 failed its Go/No-Go meeting yesterday, at today’s meeting this next installment of Red Hat’s Fedora Linux was cleared to be released next week.
Fedora 23 RC10 has been promoted to final at today’s meeting, per the notes.
Fedora 23 will now be officially released next Tuesday, 3 November. Fedora 23 is in exceptional shape and comes with a variety of new features. I personally look forward to upgrading to Fedora 23 on my main production system once switching over to a Skylake ultrabook.
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The Fedora KDE community has been dealt a blow today with one of the co-maintainers of the Fedora KDE packages resigning from those duties along with his roles relating to the Fedora KDE special interest group.
Kevin Kofler, who has long been involved in KDE packaging for Fedora and advancing KDE on Fedora, he is stepping down from their KDE SIG and from co-maintaining all of the Qt/KDE packages he maintains for the distribution — except for the few packages he is the upstream maintainer of in the KDE world.
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Jan Kurik tonight announced that Fedora 23 is GO for release. An internal RC10 will be created and tested and if no major issues arise, it will be released as Fedora 23 next week. For KDE users it may not be a day for celebration, as Phoronix.com’s Michael Larabel reported today that a co-maintainer for KDE in Fedora said that upcoming version 23 is “easily the worse KDE spin we have ever released.” Yikes.
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Linux Voice magazine periodically releases older issues of their magazine under a CC-BY-SA license so the entire Linux community can read, share and use the articles they publish (they also donate 50% of their profits to the Free Software community).Today, they released Issue 12 of Linux Voice under the CC-BY-SA license, nine months after the release of the magazine back in February.
Of particular interest to Fedora users is at the end of their Distro Hopper segment, they take a look at our first ever release — Fedora Core 1. While obviously a little dated, with the release of Fedora 23 so close, there is also a review of Fedora 21. The issue also features an interview with systemd developer Lennart Poettering.
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The Red Hat developers have finally greenlit the launch of Fedora 23 and it looks like the new version will finally arrive on November 3, the date that was previously tracked.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s Sergio Schvezov announced the release of the fourth maintenance build of the snapcraft utility that can be used by anyone to easily create Snappy packages for the Ubuntu Snappy Core operating system.
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On the last day of October, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily email to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-8 software update.
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Canonical’s David Planella sent in his bi-monthly report to inform us all about the last things that happened in the Ubuntu world. The report includes information about the work done by the Ubuntu Community Team during the last two weeks.
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Solu Machines recently launched a Kickstarter campaign with the hopes of releasing a completely new class of device. Dubbed the Solu, the company has prototyped a 4.5-inch cloud-powered computer with a peculiar square form factor. Its touchscreen display allows users to navigate the device with their fingers, like they would a smartphone or tablet.
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Solu Machines recently launched a Kickstarter campaign with the hopes of releasing a completely new class of device. Dubbed the Solu, the company has prototyped a 4.5-inch cloud-powered computer with a peculiar square form factor. Its touchscreen display allows users to navigate the device with their fingers, like they would a smartphone or tablet.
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Solu Machines is running a Kickstarter campaign for an unusual type of computer. The Solu is a mini PC that measures about 4.5 inches square and has a touchscreen display, so you can use it sort of like a mobile phone or tablet. But connect it to a monitor and keyboard and the Solu becomes a touchpad that you can use to interact with desktop on a bigger screen.
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VIA’s “EPIA-E900” SBC uses VIA’s own Eden X4 processor, and debuts a reincarnated “Pico-ITXe” form-factor featuring MXM-based PCIe and multi-I/O expansion.
VIA’s new EPIA-E900 single-board computer introduces a second generation of the Pico-ITXe form-factor that VIA demoed at an Embedded Systems Conference back in October 2008. Although this Pico-ITXe re-spin has the same name, it bears little resemblance to the now-defunct Pico-ITXe v1.0. While the original Pico-ITXe footprint measured 100 x 72mm and included self-stacking SUMIT expansion, today’s Pico-ITXe is 38mm longer and expands with a coplanar MXM slot that carries a collection of I/O interfaces plus PCI Express.
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Phones
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Tizen
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VLC is a cross platform open source media player that is created by the VideoLAN Project. It supports many different audio and video compression methods and file formats and Is regarded as one of the best and most versatile media players out there.
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Android
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Back in March I was given an LG G Watch R, the first Android Wear smartwatch to have a full round display (the Moto 360 was earlier, but has a bit cut off the bottom of the actual display). I’d promised I’d get round to making some comments about it once I’d had it for a while and have failed to do so until now. Note that this is very much comments on the watch from a user point of view; I haven’t got to the point of trying to do any development or other hacking of it.
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That’s where people like GM’s Phil Abram come into play. Abram — who has stints at Sonos and Sony on his résumé — led the company’s adoption of CarPlay and Android Auto, which will eventually reach just about every vehicle GM sells in the US. He’s also coming off a connected car deployment in China after rolling out in Europe and North America, where LTE currently ships on 16 models.
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ChromeOS is a stripped-down Gentoo-derived GNU/Linux operating system built using Chromium OS. At its simplest, it’s a browser as operating system.
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Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: there’s no practical application for the apps demonstrated below, at least not in the way they’re being used. You can’t seriously play a game meant for a 20-button controller on a screen smaller than two inches across, even if your fingers are tiny enough to hit the virtual buttons. This is the work of an enthusiast gamer and Android fan. It doesn’t have to make sense.
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Two Android devices, using the very same build of the OS, can be quite different in reality if they’re made by different manufacturers. So much so that it’s not rare for (uninitiated) friends and family members to ask us whether a heavily skinned device is an Android device. It’s kind of weird.
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This week, the Nexus 6P and 5X received a substantial new feature: Factory images. Factory images are a great failsafe to have with a Nexus device, just in case you need to restore it back to its original state if catastrophe strikes.
This update was one of the few highlights in a rather slow week of updates in Android Land. Of course, if Android really does swallow up Chrome, we can’t wait to add a whole list of Android-powered PCs to this weekly compilation.
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Back at Google I/O in 2014, Google announced Android Auto. Their first step into the car – well other than their self-driving cars. The idea was to provide a seamless experience in terms of infotainment systems in our cars. Because let’s face it, the car makers suck at making infotainment systems. However, Google also wanted that data (reports have stated that Google wants basically an OBD-II dump, while others have stated that it’s just whether the car is in park, what the headlights are doing, etc). After all, Google collects data about everything.
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Root. It’s a word we’re mostly familiar with here. Despite the ever-increasing attempts by Google to make it harder to achieve and use (and most likely this will continue, with the predicted convergence of the heavily locked-down ChromeOS and Android platforms), rooting remains incredibly popular on XDA.
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Open source enterprise use cases appear to be on the rise, at least anecdotally, with an increasing number of CIOs, IT directors and Chief Technology Officers telling CIO UK about investigating and adopting free and open source alternatives to proprietary software as they seek to gain freedom and flexibility, cut costs, increase agility, improve code quality and avoid vendor lock-in.
UK businesses it seems have also finally conquered their “irrational fears” of open source and security fears are also on the wane, reports have suggested.
The most recent studies by the non-profit Linux Foundation in its Enterprise End User Trends reports have revealed year on year increases in Linux deployments over the last four years, with the open operating system seeing particular growth as a platform for cloud computing.
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Neo4j graph NoSQL database team launches open source graph query language called openCypher. Neo Technology, the company behind the graph database, announced last week at GraphConnect Conference, the launch of the open source project that will be available to technology providers as a common language for querying graph data.
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The Tor Project has launched the beta version of Tor Messenger, an easy-to-use encrypted message client for those concerned about their privacy and potential surveillance.
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Many organizations use static analysis security testing (SAST) and dynamic analysis security testing (DAST) for monitoring, but while these tools are excellent for finding bugs in code written by internal developers, they are not effective in detecting known open source vulnerabilities in application code. In fact, open source vulnerabilities are far too complex to be found by these automated tools.
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Events
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Alan Clark, chairman of the board at the OpenStack Foundation, discusses the progress made at the OpenStack Summit this week.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Earlier this year Samsung’s Julien Isorce posted VA-API support for Nouveau to better video acceleration for this open-source NVIDIA driver. Since then he’s been working on some Gallium3D VA improvements to benefit the use-case of Chromium’s GStreamer back-end.
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SaaS/Big Data
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At the OpenStack Summit here, there have been a number of common themes and questions that keep surfacing. Time and again panels are discussing why contributions matter and how Amazon is or isn’t the competition.
One such panel session was titled “The OpenStack Orchestra: The Next Wave of OpenStack Specialist Startups,” and included executives from Mirantis, Tesora, SwiftStack and PLUMgrid.
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Networking has always been a part of the open source OpenStack cloud platform, but it has never been more popular, or as exciting as it is now. At the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, one of the hottest topics is networking, as organizations of all sizes turn to the cloud for Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization capabilities.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice 5.1 Alpha has launched, ready for the weekend. Enthusiasts and community members will be able to grab the software and partake in the first Bug Hunting Session from Friday October 30th to Sunday November 1st. The final build of LibreOffice 5.1 is expected to launch in February next year.
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BSD
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I’m Henning, not 20 any more, OpenBSD developer since 2002. I architected & wrote large parts of pf, started, architected and wrote large parts of bgpd and ntpd. The imsg & privsep framework I wrote for bgpd is in almost all newer OpenBSD daemons. I also worked a lot in the network stack, including many redesigns. One of the last bigger projects I did was the replacement of the queueing subsystem.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Stepping ahead of the Linux 4.3 release is a Halloween release of GNU Hurd 0.7, GNU Mach 1.6, and GNU MIG 1.6.
GNU Hurd 0.7 improves the node cache for the EXT2 file-system code (ext2fs), improves the native fakeroot tool, provides a new rpcscan utility, fixes a long-standing synchronization issue with the file-system translators and other components, and the Hurd code has been ported to work with newer GCC versions and libc.
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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) contains provisions penalizing the circumvention of “technological protection measures”. These measures are digital jails denying users access to the software and other digital works they possess, preventing them from examining or changing the software on their devices. While such measures are nominally meant to protect copyrighted works, in reality they function as unacceptable restrictions on computer user freedom. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) opposes such Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) systems. The FSF further opposes the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, and demands that Congress repeal those provisions. Other countries with similar laws should follow suit.
Every three years, the Library of Congress reviews proposals granting limited exemptions from the DMCA’s broad ban on users controlling the software and data on devices encumbered with DRM. This flawed process is meant to lessen the DMCA’s harm by giving user rights advocates an opportunity to request exemptions allowing circumvention in particular cases. Even when such petitions succeed, the resulting exemptions last only three years, meaning that advocates must repeatedly fight to retain the limited ground they won.
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Licensing
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Each approach strikes a different balance between your costs, benefits and PCI risks and workload. The table sums up the highlights, the details of which I’ll explain further.
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Openness/Sharing
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Croatia’s e-Građani (eCitizens) project was declared the best European eGovernment services project, in an awards ceremony at the Open Government Partnership Global Summit 2015 in Mexico on Wednesday.
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Open Access/Content
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On Thursday, Harvard Law School announced its Free the Law project, teaming up with a company called Ravel to scan all federal court decisions and all state court decisions, and then place them all online for free. This is pretty huge. While some courts now release most decisions as freely available PDFs, many federal courts still have them hidden behind the ridiculous PACER system, and state court decisions are totally hit or miss. And, of course, tons of historical cases are completely buried. While there are some giant companies like Westlaw and LexisNexis that provide lawyers access to decisions, those cost a ton — and the public is left out.
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The Department of Education has launched #GoOpen, a campaign to encourage schools to use open educational resources (OER). To add force to the hashtag, the Department proposed new regulation that any tool developed with its federal grant funds will be required to have an open license, would which allow schools to use and modify those resources for free.
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Open Hardware
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A pair of engineers in Singapore, Andrew “Bunny” Huang and Sean Cross, have developed a working laptop which was designed to be completely open sourced, with no proprietary drivers or software of any kind. The Novena laptop is powered by a Cortex A9 and an FPGA and runs Debian, even communications are handled by a software-defined radio board. This is more of a proof of concept than a marketable machine but the links at The Register will take you to the details on how you could build one yourself. Even the bezel is open source and modifiable, it is a laptop with an upgradable screen!
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Programming
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PHP 7.0 RC6 was released today for what may be the final release candidate ahead of PHP 7.0.0′s official premiere in two weeks.
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Ceylon, the programming language based on Java and developed at Red Hat, is out with a new version of this programming language that can be lowered down into JavaScript.
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We’re pleased and proud to unleash PyPy 4.0.0, a major update of the PyPy python 2.7.10 compatible interpreter with a Just In Time compiler. We have improved warmup time and memory overhead used for tracing, added vectorization for numpy and general loops where possible on x86 hardware (disabled by default), refactored rough edges in rpython, and increased functionality of numpy.
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PyPy 4.0.0 was released today as a major update for this Python 2.7 interpreter and JIT compiler.
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CAIRO: Egypt confirmed on Saturday that a Russian passenger plan had crashed in central Sinai.
A statement from the prime minister’s office said Sherif Ismail had formed a cabinet level crisis committee to deal with the crash.
The plane, travelling from the Egyptian resort Sharm el-Sheikh to the Russian city of St Petersburg, disappeared from radar screens in Cypriot airspace, Russia’s RIA news agency reported, citing a Russian aviation authority source.
The source said the aircraft was an Airbus A-321 jet, had 224 passengers and crew on board, and was operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia.
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Sunday, October 16 was declared Steve Jobs Day by California’s Governor Brown. I admire Brown for taking a step to recognize Jobs’ extraordinary contributions, but I couldn’t help be struck by Rob Pike’s comments on the death of Dennis Ritchie a few weeks after Steve Jobs.
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I’ve been lamenting the demise of the Unix philosophy: tools should do one thing, and do it well.
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It takes a little longer, but it’s so much nicer if you can read an email thread from top to bottom rather than having to scroll to the bottom, read, scroll backward, read, scroll backward, read, etc. Yes, it’s the easiest way to reply to a message, but it’s an enemy of comprehension for recipients.
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Security
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Lauri Love made an appearance on the BBC flagship current affairs programme Newsnight on Friday 23 October, explaining the significance of a widely publicised hack of telecoms provider TalkTalk, which has led to the disclosure of personal information of millions of subscribers.
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Free website hosting service 000webhost has suffered a data breach which has placed the service’s security practices under scrutiny.
000webhost is a free web hosting service which supports both PHP and MySQL, catering for millions of users worldwide. On Wednesday, the firm told users in a Facebook message that the company had suffered a databreach on its main server.
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Google has given Symantec an offer it can’t refuse: give a thorough accounting of its ailing certificate authority process or risk having the world’s most popular browser—Chrome—issue scary warnings when end users visit HTTPS-protected websites that use Symantec credentials.
The ultimatum, made in a blog post published Wednesday afternoon, came five weeks after Symantec fired an undisclosed number of employees caught issuing unauthorized transport layer security certificates. The mis-issued certificates made it possible for the holders to impersonate HTTPS-protected Google webpages.
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Conjecture on cracked primes for the Diffie-Hellman asymmetric algorithm is in recent news, suggesting that several nations have broken primes in common use and can read all traffic…
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While the software was designed to be run on an Intel NUC using Linux (or similar device), it could conceivably be run on other platforms and setups. The code is open, after all, and there for the taking. In any case, here are the specs described by the company:
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Syrian rebels wielding US-made anti-tank missiles have become YouTube war heroes after a surge in successful attacks on forces loyal to dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Use of the BGM-71 TOW missiles – which cost $50,000 a piece – is up over 850% in October with the American-made weapons responsible for the destruction of scores of Syrian army tanks. Charles Lister, a Syrian expert at the Brookings Institute, said there had been 82 uses of the missiles as of 20 October up from 13 in September.
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It’s been 43 years since the CIA cut off support to the Tibetan guerillas that the agency trained and armed to fight a covert war against China. Yet, a monument to the CIA’s secret war in Tibet is still standing in Pokhara, Nepal.
The former Hotel Mount Annapurna building sits on a quiet side street off the Pokhara airport. Established in 1972 with CIA funds, the hotel was meant to give former Tibetan resistance fighters based in Nepal’s nearby Mustang region a livelihood and a future as they laid down their arms and transitioned to life as refugees.
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In particular, it is becoming more common for countries to punish people who express sensitive opinions on social media and in other forums. Perhaps the most high-profile example of the past year occurred in March, following the death of Singapore’s first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Five days after Lee died, a sixteen-year-old named Amos Yee tweeted mild criticism of the former Prime Minister and linked to an eight-and-a-half-minute YouTube clip in which he condemned Lee as a “horrible person” whose legacy was to make people afraid to criticize him. Yee appears to have had a point, because, days later, the police arrested him, charging him with having violated Singapore’s Harassment Act, which restricts “threatening, abusive, or insulting communication.”
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According to a Brazilian lawmaker, US Central Intelligence Agency is active in several Latin American countries, trying to destabilize the situation there.
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The runaway military surveillance blimp that came loose from an Army base in Maryland on Wednesday dragged its torn tether through power lines in two Pennsylvania counties before crashing into the woods.
But at least no one died.
The same can’t be said of a recent accident involving a U.S. military blimp in Kabul that constantly hovers over the Afghan capital. (See The Above, a short documentary from The Intercept’s Field of Vision project, also embedded below.)
On Oct. 11, a British military helicopter was coming in for a landing at NATO headquarters, where the blimp is moored. According to an eyewitness who spoke to the BBC, the helicopter hit the tether, which then wrapped itself around the rotors. The helicopter crashed, killing five people — two U.S. service members, two British service members, and a French contract civilian — and injuring five more.
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WESTERN NATIONS, primarily the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, and Russia, have helped increase corruption among Middle Eastern and North African states by selling them vast quantities of weapons with little oversight, according to a new report by Transparency International. The resultant corruption, the report says, has worsened the region’s many conflicts, weakened military coherency, boosted extremism, and “formed a narrative for violent extremist groups.”
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Donald Trump has claimed many, many times—on TV, at campaign stops and at candidate debates—that he opposed the 2003 US invasion of Iraq in real time. “You know, I was the one, and I said it very strongly, and you know this, and it was reported by everybody, because unfortunately I get a disproportionate amount of publicity,” Trump told CNN‘s Chris Cuomo (10/6/15). At the September debate (9/18/15), he said he could point to “25 different stories” about him being against the war before it started.
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A couple points before dissecting the journalistic efficacy of disseminating these vague, half-assed threats. Firstly, it’s odd that the New York Post is and continues to be the sole source of this bulletin. The FBI typically posts major threats on its website, but this one, according to the FBI press officer FAIR contacted, was “meant for law enforcement and not to be disseminated.”
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Transparency Reporting
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President Barack Obama found himself drawn into Hillary Clinton’s email controversy Friday as the White House acknowledged the State Department is withholding a set of messages Obama and Clinton exchanged during her four years as secretary of state.
As the State Department made public a new batch of more than 7,200 pages of Clinton’s emails, officials stressed that the White House was not asserting executive privilege over the Obama-Clinton exchanges but insisting that they be treated as presidential records, which are normally not available to the public until between five and 12 years after a president leaves office.
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Finance
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We all know how hard it is for folks like New York Times columnist David Brooks, living in a remote corner of Washington, to find out about changes in public policy. Therefore it wasn’t surprising to see him praise Marco Rubio, Brooks’ favored candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, for a welfare reform proposal that was put in place almost 20 years ago.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The CIA’s internal watchdog has criticized the spy agency for introducing Hollywood representatives to undercover officers and allegedly being careless in talking to them about agency secrets.
In a 20-page report prepared in 2012 and stamped “secret,” the spy agency’s Inspector General said that CIA employees who had contact with Hollywood representatives had “not always complied” with agency regulations intended to stop leaks of classified information.
The report was made public on Wednesday by Judicial Watch, a conservative group which said it obtained the document under the Freedom of Information Act.
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If Europe is serious about regulating the car industry and protecting public health and the climate, it needs to stand up to the car lobby rather than allowing those resisting regulation to write it.
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I am sorry to have to do this, but as a representative of the mainstream media, I hereby declare war on GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz.
In the media’s defense, Cruz started it. Literally.
I received a fundraising email from him today that said, “I am declaring war on the liberal media.” Liberal media and mainstream media are synonymous, generally defined by Republicans as “any media outlet that presents facts that prove we’re lying.”
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The Koch-backed measures to eviscerate Wisconsin’s limits on money in elections and neuter the state’s election watchdog hit a stumbling block in the state senate this week, with a handful of Republican senators expressing concern that the measures go too far.
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Censorship
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Last week the UK’s Cabinet Office sought silently to remove the reference to “international law” from the Ministerial Code.
The text had stated that there was an “overarching duty on ministers to comply with the law including international law and treaty obligations and to uphold the administration of justice and to protect the integrity of public life”. The new version states that there is an “overarching duty on ministers to comply with the law and to protect the integrity of public life”.
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In debates about freedom of expression in the UK, a common refrain is ‘well, at least we’re not as bad as Over There’. Whether it’s France banning burqas, Poland prosecuting those who ‘insult Poland’, or half of Europe prosecuting Holocaust denial, we’ve usually been able to point to some more authoritarian, European neighbour to reassurre ourselves that we’re not as bad as all that. Well, it’s time we snapped out of it, and realised we’re no longer in a position to do this. The list of countries that are worse than us on free expression is rapidly diminishing.
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A new chat tool has been launched in an effort to improve the security of online messaging.
Tor Messenger allows users to chat over the Tor (The Onion Router) network in a way which hides the location of participants.
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China’s leaders have drafted the country’s first film law, which would ease the censorship process and be intended to boost movie production in the world’s second biggest movie market.
China’s film market is heavy regulated, but, with no clear published guidelines, filmmakers are unsure what can pass censors or not.
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China’s heavy censorship of Hollywood films is not only affecting Chinese moviegoers, but also how American studios produce their films, and Beijing’s Internet censorship was ranked the world’s worst, according to a U.S. watchdog organization.
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A new report co-authored by Bates Dean of Faculty Matthew Auer in this fall’s issue of the journal Index on Censorship pulls back the veil for the first time on the social media censorship surrounding Under the Dome.
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A number of circumvention tools designed to bypass the Firewall have been shut down in the past year, including projects such as Shadowsocks, whose developer was visited by the police. Outside of China, anti-censorship activists and developers have also been hit, with groups such as GreatFire.org suffering major DDoS attacks attributed to the Chinese government. Currently, China is in the process of finalizing a new Internet security law that will bolster Internet censorship and further strengthen information control within the country.
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While the British press were speculating as to the cause of Peng’s powdery complexion, netizens saw their photos vanish from the internet as censors stepped in to maintain the illusion of a gaffe free state visit.
The photos were taken at a banquet held by the Lord Mayor of London in Xi Jinping’s honor which took place at Guildhall, London on Wednesday. The usually rather stylish Peng was seen with powdery white smears around her forehead, nose and upper lip.
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According to the American Library Association (ALA), there were at least 311 reported challenges in 2014, with many going unreported. Some of the books on the list may serve as a surprise: “And Tango Makes Three” by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, a picture book about a zookeeper’s account of two male penguins caring for a baby penguin; “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky, written from a teenager’s perspective and covering such topics as substance abuse and sex; “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini, which chronicles the friendship of two boys from Afghanistan, yet has violence and offensive language.
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In an authoritarian regime, nothing gets published or broadcast without state approval. I watched the inner workings of direct government control of the press during a visit to Turkmenistan. Every magazine and newspaper was run out of the same office. Many were edited by the same people, all wearing the same lapel pins, an image of the country’s then-dictator, Sapamurat “Turkmenbashi” Niyazov.
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If NPR’s “Marketplace” has ever interviewed a communist about why capitalism sucks and should be replaced, I missed it. Biased? You betcha. Always. Inevitably.
Here in the United States, censorship is usually self-directed. No one from the State Ministry of Propaganda calls The New York Times to tell them what’s fit to print. They make those decisions on their own. But those calls are informed by who those editors are — the elite schools from which they graduated (Columbia Journalism School), their class background (parents rich enough to send them to Columbia J-School), input from their friends and colleagues (other people whose parents are rich enough to send them to Columbia J-School). Who they are determines what makes it into print.
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Some 150 film professionals and institutions from Turkey, including documentary directors, critics and festival organizers, have announced that they will not be attending the Antalya International Film Festival until the festival’s management lifts its censorship of domestically produced documentaries.
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Mobilizing for Digital Freedom has sent an open letter to the Prime Minister’s Office of Turkey to express their concerns about the censorship and restrictions being imposed on Turkish journalists and websites, calling on the Prime Ministry to end this censorship ahead of the Nov. 1 snap election.
The letter includes the signatures of various human rights, media, and political organizations in Turkey and around the world. In the letter, Access states that they sent the letter to “request the cessation of online censorship of independent news organizations and journalists. We demand authorities refrain from imposing limitations on access to the Internet or specific online services and remind the government of its duty to protect the rights of people in Turkey to freely seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
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We are writing to you before the November 1, 2015 general elections, to request the cessation of online censorship of independent news organizations and citizen journalists. We demand authorities refrain from imposing limitations on access to the Internet or specific online services and remind the government of its duty to protect the right of people in Turkey to freely seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
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The UK Prime Minister has doubled down on his Great Firewall of Cameron, which is an arrangement whereby the UK ISPs “voluntarily” agreed to block websites that had been secretly ruled to be pornographic, unless customers specifically asked them not tp.
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The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival has cancelled events discussing the 1965 Indonesian massacres, after police threatened to revoke the festival permit.
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Over 300 radio and TV stations in Ecuador could disappear overnight, according to a warning issued by Ecuadorian NGO Fundamedios on Wednesday, October 21.
The Agency for Regulation and Control of Telecommunications (Arcotel) is currently reviewing hundreds of network licenses, and claims that the government agency that originally issued them was “not authorized” to do so.
Arcotel’s list includes media outlets whose licenses were automatically renewed by the Telecommunications Superintendency, formerly known as Supertel, between 1995 and 1997.
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Internet censorship will inevitably impact Malaysia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and discourage businesses from operating here, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) said today.
HRW Asia Director Brad Adams added that research from China, known for its multiple bans on many popular websites like Facebook and Twitter, has shown that the move to stifle Internet freedom has affected the country’s monetary gains.
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A top scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) filed a whistleblower complaint Wednesday that accuses the agency of harassment and retaliation for his work showing harmful effects on monarch butterflies from a class of widely used insecticides know as neonicotinoids, or neonics.
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Since late March, I have been subjected to a sudden but escalating pattern of impediments and disruption of my scientific work, restraints on my ability to communicate with scientific colleagues, as well as the media and a growing professional toll that is making further scientific work in ARS untenable. This abrupt onset of actions undoubtedly appears to have been prompted by the scientific activities that are supposed to be specifically safeguarded and encouraged under the USDA Scientific Integrity Policy.
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This follows the European Parliament vote on net-neutrality regulations, which will ban the current voluntary agreement that the Government pressured Internet Service Providers into accepting, where they provide filters for the Internet and encourage customers to use them. Some of these filters are now switched on by default.
We’ve said it before, and we will keep saying it: filters are flawed. They block lots of “good” websites and let through many “bad” ones (and anyway, who gets to decide the difference?) They apply equally to your seven-year old and your 17 year-old despite their different needs. They affect many more people than just children, and most housholds switch them off, as they just get in the way.
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Privacy
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Edward Snowden’s efforts to inform the American public just how far the NSA tick is dug in to the American information streams revealed that while the United States, with that pesky 1st Amendment, does not yet have something like China’s “Great Firewall” actively blocking access and dissemination of information that the government doesn’t like, what the US government does have is a pervasive, never-sleeping information Panopticon where everything every American (and as much of the entire world as they can reach) does online, or with their cell phone, is saved, supposedly “just in case”, and saved forever, while also being sifted for “key words” or phrases, you know, “just in case”.
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The future just got a bit brighter for Edward Snowden.
The European Union called on its member states to protect the former NSA contractor, recommending in a close vote Thursday that states drop charges against the fugitive whistleblower and reject U.S. extradition requests.
The 285-281 vote in the European Parliament suggested that states “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistleblower and international human rights defender.”
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Police are to be given the power to view everyone’s entire internet history in a new surveillance bill to be published next week, according to reports.
The proposed legislation will make it a legal requirement for telecoms and internet service providers to retain all of the web browsing history for all customers for a period of 12 months, according to the Daily Telegraph.
Authorities such as the police, intelligence services and the National Crime Agency would be able to access specific web addresses people had visited, but would need approval from a judge to view the content of websites, emails and social media messages.
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Theresa May will next week refuse to allow judges to sign off spying warrants after the government’s top lawyer warned they could paralyse the intelligence agencies.
The major reform has been called for by civil liberty campaigners and backed by a top QC’s independent report.
But The Sun can reveal that the Home Secretary has been told by the Attorney General that all judges’ spying decisions could be judicially reviewed under controversial human rights laws.
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The director of the FBI confirmed to Congress last week that the agency flew surveillance aircraft over Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore during the protests following the police killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. Today the ACLU is releasing FBI and FAA documents with new details about the Baltimore surveillance flights.
The new internal documents, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, reveal that the government was doing more than just monitoring the situation with regular cameras. The FBI was using advanced technology like infrared and night-vision cameras, and it is holding on to surveillance video it recorded from the sky.
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Today, the 100,000th person signed our petition calling on President Obama to reject compelled backdoors in our communications.
The campaign, hosted at SaveCrypto.org, uses the White House’s We the People API to feed signatures into a petition hosted on Obama’s preferred petition platform. The campaign was the work of over 40 nonprofits and tech companies, including Access Now, Fight for the Future, OpenMedia, Mozilla, Sum of Us, Twitter, Google, and DropBox. President Obama has promised to respond to any petition that gets 100,000 signatures within 30 days.
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Peers are preparing for a fresh showdown with the Government over plans to allow police to examine people’s online browsing histories. They are also concerned that the Government has rejected calls for judges, rather than ministers, to issue eavesdropping warrants.
The moves, which come days after the House of Lords torpedoed George Osborne’s tax credit plans, reflect growing anxiety over the impact of a wide-ranging surveillance Bill to be published next week.
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Is there a tear in the spy fiction continuum? On Monday, the new James Bond movie Spectre premiered to the sort of five-star reviews normally reserved for subtitled documentaries about extraordinary rendition. On Wednesday the Times was given unprecedented access to GCHQ, which it ran, tie-in style, beneath the splash headline “For your eyes only”. And in a further coup for state-of-the-art news planning technology, next week sees the publication of the draft investigatory powers bill, with senior police officers demanding the right to view the web-browsing history of every internet user in the country.
I don’t know who’s running this mutually masturbatorial PR campaign – my guess is a slightly disappointing nuclear publicist in the mould of Jonathan Pryce’s media baron in Tomorrow Never Dies. But I will of course withdraw that remark if they can produce a fourth nipple or a properly shaggable concubine with a sledgehammer single entendre name. Something like Snowden Asfaka.
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SNOOPERS’ CHARTER VERSION 2.0, otherwise known as the Investigatory Powers Bill, could allow police to view the web browsing history of everyone in Britain.
A report at The Times (paywalled) said that senior police officials have lobbied the government to force telecoms companies to retain data for 12 months that would reveal specific web addresses visited by customers.
This could mean that, under the Investigatory Powers Bill that is expected to be introduced by home secretary Theresa May next week, ISPs will be required to retain customers’ web browsing histories for a year.
Access to this data would then be granted to police, the National Crime Agency, intelligence agencies and HM Revenue and Customs, according to the report. However, approval from a judge would be required to view the content of websites, emails and social media messages.
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Want to travel from anywhere to anywhere in the United States without being hassled by law enforcement officers? Good luck with that, citizen.
USA Today’s Brad Heath pointed out an interesting footnote in an asset forfeiture filing that made the assertion that traveling from Chicago to Los Angeles is inherently suspicious. (One presumes the opposite is also true.)
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French socialists have, once again, betrayed liberties to strenghen surveillance! Claude Moraes’ report has been adopted today by the European Parliament. This report was condemning mass surveillance and calling for an investigation of French surveillance laws. But thanks to the pressure exerted by French Socialist MEPs on their party, any mention of investigation into French laws has been erased.
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Federal prosecutors have said that they are moving forward in their attempt to compel Apple to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7, even after the defendant in a felony drug case has now pleaded guilty.
The judge in the case, United States Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, said in a Friday court filing that he is confused.
The defendant, Jun Feng, whose trial was scheduled for next month, was originally charged with three counts of possessing and distributing methamphetamine.
On Thursday, Feng pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine.
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Edward Snowden said the United States spies on ally South Korea as part of its massive surveillance network called “Five Eyes.”
Speaking from Moscow via video, Snowden made the remarks after a screening of the 2014 documentary Citizen Four, which is to be released in Korea on Nov. 19. Snowden said South Korea is one of 38 countries under National Security Agency surveillance, a list that includes close U.S. partners France and Germany, South Korean newspaper Kyunghyang Sinmun reported.
The former NSA contractor told reporters that Seoul and Washington already share a significant amount of classified military information to track North Korea movements, but added that he didn’t see anything wrong with the sharing of information.
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The public defender representing 41-year-old Martin told the judge he has no criminal record, he works for the National Security Agency as a mathematician and he is pursuing his Ph.D. at Cornell University in math, according to the statement. The attorney also said Martin taught math at James Madison University.
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Adam Fuchs and his small team labored for years inside the National Security Agency on a system that would enable analysts to access vast troves of intelligence data and spot hidden patterns.
“We very much had a startup feel,” Fuchs said of the team’s office at Fort Meade with whiteboards and old furniture.
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Experts in the cybersecurity space have called into question how effective CISA will actually be in the ongoing blitz of cyberattacks.
“In theory it is a great idea, but when we take the legislation from theory into practice it breaks into two areas. Information sharing is positive with synergistic benefits to the companies under attack. However, forcing engagement rules will slow the process down,” Shlomo Touboul, CEO of cybersecurity company Illusive Networks, said. “Cyber attackers are organized like malicious, agile start-ups that don’t require consensus for success, while government legislation and consortiums don’t move at the same speed as a cyberattackers.”
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Symantec CEO Michael Brown voiced concerns about the act and says that — in its current form — it does not go far enough to protect privacy.
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The largest tech companies in the world, from Google and Apple, to Reddit and Twitter, issued statements condemning the cyber-security bill called CISA, but to no avail. CISA (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015) easily passed through the U.S. Senate’s vote on Tuesday, creating a new avenue for consumer data sharing that benefits anti-privacy entities like the NSA, reports The Guardian.
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A US appeals court on Thursday refused to immediately halt the government’s bulk collection of millions of Americans’ phone records during a “transition” period to a new federal scheme that bans the controversial anti-terrorism surveillance.
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A lawyer who won a federal judge’s determination that the National Security Agency’s spy-on-Americans program is “Orwellian” and likely unconstitutional is encouraging the judge to maintain his stance after a federal appeals court ruled the collection of phone metadata can continue.
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Germany’s hard line on the transfer of its citizens’ personal data to the U.S. has come in for criticism from an influential European association of global digital businesses, which argues that severely limiting such transfers would cause market volatility.
Germany’s federal and regional data-protection authorities this week said they wouldn’t approve any new transfers of data to the U.S. — even for transfers based on arrangements different from the trans-Atlantic data-transfer pact knocked down by the European Union’s highest court.
The European Court of Justice this month invalidated a 15-year old agreement, known as Safe Harbor, which allowed businesses to move Europeans’ data, such as employee information, to servers in the U.S. The court ruled that Europeans’ data was insufficiently protected when transferred to the U.S., where it could be accessed by national intelligence services.
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U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker on Thursday pressed European Union officials to put in place a new “safe harbor” data transfer agreement to replace one struck down earlier this month by the European Court of Justice.
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As a leader in the VPN industry, Khan warns there are mixed opinions on the subject of protection and privacy, “There are those who believe every internet user should have the right to privacy irrespective of the circumstances. On the other hand, many believe that privacy is a right but should not infer complete anonymity.”
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CISA significantly weakens the Freedom of Information Act and puts decision-making power on FOIA requests into the hands of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the same body where current CISA legislation originated.
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Under the guise of “cybersecurity,” the Senate on Tuesday passed a spying bill that “carves a giant hole in all our privacy laws and allows tech and telecom companies to hand over all sorts of private information to intelligence agencies without any court process whatsoever,” writes Trevor Timm at The Guardian.
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In the UK, David Cameron’s administration has all but declared war on encryption. In the US, 63 percent of Americans approve of backdoors for the government to monitor encrypted business communications in response to a national security threat, according to a recent Vormetric survey.
But in Germany, the government openly advocates that all citizens use encryption and has even pushed forward a De-Mail service to help make that a reality.
In the country’s Digital Agenda, the German government made it clear that it aspired to be “one of the most secure digital locations” on the planet: “We support the use of more and better encryption and aim to be the world’s leading country in this area. To achieve this goal, the encryption of private communication must be adopted as standard across the board.”
It’s no secret that Germans value privacy, and Rik Turner, a British senior analyst with the IT and telecoms consulting firm Ovum, argued that the country’s embrace of encryption has geopolitical roots extending back to World War II.
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Senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy are investigating why the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is using a cellphone tracking system in its investigations. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has already admitted they are using this technology but did not say in what capacity. The technology, known as cell-site simulators, send out a signal similar to a cell tower which could fool your cellphone into connecting to it. The technology does not monitor phone conversations but it does gather information (including text messages) about the device and can track the devices location as it moves.
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Germany on Friday announced new measures to curb the activities of its foreign intelligence agency after a damning official report revealed improper collusion with the US National Security Agency.
Berlin will in future implement stricter guidelines governing cooperation between the BND foreign intelligence service and the NSA, deputy government spokeswoman Christiane Wirtz said in a statement.
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An NSA catchword surveillance list contains numerous European and German targets, according to a German news magazine. According to its report, a German federal investigator has concluded that US spying was widespread.
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A special investigation into the extent of mass surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA) within Germany has unveiled a huge list of targets wanted by the US agency, including many European governments and companies.
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) overstepped an intelligence-sharing agreement with Germany by requesting German technicians to snoop on allied governments‘ emails, a top-level inquiry has concluded.
Media obtained Friday the 300-page report by Kurt Graulich, a judge appointed to investigate how the BND, or Bundesnachrichtendienst, intercepted data streams from satellite links, fishing out messages by spotting email addresses, telephone numbers and words of interest.
Graulich is the only non-intelligence official to have been shown 40,000 of these so-called selectors which the BND challenged.
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A German government-sanctioned special investigation has exposed a “clear breach” of intelligence-sharing agreements—including illegal surveillance of European authorities—between the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its German counterpart, known as the BND.
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When it was revealed in 2013 that the NSA and its UK equivalent, GCHQ, routinely spied on the German government, artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter came up with a plan.
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In the face of Obama administration opposition, AT&T customers asked the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday to rule that a government mass surveillance program is unconstitutional.
Five people sued the National Security Agency seven years ago in Federal Court seeking a court order to dismantle a “digital dragnet” that allows the agency to tap into the fiber optic cables of U.S. telecommunications companies to intercept emails, text messages, phone records and other communications.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been busy lately, especially with all of the revelations coming from Edward Snowden. The organization has been busy taking on the NSA, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have time for other causes.
Now the EFF is taking on the California Supreme Court, urging an end to the gathering of personal prescription information by law enforcement and done without a warrant.
Prescriptions in question cover things such as pain, anxiety, attention disorder, insomnia and the like. Up until now, this was a treasure trove of information being gathered, though reasons for that netting of data are unclear.
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Once you get in your car, get ready to be tracked, no matter how well your face is disguised. Law enforcement agencies all over the country use ALPRs (automated license plate readers) to track drivers’ locations and activities. ALPRs are cameras—mounted on police cars or placed in stationary locations like light poles—that detect when a car passes, capture a picture of that car, and record its license plate number. Accumulated location data creates a history of drivers’ movements that can provide private and intimate details on people’s lives, like where they work, where they live, where they worship, where they go throughout their day, and who they associate with. Law enforcement agencies like the NYPD have used ALPRs in exactly this way, trying to map out the entire Arab and Muslim community of New York and Newark. The Los Angeles Police Department and the LA County Sheriff’s Department scan three million plates every week.
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John Miller reckons he can get into pretty much any safe. A court order to the owner is one option, another is a team he has with blow torches.
The reason John Miller has such a team is because he is Deputy Commissioner of the New York Police Department (NYPD) for intelligence and counter-terrorism.
Getting into safety deposit boxes and bank vaults has not been a challenge. But he says NYPD is now faced with a new problem.
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The Pentagon’s principal spy agency is appointing a British Air Force officer as its first deputy director in charge of improving “integration” between U.S. intelligence units and spy agencies of other English-speaking countries.
U.S. intelligence agencies have long had close relationships with their British counterparts, but former and current U.S. intelligence officials said this is the first time they knew of a U.S. spy agency naming a foreigner to a top executive position.
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The UK government wants backdoor access to communications for “everything people actually use”, Edward Snowden has claimed.
The former NSA contractor took to Twitter to criticise comments from Baroness Shields, the UK minister for internet safety and security, over her position on encrypted data.
Shields said the government didn’t want to introduce backdoors that allow security services to access encrypted information, but Snowden argued proposed warrants for access to data were in effect a backdoor.
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The UK surveillance agency GCHQ had only a small public relations team up until June 2013. As the most secretive of the intelligence agencies, it did not really need anything more. The duties were not arduous, with inquiries from the national media invariably met with a blunt refusal to comment.
That attitude has not survived the shock of former CIA and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who leaked tens of thousands of documents exposing GCHQ’s innermost secrets. Today, GCHQ’s new and expanding PR team is increasingly sophisticated, open to engagement with journalists in ways that were inconceivable before Snowden.
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It seems that many organisations are now wanting to shift their data out of the UK and the US, thanks to concerns about surveillance and privacy.
This news comes courtesy of Artmotion (a data hosting provider), which questioned 1000 IT decision-makers in this country and the States, subsequently producing a report entitled Defending Data Privacy.
The headline figure is that 76 per cent of respondents said they would move their company’s data to another country, away from the UK or US, due to privacy concerns.
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Over the last year, law enforcement officials around the world have been pressing hard on the notion that without a magical “backdoor” to access the content of any and all encrypted communications by ordinary people, they’ll be totally incapable of fulfilling their duties to investigate crime and protect the public. EFF and many others have pushed back—including launching a petition with our friends to SaveCrypto, which this week reached 100,000 signatures, forcing a response from President Obama.
This is in addition to multiple findings that the government’s “going dark” concern has proven completely unfounded in the past, along with former national security officers disavowing the concern all together. And given law enforcement’s continuing attacks on the public’s use of encryption, we think it’s time for a quick look at the long tradition of encryption use by some ordinary, and some not so ordinary, Americans.
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In a return to what is being called ‘Cold War level’ tension, the New York Times reported on Sunday that Russia could be developing plans to sever key global internet communications – undersea data cables – “that carry almost all global internet communications” during possible “future wars”.
The Times report claims that there is “aggressive” movement near vital undersea cables, raising concern among several US military and intelligence officers.
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Millennials are rather careless when it comes to using technology and sharing information online. We don’t think twice about entering personal information into an online form or telling the world where we are at any given moment and who we are with. So when we are told that the government is collecting this data, a common reaction is—Why should I care? I have nothing to hide. But how many of us understand the implications of having so much personal information up for grabs?
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Hillary Clinton is wrong about Edward Snowden. Again.
The presidential candidate and former secretary of state insisted during the recent Democratic debate that Snowden should have remained in the United States to voice his concerns about government spying on U.S. citizens. Instead, she claimed, he “endangered U.S. secrets by fleeing to Russia.”
After accusing Snowden of stealing “very important information that has fallen into the wrong hands,” she added: “He should not be brought home without facing the music.”
Clinton should stop rooting for Snowden’s incarceration and get her facts straight.
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New York Times reporter Eric Licthblau is returning to cover the Justice Department, a beat he left in 2009 amid threat of subpoena over a Pulitzer Prize-winning story on the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program.
Lichtblau, who was most recently covering 2016 campaign finance issues, drew the ire of the Bush administration early on for his reporting, leading to his Justice Department press credentials being temporarily revoked in 2003. Tensions only increased after The Times published Lichtblau and James Risen’s 2005 report on NSA surveillance, a story the paper initially held for 13 months under pressure from the White House.
Lichtblau told The Huffington Post that the Bush administration aggressively investigated the NSA leak and there were vague threats of subpoena in 2006 and 2007. But it wasn’t until Dec. 16, 2008 — after President Barack Obama won the presidential election but before the Bush administration left off — that Lichtblau received a letter threatening a subpoena if he didn’t provide the source information by Inauguration Day a month later. He did not comply. Still, the threat didn’t go away when Obama took office, and in early 2009, Lichtblau and Times editors decided it was best he leave the beat.
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The tech sector is an ever-growing force in politics. No longer just a bunch of scrappy startups struggling for their place at the bargaining table, Silicon Valley’s top companies—Google, Facebook, Apple, and others—now spend millions of dollars a year lobbying for their industry’s interests.
Politicians like tech companies, not only because they paint a rosy picture of the future, but because they’re among the top job creators in the country. Plus, their idealistic, largely white-collar workforce tends to have deep pockets, turning the tech sector into a bigger source of campaign funding than other politically powerful and entrenched industries like defense and big pharma in recent years. Candidates are all too aware of this shift, so they make frequent stops at tech startups and carve out time on the campaign trail for fundraising trips to Silicon Valley.
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Civil Rights
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The propensity of the Saudis to use barbaric physical punishments is blithely passed off as a local tradition and custom, as if tying someone to a pole and flogging them nearly to death is somehow comparable to having a pole on a village green for dancing around on May mornings.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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We’ve discussed many times now how zero rating, or the carrier act of letting some apps or services bypass a user’s broadband usage cap, sets a horrible, dangerous precedent. By its very nature, letting one company or service bypass usage caps immediately puts non-whitelisted services, small businesses or non profits at a disadvantage, tilting the entire playing field and distorting the entire democratic nature of the Internet. For some reason, this is a very difficult concept for some consumers to understand, so lathered up they are by the initial lure of getting something for “free.”
Of course you’re not getting something for free. Usage caps are entirely arbitrary, untethered from financial or network performance necessity. They’re an artificial construct, and allowing some services to bypass them (for a fee or otherwise) puts the ISP in the powerful position of picking winners and losers, instead of just doing its job (the delivery of bits). When it comes to net neutrality, the battlefield is no longer focused on ham-fisted throttling or blocking of services, it has shifted to more nuanced and clever abuses of gatekeeper power including interconnection, usage caps, and zero rating.
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